Bliss, Remembered: A Novel

by Frank Deford

  Eleanor told me she just said that off the top of her head, but Brundage took hold of it, and he asked her who’d finished fourth. Eleanor replied, “Oh, don’t send her, Avery, she hasn’t got a prayer for a medal. But if you send that girl I introduced you to at the Trials, that Sydney Stringfellow—now that kid has the potential to maybe put it all together and win something.”

  Actually, Eleanor told me, she still thought Brundage was going to come to his senses and back down, but he was dead serious. Why, he threw Jesse Owens himself out of amateur athletics a little later—hardly a week after Jesse was the toast of Berlin—just because he said he might turn pro. You see, as far as the Olympics were concerned, Brundage pretty much made up the rules on the fly, so he just went ahead and fired that telegram off to me.

  Well, Teddy, Mother was terrified. “Trixie,” she said, “are you really prepared to go up to New York and get on a foreign ship, where they’ll be speaking German—not the king’s English, mind you—and go off to Hamburg all by yourself and trust that someone can get you to Berlin? You really are brave enough to do that?”

  The fact is, I was scared myself, but it was such an amazing opportunity, so somehow I got my courage up and told Mother I was prepared to go. All by myself. She took a deep breath and said, “All right, Trixie, if you can promise me your father won’t roll over in his grave.”

  That made me think about Daddy and all the things we’d done together, out fishing, shooting ducks and doves, playing ball—and, Teddy, that just evaporated any fears I had. Stoutly, I told Mom, “I’m sure Daddy would want me to be his girl and go.”

  So she drew in a deep sigh and said, all right, she’d ride with me on the Bullet up to Wilmington, where I’d catch the train for New York. We called Western Union and wired Avery Brundage that I’d be on my way. It cost, I think, ten cents a word, but Mother splurged, because she added one more sentence, seventy cents worth: “PLEASE BE SURE MEET AT HAMBURG PIER.”

  That was all that really worried me, getting off the ship in a foreign land. The rest seemed pretty easy. After all, Teddy, at this point, I was gettin’ to be quite the veteran traveler, a regular Baedeker. Why, I’d been to Chicago and New York City, and I’d ridden in subways and called for taxi cabs, and now I was goin’ back up to New York and then across the ocean all by myself. But sometimes, it isn’t that you grow up. Sometimes I think it’s just that you’ve already grown up, only you don’t realize it till something faces you down.

  That’s what happened to me that summer of ’36. If I’d looked back then, say in September, I would’ve hardly recognized that girl I’d been a few weeks ago. So much had happened to me. I wasn’t a different person, you understand. And it wasn’t a matter of just changing my name from Trixie to Sydney. It was all of me. But, of course, I didn’t look back, because by then I was looking forward. That’s the whole point of growing up, isn’t it?

  It’s funny, isn’t it, Teddy? Here Eleanor gets thrown off the team, but it turned out to be a terrific thing for her. She told me that herself. By the time I got to New York, she was on all the front pages. You don’t get that no matter how pretty you are and no matter how fast you can swim backstroke. So Avery Brundage was the best thing that ever happened to Eleanor. And me, too, of course. He changed my life for forever and a day. You’ll see.

  But then, if you’ll excuse me, Teddy, he was still a total horse’s ass till the day he died.

  Part Two

  HORST

  Well, sure enough, Teddy, I got to Berlin without any difficulty at all. The ship sailed across the ocean blue, and, as promised, I was met right at the pier in Hamburg and taken directly to the women’s dorm. We were kept separate from the men. They had a large village about five miles away, but no girls were allowed in. As far as I know, the only woman who ever got into the village was Leni Riefenstahl. Do you know her, Teddy?

  I shook my head, though the name sounded vaguely familiar to me.

  Oh, she was a piece of work. She’d been a big German movie star, and Hitler was crazy about her.

  “You mean they had an affair, Hitler and . . . ?”

  Leni Riefenstahl. I’m surprised you never heard of her, you being in the theater. Well, yes, there was some scuttlebutt about that, but the general consensus was, no, they were never lovers. Now, the Nazi bigwig all the movie stars had to worry about was Joseph Goebbels. Certainly you’ve heard of him?

