Riefenstahl, who at the time was often referred to as the first lady of the Third Reich, flattered Hitler and flirted with him and believed that he would “save” Germany. Her first conversation with him about the Olympics film took place on Christmas Day, 1935, at Hitler’s spartan residence in Munich.
“How did you spend Christmas Eve?” she asked.
“I had my chauffeur drive me around aimlessly,” Hitler responded sadly, “along highways and through villages, until I became tired. I do that every Christmas Eve.” He paused, then added, “I have no family and I am lonely.”
“Why don’t you get married?”
“Because it would be irresponsible of me to bind a woman in marriage,” Hitler said. He was dressed casually, not in uniform. “What would she get from me? She would have to be alone most of the time. My love belongs wholly and only to my nation—and if I had children, what would become of them if fate should turn against me? I would then not have a single friend left, and my children would be bound to suffer humiliation and perhaps even die of starvation. I have tried to express my gratitude wherever I can, for gratitude is a virtue insufficiently valued. I have people at my side who helped me in my bad years. I will remain true to them, even if they do not have the abilities demanded by their positions.”
Then Hitler said, “And what about you? What are your plans?”
“Hasn’t Dr. Goebbels told you?” Riefenstahl asked. She had assumed that Hitler knew about the film.
When she told him, he was surprised. “That’s an interesting challenge for you,” he said. “But I thought you didn’t want to make any more documentaries, that you only wanted to work as an actress.”
“That’s true,” Riefenstahl said, “and this is definitely my last documentary. I thought it over for a long time. But I finally said yes because of the great opportunity that the IOC offered me, the wonderful contract with Tobis [the company that would help make and distribute the film], and, last but not least, the realization that we won’t be having another Olympics in Germany for a long time.” Hitler did not mention his plan to make Germany the permanent home of the Olympics.
She then explained, as best she could, the inherent difficulties of such a tremendous undertaking and her doubts about its eventual success.
“That’s a mistake,” Hitler said cheerfully. “You have to have a lot more self-confidence. What you do will be valuable, even if it remains incomplete in your eyes. Who else but you should make an Olympic film?” Then, to Riefenstahl’s surprise, Hitler said, “I myself am not very interested in the games. I would rather stay away . . .”
“But why?” she asked.
Hitler took a moment, then said, “We have no chance of winning medals. The Americans will win most of the victories, and the Negroes will be their stars. I won’t enjoy watching that. And then many foreigners will come who will reject National Socialism. There could be trouble.”
At this point in their conversation, Hitler offered his requisite criticism of the Olympic stadium as inadequate to the scale of his ambition. It was too small. Too modest.
“But don’t be discouraged,” he said. “You are sure to make a good film.”
Before they parted that night, Hitler offered his assessment of the character of Dr. Goebbels: “A man who laughs like that can’t be bad.” Then he took Riefenstahl down a corridor, unlocked a door, and showed her a bust of a girl decked out with flowers. “I told you why I will never marry, but this girl,” he said, pointing at the bust, “is Geli, my niece. I loved her very much—she was the only woman I could have married. But fate was against it.” (After finding a love letter from Eva Braun in Hitler’s pocket, Geli had killed herself in the apartment in which Riefenstahl and Hitler were speaking—although there have long been rumors that she was murdered.)
Hitler had confided enough to Riefenstahl for one night. “Good luck with your work,” he said as they parted. “You will not fail.”
Hiring Riefenstahl to make the official Olympic film was both unsurprising and a stroke of genius. It was clear that she could be counted on to present to the world exactly what Hitler and Goebbels hoped to have presented. She would shamelessly romanticize the spectacle, even if it meant reenacting the important moments that her cameras failed to capture as they occurred. In fact, only German photographers handpicked by the organizing committee would be issued credentials, and only Riefenstahl would be allowed to film the games. “These arrangements,” the New York Times correspondent in Berlin wrote presciently, “would appear to indicate clearly enough that the world at large is to see the Olympics through exclusively German lenses. It can safely be assumed that no opportunities for political propaganda that are likely to arise will be neglected and that untoward incidents from a propaganda point of view will be ignored.” When, on April 25, the Olympic organizing committee announced that Riefenstahl would be directing the official film, she was identified in the Times as “a directress” who made mostly “propaganda films” for the Third Reich.
