by Terry Frei
Yet when he talked with Karen, the feelings came in a flood. It wasn’t “guilt” as much as the renewed realization that, minus the embellishments, what Joe Williams had said of his attitudes in the story was true. She had been an important part of his life the previous two years, she had encouraged him to pursue what at one time had seemed outlandish Olympic dreams, and while she had taken the teaching job when he dragged his feet, she hadn’t given up on him—in more ways than one.
And, yes, he loved her. Her pride in him rushed through the phone line. At first, it was as if they were trying to catch up on everything in a few minutes on the phone. They both laughed, realizing that wouldn’t work. “This is going to cost you a fortune!” Karen exclaimed. Glenn briefly pondered saying the government—as far as he knew, it was the government—would pay for the call as a reward for his gold medal, but he decided against it. But he did swallow hard and say, “Honey . . . I saw the newspaper stories. It’s not your fault, but the writer in Berlin kind of twisted what I said. I never said we were getting married right away.”
She didn’t say anything, and Glenn could picture the downcast look he was accustomed seeing when Karen was hurt.
“Honey,” he said again, and paused. He realized he never had called Leni “Honey,” or anything like it. She was, “Leni . . .”
“What are you saying?” she asked.
“Honey, don’t take that wrong. . . . I just mean when we set a date, it’s going to be after we talk about it. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said shakily.
When they hung up, he told her he loved her and was looking forward to seeing her soon. He meant it.
He spent much of his travel time back to Colorado debating himself, mostly about whether he would have realized there could be no future with Leni even without the session with the shadowy Smith and Jones in New York. Glenn also thought of whether there was a middle ground—conceding he was through with Leni, but realizing that his rationalization of his relationship with her showed he wasn’t yet capable of complete commitment to Karen . . . or maybe not to any woman. Not yet.
He practiced the speech. Honey, there’s so much going on, so much coming at me, so much changed, you’re just starting your career, maybe we better back off a bit. Maybe even date others.
When he saw her, he didn’t lose the nerve to say it. Instead, he decided he didn’t want to.
34
Homecoming and Hollywood
The night before the Denver parade and celebration, Glenn and Karen spoke with Denver Post reporter Frances Wayne in George Whitman’s living room. Wayne, a middle-aged society writer wearing a huge hat, gushed: “You two look so wonderful together! I can tell how much you’re in love.”
Glenn told Wayne that he would be leaving later in the week for a multiple-city tour with other Olympic gold-medalists on behalf of the AAU. He thought: Guess they haven’t made enough money off us yet.
“After that, what?” Wayne asked.
“Perhaps Hollywood!” Glenn said.
Wayne switched her gaze to Karen. “How would you like that?”
“I wouldn’t presume to tell Glenn what to do, or what not to do,” Karen declared. “I couldn’t say whether I would like Hollywood. I mean, I really don’t know much about it . . . except what I’ve seen in the movies.”
George Whitman walked into the room, carrying Leni’s gift—the folder of photos. Glenn had handed them to Whitman in his den and explained they were from the famous filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who was making a movie about the Olympics. He didn’t explain that he had removed the shot of Leni and Glenn together, and that was safely tucked away.
“Excuse me, Miss Wayne,” the businessman said, and then turned to Glenn, holding up a tight shot of an intent Glenn preparing to throw the javelin. “These—all these—are great! Amazing stuff!”
The reporter asked who took them.
“Lena Riefenstahl,” said Whitman.
Glenn didn’t correct him—either on the name or about the fact that Leni generally didn’t take her own pictures.
“Who’s that?” Wayne asked Glenn.
“She’s a German actress and director making a movie and maybe a photo book about the Olympics,” Glenn said as matter-of-factly as he could. “She and her people took miles of film and a ton of pictures—of a lot of us—and they’ve also got the right to use anything in others’ newsreels. She said the decathlon might even be in the prologue.”
Karen raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Is she pretty?”
