A typical year in the lives of Joe Hyams and Elke Sommer makes the shuttling of Henry Kissinger pale by comparison. They can be tracked only by jet vapors. In the previous six months alone, they have ripped through Germany, Italy, South Africa, Jamaica, and across the United States.

Why then is it necessary to build a tennis court, other than to take a photo and look occasionally while in flight?

It's necessary because Elke and Joe like tennis-and the court will be used.

The trick is to live in a 32-hour day, or to cut out the luxury of sleeping. That, we are convinced, is how they do it.

It's hard to figure out where they were in their long day when we arrived. The man of the house was serenely gazing at the north-forty with Bong Soo Han, utterly calm. Elke seemed to be between flights. She burst into the room, shook hands before they were removed from pockets and gushed a warm greeting to "Master Han," who tried hard to return it, but failed due to a lack of lunch and a brutal shooting schedule.

The reason for this brief gathering was that, unbelievably enough, Elke and Joe had found the time for still another pastime. They studied Hapkido together under Bong Soo Han.

The idea first occurred to Joe, himself a longtime devotee of the martial arts, during one of their treks overseas late last year.

"One of the things we've always kidded about," says Joe, "is 'What would happen if….' We've been to some pretty interesting places. The last time we were in Italy, Elke was caught in the middle of a Communist riot. We were in Africa just before the riots and in Jamaica during the riots. The world is in unrest today and if you travel a lot, you're always in situations where there's a reasonable amount of danger. For example, in a country like Italy your chances off being kidnapped are very good indeed. Germany, too.

"Nothing has happened yet, but the point is preparedness. That's what really has got Elke with Master Han, the very real fear that she'll be standing on a street corner and some guys will pull up in a car and pull her away.

"The same goes for when we're together. The first thing that a wife does when there's any sign of a problem is to grab the husband's arm and hang close for security. She's taking Hapkido mainly to teach her to get out of the way, at least, and give me room, so if there's any difficulty, I'll have room to act and react."

Anyone who has seen Hapkido knows that its high, powerful kicking techniques have little to do with getting out of the way of anything. It's a vicious form of defense and even the make-believe fight choreography of the Billy Jack movies doesn't lessen the impact on the eye. The natural offshoot developed in Elke Sommer's case.

"About a year ago, we got to talking," Joe Hyams remembers. " 'What can a woman do?'" Elke's very feminine, but she's in very good shape. She's a first-rate athlete. She can kick over her head without even trying, and it takes me forty-five minutes of warming up to get there."

"I guess I'm just limber or double-jointed," interjects Elke.

"Yes," continues, "so in training a husband and wife, you have two different units with two different sets of capabilities. Master Han began developing some routines that would be helpful for a husband and wife. Things like what Elke could do with the items in her pocketbook, or kicking off her shoes and using them as weapons.

"But the first thing to do is to assess the situation. If there are four people, the best thing to do is to make a run for it. I mean, if somebody stuck a knife in me and said, 'Give me your wallet,' I'd make change pretty quickly. So, where Elke's concerned, it's strictly defense."

There's no need to describe Elke Sommer, what a truly magnificent-looking woman she is, as a sneaky way to show why the martial arts would be a good thing for her. She's been in countless motion pictures over here in the United States, and there are even a greater number of European films featuring the lovely blonde, which American audiences will never see.

The most remarkable thing about her is that she is uncommonly great at so many different interests. Her athletic accomplishments would be phenomenal for even a major male sports figure, since they've been so varied. Her husband prodded her into saying how it all started, which Elke did with the same foot-shuffling, embarrassed reluctance that a child piano prodigy would do when asked to play Mozart.

"I was in school with five hundred boys and two girls," she remembers of her early teen years in West Germany. "The women had to do all the sports the boys had to do because they wouldn't hire a teacher just for us. And I just won a medal in the triathlon, that's all."

That's all. In a field of nothing but Germany's sinewy male youth, Elke topped them all in the broad jump, high jump and 100-meter sprint to earn a medal from the Chancellor of the nation personally.

And it wasn't to be the last time her talent sparkled in impossible competition. As recently as 1971, Elke Sommer won first prize at the Nurburgring racetrack in Sweden, finishing tops in a field of 242 men and women. She drove an Opel at speeds averaging 186 miles per hour, on what is probably the toughest racetrack in the world.

There are probably other top finishes in any number of different endeavors, but even the goading of her husband couldn't pry them loose on this day. It was almost expected when Bong Soo Han piped in his own amazement at this fledgling student.

