by Terry Frei
Leni finally broke the news that the filming indeed would have to be delayed until Wednesday night. “For many reasons,” she said. “All logistics. It was easier when everyone was here for the Games.”
In the apartment, they watched Leni in Die weisse Hölle vom Piz Palü, or the White Hell of Pitz Palü, when Maria/Leni and her husband were rescued from certain death when stranded on a mountain ledge. An aviator spotted them and summoned rescuers. Leni explained that the pilot, Ernst Udet, a Great War ace, played himself. Her running commentary during the film was minimal, mostly about the ghastly—but realistic—conditions of the filming. After the film ended, she stood and turned off the projector. Standing over Glenn, she asked, “Now, after the last two days, do you see why I wanted to control my own destiny in the dramas? That led me to Blue Light. And do you see why I want to go back to that?”
“You never told me how Blue Light happened.”
“I wrote the story out, perhaps five pages of narrative. Together, we formulated a script from that, improvising, though, as we went. I was proud of the way it turned out.”
“You should be. I loved what I saw of that.” He smiled. “The parts I saw.”
Leni went to her second bedroom, which she had made her office. She came out with several sheets of paper. “You have to promise me you won’t react right away . . . that you will think about this,” she said.
Oh, oh.
She handed him the sheets. The first thing he noticed was the writing was in German. The second thing he noticed was the title at the top.
Leni und Glenn: Die Schauspielerin und der Athlet.
“Leni and Glenn: The Actress and the Athlete,” she explained. “It is a feature film linked to Olympia. Olympia is a documentary; this is a story. German filmmaker and actress—me—meets and falls in love with an American Olympic athlete—you. I play me. You play you. It’s our story.” She looked in his eyes. “It will be as big in Chicago and Los Angeles and New York as it is in Berlin and Munich.”
Glenn pondered the implications. “I assume we’d be telling everything?”
“At least hinting of it, yes,” she said. “Lots of hand holding and kissing. But remember, it is a script, a story. We can make it say anything we want.” Leni paused. “I would perhaps use less of the decathlon in Olympia than I envisioned, and we can use a lot of that footage of you in Leni and Glenn. So we already have a head start!”
“Interesting,” Glenn conceded.
“There’s one other thing you are not thinking about,” she said. “You want to take advantage of your fame, don’t you?”
“Well, yeah, but that would be with a good job. And maybe some endorsements.”
“I can assure you what you could make from acting, in this film, and then maybe others, would be better than any job in Colorado,” she said. “However the movie is financed and structured, I am sure the other producers would go along with providing a very handsome salary for you, and that’s just to start with.”
She named a reichsmark figure that meant nothing to Glenn. Her eyes rolled to the ceiling as she calculated, and she came back: “Perhaps fifty thousand dollars.”
Glenn couldn’t help it. “Wow!” he exclaimed.
That was more than Jesse Owens was being offered for his vaudeville work.
“Acting and film know no boundaries,” Leni said. “It would open other doors, but you would be even more famous after this is made. We would get American partners, as with S.O.S. Iceberg, and either make English and German versions or make one film with separate soundtracks, whatever we have to do.”
Despite it all, he couldn’t resist a dark laugh. “How’s it going to end?”
“We’ll just have to see, won’t we?”
Glenn got up and paced. “I’m going to have to think about this,” he said slowly.
“You should do more than that,” she said. “You should do it.”
“You’re also assuming I can act.”
“You don’t have to, not in this one. Just play yourself!”
“And no matter what, I have to be on that boat back to America. I have to go home to see everyone I need to thank, whether I’ve decided or not.”
And I’d have to tell Karen.
“All right,” she said. She took back the sheets. “And that is all we are going to say about it until after the filming.”
Much to Glenn’s shock, she stuck to that.
The next morning, Wednesday, Glenn went with Leni to the Geyer Film Lab and watched her work at the editing machine, looking through the raw footage of field hockey; the championship basketball game between the Americans and Canadians, played outdoors and on a muddy court; plus fencing and swimming. He was fascinated with the process, including Leni’s patience. He wondered: Could she really do this for a year, getting a film ready?
That night at the stadium, all was finally ready, with many of the German meet officials on hand, the lights set up at several vantage points, and the atmosphere eerie. They hadn’t found the other two competitors in the heat, but another German athlete lined up with them for the start of the 1,500 meters, far enough outside so the camera wouldn’t show his uniform. Leni directed Glenn to start from the inside lane, dismissing his mild argument that he had broken from lane two in the real race. She noted it would be much easier to focus on him with nobody between him and the camera. Glenn dug the holes for his feet and broke from a sprinter’s position, as he had in the real race. At first, he worried that his ankle wouldn’t hold up to it, but he found that it was fine. Leni filmed several takes of the start, but they only took a couple of strides. Then Leni’s strategy became clear as she had them run around the track. She used Huber and Klein to re-create the dramatic moments in the race, showing Glenn passing Klein and then holding off Huber when the German challenged him. Close enough, Glenn thought. And then, with the lights shining on the finish line, he crossed it in a blaze of glory. They also filmed an official placing a blanket around his shoulders, and then Huber and Klein separately shaking his hand. Finally, she had him don the oak-leaf wreath again and look off in the distance, as if he were peering at the U.S. flag again, explaining that she might want a shot that appeared to be in the dark after the race. But when Glenn again pointed out that the medal-ceremony had taken place the next day in the daylight, when he was wearing his blazer and tie, Leni repeated they she just wanted to have as many options as possible. “But in every one of them, you still win!” she said.