  “Oh, sure.”

  He was the head of propaganda, so he got involved in movies, and he had what they used to call the casting couch.

  “I think they still call it that, Mom.”

  Well, Goebbels was a creepy little guy with a limp. Now, please, Teddy, I’m not a mean person. I understand some very nice people have to limp, but it just added to his, uh . . .

  “Creepiness.”

  Exactly, there’s just no other word for it. Now Hitler himself really wasn’t impressive. You know, he had that foolish mustache, and he wasn’t very tall, but he wasn’t creepy. He didn’t put you off. You certainly never thought: well, this fellow is the absolute personification of evil. I mean that just didn’t cross your mind when you were around him.

  “Wait a minute, Mom. You were around Adolf Hitler?”

  As close as I am to you right now. I was at Goebbels’ house, too. Well “house” doesn’t do it justice. His estate on an island. And there was a beautiful movie star there and everyone whispered that she was his mistress. Understand, Goebbels’ wife was right there, too. The movie star was named Lida something, and I kept trying to imagine her climbing into bed with that little creep, and it made my skin crawl. I thought, if you have to do that to be a movie star, well—

  Dammit, Teddy, you’ve got me off the track again. I was talking about Leni Riefenstahl. She’d made this propaganda film for Hitler a couple years before, and now she was shooting one about the Olympics.

  She’d just burst right into the men’s village to shoot her movie. She was crazy about men’s bodies. Not that I have anything against men’s bodies, Teddy. Even as old and decrepit as I am now. But Leni Riefenstahl—her whole movie featured men’s bodies, including a number of them in the altogether—carrying the Olympic torch, in the sauna, what have you.

  Yep, when it came to Leni Riefenstahl, rules were made to be broken. I never saw a woman who could get men to do whatever she wanted better than she could. She’d cajole, she’d threaten. She could cry on cue. Well, of course, she was an actress.

  She actually got a lot of the athletes to repeat their performances for her camera, pretend to run the whole damn race again, the total rigamarole, so she could get close-ups and so forth. Whatever Leni wanted. Of course, sometimes it was a two-way street. The American boy who won the decathlon—his name was Glenn Morris. After she finished shooting him, she got him into her bed. Of course, I don’t think Glenn fought very hard to avoid that particular destination. It would not be in the least bit fair to say she seduced him.

  Mom stopped then, and a funny little smile played over her face. At moments like this, I knew enough to just let her remember whatever it was that had struck her, so I let the tape run silent. She started again after awhile, but speaking more wistfully:

  She did try to seduce Horst. Here he was only twenty, and she must’ve been thirty-five if she was a day, and she tried to seduce him. Now he told me she didn’t succeed, but, honestly, I couldn’t have blamed him, Teddy. It would’ve been very hard to reject the blandishments of Leni Riefenstahl. Especially for a young German boy. I mean, it would be like gettin’ into bed with the Queen of Sheba if you were a Sheba boy—a . . . Shebanese? Right?

  “I really don’t know, Mom.”

  Well, you get the picture. Now, I wanted to believe Horst when he said he’d managed to say no, but there was always a part of me—well, a very considerable part, to tell you the truth—that thought this one time he was fibbing. But I would’ve forgiven Horst. It was before he met me that she tried to seduce him, and, as I said, Teddy, no man could s
ay no to Leni Riefenstahl.

  I stopped her. “Mom, excuse me: who’s Horst?”

  Yeah, you’re right. What’s that word they always use now for that sort of thing?

  “What sort of thing?”

  You know, when you move from the one thing to another. Wait, wait. It’ll come to me. . . . Segued! That’s the word. I don’t ever remember people saying “segued” until very recently. Well, just now I guess I segued into Horst, through Leni Riefenstahl, but that’s appropriate, because it was because of her that I met Horst. His name was Horst Gerhardt.

  Mom stopped and smiled that special smile that I recognized only comes from bliss, remembered. In fact, as she kept sitting there, musing, blissfully, it didn’t seem that she was going to pick up the thread. So I finally spoke up. “Well, who was Horst Gerhardt?”

