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Olympic Affair Page 2
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During the weekend, security was tight. However, protesters numbered less than a dozen and their actions didn’t disrupt festival events.
Festival organizers, as they had earlier, noted that Riefenstahl never had been a member of the Nazi party.
Riefenstahl, still a striking woman at age 72, consented to interviews with individual reporters in her suite at the Manitou Lodge before the festival began, reiterating her claims that her films were the work of an artist and that she was neither philosophically nor politically aligned with Hitler and the Nazis.
“I am independent, always,” she said. “Hitler said about me that ‘Leni is as stubborn as a donkey.’”
She denied she ever had been romantically involved with the Nazi leader. “Because I am a woman and because he admired my work, people who were jealous or were looking for a good romantic story say I was his lover,” she stated. “I was never Hitler’s lover. We talked a few times on artistic things. Never politics. He didn’t talk politics with artists.”
Pointing out she was a successful actress and director before turning to documentaries, she asserted she made “Triumph of the Will” only after much convincing from Hitler, who told her that if his propaganda ministry oversaw the project “it would bore everybody.” She said she told Hitler she was ignorant of the inner workings and militia designations of the Nazi Party, but that Hitler saw that as a positive, not a negative. She scoffed at the notion the film was propaganda. “It is a documentation, a newsreel done artistically,” she claimed.
Swanson, the star of film’s silent age, especially seemed incredulous that some considered Riefenstahl’s presence deserving of criticism. “Why?” she asked. “Is she waving a Nazi flag? I thought Hitler was dead!”
The cook called Kristy over, gestured at the stool next to him, slid the section over on the counter to be in front of her, and asked, with eyebrows raised: “Recognize anyone?”
“That’s her!”
“Sure is. Read it.”
The cook returned to the kitchen. Soon, Kristy poked her head next to the order wheel.
“Okay, I’ve read it,” she announced. “And it figures.”
The cook asked, “How’s it figure?”
“She left a quarter tip.”
The grocer burst in, brandishing the same Post section, opened to the story.
“See!” he demanded, slapping the page with his free hand. “See!”
“Matter of fact, we did,” the cook said dryly.
“I was guessing she was a Nazi bitch, all right,” the grocer said. “Like all those others. We buried our buddies, we liberated the camps, we saw the human skeletons, then we heard about the Kraut bitches saying they had no goddamn idea what Hitler had in mind so give ’em and their kids food and feel sorry for ’em! But man . . .”
Pausing, he shook his head.
Then he continued, “This is The Nazi bitch. What did we do to deserve this honor?”
The cook shrugged. “Wish we could ask Glenn Morris,” he said.
2
Glenn’s Trials
Milwaukee: Saturday, June 27, 1936
Don’t fall down.
Just finish.
As he reached the cinder track’s final turn at the Marquette University stadium, Glenn Morris tried to ignore his aching legs and the sudden shortness of breath.
Two hundred meters more.
Then . . .
A hundred more.
The crowd cheered on the dark-haired runner in the Denver Athletic Club uniform. On the infield, his coach from Colorado State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Fort Collins, good, ol’ Harry Hughes, yelled: “Don’t let up!”
Almost there.
He made it across the finish line, and then slowed to a lurching walk, drawing his hands up behind his head and trying to gulp in air. A man with a stopwatch put his hand on Glenn’s shoulder. “Third place,” he said, “4 minutes, 48.1 seconds.”
Glenn thrust one arm overhead, fist clenched.
Berlin, here I come!
Hughes, craggy-faced and graying at the temples, charged up and clamped him in a bear hug so enthusiastic, the coach’s hat flew off. “World record!” the coach said excitedly.
All Glenn understood was that, unless everyone’s computations had been way off, his time in the concluding 1,500 meters meant he had just won the decathlon at the U.S. Olympic Trials. All the hard work, all the dreaming . . . it had paid off.
“World record!” Hughes repeated. “You beat Sievert!”
Glenn turned. “You sure?”
“Meet director said you needed 4:50 . . . and you beat that!”
