While all this was going on, Brundage’s scribble pad was filling up with a list of European royals he had recently encountered:
Duke Ruspoli, head of Italian Tennis Association
Prince San Faustino, or Bourbon del Monte, married to an American with house at Santa Barbara
Story of Countess from Vienna. Most people in Vienna monarchists.
And a list of wines he had heard about recently:
Domaine d la Croix rose
Veronese vino
Clastidio Italian rose wine
Odds and ends of his social life:
Soap becomes man
Learn how to walk on the ceiling
Girl in Excelsior bar “Since Americans are here the price is 30,000 clear”
And various political thoughts:
Social legislation and high taxes have reduced everyone to semi-poverty and mediocrity
More Jews than ever demanding restitution of everything lost and lot more
Warren Magee, attorney for Douglas Stewart, on plane…defended German banker, Rasche, for whom I wrote statement [a reference to Karl Rasche, chairman of Dresdner Bank, which helped fund the Third Reich, and who was held responsible for it at the Nuremberg trials after the war].
Those last two jottings, in combination, lead into the deeper hypocrisy of Brundage’s notion of keeping the Olympic Movement above politics. In the mid-1930s, after Hitler and the Nazis seized power in Germany, a strong movement arose for a U.S. boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Brundage, then head of the American Olympic Committee, fought vigorously to send a team. He said politics should not be a factor and that the IOC would extract promises from Hitler to adhere to the Olympic Creed against discrimination based on race or religion. But beneath that argument ran a deep river of anti-Semitism. In a September 27, 1935, letter to Carl Diem, chief organizer of the Berlin Games, Brundage complained of a “renewed outburst from our Jewish friends” against the Berlin Olympics. He insisted that the boycott effort “pushed by Jews” was based on irresponsible propaganda, and asked Diem for data showing “Jews going about their business in Germany as far as sports [are] concerned.”
This was not a one-time slip; disparagement of Jewish leaders of the boycott movement was a consistent theme of Brundage’s correspondence with German officials. As another example, in an October 28, 1935, letter to Hans von Tschammer und Osten, sports director of the Third Reich and a member of the Nazi Party, he included a packet of clippings of Nazi misdeeds and the proposed boycott, adding: “The most vicious of these articles are reprinted and circulated in sports circles by the thousands in order to add to our difficulties. Altho all visitors to Germany report courteous and hospitable treatment, the stories from [American] news writers on the Reich almost entirely go to the other extreme. The huge Jewish population in the large cities of America, particularly New York, and the importance of Jewish merchant advertisers, perhaps account for this fact.”
Brundage ultimately prevailed and brought a strong U.S. team to Berlin led by the great black athlete from Ohio State, Jesse Owens. In the American Olympic Committee report of 1936, Brundage referred to Owens as a “boy.” In the manuscript of an autobiography Brundage later prepared, he took note of Owens’s triumph, but paid greater attention to an elaborate fest staged by Hermann Goering, then commander in chief of the Luftwaffe and mastermind of the German economy. “This was arranged as an ‘al fresco’ buffet for several hundred guests in the huge park surrounding what was Goering’s house in the heart of Berlin,” Brundage wrote. “The food prepared by the best chefs in Berlin was arranged on tables on one side of the area, which must have been more than 200 meters square. One end of the area was enclosed by a high curtain, which, after the dinner, was drawn to expose an opera company with the finest Berlin orchestra. This was not the end of the entertainment, however, since after the opera performance, another long curtain on the other side of the area was drawn, and the guests were invited into a typical Bavarian amusement park with all the side shows and other usual forms of entertainment. Karl von Halt and I, 1912 competitors in the same event, renewed our competition in the various strength tests…The Nazis might not have adopted all the high principles of the Olympic Movement—but, they were converted to the fact that the Olympic Games are of such world-wide significance that all the power of the mighty German state should be placed behind them.”
