Olympic Affair

by Terry Frei

  “I believe it,” Leni snapped. “Don’t you?”

  “Sure I do,” Hundhausen said. “But have you thought of what you will do if one of our winners is the fencer?”

  He meant Helen Mayer, the veteran fencer who had won a gold medal in the individual foil at the 1928 Games as a teenager, was half-Jewish, had moved to America and was teaching in California. Her inclusion on the German team was billed as proof that Jewish athletes weren’t excluded in the tryout and selection process, and was cited in the campaign to prove to outsiders that the boycott movements were misguided.

  “The Mischling?” Leni asked sharply, using the derisive term for “half-breed.” “Yes, we will show her, even if she loses to the other Jewess—the girl from Hungary. It will be a very convenient way for us to prove our open-mindedness, will it not?”

  “And what will Goebbels think of that?”

  “My goal is that the first time he sees this, it will be at the premiere,” Leni said. “If necessary, it will have to be impressed upon him that he needs to consider the bigger picture—as I am quite willing to do. Even if it means showing at great length the primitive American track and field athletes winning or a Jewess winning in the Fatherland’s uniform.”

  Hundhausen laughed. “Good luck with that.”

  “I am thinking of Paris and New York, too,” Leni said. “And so should Goebbels.”

  17

  S.O.S. Iceberg

  “Jesus,” the Badger AOC man bellowed through the bullhorn, “we’re never going to win any medals for marching! That’s going to have to do!”

  Glenn was relieved. “This was starting to get ridiculous,” he told Walter Wood.

  “Left, right, left, right,” Wood said. “Not like it’s hard.”

  Jack Torrance was drenched with sweat. “Somebody tell me . . . what difference does it make if we don’t look like the guys at West Point?”

  For an hour, the American men from all sports had taken several cracks at starting en masse at the end of the Village’s practice track, walking down the front straightaway eight abreast and then curling onto the infield to reform as a group. It was difficult to take serious for several reasons, including because the American women—who would be marching behind them in the real ceremony—were miles away at their own village in the Reich Sports Field complex, and the U.S. officials who also would march weren’t present, either. Plus, the jokes kept coming, both lighthearted and grim. Marty Glickman, seemingly half-serious and half-joking, suggested that all the Jews and Negroes should be on the inside of the lines on the track, and then at the far side of the group on the infield, as far away from Hitler as possible. Glenn Cunningham argued that if they did that, it was a form of segregation, anyway. So they just gathered, formed lines across the track, and marched. Despite several attempts to time the removal of the straw hats—the only part of their official outfit they were wearing—and the placement over their hearts, it still was more casual chaos than synchronization. Up front, flag bearer Al Jochim, a gymnast attending his fourth Olympics, never dipped the banner. In fact, he drew laughs in one run-through when, with feigned Herculean effort, he briefly raised the flagpole to a straight vertical angle as they reached mid-track and in theory were opposite Hitler. They’d all been given sheets with the “Official opening ceremonies Parade Instructions,” clearly calling for all flag bearers to dip their banners, but Jochim knew he was expected to ignore that. Veteran water polo men Wally O’Connor and Fred Lauer, both also at their fourth Olympics, were the “color guards” on each side of him.

  The Badgers said that Avery Brundage, while at the International Olympic Committee meeting that morning, would issue a statement pleading with the newspapers and radio reporters to emphasize that the Americans meant no disrespect for the host nation, but rather were following a time-honored U.S. Army protocol that had to be honored. Still, the athletes were warned that they might draw some catcalls and whistles for not dipping the flag, and were told not to respond or get flustered.

  After the rehearsal, the trackmen for the most part remained in a pack, and Jochim—adopted as one of them because of his flag-bearer duty—was walking and talking among the group with another elder statesman on the squad, Glenn Cunningham.

  Sam Stoller was indignant. “They’re still acting like we should give a damn what the Nazis think.”