  He was my gold medal, Teddy.

  She beamed.

  Horst was my gold medal.

  She paused again. My curiosity was up. “Well, tell me about him,” I asked. Instead, Mom rose abruptly.

  No, not right now. Before I get into Horst, I have to assemble my thoughts.

  And she left me right there, with the tape still running.

  She had acted so precipitously that when she went into her bedroom I began to fear that she might’ve experienced some sort of crisis, or perhaps was in pain. But on the contrary: when Mom emerged, she seemed downright chipper and blithely suggested we go out to lunch. “I’ll treat,” she said. She had a favorite little restaurant in mind, one where we could sit outside in a pretty, covered courtyard. Very green; very northwest. As soon as we sat down, she called the waiter over and, bingo, ordered two Bloody Marys.

  “You didn’t even ask me,” I said.

  “If I’m going to be fortified, I want you to be, too,” she replied.

  “You need to be fortified? Against what?”

  “Well, it’s not fortified against, Teddy. It’s just that I wanna have all my ducks in a row.”

  “Because of this Horst?”

  “Exactly. I sorta got ahead of myself back there. Let me back up now and get a running start into Horst.”

  “All right. Where do you start to run from?”

  “Well, get out that tape recorder, Teddy, and lemme see.”

  Dutifully I obeyed, and Mom pondered for only a second before she launched back into her tale.

  Well, I’ll begin at the women’s village. Of course, it wasn’t a village. Not like the men’s. Now that was a village. It was way out of town, in Doeberitz, set in these lovely birch woods with ponds and all sorts of animals. They even had a kangaroo or two to make the Australian boys feel at home. And the sauna, of course. That’s where Leni got her film of the Scandinavian boys all runnin’ around naked as blue jays. That was avante garde for the time, Teddy. Very avante garde. I can assure you, you didn’t get to see that sort of thing at the New Lyceum Theatre in Chestertown.

  But as for the Olympic girls—well, there simply weren’t enough of us competing then to have a village. We just had a dormitory—the Friesenhaus they called it—and it was mighty spare, lemme tell you. They turned it into military barracks after the Olympics were over, and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts it wasn’t for officers.

  They’d just finished the place, too, and because it was so damp and cold when we first got there—

  “In August?”

  Exactly. All the Germans were saying it was the first time they’d ever had April in August. It was so raw that the plaster was still wet. And the beds. The mattresses were filled with straw, I think. Oh, they were awful. But I was lucky, Teddy. By the time I got there, the other girls had already been there a week, and they told me the food had been so bad at first, almost nobody could eat it. Green apples, brown bread, all that heavy Teutonic stuff. There’d been so many complaints, though, at least it was edible by the time I arrived. And you know how it is: when in Rome. Why, I even got to like pickled cabbage and cucumbers—

  “What the hell, Mom. You also like scrapple.”

  Well, I suppose. Anyway, the cuisine was definitely improving. I got there on the third. Monday, August the third, 1936. Things had started on the first. The track and field especially. Jesse Owens was already the talk of the town.

  There was two of us to a room. I got put in with Mary Lou Petty, because Eleanor had originally been assigned as her room-mate. I think it was Olive who said, “It was convenient for Eleanor that she got thrown off the team on the boat, because she’d’ve left this place first night.”

  And Iris said, “If I’d’ve known what this place was gonna be like, I’d’ve run around with Eleanor on the boat and gotten thrown out myself.”

  But we were just gripin’, you know. It’s the nature of the beast, Teddy. And nobody much expected a great deal then, in the way of accomodations. I mean, it was the Depression. You were grateful for a roof over your head and three squares. You know what we use to do for amusement in the dorm? We’d bowl oranges down the floor at Coke bottles. Nowadays, none of the young people can amuse themselves unless they have something electronic.

  “Video games.”

