Olympic Affair

by Terry Frei

  “Of the student body, yes. But they voted for me because I was a football player. A few months ago nobody recognized my name outside of Colorado. And now . . . I’m in what looks like a famous restaurant . . .”

  Leni smiled. “Oh, it is famous.”

  Glenn continued, “. . . with a famous actress and director.”

  Leni smiled and shrugged.

  Glenn said, “But now it’s your turn.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To answer. The Time magazine story about you said your father was a plumber in Berlin. Were you born here?”

  “Yes, but your American writer misunderstood. My father . . .”

  Glenn interrupted. “What’s his name?”

  “Alfred,” Leni said. “He started out as a plumber, but he became involved in construction projects, mostly the improvement of existing buildings and larger homes with modern sanitation and ventilation. He was not fixing toilets. He did well until our currency was worthless, and then as everyone did, we went through difficult times when I was very young after the war. But we—my parents, my younger brother and I—survived. Father is doing well again now. You might see his trucks—Riefenstahl Heating and Sanitation.”

  “And you were a ballerina?”

  “Yes, but I was mostly on my own, recitals and performances.”

  “How’d you start dance?”

  “I convinced my mother to allow me to take lessons, but she knew my father would be against it, so we had to keep it secret from him.” She smiled. “My mother’s name is Bertha, in case you needed to know that, too.”

  “Thanks,” Glenn said wryly.

  “She and I had to plot. Father believed that he had to approve everything we did, every mark spent. There were to be no surprises. He believed dancing, even ballet, was decadent and frivolous, not something a young lady did.”

  “I thought ballet was the opposite of decadent,” Glenn remarked.

  “That was a time of wildness, especially here in Berlin, and he thought anything in the arts was part of that.”

  She explained that when her father got wind of what was going on behind his back, he threatened to divorce Bertha and soon tried to get Leni away from the corrupting influences of Berlin by enrolling her in boarding school. But she practiced dance there, too, and eventually came back to the city. Finally, even Alfred came to accept that she had a talent for dance—legitimate and artistic ballet.

  “He could see that I was successful, that this wasn’t some frivolous pursuit,” Leni said. “Soon, I was giving one-woman concerts all across Germany—Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Dresden . . . and many more. And Austria and Switzerland.”

  “You must have been really good!”

  “I was . . . then. But I hurt my knee. I was able to recover, but I realized I shouldn’t rely only on dancing. I had many pursuing me to try films. So I did. I still was able to dance a little in some. Arnold Fanck—a famous director—found that I was suited for the kind of stories he loved, these silent mountain films like The Holy Mountain and The White Hell of Pitz Palü. Then I had the idea for The Blue Light, wrote the summary for the story, and we turned that into a script. I produced and directed it, also. It showed for many months in London and Paris, too. Then I was in S.O.S. Iceberg, so difficult for all of us to shoot in Greenland. My God, we all thought The Holy Mountain and Pitz Palü were dangerous, but they were easy compared to Iceberg! It was a miracle none of us were killed. I promised myself I would only do films I also directed after that.”

  “But then Hitler made you do his films?”

  “It was more complicated than that, but yes. He never threatened me. He didn’t have to. By now, we Germans understand that saying no comes with risks. To your careers, at least. Perhaps to your families.”

  “What if you had said no?”

  “I would not have worked again,” she declared. “He would have said he understood, but the second the door closed, he would have made sure the Reich Film Board was told to let it be known I was not to be touched, not as an actress, not as a director. Not as anything. Financing for my future films would have been impossible to secure. My father’s business would have been in danger. So, yes, I had a choice—but not much of one.”

  “You could have left Germany. You are known around the world.”

  “Known, with some successes in other nations. But not completely accepted yet. I want to have international success, yes . . . but from here. I am German. I want to stay. I make no apology for that. Even if I could have left, my family still would have been here and been subject to reprisals.”

  “But you’ve never become a Nazi.”

