Olympic Affair

by Terry Frei

  “No, Cunningham, that’s the date they wanted to do it . . . and we had to go along.”

  There were a few grumbles, and Brundage, glaring, let them die down.

  “Also,” he said, “most of you consented to be part of post-Olympic meets and exhibitions . . .”

  “Like we really had a choice,” one trackman near Glenn muttered.

  Brundage continued, “We’re still hearing from European promoters who say they’re interested in hosting some of you. We might ask a few of you to go somewhere before London, but I would assume that for the most part, it will be after. If it’s a bunch of places, we’ll divide you into groups. We expect these offers to keep coming in after the Games start, because what you do will build excitement and interest in seeing you compete in person. So some of this—a lot of this—might be arranged at the last minute. I’d apologize for that, but it’s unavoidable.”

  Jack Torrance raised his hand.

  “Yes, Mr. Torrance?”

  “With all due respect, sir, I take it you’re getting a cut of the gate, right? What are we getting out of it? Shouldn’t we at least have more choice about who goes where?”

  A few gasped at the big shot-putter’s impertinence. Many mumbled their agreement with his implied point.

  “Absolutely, Torrance, we will get a share of the box-office receipts or guarantees, or both, wherever any of you are sent,” Brundage said. “Mister Ferris, the AAU secretary-treasurer, will attempt to consult with most of you to discuss the possibilities as they unfold. But what you get out of it, first, is a chance to see more of Europe. What you get out of it, second, is the satisfaction of knowing you’re helping the organization that sent you to Berlin—the American Olympic Committee—fund programs down the road . . . including the 1940 Olympic teams. We can’t just pull money out of a hat, as you saw when we barely came up with the funding to send this team.”

  Glenn gave Brundage credit: The official was smart enough to realize they all had been reading about the frantic last-minute fund-raising, and the pronouncement shortly before the Americans’ departure that the goal had been reached.

  “What places are we talking about besides London?” pole-vaulter Bill Graber asked.

  “Well, so far . . .”

  Brundage looked up at the ceiling, jogging his memory.

  “ . . . several other German cities, plus Scotland, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Sweden, Norway. They’ll be watching what goes on in Berlin and gauging the demand before they finalize anything with us.”

  Torrance muttered, “That means they’re haggling over their cut.”

  Gould and his AP photographer knocked on Glenn’s door five minutes early. Glenn was dressed in a USA sweater and lounged on the bed, with Thomas Wolfe’s latest novel, Of Time and the River, open on his chest. He jumped up and, with his index finger marking his page, let in the AP men.

  Gould took note of the book.

  “Wow,” Gould exclaimed, “you really reading that? Wolfe? I tried Look Skyward Angel and couldn’t get past page two hundred.”

  “Look Homeward, Angel,” Glenn corrected. “And yeah, I made it through it for a class. The professor wanted to turn it into more than it was, I admit. I read it like it was his life—no more than that.”

  “You’re the only one I know who read the whole thing,” Gould said. “I thought it was one of those books everybody bought and nobody made it all the way through—but wouldn’t admit they gave up. Congratulations! How’s this one?”

  “Pretty much more of the same,” Glenn said, grinning.

  “Is that good or bad?” Gould challenged.

  “Good,” Glenn said. He laughed and added, “Mostly.”

  Gould pointed at the book. “How long’s this one? A thousand pages?”

  Glenn turned to the back pages and checked. “Close,” he said. “Nine hundred twelve. I’m on . . .”—he looked at his finger bookmark—“ninety-two.”

  “No way you’ll make it.”

  “I’ll try.” Glenn thought a second and added, “Hey, if you’re writing anything, you don’t need to mention that stuff. I don’t want to make people think I’m claiming to be some egghead or something. I just like to read.”

  Spotting the picture of Karen on the little desk, Gould asked, “That your girl?”

  “Yeah,” Glenn said.

  “What’s her name?

  “Karen.”

  “Back in Fort Collins?”

  “Well, she’s in Sterling—Sterling, Colorado—now . . . for a little bit.”

  “Been going steady a long time?”

