Olympic Affair

by Terry Frei

  Leni shrugged.

  That was at the heart of why she was determined to again do most, perhaps all, of the editing herself—regardless of how long it took. It would enable her to adjust the content and tone, for the film in general and for the various versions, depending on the backdrop of unfolding European events over the next couple of years.

  As Glenn and the men were in the first part of the front straightaway, stretching behind the women, the call came out from the front of the group: “Hats!” In something between unison and one-by-one independence, Glenn and the others doffed their white straw hats. Glenn could feel his against his heart as he moved, and he got out of control, skipped in his stride and almost bumped into the athletes in front of him. He did turn his eyes to the right, looking up at Hitler and the dignitaries. He guessed that he was the only American who noticed the woman at the side and back of the rostrum area, offering a couple of quick and tight waves with a hand in front of her shoulder. He nodded, uncertain she would be able to notice and hoping nobody watching would think he was nodding at the German leader.

  As Glenn neared the turn, the stadium erupted. The Germans had entered the track. The band abandoned its generic martial marching music and again began playing “Deutschland uber Alles.” The host nation’s athletes offered the Nazi salute. The smiling Hitler gave it back. The roars continued undiminished as the Americans moved around the turn and eventually onto the crowded infield. Taking stock of the Nazi salutes, the yells, the passion, the fervor, all around the stadium, Glenn shook his head slightly and caught Walter Wood’s eyes. Jesus. Suddenly, he knew that until this minute, he had been naïve about Hitler’s hold on the German people. They had witnessed some of it since landing in Germany, but this was another level and confirmation. Not about its reach, so much, since he wanted to believe Luz Long’s assertion that not all in the nation or even in the German Olympic uniform were fanatical Nazis. But this was about the emotional depth of those committed. What would be in store for a German who sat quietly and didn’t join in? What would happen to Luz Long if he won a medal and then spoke out? Or Leni, if she didn’t make Hitler’s films?

  After the Germans finished their triumphant loop and settled into the infield with the other delegations, attention turned to the rostrum. A scratchy recorded voice came through the speakers in French. “Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Games,” the Badger closest to Glenn announced. “Competing, not necessarily winning, is the thing, he’s saying.”

  “Try telling that to the folks back home,” Earle Meadows said dryly.

  Lewald stepped to the microphones. As the Organizing Committee executive droned on and on, Glenn caught enough references to Hitler to assume it was some sort of sickening tribute to the leader of the host nation. Finally, it was Hitler’s turn. His pronouncement from his rostrum was brief, delivered in short bursts, and decisive.

  The Games were open!

  To tumultuous cheers, Hitler backed away, smiling. The huge Olympic flag was raised at one end of the stadium. Hitler Youth members released thousands of pigeons, and suddenly, Glenn felt a “splat” on the top of his straw hat and didn’t dare immediately take it off to check as he heard others react—“Shit!” was the most common expression—around him. One more thing these hats are good for. Guns fired in salute.

  All eyes, including Glenn’s, turned to the East Gate. At the top of the lower bowl, a lanky runner held a torch aloft in his right hand. He trotted down the stairs, cut to his left, heading in what Glenn and the competitors considered the “wrong” direction on the track, and made his way to the other end of the stadium. He climbed Marathon Gate stairs and came to the huge bowl, balanced on a tripod, at the outside ground level entrance. After showing the flame to the entire stadium, he turned and held the flame inside the bowl, which ignited. The Americans and all those around them cheered.

  The flag bearers for each nation were called out of formation to gather around a podium on the field as a German athlete—Rudolf Ismayr, a weightlifter—took the Olympic athletes’ oath, while grasping a part of the huge German flag on the pole at his left. Glenn and the Americans had been asked to study and even recite the English version, so they knew what he was saying: “We swear that we will take part in the Olympic Games in loyal competition, respecting the regulations which govern them and desirous of participating in the true spirit of sportsmanship for the honor of our country and the glory of sport.”

