by Terry Frei
“We had to wait for you big lugs!” Jesse joked.
The parade caravan went up Broadway, into Harlem, and eventually to Randall’s Island. Glenn was stunned by the reaction as he sat on top of a back seat in an open car with Dale Schofield and waved. New Yorkers lined the street and leaned out of windows, waving and cheering, dropping and throwing ticker tape and other bits of paper. At the Randall’s Island stadium, Glenn was the first to meet Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who presented him with one of the commemorative New York medals he handed to the entire team as perhaps 2,000 gathered in the stands. Glenn was a bit taken aback, and he was surprised by the grumbling, when the athletes figured out that the New York medals weren’t the same for all—silver medals went to all Olympic medal winners, bronze medals to those who didn’t place.
Walter Wood was headed home for New Jersey, so the roommates had to say good-bye.
“Thanks, Walter, you’ve been great,” Glenn said. “A real friend.”
After they hugged, Walter said, “Your secrets are good with me . . . but call me if you need to talk. Don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t be.”
They shook hands again and Glenn headed to the bus. As he walked and was trying to decide whom he’d call first and how he’d proceed, a Badger tapped him on the shoulder. “Got a national radio appearance for you,” he said. He introduced Glenn to the man with him, a Ralph Something who worked for the Columbia Broadcasting System. He was an athletic-looking man in a suit and hat and could have been mistaken for a recent Olympian himself. Ralph said he’d escort Glenn to the network studio and then to the hotel.
“Shouldn’t take long,” he said.
“Do I have to?” Glenn asked politely. “I’m awful tired.”
Ralph Something said, “I guess not, but I would think you’d want to.” He laughed. “If you don’t stay an amateur, the more your name is out there, the more . . .” He rubbed his thumb on two fingers. Money.
“All right,” Glenn said.
In the taxi, the radio man asked about the food in Germany and about the Olympic atmosphere. He said he was proud to be an American when the boys did so well. They got out at a building on 49th Street, just after they had crossed Lexington Avenue. Something wasn’t feeling right. There were no indications, no signs, that this was CBS’s headquarters. Noticing Glenn’s uneasiness, Ralph reached into his inside coat pocket and held up a wallet badge. “FBI,” the man said. Before Glenn could react, two other men—dressed the same, looked the same—joined them, nodding at Ralph.
“What’s the story here?” Glenn stammered.
“Someone needs to see you,” Ralph said, still amiably.
“I take it I have no choice.”
“You have no choice.”
Glenn’s heart started pounding.
They took him to what seemed to be a freight elevator at the back. On the eleventh floor, there was a reception-type area with a desk and a man at it right off the elevator, and a hallway running down each side.
“This way,” Ralph said, taking him down to the end of the hall to the right and knocking on the door.
“Come in,” a husky voice said.
The room was a huge office, with a large desk devoid of any pictures or other adornments. Nothing was on the wall behind it, either. Another door was behind the desk. In the other end was a conference table. One man, in his fifties, was sitting behind the desk. A second, in his forties, was standing. He had a notebook in his hands.
“Thanks for coming, Mister Morris,” the younger man said.
Glenn didn’t respond.
The older man moved out from behind the desk, carrying a single sheet of paper. “First of all, congratulations on your victory in Berlin,” he said, reaching out with his hand. Glenn shook it, warily. The older man gestured at the conference table. “Sit,” he said. It was not a suggestion. On the other side of the table, the younger man kept the notebook below table level, on his lap. The older man had his single sheet folded in half vertically and still in his left hand.
“So what’s the FBI want from me?” Glenn asked.
“Oh, we’re not FBI,” the younger man said. He gestured in the direction of the hallway. “Those men are. We’re not.”
“Then who are you?”
“You don’t really need to know.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Okay,” the older man said with a laugh. “I am Mister Smith.” He pointed at his compatriot. “He is Mister Jones. And when you walk out of this office, you will forget even that, and you never will have been here.”