A week after he returned to America, Brundage came to New York for the German Day celebration held October 4, 1936, at Madison Square Garden. The event, run by a committee dominated by members of the American German Bund, an organization of German American citizens sympathetic to Nazi Germany, drew more than twenty thousand people. The honored guests included Karl Strolin, mayor of Stuttgart, who spoke of “the miracle which we owe to our leader Adolf Hitler and his unshakable belief in Germany.” The German ambassador to the U.S., Hans Luther, said, “Germany is rearming not to make war but to make peace secure.” When Brundage took the microphone, he defended the Olympics and praised Germany. No country since ancient Greece, he said, “has displayed a more truly national public interest in the Olympic spirit in general than you find in Germany today.” He thanked German Americans for helping fund the U.S. Olympic team when others threatened a boycott. “The question then was whether a vociferous minority highly organized and highly financed could impose its will on one hundred twenty million people.” And he brought the huge crowd to its feet with a lesson he brought home from Berlin: “We can learn much from Germany. We, too, if we wish to preserve our institutions, must stamp out Communism. We, too, must take steps to arrest the decline of patriotism.”
Madison Square Garden reverberated with the sounds of thousands in full voice. They sang the “Star-Spangled Banner,” “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles,” and the Nazi anthem, “The Horst Wessel Song.”
NOW, A QUARTER of a century later, across the cataclysm of the Holocaust and World War II, Brundage sat at the front of the conference room at the Hotel Excelsior in Rome, scribbling his random thoughts. He could look out to the rows of IOC members and see his old friend, Dr. Karl von Halt, the German with whom he had jovially competed in tests of strength that night at Hermann Goering’s outlandish mansion.
On the afternoon of the second session, Brundage was elected to a third term. The Soviets decided not to challenge him, and the Marquess of Exeter, the ambitious vice president who had wanted the top job since 1952 and now hoped to offer himself as a compromise candidate, instead rose to make the nomination. There was a loud cheer, and the monarch of sport still held sway over his vast expanse of territory.
4
MAY THE BEST MAN WIN
ON the day before the Olympics began, Paolo Pedinelli and his father made a pilgrimage down to Rome from the ancient Umbrian town of Amelia to see the world’s great athletes. Paolo was five years old then, and the scene he encountered at the gates of the Villagio Olimpico was so magical that he would remember it the rest of his life. There was a crush of humanity on the wide concrete expanse outside the main gate to the village; joyous crowds seeking autographs, elbowing for better views inside, shouting out the names of recognizable stars from Germany, Italy, Australia, Russia, and the United States. It all seemed exotic even before the Pedinellis came upon a good-natured group of turban-wearing Sikhs, who turned out to be members of the wrestling squad from India. One of them scooped up little Paolo, hoisted him onto his shoulders, and carried the boy around, his head bobbing above the throng. Paolo had that familiar childhood sensation of feeling giddy and a bit scared at the same time. He felt like he was riding atop Hercules, he said later, and the world from up there seemed fresh and beautiful.
Until a few years earlier, when Rome began a massive construction campaign in preparation for the Olympics, the territory within sight of the shoulder-boosted youngster had looked only fetid and ugly, a reminder of the scars of war. Since the end of World War II, this flat swampland at a bend in the Tiber River on the northern rim of Rome had
been a shantytown of old railcars, truck beds, and tin and cardboard shacks housing the poor and dispossessed who had been uprooted from their homes during the intense fighting at Anzio and Cassino. Now the squatters had been dislocated again, replaced by a sprawling modernist village of yellow-brick apartment buildings replete with recreation rooms, drugstores, telephone and telegraph offices, a bank, an outdoor movie theater, a hospital, and a row of restaurants and sidewalk cafés, all contained and connected by twelve kilometers of new roads and pedestrian walkways, and protected by a private police force. The apartment buildings, two to four stories, with enough beds for eight thousand residents, would serve as public housing after the Olympics. They looked the part, except for a signature feature: all were raised one story off the ground by rows of cement stilts, providing shaded breezeways underneath that gave some relief from the sweltering August heat.
The U.S. men’s team was housed in two of the larger buildings in the middle of the village, sharing fifty suites that held three to eight athletes each. They tended to bunch up by sporting specialty: cyclists here, boxers there, trackmen across the way. “With three big guys, you had trouble moving around a little bit, but we were used to that,” recalled Oscar Robertson, the basketball star, whose roommates included the nearly seven-foot Walt Bellamy. Although Olympic officials boasted that some beds were long enough even for Big Bells (the beds were called de Gaulles, in reference to the towering French leader), none seemed adequate. At whatever length, Lance Larson, a swimmer from California, also thought the beds were scratchy, as though the mattresses were made from straw.