Soon, confirmation came: Glenn Morris, nine days after his twenty-fourth birthday, had set a world record. It was only the second decathlon of the former college football and track star’s life; his first was only three months earlier, at the Kansas Relays in Lawrence. His 7,880 points at Milwaukee in the two-day, ten-event test of speed, strength, stamina, and versatility bettered German Hans Sievert’s two-year-old mark. Bob Clark, best known as one of the nation’s top broad jumpers, was second at 7,598, and Jack Parker, who had just finished his sophomore year of college in Sacramento, was third, at 7,290.
The top three would represent America at the Summer Games in Berlin.
During the Olympics-style awards ceremony, Glenn was on a higher platform in the center, between Clark and Parker. They accepted their ribbon-style medals and congratulations from Avery Brundage, the head of both the Amateur Athletic Union and the U.S. Olympic Committee, known for his rimless spectacles, his conservative and expensive suits, and his dictatorial manner and arrogance.
The decathlon men were the only Americans competing at the two-day meet who knew they had their Olympic spots clinched. The rest of the meet was the Central portion of the Olympic trials qualifications, coinciding with the West competition in Los Angeles and the East meet at Harvard. At the three regional meets, the top two finishers in each event qualified for the final U.S. Olympic trials at the new stadium on Randall’s Island in New York on July 11 and 12. The grueling decathlon test took so much out of the decathlon athletes, organizers believed the Olympic team selections would need extra time to recover before Berlin. Plus, there weren’t enough men crazy enough to compete in the decathlon to make regional trials necessary to thin the field.
After the formalities, Brundage called them off the stand for a private conversation. He said, “As you know, I competed in your event—and the pentathlon, too—in the 1912 Olympics . . .”
Glenn thought: You did?
“. . . and I know you boys are going to represent us well in Germany.” Brundage checked his watch. “I need to get to the train station now,” he said. “But I’ve got a suggestion.” He reached into his inside breast pocket, pulled out a postcard-type advertisement and handed it to Glenn. “Since you know you’re going to Germany, this is the place to have dinner and celebrate. Make sure you say I sent you and you’ll be taken care of.”
The card plugged the Café Brandenburg and displayed its motto: “You’ll Think You’re in Berlin.”
When the three decathlon men and Hughes picked up their keys at the front desk of the hotel section at the Milwaukee Athletic Club, the clerk also handed the athletes stacks of telegrams. Glenn’s was the thickest.
congratulations darling
love karen
you made us proud
mother & father
all members salute you
denver athletic club
how come you’re so much
better at this than football?
congrats! red white
When Glenn chuckled at the last one, Clark gave him an inquiring look.
Glenn handed him the telegram, saying: “Our passer with the Aggies. He always said if I had any hands, he would have been an All-American.”
Harry Hughes peeked over Clark’s shoulder.
“Well, Red’s got a point,” the Aggies’ football and track coach said.
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br /> Glenn tried to convince Hughes to join them for dinner, but the coach passed. “You guys go out and blow off some steam,” Hughes said. “No coaches.” He laughed and added, “No adults.”
At the Café Brandenburg around the corner, the mustachioed maitre d’ indeed perked up when they mentioned Brundage.
“Ah, the decathlon men! Herr Brundage said you might be coming.”
He led them to a booth in the corner of the dining room nearest the bar.
They ordered a round of beers.
Parker, who had just turned twenty, assured his elders he could drink them under the table, but added he was going to let them off the hook.
Glenn hadn’t told his fellow decathlon men he rarely drank, in part because he’d learned the hard way it didn’t take much beyond one beer to get him sloppy. In fact, many of the stories written about him in Colorado repeated the exaggeration that he was a complete teetotaler who greeted the end of prohibition three years earlier with complete indifference.
When the beers arrived, they clanked steins and agreed that one of them would win the gold in the decathlon for America . . . or they’d all die trying.
Clark pointed out the poster in a corner for a German American Bund rally scheduled for the next weekend in Grafton, Wisconsin, wherever that was.