The younger man—“Jones”—leaned forward. “Near as we can tell, you got laid a lot in Berlin,” he said. “Big movie star, famous woman. Wham, bam, go home. Hey, if that’s all it was, more power to you. We’re jealous, as a matter of fact.”
Smith said softly, “But if you think it can be more than that . . .”
Jones jumped back in. “Playing house with Miss Swastika herself?” He looked down at his notebook and read aloud, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “Reich Film Board memo, translated. Leni and Glenn: The Actress and the Athlete. To be financed in entirety from the Reich Treasury, with funds transferred to a company formed to preserve the appearance of independence. Glenn Morris to receive fifty thousand U.S. dollars, half immediately, half upon the completion of filming.”
Jones looked back up and locked in on Glenn. “How stupid can you be?” When Glenn didn’t respond, Jones snapped, “I’ll tell you how stupid . . . it’s gonna take a few hours to tell you.”
Smith put his hand on Jones’s shoulder. “You’re being a little harsh there,” he said. Next, he clasped both hands together on the table in front of him and looked at Glenn. “It was easy to lose perspective over there. You lost your perspective. You can get it back.”
Smith raised his hand. A signal. Two men—not the FBI agents—hustled in through the door behind the desk. One shoved a cart with a movie projector on it and set it up at one end of the table and plugged it in. The other set up a screen at the other end. Another man entered—scholarly, distinguished, looked as if he had forgotten his pipe—with a stack of papers and sat at the far end of the table, nearest the projector. He also had a flashlight.
The lights went out. The man turned on the projector. For over a minute, just grainy darkness was on the screen, accompanied by dark orchestral music. Then the menacing Nazi eagle on a stone perch, and a scroll below it to:
Triumph des Willens
“Triumph of the Will,” intoned the man at the end of the table. As the words and numbers appeared on the screen in German, he again translated: “The Documentary of Reich’s Party Convention 1934. . . . Produced by order of the Führer. . . . Directed by Leni Riefenstahl. . . . Twenty years after the outbreak of the World War . . . sixteen years after the onset of German suffering . . . nineteen months after the beginning of the German rebirth . . . Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review his faithful followers.”
Glenn felt a lump in his throat and had to swallow.
For nearly two hours, they watched. Glenn felt worse and worse. He kept trying to tell himself: This is what she told me. She had to do it. This is her job. She had no choice.
For the speeches, the translator was reading from a transcript and delivered the English almost simultaneously. In the opening session in the convention hall, the Nazi figure identified as Julius Streicher intoned: “A people that does not maintain the purity of its race will perish.”
Glenn told himself: A lot of people in America feel the same way.
As he watched, he decided that what she had said in so many ways was true: There wasn’t continuous venom, no point-by-point recitation of the hateful party program—the one Leni had told Glenn would be toned down. But he knew: She had to believe to make this. She had to.
He saw Hitler’s motorcade after his arrival in Nuremberg, the band concert, the Labor Service Rally, the SA Torchlight Parade, the Hitler Youth rally, the review of the troops, all shown f
rom the perspective of reverence . . . and agreement. The film came to Hitler’s speech on the closing night, when, at least according to the translator, he said: “. . . and with the best racial quality of the German nation, its proud self-esteem, we boldly claim the leadership of the Reich and the people. . . . One who feels himself the bearer of the best blood, and knowing this has risen to lead the nation, is resolved to hold this leadership, fulfill it and never give it up. . . . It is only part of a people that constitutes genuinely active fighters. More is demanded of them than of the millions of other countrymen. For them, merely declaring, ‘I believe,’ is not enough. Instead they vow, ‘I will fight.’”
When Hitler was through, Rudolf Hess led the “Sig Heil” salutes to Hitler. Then came the haunting “Horst Wessel” song.
The lights came on.
“Yeah,” Jones said, “just a nice little documentary by a lady letting us make our own judgments, right?”
Glenn was afraid it wasn’t.