  “They have let me take the position that it would diminish my work for them if I were not truly independent. At the party gatherings, I was an artist capturing on film the National Socialist men and message as they were. For better or worse. That film was not propaganda. It was documentary.”

  “I think I’d much rather see you on the screen than Hitler. In The Blue Light or any of those.”

  Leni’s smile was warm—and warming. “I will see what I can arrange,” she said. She thought for a second. “What is your schedule tomorrow?”

  “Training. At the Village.”

  “Of course. All day?”

  “Four hours, maybe. It’s still over a week until our competition. I need to get back in shape and then start tapering off.”

  “Can you be done and ready to leave the Village by 13:00?”

  Glenn mused, “One in the afternoon . . . I suppose so. Why?”

  “If you are agreeable, I’ll have a car pick you up again . . . and we will go to the movies!”

  He grinned. “Popcorn?”

  “If you want.”

  Suddenly, she slid out of the booth and was standing above him. “I will be right back,” she said. “Then we will go.”

  She headed to the bathroom in the back of the private room. Glenn still was trying to figure out what that meant—go where?—when she returned and slid into the booth next to him. She put her hand on his knee and smiled, but her tone was far from lighthearted. “Only one rule,” she said.

  Glenn waited.

  “You never, ever repeat what I said about . . . about the Führer and his policies,” she said. “And how I came to be involved with the Nuremberg films. I shouldn’t have been so careless. Even with you. I have shown a lot of faith in your discretion. Already. I hope you are flattered and aware of what that means.”

  Tough Leni Riefenstahl, the whirlwind, suddenly was touchingly vulnerable and afraid.

  “You can trust me,” Glenn said.

  She kissed him. It was soft, but very real. Then she said, “Don’t save my notes, either—the one from last night or any future notes. Promise me that. You will tear them up and get rid of them. I also said too much in that first one. I won’t . . . I can’t . . . do that again.”

  She paused and gestured around the room. “Coming here was probably a mistake. I wasn’t thinking of secrecy, more of privacy. But as I said in the note last night, it probably would not be wise to tell others about our friendship. The staff here knows not to talk. But someone might place us together. So if anyone asks, this was a business dinner to talk about the Olympics film.”

  Funny, that’s just what I was thinking . . .

  She said, “I have to go back to Castle Ruhwald now to speak to the cameramen and go over the plans for tomorrow.”

  “I was going to ask you about that,” Glenn said. “You have a castle?”

  “It’s the building where we all—all of us working on the film—are staying now, through the Games. It’s not where I normally live. I have an apartment in Central Berlin. I have been gone so often, there is not much reason to have a villa. Maybe soon.”

  “So no drawbridge and moat?”

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s what we think of when we hear ‘castle.’ A drawbridge and a moat, and maybe men with bows and arrows and swords on the top of the wall.”


  “So you read of King Arthur?”

  “Sure did!” Glenn said excitedly. “The junior-high English teacher in Simla made everyone read it every year. Came to figure out later that he was too drunk to teach anything different. So that meant three years in a row for us. But I didn’t mind.”

  “Glenn Morris, you are a very interesting man. Part small-town boy still—you don’t mind me saying that, do you?—and yet a man who will become more famous every day. You certainly aren’t like the movie men I have to deal with . . . and not like the politicians and functionaries I have been made to work with the past few years. Many of them are assholes.” She winced. “There I go again. Forget I said that.”

  And she certainly is not like Karen.

  “I’ll be at the swimming pool in the morning to make sure we’re ready there,” she continued. “Hans Ertl, one of my best cameramen, and I have devised some approaches for the swimming and diving we need to test. But I can take a break in the afternoon. It might be good for me, in fact.”

  “Same for me,” Glenn said.

  Leni kissed him again and Glenn kissed back. After a few seconds, Leni pulled away and quickly stood. When Glenn tried to stand, too, Leni gave him a gentle nudge back into the booth.