  Hundreds of young singers had moved in on the Marathon Gate stairs. Now, a gray-haired man was introduced. From their scripts, the Badgers told the athletes that the man was composer Richard Wagner and the song was going to be his new work composed for these Games, the Olympic Hymn.

  After the final notes, Hitler and his entourage filed down the stairs and onto the track. There, the Greek 1896 Olympic marathon champion, Spyridon Louis, handed Hitler something.

  “What’s that?” Marty Glickman asked.

  “Olive branch,” a Badger said.

  Glickman laughed darkly. “Lot of good that’s going to do.”

  “At least he took it,” Glenn mused.

  “Probably didn’t even know what it was,” Glickman said.

  As Hitler left, the chorus began singing again—a different song, the type that seemed to have verses easily repeated and could go on forever. The delegations on the field also began to file out of the marathon gate tunnel. This time, the Americans were early in the procession, and it was more of a mob scene than an orderly parade.

  As Glenn emerged from the tunnel and blinked in the light, the thought struck him: Wonder how Leni did with all that?

  Leni was exhilarated that after all the threats, her camera in the box had captured Hitler declaring the Games open. To her, that and the lighting of the flame were the indispensable shots, and all indications were that everything went well on both.

  “Okay, the first lesson learned today,” Leni said, facing the staff in the long room shortly before midnight, “is we’re going to have to be on our guard every second to fight off interference. It was Goebbels today. It may be someone else tomorrow.” She held up several sheets of Geyer Lab’s film lab reports, summarizing the raw footage from each camera. “But if these summaries give us a fair picture, I think we got everything we needed. All agree?”

  Heads nodded.

  “Any observations?”

  Guzzi Lantschner jumped in. “I heard some of the athletes complaining about the camera pits at the track,” he said. “I couldn’t understand everything, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there are some objections tomorrow.”

  Cameraman Georg Lemki joked, “Maybe we can kill two birds with one stone—throw Goebbels into one of ’em and fill it in.”

  The laughter was sudden, and short. Every one of them was aware that in the Third Reich, sentiments expressed in private meetings—even one-on-one—could end up in reports. Friends became worse than enemies; they became informants. Leni waved that off, not in dismissal, but as a sign it was time to move on.

  “I’ll be going around with assignments for tomorrow. Let’s try to make this as painless as possible, both now and every night. If we try to argue or debate every placement, we’ll be here until dawn. If there’s something you must get off your chest, or something you think I should know, speak up. But please don’t waste my time—or yours—with whining or bullshit.”

  Leni started with Hans Ertl and his crew. Cameramen Leo de Laforgue and Werner Hundhausen, seated together, knew they faced a long wait. “Does she have any idea how inefficient this is?” de Laforgue asked. “Insisting on doing everything herself? Not delegating anything?”

  Hundhausen had worked with Leni more than de Laforgue. “She knows no other way,” he said. “She knows what she wants.”

  “Doesn’t she trust anyone?”

  “She doesn’t trust us to read her mind,” Hundhausen said. “And what’s in her mind is the only right way to do it.”

  19

  High Jump, High Drama
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br />   Sunday, August 2

  Glenn decided to stay at the Village for training on the first day of track and field competition. Some of his teammates went to the Reich Sports Field, saying they would work out at the nearby practice track and then walk over to the stadium to watch some of the events. Glenn’s theory was that he would be tempted to leave the practice track too early, trying to catch the high jump, with Cornelius Johnson the favorite, and the shot put, where Jack Torrance would hope to prove that his ballooning since becoming a police officer would help—and not hurt—him in his event. Seeing Leni, too, with all the conflicted emotions that would bring, would complicate matters and distract him on his final day of serious training.

  At the Village practice track, despite light rain and cold, Glenn worked on the pole vault with Earle Meadows, Bill Sefton, and Bill Graber, in relative private. With the technique help and encouragement of the Americans, especially the veteran Graber, he was starting to feel more confident that he wouldn’t have any problem clearing a minimal height—one at least high enough to avoid scuttling his gold-medal hopes.