They finished after midnight. As they packed up, Glenn called over the still photographer and had him take a picture of him with Huber and Klein, arms around shoulders and smiling.
When Glenn was in the dressing room, Huber approached Leni, close enough so nobody else could hear him. “You’re not fooling yourself with Morris, are you?”
“I don’t believe so, Erwin.” After a few seconds, she added, “But what do you mean?”
“When—or if—if he goes home, he’s not coming back. You know that, don’t you? I know he can’t hurt you, I’m just saying you are treating this as a farewell, too, aren’t you?”
Leni pondered how much to confide. “I’m offering him a life far better than what he would have in America. He will realize that. He would have a job in industry, a meek wife, four children, and an unexciting life. If he continues to compete, it will be as an amateur—a pauper. If he doesn’t compete, he might be paid to be in advertisements, but that won’t last, and there will be occasional banquets where he is saluted for what he once did. And soon his countrymen will forget even that.”
Huber said, “You’ve got this all figured out, don’t you?” His grin lightened the mood. “If you two have children, will you at least name the first-born son Erwin Morris?”
Over breakfast, Leni reached out and put her hands on Glenn’s.
“Stay.”
He shook his head. “Leni, I’m not a dog.”
This time, she pleaded. “Please stay. With me.”
“I can’t!”
&
nbsp; “You say that like you couldn’t ever go back to America. I’m asking you to stay here. Now. With me. You said you’d think about it. And us.”
“I am thinking about us! I said I’d think about coming back. So tell me how that would work.”
She laid it out. The first thing he would do after returning would be to participate in the additional filming for Olympia’s prologue, playing Myron’s sculpture of the Discus Thrower come to life. “What do I wear, my American uniform?” he asked.
“No,” Leni said, “you wear a loincloth.”
“And?”
“That’s it. A loincloth. You are an ancient Greek, after all!”
“Wow,” Glenn said, wondering if he was blushing.
Leni said she would depart from her usual procedure and enlist aid in editing and putting together Olympia, so she could work on a script for Leni and Glenn and move forward on that film. Her goal would be to have Olympia out first, whetting the appetite for the love story, and then to premiere Leni and Glenn soon after, perhaps in early 1938.
As she talked it through, she congratulated herself on her ingeniousness. Instead of following through on the plan she hadn’t told many about—a two-part Olympia, perhaps four hours long—she would pare down the documentary and essentially make Leni and Glenn the second part. That is, if Glenn went along. The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea of perhaps becoming the highest-profile multinational married couple in the world. Together, they would be far greater than alone—or than they would be with anyone else.
“If you stay now, Glenn, it will be so much easier,” she said.
“Now you’re just thinking like a director,” he countered.
“Stop it! It’s part of what I am, but this is what I would be saying if there were no films,” she said. “I would be saying . . . please stay. We could be husband and wife and lovers and partners and . . .”
“Wow,” Glenn said.
“I’m not saying we get married tomorrow. Sometime. But for now . . . stay.”
“I can’t.”
He got out of his chair and looked out the window.
Unless something comes up you haven’t heard about yet, there might be some one-time endorsements and then you’re going to have a nice job in Denver. Hmmm. Work in Denver, probably marry Karen; or be a movie star, on both sides of the Atlantic, and be with . . . maybe even marry . . . a famous and exciting woman. God knows what’s going to happen in Germany, but if Leni is right? It could work, and you wouldn’t have to be a Bad American to do it!
He turned. “Leni, I have to go home first,” he said. “I have to see my family. I have to see Karen. No matter what I tell her, I still have to see her. I have to say thanks to the people who helped get me here in the first place. If I don’t, it probably closes every door in America . . . and for you, too, in a way, right?”
Leni was sobbing. He joined her on the couch.
She rode with him to the airport. They held hands on the way. When they arrived, Leni’s face looked as it did in the climactic moments of The Holy Mountain, tears running down her cheeks. Her driver circumspectly got out of the car and, with some help, carried Glenn’s bags inside as Glenn and Leni embraced and kissed.
“Are you coming in? Glenn finally asked.
“I don’t think I can,” she said. “I’d fall apart. This is best.”
She paused and said, “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“This won’t be farewell,” she declared. “You will be back. Think of the life we will have together.”
“I’m thinking about it,” he said.
They embraced again. Finally, Glenn pulled away, looked her in the eyes one more time and, suddenly, slid out of the car. But he leaned back in and smiled.
“Thanks for everything,” he said.
“Tell me you will be back.”
“I will be back.”
And then he was gone.