  She said, “I ask that you wait here for Franz to come and get you, and he’ll take you to a door—not the front door—where your car will be waiting.”

  “All right,” Glenn said.

  Then she was gone.

  In his limousine on the way back to the Village, Glenn again wrestled with himself and tried to interpret the signs. The mutual attraction was unmistakable. But what was she saying? What was she offering? He conceded to himself that he hadn’t been a saint since he and Karen started going together. In the past few months, he had ended up in bed with the waitress in Lawrence at the Kansas Relays and then with the daughter of a Fort Collins insurance executive who bought a car from him. He had felt guilty each time, at least, and it was fortunate that the daughter of the insurance man was attending college out of state and didn’t seem to have illusions. He rationalized it as a few wild oats before settling down. But this was different. This was a world-famous woman, not a woman whose name he couldn’t be certain of as he looked back a week later, as with the waitress (Betty? Barbara? Bernice?).

  But at least now he was certain Leni was neither a whore nor a Nazi. Remembering Wood’s words, though, Glenn conceded to himself he needed to find out if there was a general—or someone—in the picture.

  14

  The Blue Light

  Leni’s early morning meeting was with two executives of the Reich Film Board to go over her plans for the Olympics film and make sure they would support her. A young assistant was with them, and in the ensuing minutes he took notes only when told to write down something specific for future reference. But he was so attentive, he seemed to be soaking up every word.

  After Leni was assured of that support for the Olympics project, she also brought up the terms for the future national rerelease of The Blue Light to theaters across Germany, most likely in conjunction with the release of Olympia. She was planning to head to the swimming stadium after the meeting.

  “So how many Jews are we talking about here?” asked the portly board president.

  “Three,” Leni said. “Balazs as a director and writer, Mayer as a writer, Sokal as a producer. All were in consultation and subordinate to me, of course.”

  “Their names cannot remain on the credits, you understand.”

  Leni laughed. “You are not expecting an argument, are you?”

  “Well . . .”

  “They are Jews,” she snapped. “They got more credit than they deserved. That was, and is, my vision, my story, my film. Sokal put up some money and as a Jew, he wanted more in return and I am sure, as a Jew, he swindled me. To give him any credit mocks the creative process. The other two helped me, I admit, but to claim that it was anything more than that is ludicrous. And they have made those claims.”

  The president asked, “And you were surprised by that?”

  “Nothing Jews do surprises me,” Leni said with disgust. “At least not now. I admit there was a time when I was naïve, but I am smarter now. The Führer helped me see things for how they are. I’ll never again let Jews manipulate me. Good riddance. The credits without them will be more accurate with the spirit of how that film was made—and who made it.”

  “Then I think we’re all on the same page.”

  Inside, she was gleeful. The Blue Light would become even more her film—and hers alone—from now on. Harry Sokal, forceful and astute as a banker, but pathetic and easily manipulated as her lover, was in her past. She had been embroiled for three years in a battle with writer and director Bela Balazs, who had the gall to expect to be paid for his help with the script. He should have been honored to help a great actress spread her wings! Now, for certain, he wouldn’t receive a reichsmark for it. Somebody also had to tend to nominal directing duties when Leni was on camera, but a trained monkey could have pulled it off after Leni had laid out what she wanted. Deep down, even she had to admit Carl Mayer was a capable writer who had done good work—but as far as she was concerned, he also just had offered advice on how she could turn her idea for the story into a script. Her script.

  Good riddance . . . all three.

  Ecstatic in the wake of the meeting, Leni watched at the swimming stadium as Hans Ertl demonstrated the ingenious procedure he had come up with to shoot film of the diving. This was the official day of practice when the competitors could become accustomed to the venue, and Ertl was in the pool, in a swimsuit and with his Sinclair camera, encased in a protective cover. He shot the divers, both men and women, coming off the three-meter board and ten-meter platform, and then went underwater himself to follow them.