Riefenstahl did not dispute this characterization until after the Third Reich crumbled in 1945. In the meantime, she marshaled all of her considerable talents in service to making the documentary. It probably did not occur to her that the star of her film would be a handsome, dark-skinned non-Aryan whose grandparents had been slaves.
12
The Belle of the Ball
* * *
ABOARD THE SS MANHATTAN: JULY 1936
THE NIGHT BEFORE EMBARKING for Berlin, Jesse Owens found himself seated next to George Herman Ruth at a banquet honoring the American Olympic team.
“You gonna win at the Olympics, Jesse?” Ruth asked, slicing through his sirloin.
“Gonna try,” Owens replied. He was nervous on two counts. Naturally, he was awed by the Babe, but additionally, watching the gargantuan Ruth eat, he was praying that nothing would be spilled on his rented tuxedo. It was obvious that coaching first base for the Dodgers was not a position that required physical fitness or table manners.
“Trying doesn’t mean shit,” Ruth said with a grin. “Everybody tries. I succeed. Wanna know why?”
Owens could only muster a nod.
“I hit sixty home runs a few years back because I know I’m going to hit a home run just about every time I swing that frigging bat,” Ruth said. In his first full season of retirement, he could not quite bring himself to speak of his playing career in the past tense. Swallowing and continuing, he said, “I’m surprised when I don’t! And that isn’t all there is to it. Because I know it, the pitchers, they know it too. They’re pretty sure I’m going to hit a homer every time.”
Owens was duly impressed. Ruth was right. Confidence mattered, and when he boarded the SS Manhattan the following day, bound for Germany, he had never felt quite so confident.
Still, the voyage was a precarious one for him and his teammates, if only because of their proximity to Avery Brundage, who was on the lookout for revelers and anyone else who violated his code of conduct. They weren’t exactly at close quarters with the AOC president; he and his cronies went first class, while the athletes were in steerage. Even in steerage, though, so much food was served that several Olympians ballooned as the ship sped toward Europe. Jesse Owens was lucky. His fine sense of balance made him particularly susceptible to seasickness, which made eating a less than pleasant pastime. He felt especially nauseated after the Manhattan encountered a tremendous storm on its second night at sea. A head cold also kept him in the stateroom he was sharing with Dave Albritton, Room 87 on Deck D, for some time.
“You’ve got to work your legs,” Snyder told Owens, who was curled into a ball on his bed. “You can’t just lie there for a week.”
“Listen, Larry, if I so much as stand up, I’ll be sick. There’s no way I can run.”
“Well, forget running,” Snyder said. “You’ve got to eat. There won’t be time to put the weight back on.”
“I don’t want to eat,” Owens said. “I’ll throw up.”
Finally
Snyder prevailed on him to go to the dining room. Before he knew what had happened, he was sitting down with three white southerners: hurdlers Glenn Hardin and Forrest “Spec” Towns and shot-putter Jack Torrance. Their accents and their jokes immediately made him feel ill at ease. This, he decided, was not the night on which he would come to terms with his boyhood in Alabama. Queasy already, he quickly excused himself and found a seat with Albritton.
“Did you hear about Eleanor Holm?” Albritton asked, negotiating some peas onto a fork.
“Hear what?” Owens said. Despite his illness, he cut a dashing figure in the dining room. He was wearing his handsome pinstriped suit—his only suit.
“She’s been drinking with the writers,” Albritton said, “and they’re saying they might kick her off the team.”