Much like American GIs who had helped liberate Europe a generation earlier, U.S. Olympic athletes brought a bountiful supermarket culture with them to Rome. Richard Cortright, a veteran cyclist from Buffalo, entered the village with a stash of supplies, clothes, and foodstuffs to sell and trade. “He sets the stuff up in his bedroom closet cabinets so when he opens the double doors it’s all on display on the shelves and hanging on the inside of the doors,” his teammate Jack Simes recorded in his journal. “We call it Dick’s Store. And it quickly becomes known to the Italians who work in the village, and other athletes. So, at odd times it’s not unusual for strangers to be walking down the hall in search of a deal.” There was one crucial item missing from Dick’s Store, according to Bob Tetzlaff, a fellow cyclist: toilet paper. The Italians had two kinds, one like wax paper and another like a paper towel, neither pleasant.
The Americans had their own dining unit open twenty-two hours a day, from five in the morning to three in the morning. It was operated by an Italian chef with seventy-six employees, but the menu was quintessentially red-meat American long before the era of health foods and carbo loading. Beef was always available as the first option. “They fed us steak, steak, steak,” said Ed Temple. Also liver, roast baby lamb, turkey, and veal. Each part of the world had its own restaurant, ten in all, and many of the Americans quickly grew sick of their fare and experimented with more exotic foods, especially Indian curries. “We would run the track managers crazy because they would say you can’t eat foods from other countries,” Ray Norton, the sprinter, later said. “So they would sort of follow us around…We’d go where the Russians were…and then we’d go visit the Indians, the Italians, all over the place.”
One place the men could not go was inside the women’s quarters, a separate sector on the other side of a raised highway and cordoned off by an iron gate and eight-foot wire fence. Village guards roamed the perimeter, and a no-nonsense Italian matron, Signora Ernestina Cabella Nardi, was stationed at the entry gate, deputized to separate the 611 female Olympians from the thousands of eager young men on the other side. There were jokes about Don Bragg, the self-styled Tarzan of the Americans, pole-vaulting over the fence, and of John Thomas, the buoyant young high jumper, making the leap. Janis Krumins, a Soviet basketball giant, almost seven foot three, could reach his hands over the top. The Nashville Banner’s Fred Russell, touring the village with some of his sportswriter pals, took note of the “rigid precautions” to “make the encampment man-proof” and said that a snooper “would have to hire a helicopter.”
Not quite, as it turned out. Three young Italian men tricked their way past the gatekeeper; armed with pesticides, they claimed they were there to kill pesky mosquitoes.
There was also the problem of a raised highway.
Before the U.S. delegation left for Rome, some parents of girls on the swim team (and they were girls, aged thirteen to seventeen) expressed concern about them staying in alien quarters so far from home. After a few days at the village, one of the swimmers, fifteen-year-old Anne Warner, wrote a letter to her parents in Northern California reassuring them: “Mom and Dad, I’ll be great because we have a guard and a guardhouse and a big fence.” A few days later Warner received a telegram from her mother with the urgent message “CLOSE THE DRAPES!” She had been mortified by a story in the local paper about Roman Peeping Toms who had staked out positions on the raised freeway, where they peered down with binoculars and telephoto lenses. “From sundown until past midnight, dozens and dozens of motorists park opposite the girls’ windows,” the story reported. Sure enough, Warner and her roommates looked out and noticed the unwelcome snoops for the first time. Many of the windows lacked curtains, so they covered them with sheets.