“So when were you going to look at this?” Jones said. “She showed you all the fairy tales, right? She showed you all your own glorious moments in the decathlon—with Hitler sitting right behind you, clapping, and thinking you show an American can look like a storm trooper. How come she didn’t show you this?”
How did they know?
Smith said softly, “Morris, most of us know—or think we know—what happened. She’s captivating. She’s charming. She can say exactly what needs to be said at any given time and believe it. Then she can say something completely different five minutes later and believe it, too. By the way, just curious: How old is she?”
“Never asked her,” Glenn said. “The Time story during the Winter Games said twenty-eight. So twenty-eight or twenty-nine.”
“She turned thirty-four on August twenty-second,” Jones snapped. “You were fucking an old lady. Ten years older than you! You were a damn college boy a year ago . . . and she was using you. Like she uses everyone else.”
Smith nodded at the translator, who read from another sheet:
“Leni Riefenstahl, July 1936, Berlin, meeting with two members of the Reich film board to discuss rerelease of The Blue Light and the board’s instruction to remove her Jewish partners from the film’s credits.
“Board President: ‘So how many are there?’
“Fraulein Riefenstahl: ‘Three. Balazs, director and writer, Mayer, writer, Sokal, a producer. All were in consultation and subordinate to me, of course.’
“Board president: ‘Their names must be removed from the credits.’
“Fraulein Riefenstahl: ‘They deserved no credit from the start. The Blue Light was mine. Sokal put up some money and as a Jew, he expected more back and I have no doubt that, as a Jew, he swindled me. The other two helped me, but no more than nominally. And they have made claims that it was much more than that!’
“Board president: ‘This surprised you?’
“Fraulein Riefenstahl: ‘Nothing Jews do surprises me. Not now. Once I was naïve and was taken advantage of, but I am smarter now. The Führer helped me see things for how they are. I never again will let Jew vermin manipulate me.’”
The translator looked up. “End of transcript.”
After a long silence, Jones tossed out: “We just obtained that transcript. But so you know, that was the morning after your first little afternoon tryst in the apartment.”
Glenn faked more defiance than he felt. “You can just make that stuff up,” he declared.
Smith said softly, “You just saw that film. You think we made it up?”
Glenn was afraid they hadn’t.
Jones said, “We’ve got another film of the Nazis that Fraulein Riefenstahl made the year before. It’s called Victory of Faith, and it’s a nice little story—except Hitler had one of his costars, Ernst Röhm, murdered soon after it came out, so that was a bit of a problem. That’s why you won’t see it in Germany any more. But Fraulein Riefenstahl showed how wonderful those Nazis are.”
Smith asked quietly, “Need to see that, too?”
Glenn shook his head.
After a knock, another man entered. He dropped Leni’s gift—the folder of photos—on the table. “This was in his bag,” the man said to Smith. “We took pictures of all of them, so we’ll have copies. But thought you might want to see this.”
“Hey, you had no right!” Glenn protested.
“Sue us,” Jones said. “Besides, don’t sweat it. We already sent your bags—and your Nazi tree—on to the hotel.”
For a minute, Smith leafed through the prints, with Jones watching. Smith stopped the longest at the one showing Leni and Glenn at the shot put ring during his return trip. Leni was standing over the shot put and Glenn was bending over, his hands on his knees and looking at her. Smith and Jones didn’t say anything, but exchanged meaningful looks. Finally, Smith flipped the folder closed and slid it across to Glenn.
“These are quite good, I have to admit,” Smith said. “She and her people know what they’re doing.” He stood and looked down at Glenn. “You know how much credit we’re giving you, I hope. If we thought for one second you are, or could be, a Nazi yourself, or at least go over there and along with that kind of thinking without goose-stepping in the parades, we wouldn’t be taking this approach.”
Jones snapped, “Because then we’d be thinking you might just run right back across the Atlantic and back into her bed, and say America is misunderstanding this fine fellow Adolf.”
Smith said, “We think you’re a better man than that. Are we right?”
Glenn again nodded.