Owens pursed his lips and nodded his head. “I guess old Avery isn’t messing around.” While it was far from surprising to him that Eleanor Holm Jarrett had been partying—that surprised no one—he was disturbed by the thought that America’s most decorated female swimmer might be prevented from competing. The daughter of a Brooklyn firefighter, Holm was only twenty-two years old, but she was sophisticated and experienced. In Los Angeles four years earlier, she’d won a gold medal in the backstroke. Her beauty and vivaciousness made her one of America’s first female sports stars. They also attracted a famous suitor who became her first husband—the bandleader Art Jarrett.
“She won her place on the [1936] Olympic squad fresh from two solid years of trouping with her husband’s band,” Paul Gallico, one of her occasional drinking buddies, wrote, “during which time she sang nightly, never went to bed before three or four in the morning, and carried her share of the burden of the traveling cabaret show business by drinking with the local big shots and helping her husband sit up with them until the waiters whipped the cloths from the table and turned out the lights.”
If there was one man who was impervious to Holm’s charms, it was Brundage, who found her behavior repugnant, an embarrassment to the American Olympic team. Disregarding the directives of the AOC, the swimmer brazenly consorted with writers and other passengers aboard the Manhattan. One night early in the voyage, she outdid herself, in the company of Charles MacArthur, the gifted playwright, whose wife, the equally gifted Helen Hayes, had turned in relatively early. Holm, whose fondness for champagne was self-confessed and well known, drank enough of it with MacArthur to make her subsequent unsteadiness quite conspicuous. Certainly the Olympic officials she literally bumped into noticed.
This party, during which Holm declined to heed hints that she would be well advised to return to the athletes’ quarters, culminated in the American Olympic Committee’s serving a sharp warning that put the backstroke star on probation with “one more chance,” in Avery Brundage’s words.
“If I was her,” Owens said to Albritton, “I would stay in my room.”
“Doesn’t matter now,” Albritton said, as he speared another pea. “She’s a goner. They’ll find a way to get rid of her.”
On the final night of the crossing, Holm would once again get drunk, this time within full view of an official chaperone. The next morning, as the Manhattan docked in Bremerhaven, Brundage kicked her off the team, igniting a storm of criticism.
“The campaign of vindictiveness against the little lady was inspired not so much by the fact that she drank champagne,” Gallico wrote later in her defense, “but that she could drink and still win. That was and always is the unforgivable sin.” Then, taking aim at Brundage and his cronies, he continued, “The Amateur fathers were always delighted to avail themselves of the girl’s services—gratis, of course—at their swimming meets and cash in on her attractions; but when she punctured an illusion for them, they repaid her with public disgrace. It was a noble ganging-up.”
Lawson Robertson was among those ganging up on Holm. In fact, he didn’t think women should participate in the Olympics, period. “The Greeks had the right idea over 2000 years ago,” he said, “when all women were barred.” That comment, which today would be grounds for immediate dismissal, drew hardly a sniff. For many of the titans of the Olympic movement in 1936, the presence of women on their team was as objectionable as the presence of blacks and Jews. In other words, such athletes were tolerated, barely, and far from equal.
Most of the preeminent sportswriters of the era were not what could be called liberal thinkers, but compared to the Olympic solons, they were proto-integrationists and proto-feminists. Their mixed praise for the blacks and women was better than nothing.
Comparing Holm to other great athletes known for the laxness of their training regimens—including the great middleweight Harry Greb and the golfer Walter Hagen—Grantland Rice wrote that she “has been one of the few immortals who break training rules and world’s records together.” Rice defended her, sort of, writing that she had trained the same way for her first Olympics, in Amsterdam in 1928, when she was fourteen years old. It is unclear whether he meant she had been drinking then too.
“I have always taken a drink when I felt like it, when I felt I needed it to keep relaxed,” Holm told Rice. “This trip has been no different from any other I have taken, including those to the Olympics at Amsterdam and Los Angeles. I am still in condition to swim backstroke in record time. Facing my third Olympics, with the records I have made, I still feel I am the best judge of what I should do, within reason. I was quoted as saying before the Olympic trials that I had trained on champagne and cigarettes. I did not mean this literally. I merely meant that I had led my natural life to keep from going stale from so much competition.”