“I didn’t notice,” Glenn deadpanned in a tone making it clear he did, but wanted to come off as teasing. As in: Of course she is, but no big deal, honey. Karen laughed and hit him with a couch pillow.
She was at his side the next day. They rode in a parade through downtown Denver, and were honored in a ceremony carried on national radio and attended by 10,000 at the University of Denver football stadium. The only tense moment between Glenn and Karen during the proceedings was when Glenn told Chet Nelson, the perpetually red-faced Rocky Mountain News sports editor, that Joe Williams had “misquoted” him. He explained that he and Karen were engaged, but they didn’t know when they’d be married. Glenn tried to take the sting out of that with a quick arm around her and hug. He scoffed when Nelson asked him whether Eleanor Holm Jarrett’s ouster from the team was fair. “Well, she got kicked off, didn’t she?” he asked. He didn’t mean to be as harsh as it sounded, but he decided he’d be digging himself in deeper if he tried to explain the nuances of his position.
Karen left for Fountain, insisting that she had signed a teaching contract, needed to honor it and didn’t want to let down her students. Glenn said he understood.
That night, the Denver Athletic Club paid tribute to him at a banquet, and Glenn found himself choking up when he went to the microphone and faced Whitman and the audience of businessmen. “You stood behind me before I’d even tried the decathlon,” he said. “You showed faith in me and gave me a chance. I’ll always be grateful, no matter where life takes me. You helped me realize how proud I am to be an American, how proud I am to be from Colorado, and how proud I am to have represented you all!”
He got a standing ovation.
In Fort Collins, Glenn was greeted as a returning Aggie hero, and he presented the oak tree seedling to Colorado A&M president Charles Lory.
In Simla, he was saluted on his “Day,” culminating with a town barbeque. As he spoke from the hotel balcony, he spotted his very first love—the girl who had cried for an hour after the first time for them both. She had two little children and a husband with her. She looked more like a discus thrower than a runner now.
In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels’s secretary called Leni and declared that the propaganda minister needed to see her. She knew it would be counterproductive to balk. When she arrived, Goebbels with obvious pleasure immediately told her that he was going to order German reporters to not mention her or the Olympic film project for the foreseeable future.
“Why not?” Leni erupted.
“Until we have a handle on the way you are spending the money allotted for this, and that you will not remain out of control and wasting money for your personal pleasures, we will pretend that this film is not being made. It won’t be as embarrassing if we decide to shut down this project completely. We’ll carefully audit your records and expenditures and decide how to proceed from there.”
“You can’t be serious! You don’t want to fight with me on this! The Führer is all for it! And for the other film, too!”
“The other film? Fraulein, if I were you, I wouldn’t even bring that up any more. But if you wish, I will inform the Führer also that the American athlete made you look so foolish. He led you on, he got what he wanted from you, and then he walked out on you and went home to get married.”
“You’re just jealous,” she snapped. “Of everything he has. I knew there was a girl in Colorado. He told me. I even know he said nice things about her from here that a reporter distorted, and tha
t was before he came back here and we talked it through. He is going to be coming back to me.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do.”
He handed her a stack of sheets. On top was a wire photo of Glenn in his Olympic blazer and slacks, with Karen. They were warmly hugging each other in an outdoor pose for the photographer. It didn’t appear to be forced affection. “That was taken yesterday. As you see, he is rejecting her,” Goebbels said sarcastically. “They probably went into the bushes and fucked right after the photographer was done.”
Beneath the picture, a long sheet of newsprint, folded in several places horizontally, was a wire-service story, and a quick glance told her it was a rewritten German version of Glenn’s homecoming. Another stapled stack of sheets contained typed and translated versions of all the Denver newspaper stories. “Go ahead, read at your leisure,” Goebbels taunted. “You’ll see . . . he forgot about you the second he left your bed. You tell me if that sounds like a man coming back to you. You tell me if you want the Führer to know all this. The Führer seemed to like the fellow and he thought you could work your magic on him. And I’m starting to think you must be boring in bed, because you can’t hold on to any of these men. I have decided you don’t tire of them; they tire of you. As I’m sure I would have!”