  With Jesse Owens by his side, Ralph Metcalfe offered thoughtfully, “Well, again, I don’t think all the Germans in the stadium are Nazis.”

  “Most of them will be Nazis,” Marty Glickman said with a snort. “That’s how they’re getting the tickets! And Hitler is Hitler.”

  Glenn thought of what Luz Long had said. “Don’t you think we can do both?” he asked.

  Metcalfe asked Glenn what he meant.

  “We talked about this on the Manhattan, I think,” Glenn said. “Whoever looks—eyes right—at the people on the stand is showing respect for the Olympic tradition and the host people, not Hitler. Nobody’s going to be keeping score of who does and who doesn’t. If you don’t look over, that’s your business. That’s all.”

  “But the writers at least are going to trying to figure out what we’re doing as a team!” Metcalfe said.

  “We’re going to look like a mob,” Glenn said. “They won’t be able to tell what angle Marty’s—or anyone else’s—head is. Or even if his eyes are closed or if he’s looking down . . . or anything like that. It’s the same with everybody. I think this is going to be fine.”

  Torrance jumped in. “We didn’t dip the flag at Amsterdam eight years ago, right? Jochim, you were there! I bet you didn’t debate it like a bunch of little old ladies playing bridge or some such shit.”

  “No, we didn’t,” confirmed Jochim.

  “And I don’t think the Dutch declared war on us,” Torrance said. “This a whole bunch of worrying over nothing.”

  “In Amsterdam,” Jochim said, “I think somebody said we didn’t dip it to the king in London because some of the other Irish guys on the team hated England . . . and that was the start. I don’t remember anyone saying anything about an Army rule.”

  Glenn decided Jack Torrance had the right attitude. It wasn’t intended to be an insult to Hitler. Or to the Nazis. Or to the Germans. But if that’s how they wanted to take it, that wasn’t the Americans’ problem.

  The trackmen and the others had started to disperse when AP’s Alan Gould chased them down.

  “Need comment on two things!” he announced breathlessly. “Jochim . . . just confirming you’re not dipping the flag, right?”

  “Absolutely not,” the gymnast said.

  “Everybody support that?”

  “Absolutely,” Jochim said.

  Gould looked around.

  “Morris? That right? Everybody’s behind it?”

  “We didn’t take a roll call,” Glenn said carefully, “but I sure think so.”

  “Okay, second thing,” Gould said. “Anybody have a comment on the 1940 Games being awarded this morning to Japan? To Tokyo? Cunningham?”

  “If I go there, it’ll be as a spectator,” Cunningham said. “So I’m not the one to ask.”

  “Morris?”

  “Seems fine to me. Spread things around.”

  Leni had the script for the opening ceremonies, with her handwritten notes on it, in one hand. It was called a script, but as Leni confessed to her cameramen and other staff, she knew it was more of an outline, because the parade of athletes of the various nations almost certainly wouldn’t conform to the time schedule that organizers—and the stand-in members of the Hitler Youth Corps—followed at the rehearsal the day before. Among the delegations that already had “rehearsed” their entrances on their own, she was told, most were acting as if both suggested pace and formations were nothing more than that—suggestions. And only God knew what Glenn and those Americans would do, given all the blather about their flag protocol.

  She used her other hand to gesture and point at the model of the Reich Sports Fiel
d, zeroing in on the stadium. She emphasized they needed to shoot the various delegations from the second they came into sight until they moved onto the infield, and how that required teamwork among the cameramen. They had gone over the rest many times before—from the athlete’s oath, to Hitler’s declaration, and the arrival of the final torch runner and lighting of the stadium flame. So this was a refresher.

  She already had confided in Willi Hameister, in charge of the cameras in Hitler’s box, that they should be prepared to remove them immediately after the Führer’s brief speech, but that if they could get away with leaving them in place for the entire opening ceremonies session, they should. So she didn’t bring that up in the mass meeting. But she did designate two other cameras on the lower levels to be looking up to Hitler and rolling as he spoke, just in case the cameras in the box malfunctioned.

