by Terry Frei
“Have you seen it?” Glenn asked.
Stowitts said he had, and confided that Glenn and the decathlon were prominently featured in the second part, Festival of Beauty. “You’ll want to see it,” Stowitts said. He laughed. “Trust me. She didn’t hold a grudge. Or at least you couldn’t tell it from the film. You’re a star in it!”
Great. He knows, too.
Stowitts emphasized, though, that her instructions to him were specific: The Wilshire Ebell Club showing would be only for the athletes, nobody else. No wives, no girls, no coaches, no friends . . . and certainly no reporters or reviewers. Everyone had to agree to sit through the entire four hours and not leave once his or her event was shown. “Hitler hasn’t even seen it yet!” Stowitts exclaimed. “It has to be kept quiet. Agreed?”
Glenn preferred it that way.
It was great to see a lot of the boys again, including Ken Carpenter, Earle Meadows, Bill Graber and a handful of the swimmers and divers. There was awkward small talk, but before long, it was as if they were back in the Olympic Village, teasing. Glenn even took it good-naturedly when Carpenter teased that if he didn’t win an Academy Award for Tarzan’s Revenge, there was no justice in the world. Glenn did notice, but didn’t ask about, the absence of any of the Negro trackmen who lived in Southern California. Nobody questioned him about Leni before the film started.
Standing at the front of the room, Stowitts again explained that it was two parts, Festival of Nations and Festival of Beauty, and that this soundtrack was in German, but it would be replaced with an English one for the eventual North American release. “If there is an eventual North American release,” he added. He repeated that Hitler hadn’t even seen this yet, as far as he knew, and absolute discretion about the film’s content was both requested and expected.
They hooted during the erotic prologue, showing the Greek ruins, nude women dancers, and eventually Erwin Huber nearly nude as Myron’s Discus Thrower. Glenn was the only one who recognized him, and he also was all but certain he saw Leni, shown only from behind, in the artistic shots of the nude women. Then came the opening ceremonies, with the Americans marching in near the end and with the Olympians in the screening room trying to spot themselves. Most of them jeered when Hitler pronounced the Games open. Then they came to the events, with the excited German announcer providing narration as if he was watching the events live. The “restaged” pole vault footage looked obviously contrived to Glenn, especially because Meadows and the Japanese appeared as if they were about to burst out laughing any second during their close-ups at the end of the runway. Glenn looked at Meadows and Graber, who chuckled, but they seemed to be the only ones who thought it looked a little strange. Otherwise, Glenn was stunned at how even-handed the film seemed to be with the Negro athletes, especially playing up Jesse Owens.
“Man,” Ken Carpenter said to Glenn, “your lady friend might be in trouble for this.”
The decathlon didn’t show up until about a half-hour into the second part. But for about twenty minutes, Glenn truly was the star, in close-ups and in the events. Carpenter and Graber especially teased him when the camera panned up and down his legs. He had seen much of the footage in the theater at the Geyer Film Lab, so he resisted the temptation to blurt to Stowitts that it wasn’t true that Hitler hadn’t seen this yet. But he saw the footage of the restaged 1,500 meters for the first time, and it looked ridiculous to him, as if someone was following him around with a flashlight as he circled the track or shook hands with Huber. He noticed that Eva wasn’t in the film, and that all that was of him reaping the spoils of victory was his restaged peering at the flagpoles, with the wreath on his head. There was nothing from the real medal ceremony in the daylight.
When it ended, the athletes rose for a standing ovation, feeling a bit silly doing so, but doing it nonetheless.
The trackmen adjourned to the club’s bar to talk about it, and the consensus was that it was both better and more seemingly objective than they had expected. They agreed it had taken them back to 1936. Graber finally asked him what they all were wondering: “Did you guys just break it off when you left or what?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Glenn said in a tone that made it clear he knew exactly what he was talking about.
“Hey, you can tell us now!” Graber protested.