“Guess we better get used to it,” Clark said.
On the way to the bathroom, Glenn stopped to look at the Bund poster, and then noticed several movie posters next to it. The first was for Das Blaue Licht, and the detailed artwork showed a barefoot beautiful young woman in a ragged red dress, with a straw basket in her left hand, seemingly leading, or running away from, a mob of angry-looking bearded old men. Another for Der Heilige Berg featured a huge shot of a snow-capped mountain with cut-in pictures of the stars, including one who looked to be the same woman. The third was for Die weisse Hölle vom Piz Palü and again showed the actress, perched on top of a ridge in high boots. Glenn looked back over all three and figured out the actress’s name: Leni Riefenstahl. It rang a bell, no more.
The maitre d’ joined him.
“I assume you don’t speak German?” the older man asked, smiling.
“No, sir,” Glenn said. “A little French. That’s it.”
One by one, the maitre d’ pointed at the three posters and translated the names. The Blue Light. The Holy Mountain. The White Hell of Pitz Palü. He turned his palm up in a presenting gesture, toward the caricature of the running woman on The Blue Light poster. “All, of course, starring Leni Riefenstahl,” he said.
“She’s very pretty,” Glenn said.
“She also is, as you would say, a very tough cookie. She wrote and directed The Blue Light, too. But now, of course, she has her other sort of film work.”
Noticing Glenn’s blank look, he moved to another poster down the wall.
It showed a stern young German man in uniform—some sort of uniform—holding a red flag with a black swastika on a white circular background. Behind him loomed a castle-type building and a rendering of the Nazi state’s eagle perched on a swastika. The lettering below the drawing:
Triumph
des Willens
Reichsparteitagfilm der N-S-D-A-P
Gesamtleitung—Regie—Leni Riefenstahl
The maitre d’ explained, “‘Triumph of the Will, a film of the National Socialist Party Congress, producer and director Leni Riefenstahl.’” He paused. “It just came out last year.”
“She’s a Nazi?” Glenn asked incredulously.
The maitre d’ was offended by the question. But he answered it. “No, she hasn’t joined the party,” he said. “Not many woman have. She also makes it clear she is a very independent artist.”
On the way back to the table, Glenn stopped and looked again at The Blue Light poster. The woman in red. Leni.
Although he could have gotten by without doing so, he made two more trips to the bathroom before they left. On the second, he also noticed a front page of the Milwaukee Journal sports section, from a week earlier, taped to the mirror behind the bar. The blaring headline and huge pictures commemorated German heavyweight Max Schmeling’s shocking twelfth-round knockout of Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium.
The bartender noticed Glenn’s interest and called out. “And we thought Herr Schmeling’s best days were behind him!”
When the check came, Clark looked it over, his eyebrows raised.
“So much for Brundage’s pull,” he said, pointing. “Full bill. Not even a beer free.” He reached for his wallet. “Start digging, boys.”
As they were leaving, the maitre d’ smiled at Glenn and held out a magazine.
“Here, young man,” he said. “I found this in the back.”
It was the February 17 issue of Time. On the cover, a woman in a modest swimsuit was on cross-country skis, climbing uphill at the site of the 1932 Winter Games. The caption under the picture announced:
hitler’s leni riefenstahl
At Garmisch-Partenkirchen, woman’s work is never done
In his room, he skimmed the story about the Winter Olympics until he came to the passage on the filmmaker. It noted that she was twenty-eight and the daughter of a Berlin plumber. She had been a ballet star; a movie star, impressively doing her own dangerous stunts; and then the writer, director, and star in The Blue Light. The story reported Hitler and Riefenstahl had met in 1934, and the Nazi leader considered the actress a German womanly ideal even before commissioning her to make a documentary of the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg. Answering an obvious question—one Glenn was asking, too—the writer said Hitler was a “confirmed celibate” and wasn’t involved with Riefenstahl. It made light of Riefenstahl skiing at the Winter Games site in a swimsuit, as pictured on the cover, to work on her tan.