  “We keep working with you, we’ll have you clearing fifteen feet by Tokyo!” Meadows teased.

  Glenn laughed at that. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to be done with this stuff by then,” he said.

  Meadows walked off, leaving Glenn alone with Graber, the veteran of the group. “Can I make a suggestion?” Graber asked.

  “Sure.”

  “No matter what you do, you could work out enough to stay in decent shape, maybe enter a few meets a year, then in a couple of years decide if you want to give it a shot for Tokyo, too. That’s kind of what I did this time.”

  Glenn nodded. “Makes a lot of sense. If I do it, that’s probably how I’ll do it.”

  Graber balanced the end of his pole on his shoulder. “One other thing: If you have people telling you that you’ll have all kinds of endorsement offers if you win and you can turn pro and you’ll be rich . . .”

  He paused, so Glenn jumped in and said, “No, the DAC guy and I are talking about a good job and maybe some other things, but nothing definite. And certainly not about getting rich off the Olympics. At least not off the Olympics, alone.”

  “Good,” Graber said. “I can tell you there was a lot of bullshit flying in Los Angeles about what winning could do for anyone. Yeah, guys have good jobs and time to train, continue to compete for clubs in AAU meets . . . but endorsements and turning pro and making tons? That was bullshit. I mean, Eleanor Holm got a rich husband and a movie contract and so little came of that, Brundage couldn’t even get away with declaring her a professional! And she had a couple of advantages we don’t have.”

  Yeah, I remember that wet swimsuit.

  Glenn thanked Graber for both the help and advice.

  Ultimately, after six hours of off-and-on work at the track, Glenn toweled off his sweaty face, neck, and arms. As he pulled the sweatshirt over his head, the third pole-vaulter, Bill Sefton joined him. “German guys gave me the report on what’s happened so far,” he said. “Want to hear it or want to stay in suspense?”

  “Go ahead,” Glenn said.

  “Jesse broke the world record this afternoon in the quarterfinals . . . 10.2.”

  “Wow!”

  “That’s the good news. The bad news is none of the shot-putters got a medal.”

  Glenn was shocked. “Not even Torrance?’

  “Nope, fifth. Germans got first and third.”

  Glenn thought of the injured decathlon man. “Hans Sievert one of them?”

  “No . . . don’t think so.”

  “What about the high jump?”

  “Still going,” Sefton said. “They’ll probably finish in the dark!”

  For Leni, the stadium on the first day of competition was a studio, a stage, and the spectators were only bit players and a collective backdrop. She deliberately dressed a bit frumpily, almost matronly, with an especially conservative and baggy suit with long skirt and white hat, to emphasize her seriousness as the woman in businesslike charge.

  In the afternoon, Jesse Owens lined up for his second race of the day, a quarterfinal heat. As she had been for Jesse’s easy win at the morning session, Leni was on the infield, near the finish line, with Erich Nitschmann and a big tripod camera. She was perched underneath the camera, looking up. She knew one of her crews was stationed in the pit along the outside of the track, at the corner past the finish line. She was gratified to see several of her cameramen, as ordered, again focusing on Owens at the starting line area, from the outside of the track and from the inside. Watching him run for the first time that morning, she had noticed that rather than concentrating as if he were wearing blinkers, he sensed the cameras’ presence and even played to them. Leni always had maintained that cameras invigorated—rather than distracted—true “performers,” including athletes and leaders speaking at podiums. She pictured the cameras’ film of the powerful Negro, tense as he moved into the set position and then broke at the sound of the starter’s gun. Owens won easily, and the judges announced his time was a world-record of 10.2 seconds. As he had at his morning race, he found a camera after the finish and walked right at it, smiling.

  Leni was thrilled: The nigger is a showman!

  She was mildly surprised to see the Führer arrive in his box during the afternoon. He already had backed down from his resolve to skip the frivolity of athletics after the opening ceremony! After Owens’s race, she looked up at Hitler’s box to see if the Führer had a noticeable reaction to the runner’s dominance. He didn’t seem to be paying attention.