Glenn sighed. “I haven’t seen her since I left Berlin. And you guys seem to forget that I got married a few months later. Does that answer your question?”
“Not really,” Carpenter said. “It just raises some more.”
That’s all they got out of him.
Driving home, Glenn was excited. Thanks to Leni, he would be back in the international spotlight when this finally was released—as a hero, not as a guy with four words of dialogue in a terrible movie or a guy standing around on the fringe of the huddle in a football comedy. After it came out, he hoped, the offers would get better. He convinced an agent, Eddie Hanson, of that, and signed on with him, asking him to find work for him beyond the conditional work from Lesser. He had given up on Smith and Jones.
He filmed his small part in Hold That Co-Ed, and then settled in to wait. During his many arguments with Karen, he tried to get the point across that when Olympia finally came out, it might open doors for him. Each time he mentioned Leni, Karen’s looks got sourer.
Glenn was crestfallen when he read in Daily Variety that the premiere was being delayed until April 20, 1938—or Hitler’s forty-ninth birthday. The Germans claimed it was to honor the Führer, but the assumption was that the Germans’ march into Austria in March had something to do with it. After it opened, though, the dispatches from Europe made it clear that the two-part film was a triumph, praised even by non-Germans. As it premiered in other European nations, too, Leni repeatedly drew praise for her treatment of the American Negroes and for showing triumphs of all nations, not just Germany.
Glenn kept waiting for confirmation that Olympia would be distributed in America. The trade papers ran periodic pieces about American studios and theaters balking. The four-hour, two-part configuration was an issue. But mostly, it went beyond art. Germany was increasingly bellicose. Leni was wrong: Instead of moderating his anti-Jewish stands and practices as time passed and the world knew he was there to stay, Hitler and the Third Reich turned even more hateful. That became increasingly clear with each dispatch from Germany, and movie moguls understood it was bad business to make any sort of financial commitment or otherwise be linked with the Germans. Then Glenn read a story in the Hollywood Reporter saying Leni hoped to come to America to plead her case, including about the film being an International Olympic Committee and not a Third Reich project. She wanted to bring prints designed for the U.S. market, with an English soundtrack and, presumably, fewer shots of Hitler and displays of German nationalism.
His agent, Hanson, got nothing done. Glenn fired him in June, deciding that he would find a new representative when Olympia reached the United States and he was a hot property again.
Leni’s letter came in August. Glenn was glad he beat Karen to the mailbox. The letter was neither coldly formal nor warmly intimate, perhaps written with the assumption that Karen might see it. She hoped this letter found him well and happy, and on the verge of Hollywood breakthroughs. She thanked him for his cooperation on Olympia and said the reaction—in France even!—was rapturous and that the segment on the decathlon was drawing much praise. Glenn was a star in Europe again! She confirmed she would be coming to New York in the fall and hoped to eventually make her way to Hollywood. Perhaps by then, she said, it would be unnecessary, and that exhibitors and others would have seen the light, but she feared that might not be the case and she would be staging private showings, hoping to convince all that this was not a German film, but an international one. She said she would be honored if he could attend a showing or a premiere and would be in touch after her arrival in America to update him. She also would be grateful if he spread the word in his Hollywood circle that she was no N
azi and that the film was art, not propaganda. He noticed she made no reference to Stowitts’s private showing for the athletes. It was if she thought the stipulation about discretion for that showing involved her, too. As he thought about it over the next few days, Glenn found himself stepping away from the uneasiness and revulsion he felt in Smith and Jones’s office, and wondering if he had been unfair.
About a week later, when Glenn returned from a local high school and running—he was trying to stay in condition, at least for the screen and not competition, given his “professional” standing—Karen had Leni’s envelope in her hand. “What’s this?” she challenged.
“Letter about Olympia,” Glenn said. True enough! “Go ahead and read it,” he said, assuming she already had.