Leni didn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. She broke down in the car, though, in bursts of both sadness and anger.
Against his better judgment, wondering if the letter would be either intercepted or read before it left the country, Glenn wrote to Leni a month later. He didn’t apologize; he explained. He said he regretted the way it all unfolded, and he wanted her to know he meant what he said before he left Berlin. He was sure, he said, that she had come to accept how unrealistic they both had been, and this would be for the best.
He still occasionally tried to convince himself that the shadowy Americans who confronted him had made up her anti-Semitic rant. He still tried to convince himself that she could make the Nazis’ films without embracing the National Socialist agenda.
He couldn’t pull it off, but he kept trying.
Glenn’s letter arrived just before Leni left with her friend, Margot von Opel, for a quick trip to the resort on the island of Sylt in Northern Germany. Leni spent much of the stay confiding in Margot, saying it would take months for her to get over the American athlete. The story she told Margot was Leni’s Truth, with embellishments she believed as she listed them. She had Glenn swearing to her that there hadn’t been a girl back home. She said he promised to return and marry her by the end of the year. And then one just popped into her head. Pretending embarrassment, she claimed she had advanced Glenn the $25,000 first part of his acting payment for Leni and Glenn—and that she realized his desertion meant he had stolen the money from her.
On the second day, Leni joined Margot in the hotel café and apologized for being late, explaining she was checking on arrangements for Willy Zielke to film extra material for the prologue on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Erwin Huber was set to step in for Glenn as the Myron Discus Thrower.
A man billing himself as a handwriting expert was going from table to table, hustling work. His act was one of the café’s trademarks. Mostly, customers scribbled samples for him, and his interpretations sounded similar to those of Gypsy palm readers. As he neared their table, Margot asked Leni if she still had Glenn’s letter. Leni did, but she pointed out that it was in English. Margot talked her into pulling it out, anyway, pointing out that the man would interpret the handwriting, not the words.
Margot handed it to the man. He looked at it, winced, and then dropped it on the table. He insisted he couldn’t interpret it, but Margot pressed him. After poring over it for a minute, he declared that the man who wrote it had a dark side few knew about, with violent, sadistic, mean-spirited and unstable elements that would take over his life—and anyone around him. Margot thanked him and gave him a sizable gratuity. The man nodded and moved on. Leni appreciated the gesture, but she knew Margot must have huddled with the man before she arrived and told him what to say if she handed him a letter written in English. She appropriated the man’s message as Leni’s Truth, too.
In December, Glenn was living in New York and working for NBC Radio as a liaison for sports broadcasts, and preparing to compete for the New York Athletic Club, when he and Karen were married at her parents’ home in Sterling. She gave up her teaching job and moved with Glenn to Manhattan. That month, he also was named the winner of the Sullivan Award as the nation’s top amateur athlete for 1936, and he angered AAU officials when he reacted honestly, saying to the reporter who informed him of the news: “If I won, what happened to Owens? I thought he’d get it.” He knew many of the voters were holding it against Jesse that he quickly had declared himself a professional after the Games, and Glenn was especially sheepish because he didn’t intend to remain an amateur much longer, either.
In mid-1937, the call came from Hollywood, and the AAU declared him a professional, too, for “cashing” in on the fame Olympic competition had brought him. Karen marveled that he didn’t even need to take a screen test for the film moguls, but Glenn explained to her that his agent—a Mr. Smith—had given copies of his Olympic photos to a producer, and that was enough to get his foot in the door. He didn’t mention that Leni Riefenstahl had given him the pictures. He and Karen went to Los Angeles, where he first played himself in a brief MGM newsreel-type feature, Decathlon Champion: The Story of Glenn Morris. A small Los Angeles college served as Colorado Agricultural College during his playing days,, with some other contrivances used to represent Simla. He enjoyed making the film, but he knew how much better Olympia would be—and how much better Leni and Glenn would have been. There was no word from Berlin about when Olympia would be released, and it was as if there was a curtain drawn over the project. Glenn was unsure and uneasy about how Leni would treat him in the film after all that happened, but if she still showed him prominently, he hoped it would generate other opportunities . . . especially if the film made it to America.