  “Three years. She just graduated.”

  “Heading for the altar, sounds like.”

  “At some point, I s’pose so.”

  After the interview, Gould said he had another idea for a picture. “You sit there, on the bed. Here’s a pen. Here’s some paper. Start writing to her. People love that stuff, Morris.”

  Glenn played along, actually starting a letter to Karen. The photographer took about ten pictures, both with Glenn’s head down and with him looking up and smiling at the camera.

  When the AP men left, he kept writing.

  7

  Fire and Fury

  Finally, the months of painstaking preparation would begin to give way to action.

  Leni and several staff members boarded a Junkers “Ju 52” plane, a seventeen-seater, heading for Greece and the Olympic torch lighting. On the way, they stopped in Belgrade, where Leni was greeted as a great woman of the cinema, meeting with reporters at the airfield and delivering a preview of her Olympics film.

  “This will be like nothing else I’ve done,” she said as photographers, including her own, shot pictures of her speaking. “It’s the beauty of the human body and athletic competition, all against a backdrop of the Games’ roots, which we’ll salute in the filming in Greece.”

  At the Royal Palace, she had an audience with both Prince Paul, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s regent; and his nephew, King Peter II, who was only eleven years old and had succeeded his assassinated father, Alexander I, in 1934. Prince Paul was far more cordial than young King Peter, and Leni chalked up the boy’s attitude to shyness. She tried to break through by presenting the boy monarch with her standby for such occasions—a copy of the portrait of her as Junta in the opening scene of The Blue Light. It didn’t work. The young king thanked her, but remained distant.

  “A strange one that boy is,” she said in the car on the way back to the airfield.

  She was with Ernst Jäger, the former journalist she had hired as her publicity man on Olympia. Jäger was on the trip mainly to answer questions about the project for the entourage of German reporters and radio announcers covering the torch relay. But Leni trusted his instincts enough to use him as a sounding board. After all, his work history included a stint as editor of Film-Kurier, the German movie trade publication that had raved about much of Leni’s work as an actress. His editor’s career was derailed because his wife was Jewish, but Leni realized he could help her. His malleability was proven when, under Leni’s name and her line-by-line approval, he wrote breathless copy for the picture-laden booklet, Behind the Scenes of the National Party Convention Film, issued in early 1935 to coincide with the release of Triumph of the Will.

  “Leni, he was probably just scared of you,” Jäger said. “You can be very intimidating to a boy whose voice is about to break.” He chuckled. “Or anyone else.”

  “How can he be intimidated? He’s a king!”

  “He certainly is, but . . .”

  Jäger paused, seemingly having decided not to continue. Looking at his watch, he said, “We should get to the airfield by . . .”

  Leni cut him off. “What were you going to say? But what?”

  “But he’s a boy!”

  “That’s not what you were going to say.”

  Jäger thought for a moment. Slowly, he said, “Well, one of the reporters told me the king’s being told by some who have his ear that he needs to w
orry about the Third Reich and its intentions for his nation. If all of that is true, perhaps he extended that wariness to you.”

  Leni shook her head. “Why does everyone want to bring me into affairs of state?”

  “You have to face it, Leni. To many, you’re no longer the actress playing Junta or any other role. You are . . .”

  He paused to set it off.

  “. . . Hitler’s filmmaker.”

  Leni snapped, “I should send you back to Berlin right now!”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s the truth,” Jäger said. “If you want someone to only flatter you and lie to you, you need someone else. You know I can be practical—in my situation in our country now, I have to be—but if you want me to serve you well in this position, I have to be able to be blunt with you.” He let that hang for a moment. “Respectfully, of course.”

  Leni sighed. “I know you’re right,” she said. “That’s why, after this film, I have to return to acting, too, in my own dramas. I need to open doors, not close them!”

  After ten minutes of less serious discussion, Leni put her hand on Jäger’s knee. “Ernst, you understand I wasn’t saying there’s anything wrong with being”—a change in her tone set off the next two words, just as he had done—“‘Hitler’s filmmaker.’”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I am not a plant to test you,” Jäger said sharply. “You hired me, not Goebbels, and I am grateful for that, especially under the circumstances. I’m not taking notes.”