"Elke is so limber and coordinated," said her instructor, "all I have to do is show her once and she can do it. It's just amazing how someone can do that."

Of course, Joe Hyams is a 25-year student of the martial arts himself, and a pleasure for his new instructor to watch. He's been learning Hapkido from Bong Soo Han for more than three years, and before that it was with Ed Parker, and then, Bruce Lee.

"As you get older, you get stiff," he admits, although Joe seems young and athletic enough to keep up with the best of them. "Your reaction time slows down. I like going at it with the white belts because it keeps me limber, although the only sparring I'll do is with Pat Strong, because he's had so much experience.

"I' really like all the by-products of the martial arts. I'm past fifty now and the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the martial arts are fascinating to me. I like the feeling that I don't have to prove anything, the feeling of self-confidence. I like feeling I can protect us, unless I'm outnumbered or unless it's someone who knows more than I do-which is only about ten million people in this world who do."

"Because of my work, we go to some places that are not safe," Elke clarifies. "And while we are there, I don't want to stay in my hotel room. I want to see how the people live, but we go every place alone, just the two of us."

Joe's training in hand-to-hand combat goes all the way back to a stint he did in boot camp with the Rangers-paratroops, if you will. He was a war correspondent at the time, but his interest in the martial arts didn't end with the war. He first joined Ed Parker in the early 1950s and spent three full years under the tutelage of Bruce Lee afterward.

"Bruce had a little bit of everything," he remembers. "Wing chun hands, tae kwon do, boxing-he was very fast and very small. I don't know anyone who is as fast, and Bruce's kick was totally different. I learned with Bruce before he taught any of the other Hollywood people like Silliphant and Coburn, and I stayed with him until just before he left for Hong Kong. When you sit all day at a typewriter on your fanny, you've got to do something."

Joe Hyams is a writer by profession, and although his "fanny" doesn't look it, he's sat on it long enough to produce 16 biographies-giving Southern California its own answer to Plutarch. His newest book, Inner Strength: The Zen of the Martial Arts, underscores his deep interest, but prior to that he has added a new dimension to biographical books. He has made them contemporary, often journalistic, and he chose subjects who would otherwise have remained anonymous. For instance, Hyams whipped up an interesting story about a hero of the Warsaw ghetto, the civilian insurrection against the Nazis. He also did one on a prison superintendent in Arkansas during the middle of a siege, exposing the whole prison system in that state.

Joe's career began as a war correspondent in the South Pacific in 1943, but after the war he landed a position as a feature writer aboard the highly regarded New York Herald Tribune. He left the Trib a day before the paper folded ("The guilds forced them to close it," he explains), and from there he worked for himself.

To say the couple lives comfortably would be an understatement, but their Bel Air home of the last eight years is not ostentatious either. It's a homey place, and as you sit in the living room, three-and-a-half dogs stare longingly at you through a glass door. There is a great deal of activity, what with the gardeners and the workers building the tennis court walking all about. The only constant is Bong Soo Han, who sits quietly exhausted on a plush leather couch. Han has managed to work in a free day in a shooting schedule that often has him on the set of Kentucky Fried Movie for 15 hours at a stretch. He is a high point in one chapter of the comedy, to be entitled A Fistful f Yen, which is a take-off on Enter the Dragon. But the movie isn't funny to Bong Soo Han right now, so weary that even his ginseng tea doesn't seem to help.

Next to him on the couch, Elke and Joe trade interview time. They seem to have it organized in shifts. As Elke pops back into the room with a spot of tea for her tired sensei, Joe pops off the couch to talk with his friend and fellow martial artist, Pat Strong. Now it is Elke's turn.

"I work out only twice a week when I'm home," she volunteers. "And I'm home so little that it's an irregular thing."

When she's not home, Elke is often in Germany, her native country and hideaway, where she owns a beautiful, provincial estate in Franconia. Born in Berlin, a city utterly destroyed by Soviet artillery and partitioned among four nations, Elke Sommer learned at an early age about maturity. Her mother was a teacher and her father, a minister, died when she was fourteen. She has no compunctions about saying she learned to be the man of the house.

"My mother raised me from there-or I raised her," she says. "I had to be mature at an early age. She started painting when she was six years old. Just three years ago, she painted a dark-themed impressionist-style image that became the poster for the National Suicide Prevention Foundation. Young Elke also took up dancing in Germany-ballet, classical and modern-which accounts for some of her extraordinary athletic ability. The foundations explain how she's able to watch a Hapkido technique once and then perform it flawlessly s well as how she has succeeded in so many other things. For instance, she is fluent in Spanish, French, German, English, Italian, and can even discourse in Ancient Greek-if only people spoke it anymore. She wins at everything, like her yearly visit to Nurburgring shows.