  Exactly. But you had to make your own fun in the Depression. And, anyway, we were all just a bunch of gals away from home. It was exciting just to be there. And the Germans—the interpreters they had livin’ with us—they were the nicest ladies. Later on back home people would say, “What about those awful Nazis over there, Trixie?” and the first person who would come to my mind would be Elsa, our interpreter. I never met a nicer person on the Eastern Shore than Elsa. It’s the personal things you remember much more than the general picture. Even the matron we had, she was an old biddy, with pearls hanging down with her jowls. She’d been royalty—Baroness Von Wangenheim was her name—but she wasn’t so bad. They had a high wrought-iron fence around our dorm, but I don’t think that was so much to keep us girls in as to keep any boys out. And the Baroness was formidable enough to handle that without any fence. So we were certainly not under any house arrest, I can assure you.

  “But how did you get to meet Hitler and Goebbels?”

  Teddy, I told you I needed a running start. For goodness’ sake, let me get warmed up.

  That was when the Bloody Marys came, complete with limes and celery stalks. Mom and I clinked glasses. Then she took her celery stalk out. She explained:

  Always gets in the way of my nose.

  “I can work around it,” I said. We both took good long sips.

  Nobody says “wet your whistle” anymore, do they?

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Well, this sure wets my whistle, Teddy.

  So she took another sip and sighed and said:

  Unfortunately, not long after I settled into my room, Elsa came and said there was a man to see me in the mess hall.

  “Was that Horst?”

  Mom frowned.

  Am I telling this story or are you?

  “I’m sorry. You are.”

  I’ll get to Horst in due time. So I went over to the mess hall. It was next to the dorm. The right men could come in there, and the man who wanted to see me was the girls’ team coach, Mr. Daughters. Ray Daughters—like sons and daughters. Right away, he said, “You better sit down, Sydney,” and when I did, he said, “Look, I’m not gonna beat around the bush.” He took a breath, and I swear, I thought someone had died, before he blurted out, “I’m sorry, Sydney, but you can’t swim. You’re not eligible.”

  Of course, that hit me like a ton of bricks. It didn’t make any sense. “I’m not?” was, I think, all I managed to say.

  “No, I’m afraid Mr. Brundage put the cart before the horse. He thought he could just substitute you for Eleanor, but it doesn’t work that way in the Olympics. We’d already sent the names of the team in, and you weren’t on the official list, so you aren’t eligible. Mr. Brundage thought he could pull some strings, but even though he’s in like Flynn with the Germans, there wasn’t anything he could do.”

  “Oh,” was all I
said, Teddy.

  “Then,” Coach Daughters told me, “that means you can go home anytime you want, Sydney.”

  “You mean, go back to Chestertown? Take a boat right back across the ocean?” He nodded. Can you imagine, Teddy: go all the way to Germany and just turn around and go home like you’d just been over to Dover, Delaware? That was the nuttiest thing I’d ever heard. “Do I have to?”

  “Oh no, you can stay. You’re on the team. Here.” He handed me a credential, with my name on it. “You’re in the Olympics. You just can’t compete.”

  “Well, Coach, I think I’ll stay.”

  “Good. You can come to practice, maybe help out—whatever the other girls want.”

  “Sure.”

  “One thing, though. Did you bring a suit?”

  “A bathing suit?”

  “Yeah. See, we’ve already handed out all the suits we had on the ship and Eleanor kept hers, so if you don’t have a suit, we have to scare one up for you.”

  Well, that was the Depression for you, Teddy. The United States of America didn’t have the money for any extra bathing suits for their Olympic team. If President Roosevelt had known, there would’ve been hell to pay, but, obviously, he was in the dark. Luckily, though, I had brought my own—my sexy see-through silk number.

  So Coach Daughters said, “Well, then, you’re all set. Come on over to practice with the other girls tomorrow.” He got up then. “I’m really sorry about this, Sydney. But I guess sometimes Mr. Brundage can act like a bull in a china shop.”

  “It’s okay, Coach,” I said. “I’m just glad to be here at all.”

  Mom stopped and took another big sip of her Bloody Mary.

  See, Teddy, that’s one reason why I was never very keen to talk much about being in the Olympics. Because I wasn’t really. I was something of a fraud. As an Olympian, I was ersatz.