  “I know that. But . . . well, I just need to make that clear.” She paused. “I don’t want to be known as only that.”

  After spending the night in Athens, Leni’s entourage rode in cars to Olympia, to film the torch lighting and then the start of the runners’ relay to Berlin. They were catching up with another of Leni’s photographers, Willy Zielke, who spent two weeks in June with a crew shooting footage for what Leni envisioned as the opening scenes of the film at the Acropolis in Athens. Trusting the temperamental Zielke was risky, but he was an ace with his film camera, and as a director and cinematographer of his own works.

  Repeatedly in preliminary planning meetings and informal discussions with her cameramen, her mantra about Olympia was: “Film, not newsreel.” She said it so often, staff members saw it coming and mouthed it as she said it. They understood one of her goals was to connect the modern Games to the Olympics’ roots in antiquity. Plus, she insisted on portraying the events in Berlin as a celebration of youthful vigor and the beauty of the human body. That wasn’t newsreel. She also emphasized she would have many men with still cameras shooting, also, for supplementary material to go with the film—publicity and a picture book.

  Her vision of the Prologue was to begin with the Zielke’s panning of the ancient sites at the Acropolis and at Olympia, 350 kilometers to the west of Athens; and move to shots of many sculptures and copies, from several sites, including those of Medusa, Aphrodite, Apollo, Achilles, Paris, Faun, Alexander the Great, and, ultimately, Myron’s Discobolos—or the Discus Thrower. She didn’t know if it would work, but she wanted to try it, and her idea was to fade from the Discus Thrower statue figure to a modern, live athlete—perhaps even a real Olympian!—in the same pose, wearing only a loincloth, and then uncoiling and throwing the discus. Then, at least in the outline in her head, she would move to shots of the torch lighting at Olympia and the start of the runners’ relay. If necessary, she said without self-consciousness, they would supplement the footage of the torch lighting and relay with their own “alternative” staging, probably at the ruins at Delphi after the torch relay passed through that site, too. Her staff stifled smiles, knowing that one way to trigger her ire was to mention accusations that she had “re-created” scenes in her previous documentaries—accusations which were true, but which she always denied.

  They drove to Olympia to catch the torch lighting. There, Leni leaned forward behind the huge upright cameras and got a sense for what the lens was seeing as her crew filmed. She held up her hands, put her thumbs together as the horizontal bottom of the “frame” and raised her index fingers at the sides of the shot. Over a dozen Greek women in smocks watched as sunlight, channeled through magnifying glasses, kindled a fire, and one of the women lit a torch from it. Next, the Greek maidens emerged from the original stadium site to light a fire at an altar. After speeches by German and Greek dignitaries, a band played the German national anthem, and “Die Fahne Hoch,” better known as the “Horst Wessel” song—a Nazi tribute to those who fell in battle with “reds and reactionaries.” Leni watched impatiently. Her cameras, including one with sound, were rolling, but she already had made up her mind that the speeches and music wouldn’t be part of her film. That would be too much like her Party documentaries. This was for rehearsal purposes and also to humor Dr. Diem and the German organizers. No more.

  Finally, Greek runner Kyril Kondylis reached out to the fire, lit another torch, turned, and started running with it held aloft. He wore shoes and shorts. Nothing more.

  Leni slid into a Mercedes convertible, joining a Greek driver and Ernst Jäger. In front of them, cameraman Heinz von Jaworsky—Leni’s former personal assistant who had learned the photographer’s craft and earned both a promotion and her trust—rode in another convertible and shot footage of the early runners with his handheld camera.

  As the relay continued, heading east toward Athens, Leni realized she had been right to assume that the relay wouldn’t fit her vision. Some runners wore traditional Greek outfits, including tunics, skirts, leggings and vests. Worse, she saw a backdrop of modernity—police barricades and officers who stopped and delayed her and the crew; motorcycles; automobiles; and the vehicles belonging to the reporters and following German radio crew, transmitting intermittent reports back to the homeland.