There was a decidedly sexist tone to the Rome Olympics, reflecting not just the aggressive manner of Italian males, but also the tenor of the times and the sensibilities of the sportswriting tribe presenting the event to the public. Abie Grossfeld, a gymnast on the American team, was invited to a pre-Games cocktail party at the home of Gina Lollobrigida on the Appian Way, where the guest of honor was American actor Rock Hudson, who was working with the Italian actress in the film Come September. As Grossfeld was observing the scene, he was approached by a group of reporters who wondered whether he would object if they asked his young wife, nineteen-year-old gymnast Muriel, her measurements. They were struck by her figure and wanted to compare it with Lollobrigida’s. An ensuing story went out on the wires saying that the hostess “has quite an Olympian figure herself” but was “almost outpointed in her own home” by Muriel Grossfeld (36-22-35 for the actress, 37-21-34 for the gymnast). “Male guests at the party had it right,” the account continued. “They watched both girls.”
Arthur Daley, a prominent columnist for the New York Times, took to ogling Dawn Fraser, a top swimming star for the Australians. In a column under the headline “Dawn Fraser’s ‘Strip Tease’ Stopped by Official,” he noted that she once took off her warm-up outfit only to discover that she did not have her suit on underneath. “There is an appealing scrubbed look to this likeable twenty-two-year-old,” he wrote. “She is a pretty girl in spite of the fact that she staunchly refuses to wear either lipstick or make-up. This hasn’t slowed her down romantically, however. She is wearing a diamond engagement ring.” As it turned out, Australian officials were not so charmed by Fraser. While she could bring them reflected glory in the pool, “they were troubled by her independent frame of mind,” according to Dennis H. Phillips, a history scholar from Sydney who studied Aussie women and the Olympics. “She was accused of assorted crimes in Rome. Among other things, she was seen with a cigar poking from the side of her mouth.”
Female Olympians felt constant pressure to conform to imposed standards of modesty even as they were being portrayed as sex symbols. At its meeting in Rome, the International Swimming Federation (FINA) voted to prohibit women swimmers from racing in bikinis, demanding that “the suit must be modest.” At the same time, Art Rosenbaum of the San Francisco Chronicle was writing a column about how his tour group, before reaching Rome, had spent time on the French Riviera, where George F. Bineer, “the swimming expert with the Chronicle party,” joked that he “should have brought along a tape measure—an itty-bitty one—to figure the lack of size in bathing costumes he has observed on his way to Rome.” At Nice, Rosenbaum reported, George F. was “the first to hit the beach, and appoin
ted three other men assistant BW’s—bikini watchers.”
The women on the U.S. team had to follow a dress code established by the team’s director of activities, the Comtesse de Morelos, who in an earlier life, before marrying into Italian nobility, had been an American athlete known as Brenda Helser. With her refined continental sensibilities, the comtesse directed her sartorial hostility at Bermuda shorts. “I have lived in Europe for more than ten years, and I know that Bermuda shorts have become a symbol to Europeans of everything that is unpleasant about the U.S. woman,” she said. She banned them not only from the streets of Rome but also from the village. The U.S. women besieged her with complaints, to which her reply was: “Do you think those flapping bottoms are beautiful?”
But what angered them more than being kept out of Bermudas was being ordered to stop dancing. This edict came down from none other than Ed Temple, the track coach, and his no-frills team manager, Frances Kaszubski. A few days after the women’s track team reached Rome, Temple became concerned when his runners showed up for a morning workout “beat, and I mean really beat.” What was wrong? Word came back to him that they had been up late the night before at the village recreation hall showing the world how to dance to American rock-and-roll tunes playing on the jukebox. “The Russians and Germans and Italians sat there for hours watching our boys and girls dancing and cheering them on,” Temple said. “So I laid down the law right then and there.” Everyone wanted to dance with Wilma Rudolph, but the real swingers were Willye White, an irrepressible long jumper from Chicago, and Earlene Brown, the discus thrower and shot-putter from Los Angeles.
The women felt their coach was being too restrictive and ignored his orders when they thought he wouldn’t find out, but his mind was focused solely on performance on the track. “I told them we can dance in the United States,” Temple said later. “If they start giving out gold, silver, and bronze in dancing, then we can jump in and dance. They said they wanted to get in some recreation and go to the dance hall with all the countries, and I said, ‘No, we ain’t dancing over here.’ I said, ‘Whoever goes to dance, you going to catch the next plane home. We didn’t come all the way to Rome to dance.’ [At least] one of them tried, Willye White. We called her Red because she had red hair. Red was always a defiant type person. Red went up there and danced and everything.”
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