"I like the race cars, but I'm really getting afraid now," she admits. "It's a funny thing, but when I go to Nurburgring now, I really don't want to do it. This spring I'll be there, but I'm afraid of myself. When I go, I don't think of anything. I have no fear once I'm driving, but lately I've had seconds thoughts beforehand."

Maybe her piling-up of a Porsche last year has something to do with that. Elke escaped unscathed, but the high-performance car was a total wreck. Perhaps a less demanding hobby would suit her this year-like horseback riding.

"We went trail riding not long ago," says Elke. "I knew the horse didn't like me, but they insisted on giving me the same horse. I thought, 'Maybe he likes me now.' So we saddled it and got out on a very steep trail in Chatsworth. I knew something was wrong because the horse was not breathing out. So in the middle of the trail, it breathes out, deflates, and the whole saddle turns upside down with me in it. My foot was caught in the stirrup and it was trying to kick me. I was totally helpless.

"They're so smart," she explains, showing why horseback riding isn't her favorite pastime. "They puff themselves up when they are saddled and breathe very shallowly until they think the right moment has come. Then they deflate and the whole saddle goes down and they kick."

We asked a credible, outside source about this phenomenon of beast over man, and learned to our astonishment that it does happen with trail horses. So don't ride trail horses, because if they can beat Elke Sommer, they can beat anyone.

When you keep all these accomplishments in mind, Elke's success and fame as an actress through the years becomes more remarkable. It started more by accident than by design, for she had no formal training before her first film, and, in fact, wasn't even looking for a job in films at the time.

"I went to Italy on a tour with my mother just before I was to start at the university," she explains. "An Italian producer saw me and offered me a role in his film, and I thought I could do this and go to university on the side. But then he offered me another one and another one and another one….

"It's a drag to do pictures, though. It's tedious. It's without connection. It doesn't go through in one line. I hate it. You sit around and wait for things to be lit and you can't do anything in the meantime but sit around because your mind is too busy.

"Another thing I hate is the people fumbling around with my face and hair the way they do in makeup. I really don't have any love for the whole thing unless it's a dynamite script you're crazy about. I much prefer plays."

The theater is Elke Sommer's new outlet in acting. In her most recent trip to Europe, she appeared in Born Yesterday, which ran through 110 performances.

"With a play," she adds, "you get out there half-an-hour beforehand, get ready to go out and do your thing and have the rest of the day to yourself. Sure, it's tough in rehearsal, especially when you have only three weeks to prepare. But, at least you know what you do wrong and what you do right and there's no editing and no other person involved who can take it away and screw it up. It's a fantastic experience and you know exactly what to do. If you have a slow audience, you can push a little, and if you have a good audience, you can take back a little.

"Of course, if I did that all the time-going to the same building everyday for work-I'd go insane."

As Elke talks, words pouring forth in quick, machine-gun bursts, it's hard not to notice her intensity. Where her husband Joe is placid, Elke seems to have strong, dangerous currents that ripple the surface from time to time. She is on a precipice, her breath held and seldom vented. She laughs easily.

"I didn't really enjoy working on anything until about six years ago," went a telling statement in answer to another question. "I did as best as I could."

She is easily enthused, an example of which came when one of those TV pong games were mentioned. She animatedly described them as "terrible" and "nerve-wracking," but you can bet she'd wipe you out if you challenged her to a game today. The compulsion to win probably explains her eventual sojourn into the Hapkido school of Bong Soo Han as much as the need for "preparedness," mentioned earlier by Joe Hyams.

"He [Joe] practices on me all the time," she confesses about her first taste of the martial arts. "That's why I knew some of the things before I went to classes. He would just say, 'Get out of that,' and since I didn't know how to get out of it, he would show me. Now I get the chance to beat him once."

"It's the same in tennis, because he used to beat me consistently, which is not bad. I don't mind being beaten, but then he sneers. And then he turns around when he has to laugh. But I know when he turns around he's laughing and it makes me so angry. It's terrible."

Joe Hyams, who drifts back in to the conversation, jokes he's laughing because he's so happy to have won. And so the repartee goes, an incisive example of why Elke Sommer and Joe Hyams may be the most active couple in the world and at least the happiest couple in Hollywood.