She looked it over long enough to make it seem the first time.
“Written in July,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me about this? Or show it to me?”
“Why should I have? There’s nothing in there I haven’t been talking about,” he said. “To you and to everyone else. You’ve heard me talking about it! She’s a filmmaker. I’m in her film. She wants me to promote it. I can either promote and hope it helps, or we can be evicted from this place in a month or two.”
“That’d be all right with me,” Karen said, starting to cry.
“Honey,” he said, surprised he still could call her that as he grabbed her shoulders, “we have to play this out.”
She looked up at him. “Glenn, you’ve talked about her in your sleep.”
“What?”
“I’ve never said anything. I’ve known for a while. You talked about her in your sleep—or to her. And you’re not making a movie.”
“Oh, don’t be . . .”
“Stop it! I know. Okay, it was in Germany, I guess during the Olympics. And then you came home. I was willing to live with that after I figured it out, and I did. In all of this, even during the fights, have I ever said anything about it? But now . . . if she’s coming here . . . you have to give me your word it’s over.”
“Karen, nothing ever . . .”
“Stop it!” she sobbed.
He stepped away and went to the window. After a minute, he came back. He took her hand. “I was stupid,” he said. “It’s over. But . . .”
“But what?”
“I still have to try to get that movie seen here. For me. For us! Do you understand that?”
“If you say so,” she said. “But this can’t go on forever. We can’t go on like this. We can’t keep arguing here. We should go home . . . to Colorado . . . soon.”
“We’ll talk about that. We have a screening to go to, remember.”
His part in Hold That Co-Ed was embarrassingly minor, so he wasn’t excited to see it at the screening a month in advance of its release. But at the pre-showing reception, each time someone asked him what he was up to, or what was next, or even when he was asked about the stories in the trade papers, he pounced. Fewer and fewer Hollywood folks seemed to know who he was without being prompted. Yes, Olympic glory could be fleeting. But he forcefully advanced the theory that his prominence in Olympia—at least that’s what he had heard—and the treatment of his Negro teammates, showed that “Miss Riefenstahl” wasn’t under the thumb of the Nazis and that Americans should give her film a fair chance.
“You’re starting to sound like a Nazi, Morris,” one second-tier actor said from the fringe of the group.
Karen pulled him away. “He’s right. Especially when you talk about her.”
“I’m talking about the film,” he said sharply.
He reintroduced himself and Karen to two of Hold That Co-Ed’s stars, John Barrymore and George Murphy, and when each asked him what he was up to, he brought up Olympia and stated his—and Leni’s—case. Karen was seething, but smiled bravely. Barrymore seemed to be looking past Glenn. The affable Murphy at least listened and said he would keep an open mind. An older woman Glenn recognized waved at Murphy.
“Isn’t that Sophie Tucker?” Karen asked.
“Yes,” laughed Murphy. “The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas! Come on, I’ll introduce you.” But as they walked over to the corner, Murphy leaned into Glenn’s ear. “Whatever you do, don’t bring up any of that German shit with her . . . or with any of the other Jews here.”
In making the introductions, Murphy joked that Tucker “made me look good in Broadway Melody of 1938.”
“I certainly did,” she said with a straight face. “And they had me about eighth in the credits! Below George here and Robert Taylor and Buddy Ebsen and Eleanor Powell and even that girl Judy Garland!” Murphy was smiling, but Glenn and Karen weren’t sure how to react, and Sophie noticed and burst out laughing. “At my age,” she said, “I’m just glad to be under any man . . . even one as homely as ol’ George here!”
Glenn drove them home, and there were several problems with that. One, he was drunk. In the Hollywood of matching drink for drink, he was in way over his head. For years, from Simla to Berlin, he had been careful. But around movie people, moderation was damn near impossible. Two, he still was embarrassed over having to watch his fringe role as a football player at the screening. And three, nobody among the movie folks had promised better things were in the works, or given him any hope of support in getting Olympia into an American release.