  “Or if they decide they don’t want the cameras by the rostrum?” asked cameraman Kurt Neubert.

  “No, that’s not a possibility,” Leni snapped. “We have taken care of that. With the only man who matters.”

  She rechecked her notes.

  “I think that’s all I have,” she said. “Any questions?”

  Camerman Paul Holzki asked, “How concerned should we be with how the spectators respond to teams—good and bad?”

  “Concerned enough so that those of you shooting the stands get as much as you can, either way. That’s not just tomorrow. We’re looking for enthusiasm of foreigners for their teams, and if it’s Japanese fans cheering at the ceremonies, we can plug that in for track and field events.”

  Finally, Guzzi Lantschner hesitantly asked what many of them were wondering. The former skier was a master of the smaller, relatively mobile handheld camera, so he would be entrusted with many of the key shots that required scrambling. “After the opening ceremonies, how much should we be worried about filming the Führer when he’s at events?”

  Leni waved it off. “First, we need to get through tomorrow,” she said. “Then we need to see how often he shows up. He told me”—she paused just long enough to let that register—“that he probably would be too busy and wasn’t enough of a sports enthusiast to attend much.”

  “But if he does?” persisted Lantschner.

  “We film his arrival and his reactions, as much as possible,” Leni said.

  A young cameraman’s assistant said something that made those around him laugh. Leni couldn’t hear him.

  “What’s that?” she asked sharply.

  “If this becomes an American niggerfest at the track, and he’s there, that should be good cinema!” the assistant said.

  Leni exploded. “All right, one last time! Some of you keep talking as if this film will premiere two weeks after the Games. It is going to be a long, long time before this is ready, and we can’t have too much film. No matter what it shows. At some point, we might have different versions for different audiences. Germany, England, America, France . . .”

  That got Hans Ertl’s attention. It was the first time she had broached that possibility to the group. The star cameraman knew Leni well enough to know that she must have been thinking about this for months. He laughed darkly. “Like the English version of S.O.S. Iceberg?”

  “Oh, shit, we must be better than that,” Leni said with disdain.

  Many in the crew—those who knew the English version’s dreadful reputation—erupted in laughter.

  After the meeting, Ertl approached her. Their friendship remained intact, even after Ertl had noticed the attraction between Leni and his friend, Walter Prager, and stepped aside, if with a bit of relief because he hadn’t known how long he would be able to accept Leni’s many demands. His question was sincere, not challenging. “Leni, hearing you talk about all of this again . . . you’re not still planning on doing all the editing yourself, are you? That could take years!”

  “For now, yes,” Leni said. “The control has to be mine.”

  “I understand that,” he said. “But as your friend”—and more, which they both knew always underscored their interaction—“I’m begging you to get more help than you had on the party documentaries. I know what that did to you, and there is so much more involved with this!”

  “Thanks,” Leni said, genuinely touched. She smiled. “Concern and suggestion noted.”

  Everything she did with Olympia needed to have the long-range future in mind. She must use it to be taken more seriously internationally. She must end up back on the screen, starring in her own films. And those films would be shown not just in the major cities in America and Europe, but in places like the town where Glenn went to school.

  As Ertl walked away, Leni noticed Anatol lingering at a back table. He asked his question with his eyes. Leni gave a slight, yet emphatic shake of the head and began the walk to her office. There, she pulled out a sheet of stationery and wrote out another brief note to Glenn, enclosed it in an envelope, addressed it, and then pondered which runner to entrust with delivering it. As she had several times now, she considered trying to call Glenn on the telephone at the Village, but she knew he would have to be summoned to take the patched-through call and that was both complicated and likely insecure. She assumed all calls would be monitored. She knew her previous notes to Glenn hadn’t gone unnoticed, so she had openly talked about sending a thank-you note to him for his “briefing about the decathlon” at the stadium that day. This time, she decided her approach would be that if she said anything, it would be that Glenn had become their liaison to the American team, and she was wishing him good luck in the upcoming competition. She picked out a different runner this time, a student named Heinrich, and told him it was absolutely necessary to keep this communication quiet because it might get Morris in trouble if it came out that he was helping out the Olympia crew.