  As Leni watched from the side of the pool, a gray-haired official confronted her. “You realize, don’t you, that we will not be able to allow this during the competition?” he asked.

  She didn’t give him the satisfaction of confirming that was why Ertl was filming the training as if it were the real thing. If nothing else, they could splice in these shots among the real competition. “We can worry about that when the time comes,” Leni told the official. “But, look, the competitors seem to be enjoying this.”

  Ertl had already told her that before her arrival, his major problem was that some of the divers were making faces at the camera or waving as they moved back toward the surface. He finally had told Germany’s best diver, Hermann Stork, and the Army man attached to the American swim team for the day to ask them to treat this as the real competition.

  A tiny American girl approached Leni, waved over the Army man and said, “Can you please ask her if—”

  “I speak English,” Leni said.

  Wide-eyed, the girl asked, “You’re really the director?”

  “I am,” she said.

  “This is Fraulein Leni Riefenstahl,” the Army man snapped. “She is famous in our country as an actress and director. Our country, and beyond!”

  “Wow!”

  Knowing she—or Ertl—needed the cooperation of the divers, Leni smiled and willingly shook hands as the girl introduced herself.

  “I’m Katherine Rawls. Katy.”

  “Where are you from, Katy?” Leni asked solicitously.

  “Fort Lauderdale,” she said. “That’s in Florida.”

  “You are a tiny thing,” Leni said.

  Rawls grinned impishly. “That’s why they call me ‘The Minnow.’”

  “How old are you?” Leni asked.

  “Nineteen.”

  “I thought you were younger,” Leni said, genuinely shocked. “I hope you accept that as a compliment.”

  Grinning, Rawls pointed at the other side of the pool to another American.

  “That’s Marjorie Gestring,” she said. “She’s only thirteen!”

  Rawls breathlessly explained she competed in both swimming and springboard diving, and even had won a silve
r medal in diving four years earlier in Los Angeles. “We were right next to Hollywood,” she said, “and nobody did anything like”—she gestured at Ertl in the pool—“that. Or even filmed us at all, from what I can remember.”

  Leni laughed. “See what we women can do if they let us?”

  “I didn’t think they let women do anything in Ger . . .”

  Rawls caught herself, and then said, “I’m sorry, that came out wrong,”

  Leni waved if off.

  “I guess there aren’t many women directors in our country, either,” Rawls conceded.

  “I don’t believe there are any,” Leni said.

  “Was it hard to get them to let you do it?”

  “They didn’t let me . . . I just did it. I wouldn’t take no for an answer. They wanted me to be just a face on the screen and I said I wanted to do more. So I did it. But I also want to return to the screen, too . . . after this film.”

  A U.S. diving coach hollered from his spot near the board.

  “Katy! Any day now!”

  The little diver smiled, lifted a hand in farewell as she backed away, then turned and trotted to the board. Leni looked at her watch and decided that since Ertl was on the right track, he could continue without her.

  The same driver, Kurt, at least shook Glenn’s hand this time. He took Glenn to an impressive apartment building in Central Berlin. “This is the Hindenburgstrasse,” Kurt explained. “A very desirable location.”

  The ride was long enough that Glenn’s hair, wet when he climbed in, was dry by the time they pulled up.

  “The lift operator is expecting you,” Kurt told Glenn as he held open the limousine’s back door and gestured at the main entrance. “He will take you to the residence.”

  Leni was casually dressed in trousers and a blouse as she greeted him with a chaste kiss on the cheek and then grabbed his right hand with her left. With her right, she gestured at the huge living room.

  “Welcome to Cinema Riefenstahl,” she said, smiling.

  “Wow!” marveled Glenn, surveying the ornate furniture, paintings, a framed picture of Leni herself, sculptures of Greek figures, and a large movie screen set up and opened along the back wall, in front of the fireplace. Then he noticed the projector, too, and asked, “So this is our theater?”