Karen, who’d had too much champagne, too—a rarity for her—started crying again. “Now you’re flaunting it,” she said bitterly. “You know, probably six people there tonight told me you must have fucked her, the way you talk about her. And six more said they know you fucked her.”
He’d never heard Karen say “fucked” before.
“Well, I hope you’re proud, you got it out of me,” Glenn said bitterly. “But I remind you, we weren’t married then.”
“You are now! Everybody there thinks you’re going to be in her hotel room, fucking her, the second she gets to Los Angeles. Hope you do a better job with her than you’ve been doing with me lately!”
He took his right hand off the wheel and, as hard as he could, gave her a backhanded slap to the face.
“Shut up!” he yelled. “Shut up!”
“The truth hurts,” said Karen, crying harder and rubbing her face. She had a cut at the corner of her eye, and blood was streaming down.
“I never should have married you!” he said. “You tricked me into it after that idiot sportswriter put words in my mouth! You’ve hurt my career out here, dragged me down, told me I’m horseshit and we need to get out of here.”
“Well, you are a horseshit actor,” she screamed. “You are! You have to get that in your head!”
For the next few miles, silence. When they got home, Karen raced into the bedroom and barricaded the door. Glenn went into the second bathroom, washed his face and looked at himself in the mirror. He was drunk, but not too drunk to be horrified. Forget everything else. You hit her!
He went to the bedroom door and tried to nudge it open. He knew if he took a run at it, he could get it open, but decided against it.
“Karen?”
Nothing.
“I’m sorry. I drank too much. I said stupid things. I’m sorry for hitting you.”
Nothing. He slept on the couch.
The next morning, she came out of the bedroom with a suitcase. “I’m going home,” she said.
“I said I was sorry!” Glenn said, jumping up from the couch.
“You said things you can’t ever, ever take back, too. You can say you didn’t mean them, but you did.”
“Well, what about you? You said things, too.”
“Yes, I did,” she said. “I’ve stopped trying to fool myself. You used to be such a good man! Even after I figured out what happened over there, I still thought that. I don’t anymore.”
Her father came back out with her to Los Angeles a couple of weeks later, and she filed for divorce on September 9, 1938. Even the Denver papers turned on him with a vengeance. The filing claimed that he had punched her, pulled her hair and thrown her
against the door, knocking her unconscious. And that he had given her a black eye on another occasion. The papers noted they were only allegations, but played them up with huge headlines and a judgmental tone. The filing claimed he had made $18,000 in 1937 and asked for $700 a month in alimony and $2,000 to pay her attorney fees.
I pay her $2,000 so her attorney can make things up?
On September 22, they saw each other in Los Angeles Superior Court. They didn’t talk, at least not to each other. Glenn told the judge he couldn’t afford to pay alimony. As near as he could remember later, the wire-service story quoted him semi-accurately: “Since my wife and I separated on August 28, I have been living off the bounty of friends. I have borrowed fifty dollars—borrowed it in dribs and drabs, sometimes as little as two dollars at a time.” He told the judge that, yes, he had made about $18,000 in 1937, but the money had disappeared because of the payments on their house, the high expenses of living in Los Angeles, and his practice of sending money to his parents every month. He said he had made $975 so far in 1938. He admitted he even had tried to return to his former profession and get a job as a car salesman, but had failed, and was starting to sell insurance on commission. He insisted, though, that there still was hope for him in the movie business. He didn’t mention Leni or Olympia. The judge denied Karen’s immediate alimony request and said he would hear the case in October.
The next week, Hanson, the fired agent, sued Glenn for $288,000, alleging breach of contract. Glenn laughed at that at first, wondering what the point was—except for publicity and to embarrass the former client. Hanson knew how little he had made. But then he decided it might even be a good sign: Hanson seemed to think Glenn might make some money in the future in the business. Maybe he had heard about Olympia.