Jones stood up, too. “All right, Morris, here’s what we’re going to do . . .”
Smith cut him off. “Let me take this, okay?”
Jones nodded.
“Look, Morris,” Smith began, “we’re not going to debate politics with you or anyone else. We know some congressmen would watch that film and deep down be saying, ‘Good for them.’ The way we treat Negroes in our country can make us look like hypocrites when we say these Nuremberg Laws are disgraceful. We know all of that. But the point here is that the son of a bitch is going to drag this world into another war. Anything that gives him hope that we’d stay out of it—even something as unimportant as a movie about a famous German and a famous American playing house—will embolden him even more. We’ve tried to get that across to Mister Lindbergh. And Mister Ford, too.”
Jones said, “So you know, we even talked about having you go back to be our eyes and ears.” Noticing Glenn’s startled look, Jones continued, “We know it wouldn’t work. You’re an amateur, you wouldn’t have enough direct access, they’d have their eyes on you as an American, and the first misstep . . . well, you wouldn’t be found in the Rhine, but you’d probably be expelled at the very least, or have a sudden and shocking fatal heart attack at worst.”
Smith jumped in. “We decided it would be the best for everyone—you included—if we simply showed you the real Miss Riefenstahl and scuttled this little relationship. Just in case you weren’t going to come to your senses before you got home to Colorado and before you broke the news to your girl.”
Glenn was stunned, but not so stunned to realize they must have had someone on the inside at the Film Board; plus at the Castle Ruhwald, at the Geyer Film Lab, at her apartment building . . . maybe all three.
Jones piped up again. “We were going to list all the others she’s . . .”
Smith cut him off. “That’s not necessary now, Mister Jones.”
With a dismissive wave, Jones said, “All right . . . we wouldn’t have had enough paper, anyway.”
After a nod from Smith, Jones got up and left the room.
“You’ll be out of here in a few minutes,” the older man said reassuringly. “But you’ll be picked up at your hotel at 9 in the morning, and you’ll spend an hour or two, maybe three, meeting with some folks who will want you to tell them everything you can about your meeting with Hitler, and maybe about anything else you saw. Sometimes we don’
t even know what’s important until later.”
“What if I refuse to go?” Glenn asked.
“Come on, Glenn, that wouldn’t be smart,” Smith said. “Or patriotic. You help us . . . we’ll help you. You want to be in the movies? We at least can get your foot in the door there. If you’re bad, we probably can’t make them ignore that.” He laughed darkly. “Well, I shouldn’t say that, either, because there are a lot of bad actors out there with their names on marquees and making a lot of money. But movie people can be encouraged, shall we say, to look at you. Radio network folks here can be prompted to maybe put you to work in the interim. If you’re cooperative.”
Glenn put his head in his hands, and then brushed back his hair.
“Hey, I know it’s all overwhelming,” Smith said. “But we know you’re a good American, you’ll stay a good American, and the most important thing is that it can work out for the best for you. To start with, your hotel will be paid for, for as long as you want to stay here in New York . . . although we know they’ve got those big welcomes planned for you in Colorado next week. And speaking of that, you can call your girl—or anyone else . . . in this country, at least—from the hotel and we’ll take care of that, too.”
Smith stood and raised one hand. Again, Glenn wondered how anyone could see his gesture. But the door opened, and the three FBI men popped in. “They’ll get you to the hotel,” Smith said. “And I know this goes without saying, but you’ll just complicate matters—for yourself or anyone you tell—if you talk about this with anyone.”
At the hotel, Glenn had to call Karen’s parents in Sterling to get her phone number at the boarding house in Fountain, the small town where she had just started her teaching career. Her mother gushingly congratulated Glenn—and it took a second for him to realize she was talking about the engagement, not the gold medal. But she got to that, saying they were so proud of him. For a few seconds, he felt about two inches tall. But then he reminded himself: The reason Karen was in Fountain was that he wasn’t ready to get married, and she knew that. And that was before Leni had come into the picture.