  For the next three hours, as she hustled from position to position, checking in with cameramen through the women’s javelin, shot put, 800-meter heats for the men, and the 5,000-meter finals, one of the Führer’s aides breathlessly caught up with her, saying Hitler asked that she visit him at some point. She could see that Göring was in the box with the Führer, but she didn’t see Goebbels. After she climbed the private stairway under the stands, she went through the room and into the box. Hitler spotted her and brightened.

  “Fraulein, we can see you running around down there faster than the athletes—except the niggers, of course.”

  “I’m glad you changed your mind and came,” Leni said.

  “I decided that when there aren’t more pressing matters, I can play the good host for the athletes . . . at least most of them.”

  Göring said, “And we have started off with a bang . . . two German gold medals already!”

  Leni smiled with the rest when the two German winners—shot-putter Hans Woellke and women’s javelin thrower Tilly Fleischer—showed up together in the box, shaking hands with and accepting backslaps from the Führer. That drew thunderous cheers from the crowd. As they walked through the room behind the box, Woellke grabbed one of the many extra programs, came back in the box and asked for Leni’s autograph on the cover. She wrote her name across Glenn’s face. Then, much to Leni’s surprise, all three Finns who swept the medals in the 10,000 meters also were brought to the box. Hitler was outgoing in greeting them, joking to Göring and Leni that the Finns could have put on Luftwaffe uniforms and looked perfect!

  Leni noticed that the high jump seemed to be in its final stages. This is going to be the first test, she thought. She could just stockpile the film, including of the Negroes, and decide later how to handle it in Olympia; for the Führer, the choice about whether to visit with the winners, which she knew was really no choice at all, had to be made instantly. She pointed down to the field and told Hitler and Göring, “I need to get back down there to get the end of the high jump.”

  “Will a nigger win?” Hitler wanted to know.

  “I’m not completely sure how it works,” she said. “But it’s possible.”

  Hitler looked to the western horizon. Then he looked at his watch. “I might have more pressing matters in a bit,” he said.

  Leni hustled down to the field and, from her camera pit, saw Cornelius Johnson win the gol
d before the event continued with a three-man jump-off for second and third. Eventually, another Negro American, Dave Albritton, claimed the silver and USC student Delos Thurber finished off the sweep for the USA by edging a Finn for third.

  A few minutes before the medal ceremony started, Leni spotted Hitler departing his box. It wasn’t a run to the lavatory, either. He was heading out of the stadium. There would be no visit to the Führer’s box for these medalists.

  Glenn was in his room reading—he had knocked off another hundred pages in Of Time and the River, with only a little cheating—and Walter Wood was writing a letter when the knock came and decathlon man Jack Parker poked in his head.

  “Hey, guys, they say the high jumpers are back and they’ve got their medals in the dining hall,” Parker announced.

  Glenn looked at Wood. His wordless question: Think we should?

  After waiting a few seconds, Wood said, “Well, I’m going to go look. . . . I’m never going to get one of those myself.”

  Glenn stood. “How about if we go, but don’t touch them? Don’t want to jinx ourselves!”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Parker said.

  “You guys can do that,” Wood said. “I’m going to hold it like I just won it!”

  A couple of minutes later, the three of them heard voices as they approached the dining hall. Johnson, Albritton, and Thurber were seated as a crowd of teammates both stood and sat around them. For weeks, Glenn knew, the Negroes had been teasing Delos Thurber that with a name like his, Hitler would think he was one of them, anyway. The three Americans’ medals were on the table, next to what looked like a tree seedling in a tiny pot. The group included nearly a dozen other white boys and most of the other Negroes, minus Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, who had the 100-meter semifinals and finals coming up the next day. Glenn Cunningham and Bill Graber seemed to be the ringleaders.

  “Is it bad to ask to see them?” Walter Wood asked.