  “Shit,” she said sharply. “That won’t do. This is all useless. Useless. Boring, staged ceremony. Then this!”

  “Well, how much do you need of this?” Jäger asked. “With all you’ll shoot at the Games, you’ll have more than enough to choose from.”

  “I want the Prologue to be at least fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes to put my stamp on this.”

  “But then you’ll run out of time for the athletics.”

  “It probably will be two films, Ernst. Maybe three.”

  “Two films? How long have you known this? Have you told anybody?”

  “When the time comes, I’ll proudly announce it.”

  “Then you can’t do all the editing alone. You do it the way you did it on the other films, the premiere won’t be until after the next Olympics! You can’t bring them out one at a time, either. They all must come out at once. And you will age ten years!”

  “I’ll handle all that when the time comes.”

  Jäger gestured at the chaos around them. “Use this to your advantage!”

  “How would I do that?”

  “You go from Willy’s artistic shots and tight on the first runner lighting the flame”—Jäger’s “artistic” was a bit sarcastic—“to the contrast. To this. You start with mist in the peaceful and deserted Acropolis. That’s what Willy shot there, right? With all those smoke pots?”

  “One hundred and eleven smoke pots. Every one of them fifty reichsmarks against the budget.”

  “So, you show that! So quiet. Peaceful. Isolated. And then . . . tight on the runner lighting the flame and turning. Maybe we follow him for his first steps. And then . . . modernity! He . . . or one of the next men . . . is running in the modern world!”

  “And what would that accomplish?”

  Jäger was undeterred. “You establish the connection between the Olympic Games’ ancient roots and their place in the modern world! To 1936!”

  Leni patted his knee. “Ernst, if I had listened to you, we’d have set The Blue Light in modern Munich, not the Alps in 1866.”

  He played along. “Well, at least you wouldn’t have had to climb that damn mountain barefoot all the time.”

  “I’ll concede that,” Leni sai
d, smiling. “But what I what I want to do here is set the mood of ancient Greece and stick with it until the flame is out of Greece.”

  Near the village of Pyrgos, twenty kilometers from Olympia, she spotted her star. The dark-skinned runner had long and wavy hair swept back above his ears and across his temples, flopping on every step. He was perhaps twenty. Although he was in a billowing and traditional Greek outfit, Leni was able to picture him as a statue on display in Florence. “He looks like a Pericles!” she exclaimed.

  When the runner finished his segment, Leni ordered the driver to stop. “I must meet that man.”

  Like so many of Leni’s staff, Jäger had heard her say that many times before, too. In fact, a few of them had been ensnared in the web of the driven artist—the woman who, when she indulged in her desires, often treated sex as enthusiastic recreation, as she had dancing or skiing, but also as a means to an end. Strong men wouldn’t put up with her demanding terms. Weaker men in awe of her went along with her, but then she took them for granted and eventually became bored with them.

  Along the way, she came to consider her image as part of her power. Finding them useful more than slandering, she did nothing to diminish the exaggerations about her, such as that she directed her sex, too: Action! Cut! Next! She had fallen hard a few times, most notably for her longtime cameraman Hans Schneeberger and skier Walter Prager. Those men had moved on to other women, but remained Leni’s friends. Schneeberger wasn’t available for Olympia, and Leni regretted that. It would hurt the film. However fleeting the affair, her lovers always could be used. Forever. Producers, actors, cameramen, bankers . . . she disarmingly acted as if an ultimate level of trust had been established and should continue in their work, even when the sex didn’t.

  Standing beneath a tree as he waited to be picked up by the runners’ bus, the young torch runner sensed their approach and turned. He responded with the familiar look Leni always—accurately or otherwise—interpreted as an undressing. Introducing herself, she reached out. He shook her hand lightly, but his gaze was blank. She signaled to their Greek driver, hired because he spoke several other languages, including German. He joined them, and Leni asked him to explain to the boy who they were. But the boy’s understanding of Greek was minimal, his responses halting. The driver switched to another language. Russian, Leni thought. The boy spoke in a flurry. The driver turned to Leni.