Glenn was gratified to catch the implication that she wasn’t a Hitler mistress. But she had done so much. Ballet. Acting. Directing. And she was an athlete of sorts.
He thought of the contrast to Karen, a home economics and education student a year behind him. She was from Sterling, in northeastern Colorado, and her father was a chemist for a sugar company. They’d met at a dance in 1933, when the Fort Collins school was known as Colorado Agricultural College before its 1935 name change, and were known as a “serious” couple within a year. Karen supervised Glenn’s diet during his training, emphasizing proteins and red meat. Glenn’s affable landlady, feeling a part of the quest, went along with it, good-naturedly grousing that she should add ten dollars to his rent a month to cover the high cost of meat. Other times, Karen came over and did the cooking, either before or after she often held a stopwatch and timed Glenn in his workouts on the outdoor track or in the field house.
Glenn nodded each time someone said of Karen, “Oh, she’s such a nice girl,” implying, of course, that he was lucky to have her and she was the sort of upstanding young woman he should consider himself lucky to settle down with. She went fishing with him and held her own, and turned many heads on the dance floor.
As Karen neared graduation that spring of ’36, she mentioned they should make “plans.” When Glenn said he needed to devote all his attention to making the Olympic team and winning a gold medal, Karen looked hurt.
“Oh, honey, don’t take it that way,” he said, hugging her. “I just mean it’s not the right time to make those kinds of decisions. We have plenty of time.”
Three days later, she quietly told him that she had accepted a teaching job for the 1936–37 academic year at the high school in Fountain, just south of Colorado Springs. As Glenn headed for Berlin, their relationship seemed “solid,” but getting too specific about their future was taboo. At least that’s what Glenn thought.
He resolved to send her a return telegram from the train station.
In the morning, he packed the magazine at the bottom of his suitcase, under his clothes.
He forgot to send the telegram.
3
Leni’s Truth
Berlin
Leni Riefenstahl never lie
d. Whatever she said became Leni’s Truth. She believed it whenever she said it . . . until she needed to say something else.
So as the thirty-three-year-old former dancer and actress immersed herself in preparing for the making of a documentary about the Berlin Games, Leni’s Truth was that Hitler and the National Socialist Party leadership had little to do with the project.
Leni’s Truth was that the commission came from Dr. Carl Diem, the secretary-general of the German Olympic Organizing Committee, and that the International Olympic Committee signed off on the assignment.
Leni’s Truth was that she lined up the funding from a German film company, Tobis, and formed her own Olympia-Film, in partnership with her brother, Heinz, specifically for the project.
As with many contrivances, there were shards of reality in it.
Leni emphasized to all who would listen, and some who wouldn’t, that Diem saw Victory of Faith and Triumph of the Will, her films about the National Socialist Party Congresses in Nuremberg and aggressively pursued and lobbied her to make a documentary about the 1936 Games.
Of course, it wasn’t Leni’s fault that Victory of Faith, about the 1933 Congress, was withdrawn from theaters and banned from further distribution because of a minor inconvenience. Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Sturmabteilung, the SA Storm Troopers, was one of the “stars” of the film, seemingly inseparable from Hitler. But responding to the perceived threat of the SA’s independent militancy, Hitler had Röhm murdered in mid-1934 in the “Night of the Long Knives” purge of SA leadership. The good fortune for Leni as a filmmaker was that Victory of Faith—relatively amateurish given that she had to put together a crew hurriedly and did little preparation—turned out to be a trial run for her.
Leni’s Truth was that Diem saluted her adroitness in making them compelling films without allowing them to become propaganda pieces. She was an independent artist, a filmmaker, not a shill! She wasn’t a National Socialist Party member! Speeches in the films, even Hitler’s, were brief, and dogma was absent! These were chronicles of events and men, not of party doctrine! Hadn’t Diem been heard to say that Fraulein Riefenstahl had the body of an actress, the grace and sensuality of a dancer, the intellect of a scholar, and the eye of a painter—all combined in a peerless filmmaker?