  Leni realized there were other possibilities for leaks, even if only relatively harmless, about the notes or her relationship with Glenn. She was willing to accept that—after all, they were both adults and Goebbels couldn’t gripe because Glenn was Aryan—but there was no need to advertise it any sooner than necessary.

  After dinner, Glenn decided to give the Village cinema a try, following the pack of other Americans—a mixture of trackmen, basketball players, and swimmers—to the Hindenburg House. A different film played at 8 each night and the Americans who had sampled the fare had said it was a comfortable way to pass the time. When Glenn entered the lobby of the building, though, the poster of the night’s movie caused him to freeze.

  He had spotted Leni, wearing a fur coat and looking frightened in the arms of a bearded costar, before he noticed the title: S.O.S. Iceberg. And then, also on the poster, the details: In English. Starring Leni Riefenstahl, Rod La Rocque, Sepp Rist. Directed by Arnold Fanck and Tay Garnett.

  The Americans made up about half of the crowd. Glenn made sure he wasn’t behind the mammoth Jack Torrance and settled in to watch. He sat through the seventy minutes, mainly trying to picture what it was like to film on the chilling Greenland locations. If he were seeing it in Denver or Fort Collins, he would have walked out wondering why she was billed as the star, since her character, Ellen Lawrence, spoke only a handful of lines. In the opening scene showing a pre-scientific expedition dinner, he kept waiting for her to say something as she sat next to her explorer husband, but she didn’t. She didn’t speak until far into the film, and Glenn wasn’t even sure that was her voice. He better understood her desire to come up with a film and a role to give her more credibility in America and in the English-speaking parts of the world.

  After the film ended, some of the Americans headed off to the community room for beers. Glenn was among the group returning to their own buildings when basketball player Joe Fortenberry said to nobody in particular: “Do you buy that deal saying it was filmed in Greenland?”

  “Why would they make that up?” asked a swimmer.

  “Just to make it sound more, I don’t know . . . exotic? How do we know that wasn’t a bunch of ice piled up on a set?”


  Glenn couldn’t resist. “They made part of it in Greenland and part of it in Switzerland, and the two versions—one in German, one in English—at once. That was all real.”

  Fortenberry looked at Glenn as if he had two heads . . . or had just given the Nazi salute.

  “How do you know all that?” he challenged.

  “I’m a movie fan,” Glenn responded self-consciously.

  Diver Marshall Wayne mused, “She looks even better in person.”

  Glenn was startled. “Who?”

  “Leni whatever her name is,” Wayne said. “She was at the pool the other day. Scouting out for the Olympics movie they’re making. I guess she’s a director and all that stuff, too.”

  “I’d let her direct me . . . to do anything she wanted,” said another basketball player.

  “I’m surprised they showed it to us,” said a swimmer. “Considering she’s a Nazi.”

  “She’s not a Nazi,” Glenn declared.

  “Come on, the German guys said she made Hitler’s propaganda films,” the swimmer said, shrugging.

  Glenn considered how to reply, without raising questions—and eyebrows. Finally, he said, “I hear the Nazis even brag that she’s independent, not a party member. They—the Nazis—supposedly like that. It’s the same thing with this Olympics movie. It’s the International Olympic Committee’s baby now, not the Nazis’.”

  Those were all things Glenn had heard. He didn’t say from whom.

  Back at the room, his heart jumped when he saw the envelope that had been slipped under the door, and jumped even more when he confirmed it was from Leni. Her note was innocuous enough. She wanted him to know she was thinking of him on the eve of the Games and wished him the best of luck in the upcoming competition. And she hoped they again would be able to talk about The Blue Light sometime. He caught the code. He laughed, though, knowing he had real questions he could ask about S.O.S. Iceberg.