Producer Sol Lesser signed him to play Tarzan in the upcoming Tarzan’s Revenge, an independent production to be shot at Twentieth Century Fox. The publicity department announced that he stood to make $250,000 in the next five years under his contract with Lesser if all went as expected. Glenn knew that was hogwash and that the deal was conditional and year-to-year, even picture-to-picture, but he went along with the story. He had two shocks about the assignment: One, when he discovered his only line in the script was, “Cynthia, I am Tarzan”; and, two, when Eleanor Holm—minus the “Jarrett”—was signed as his costar and romantic interest. His first reaction was to laugh darkly and wonder if her shipboard offer was still open. He also guessed that Smith and Jones had talked with her, too, and that the government had a hand in the casting.
The filming began in early October 1937 and lasted only five weeks. Glenn did several interviews on the set. One Associated Press story distributed nationally noted that he said: “It’s a crazy business. But it’s better than selling cars.”
Eleanor frostily set the tone, and they didn’t speak to each other except when absolutely necessary. Although they never talked about it, he assumed she had heard that he didn’t sign the petition to protest her ouster from the Olympic team, and perhaps also had gotten wind of what he said to the Rocky Mountain News about her case.
At first his line in the shooting script was changed to “Eleanor, I am Tarzan,” because producers decided to change the name of his costar’s character. One day, he heard some of the crew joking that it was changed to Eleanor’s real name so the stupid former athlete could remember his line. Bruised and angered, he considered asking them what they’d ever accomplished, but kept his mouth shut. Ironically, two of his biggest scenes were when Tarzan went swimming with Eleanor—including in the movie’s ending.
The film was released in January 1938, and even Glenn admitted as he saw it at the premiere that it was wincingly awful. Though
he was allowed to be athletically heroic in foiling villians, his adjusted dialogue turned out to be saying “Tarzan” twice, plus “Eleanor” and “good” once apiece.
Glenn was cast in a bit role in Twentieth Century Fox’s upcoming Hold That Co-Ed, a light comedy starring some big names, but he knew that wouldn’t advance his career, either. He assumed Smith and Jones felt they had done their part, and now it was up to him. He still was a popular invitee on the party circuit, though, both in Twentieth Century Fox circles and outside. “Meet Glenn Morris . . . you might remember, he won the track and field decathlon in front of Hitler!” Feeling like he was on display, perhaps even wearing a breechcloth, he started to ignore his previously self-imposed limits of two beers or one cocktail. He also began drinking at home, something Karen chided him about. He worried about money, since nothing of note had come in during 1937. Karen began crying at night. She argued that if nothing happened soon, they should move back to Colorado. Glenn could use his Denver Athletic Club contacts to land a job in the business world, she said, and she could return to teaching. They argued about it almost every night. He never hit her, but grabbed her several times, in his mind trying to shake sense into her.
In early March, Glenn got a call from a man who introduced himself as Hubert Stowitts, who said he was a former dancer and actor at MGM now making a living as a painter. Halfway through his second sentence, Glenn knew he was a homosexual, but he had come to accept that it was common in Hollywood and wasn’t bothered. Stowitts did surprise him, though, when he added that he had been the track captain at the University of California before getting into dance. He told Glenn that it was complicated to explain, but he had met Leni when he participated in an art exhibition and Leni had asked him if she could use some of his artworks of athletes in her prologue. He had stayed in Berlin nearly two years, and when he returned to Los Angeles, Leni had entrusted Stowitts with a print of Olympia—scheduled now to open in Germany shortly, Stowitts said—and asked him to screen it for selected and private audiences in Los Angeles. Leni’s goal, he confessed, was to get influential Americans to stand behind the film and lobby for its U.S. release and distribution. Stowitts said he had set up a showing for selected American Olympic athletes from the area at the Wilshire Ebell Club.