33
Triumph of the Will
As Glenn waited at the Southampton dock, he was surprised to see Foy Draper, Bill Graber, Ken Carpenter, Gordon Dunn, and Forrest Towns arrive, too. Then he realized they competed in Oslo the day before.
“Hey, you guys look a little blue at the gills,” Glenn teased.
“I’m not even sure where that place was we stopped,” Carpenter said. “But getting here was worse than that flight from Prague to Stockholm.”
As Glenn expected, Carpenter got him off to the side, to talk. “Nobody believes that stuff about extra filming because it was dark,” the discus thrower said. “Graber said she did that with them, but right away.”
“Well, it’s true,” Glenn said sharply. “One day in the light, one day at night. Me and Erwin Huber and the Czech kid.”
“Okay, okay, don’t get mad,” Carpenter said. “I’m just telling you . . . you’re going to have guys asking you, or looking like they want to ask.”
When the SS Manhattan pulled up, Walter Wood was waving from the rail. The reunion was warm, with back slaps, and Walter led them to their room. Along with the oak-tree seedling, Glenn had a thick stack of telegrams, mail, and notices waiting for him on one of the little dressers. He opened his suitcase and, in it, found a surprise—a thick folder of pictures. A quick look confirmed it was filled with prints of still photos Leni’s photographers took both during the Games and the “extra” sessions after his return to Berlin. She’d had them slipped into the suitcase as his going-away present. Walter noticed. “Let me guess who gave you those,” he said. Glenn didn’t say anything as he put the folder back in the suitcase.
“So what happened?” Walter asked. “Anything you need—want—to tell me?”
“I’m not ready . . . yet.”
A couple of the telegrams were from Karen. One said:
i accept your proposal!!!
love, karen
As he sifted through, he found that her parents, his parents, Karen herself, Harry Hughes, and his own brother and sisters all considered him headed for the altar virtually the instant he arrived back in Colorado. Between the lines, though, Karen also seemed to be hurt that he wasn’t writing more often. He was perplexed and had a churning in his stomach, but he finally opened a letter from George Whitman dated August 15. Inside were two clippings from the Rocky Mountain News, and Glenn scanned them first, increasingly flabbergasted as he continued.
That’s not what I said! He put words in my mouth! I’ve never said “swellest” in my life!
He handed the clippings to Walter. “Well,” the Cornell man said after reading them, “this makes things more interesting.”
Briefly, Glenn was angry with Karen for her presumptuousness, but then he realized the position she had been put in. As his own experience with the Joe Williams story reemphasized, too, Glenn couldn’t even assume that Karen had said exactly what was attributed to her in the paper.
Before he fell asleep, he again went through it all in his mind. The one thing he knew: He couldn’t just go home, nod about all this wedding talk, set a date and then write to Leni and ask: “Okay, when do we start filming?”
If it was going to be with Leni, he had to be all in. He knew she wouldn’t stand for anything else.
The voyage home was uneventful and he accepted the barbs and even leers without responding, and he opened up to Walter with the barest of outlines about his return trip to Berlin. Otherwise, his strategy came to be telling his official story once—he had gone back to Berlin for supplemental filming with other decathlon men and nothing more—and then not respond again. Jack Torrance, whose sense of humor hadn’t been dulled by his disappointing showing in Berlin, announced that as a duly sworn officer of the law in Louisiana, he would arrest the next man for harassment who tried to press Glenn for details.
Of course, the first time Torrance was alone with Glenn, he said, “You can tell me, you know.” Glenn’s pained look caused Torrance to guffaw. “That’s all I need to know,” he said.
A day out from New
York, as Glenn walked around the deck, he came to his decision: It would be Leni. It would be daring, but . . . You only live once. Now the trick would be to figure out how to tell everyone, including Karen.
As catharsis, he wrote a letter to his older brother Jack, knowing he wouldn’t be able to mail it until they landed. The brothers weren’t close, but it was more drifting apart than estrangement, so Glenn felt as if he could confide in Jack—at least face to face. In the letter, he talked about the trip to Czechoslovakia and Sweden, and of the grand way his teammates were treating him on the return trip. He left it that he also had “many, many experiences” he would tell Jack about when the brothers got together. He also gently informed Jack that a newspaper guy had gotten carried away, and that his marriage wasn’t imminent.
As the SS Manhattan moved to the pier in New York on September 3, as a band played aboard one of the waiting ships, as thousands waited and cheered, Glenn realized he hadn’t walked on American soil in seven weeks, and he again marveled at how much his life had changed since. When reporters accosted him on the dock, he said the Olympic experience was wonderful; no, he likely wouldn’t return to his job as a car salesman; but, no, he didn’t know what the future held. The Badgers assured the Olympians planning to stay at least overnight in New York that their baggage—plus the winners’ oak-tree seedlings—would be sent along to the hotel. The AOC would pay for one more night; after that, the athletes were on their own.
At the Battery, they met many of their teammates who had returned on the SS President Roosevelt a week earlier. One was Jesse Owens, and Glenn rushed over and got in a quick hello. Jesse said about half of the trackmen from the earlier return had hung around New York, or lived close enough to return, for the parade.