As usual, Westbrook Pegler saw clearly that Brundage was a buffoon who could always be trusted to make the wrong decision. “He is very sensitive to personal flattery and honors at the hands of the soft-soap department of foreign governments,” Pegler wrote, “and undoubtedly regards his election to the International Olympic Committee as recognition of his sporting idealism rather than his susceptible innocence.”
If nothing else, it can be said of Brundage that he cared not a whit about public relations—which was what scared coaches such as Larry Snyder and athletes such as Jesse Owens. If there was an unpopular, reactionary stance to be taken, Brundage took it. In the case of Eleanor Holm Jarrett, he was almost universally criticized. As might be expected, the Daily Worker took shots at him. “The smug gentlemen of the Olympic Committee knew all about Eleanor before she was given a place on the team,” Fred Farrell, the Daily Worker’s sports columnist wrote. “They knew they could just as easily keep a bird from flying as Mrs. Jarrett from drinking. Then, why they should get in a terribly nervous state because the young lady became crocked I don’t know.”
Eventually even Hitler came to Holm’s defense. She later claimed that when she met the Führer during the games, he told her, through his interpreter, that if she had been on the German team, he would have waited until after the Olympics to punish her—but only if she had lost. “Hitler asked me himself if I got drunk,” she said. “He seemed very interested, and I said no.” (The Nazi leaders were quite taken with America’s disgraced sweetheart. Both Göring and Goebbels flirted with her, and Göring even gave her a sterling silver swastika. “I had a mold made of it,” she said, “and I put a diamond Star of David in the middle of it.”)
Unlike most of his teammates, who were gossiping as they gained weight, Jesse Owens remained relatively uninterested in the saga of Eleanor Holm Jarrett. When Albritton tried to tell him the most recent developments, he told him to be quiet. “All I’m thinking about is taking home one or two gold medals,” he said one night on his bed, all but sticking his fingers in his ears. Owens’s goals for the remainder of the voyage were simple. He wanted to avoid rich foods, stay in shape, and steer clear of Brundage.
However, he did find himself in the middle of a different, somewhat less sordid controversy. As the Manhattan sliced through the North Atlantic, Larry Snyder was fighting Robertson and Cromwell to maintain control of Owens’s traini
ng. At first it had seemed that Robertson himself would coach the sprinters. Then he delegated the assignment to Cromwell. But it was still unclear who would coach the best athlete on the team. Would it be an official American track coach or his personal coach? Finally Robertson went to Owens and asked him, on the record, which coach he wanted. “It’s up to you, Jesse,” Robertson said. They were at the rail, and the ship was pitching slightly in a gale. “You know Dean is one of the most respected coaches in the world.” The implication—that Snyder was not—was clear.
“Larry, of course.” It was chilly, and Owens was in no mood to be polite. His tone was dismissive. There was never any chance that he would sign off on the attempted Robertson-Cromwell coup.
“Fine,” Robertson said, clapping his hands together as if to say, Have it your way, you foolish young man. He looked at Owens coldly, telegraphing his disapproval. “Snyder it is.” Robertson did not again attempt to separate Owens and Snyder.
Unlike Robertson and Cromwell, Snyder was making the trip purely as a civilian, paying his own way. He was called an associate coach, but for him there were no uniforms or identity cards. He would have to finagle his way through the Olympics. In other words, the man responsible for the training of the American Olympic Committee’s greatest hope was officially an interloper.
Of course, when Owens told him about Robertson’s attempt to usurp him, Snyder was peeved—and he did not care who knew it. “I am willing to cooperate as far as possible,” he told reporters on the starlit evening of July 23, as the Manhattan, which had stopped earlier in the day in Plymouth, England, plied the North Sea, “and surely will handle Owens, Dave Albritton, and any others I’m requested to coach. But I dislike being classified as a knot-holer [knot-holing, now a largely lost art, is watching a game, usually a baseball game, through a hole in the fence]. I have been given an official runaround, but the important thing to me is to get Owens into the best condition to capture the triple Olympic honors, which he is sure to do.”
Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics Page 15
