Olympic Affair

by Terry Frei

  Desperate for money, Glenn agreed to play for the Hollywood Stars semi-professional football team, against the Los Angeles Bulldogs on November 1. He didn’t embarrass himself, and it planted the idea that returning to that sport might be a possibility in the future, perhaps in the National Football League—if he trained seriously, got back into football condition and went to a training camp with a team. But the semi-pro money was minimal and the chance of injury too great if he still hoped to get his acting career going. So he put football back on hold.

  One night out of the blue, Karen called him. She said her father and lawyer had insisted that the filing needed to be “jazzed up” a bit to provide a case for alimony, and that if she had known how carried away the newspapers would have gotten, she wouldn’t have gone along with it. But she said she was withdrawing the divorce request from the Los Angeles court.

  “Oh, honey . . .” Glenn began.

  “Glenn, I’m not coming back to you,” she said. “I need to come out there to straighten some things out, but you won’t see me if I can help it. Too much has happened. I’ll get a divorce a different way, not with the whole world watching. And it might not even be for awhile.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” he said.

  “Glenn . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “She ruined you. You won a gold medal, but now I wish you’d fallen down during the trials. You’d be coaching, I’d be teaching, we’d be happy. She ruined you.”

  35

  Olympia, U.S.A.

  Leni stepped off the Europa onto the New York docks on November 4, 1938. Ernst Jäger and Werner Klingeberg, Carl Diem’s underling on the German Olympic Committee, accompanied her. She had made many friends among the affluent Americans on board, and they made a show of flashy good-byes to her as they departed and she spoke with reporters. After one of the interruptions, one of the reporters, hollering, asked if she was “Hitler’s honey.”

  “We’re just good friends,” she said, smiling.

  Soon, she would wish that she had just pretended not to hear the question.

  In his nationally syndicated column, Walter Winchell snidely called her “pretty as a Swastika,” and that helped set the tone for derision from the press that increased when she too hastily dismissed—or even denied—the reports in the wake of the horrific state-sanctioned Kristallnacht violence against Jews across Germany on November 9. Initially, she said the reports must be exaggerated and that they slandered both Germany “and the greatest man who ever lived.” Later, she would claim that she wasn’t aware of the true extent of the carnage and violence until she returned to Germany. That, of course, was Leni’s Truth.

  From coast to coast during her visit, she encountered adulation and positive receptions many places and even rave reviews of Olympia from writers who not only watched it at screenings, but also watched it with an open mind. The grudging nature of some of the positive reactions strengthened her case, but she couldn’t overcome the odds stacked against her. “Good friends” and “greatest man who ever lived” repeatedly were thrown back into her face. Even those naturally inclined to support her, including Avery Brundage in Chicago, Henry Ford in Detroit, and Walt Disney in Los Angeles, couldn’t justify backing her publicly. Brundage arranged for an Olympia showing to a small audience at the Chicago Engineers’ Club. After seeing it, Brundage wrote to American Olympic Committee member William May Garland in Los Angeles, calling Olympia “the greatest sports film ever made.” But he couldn’t do more than that. Like other titans, he feared the backlash.

  Leni never could get America to accept that it was an IOC production, not a Reich film, and that she was independent. The view remained that in the wake of Kristallnacht especially, to embrace Leni and Olympia was to support Hitler and the Nazis. She was a Hitler crony who had made what came to be considered a wonderful and surprisingly “fair” film, but that wasn’t enough to get it into theaters or in the pipeline for national distribution.

  But for two months, she kept trying. She arrived in Los Angeles on November 24, America’s Thanksgiving Day.

  Reports of Leni’s travels in the papers, including the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, shook up Glenn. He read the “good friends” and “greatest man who ever lived” comments, too. He realized the chances of Olympia making him a national hero again—instead of a wife-beating bad actor—were dwindling.

  Her phone call on the day after Thanksgiving didn’t surprise him. The conversation was awkward at first. It had been more than two years since they parted at the airport. Two years since he said: “I will be back.” As the small talk about her trip and her first impressions of Los Angeles unfolded, Glenn guessed that part of the awkwardness was that she wondered if Karen was standing next to him, listening.

  “Leni,” he said, “I’m getting divorced. Karen’s back in Colorado.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “What happened?” She didn’t mention that she had seen several accounts in the German papers, because he still was considered big news—and now more than ever in the wake of Olympia’s release.

  “Too long a story,” he said. “At least for the phone.”

  She invited him to come to her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunday for lunch. They’d talk, catch up, and see if there was anything they could come up with together to aid the chances of Olympia finally breaking through the obstructions being placed in its path in America. She sounded friendly, but also businesslike. Glenn kept thinking back to Smith and Jones’s office, as he had thousands of times since. He remembered how offended and hurt he had been when confronted with her Nazi films and her anti-Semitic comments, how he had lectured himself for being so naïve and heard himself called stupid. Now, if anything bothered him, it was that he realized that everything said in that room was true . . . yet he still wondered how it would have turned out if he had shrugged it all off and returned to Leni anyway.

  On Saturday, Glenn went to the Southern California-UCLA football game at the Los Angeles Coliseum, meeting Ken Carpenter and Bill Graber, the USC graduates. At the March screening of Olympia, they promised one another they’d get together more often, and they’d pulled it off a few times. He teased them by wearing a blue UCLA sweatshirt to the game. As they settled into the seats, they double-teamed him. Carpenter asked, “You heard from Leni Riefenstahl yet?”

  Glenn sensed pretending was a waste of time. So he admitted he was having breakfast with her Sunday morning.

  “So how many times have you said good-bye to her?” Graber asked pointedly. “I mean, really good-bye? And you keep going back!”

  Glenn shrugged. He knew both men knew about his problems with Karen, and her—or at least her lawyer’s—accusations. But they didn’t bring those up, either at the game or after.

  The Bruins and Trojans played to a 7-7 tie, sending only the neutral away happy.

  On Sunday, Ernst Jäger answered the door. He greeted Glenn warmly and introduced him to Klingeberg, who seemed genuinely excited to meet a decathlon champion. Leni emerged from the bedroom, smiling and holding her arms out. Thanks to the correction in Smith and Jones’s office, he knew she was thirty-six. She looked her age now. As pretty as before, maybe even more, but unquestionably much more mature. The embrace was nice, but wasn’t one of lovers. The four of them sat at the table and ate scrambled eggs, and Glenn mostly parried the questions about the state of his movie career. Then Leni asked him what he thought of Olympia when he saw it at the private screening.

  “I couldn’t understand a word your announcer was saying, but other than that . . . Leni, it really is good. You should be proud. I’m proud to be in it.”

  Jäger spoke up, looking at Glenn. “It is a film about sport, and a wonderful one at that. Why can’t your people understand that?”

  Leni spoke in German to Jäger, and touched his hand.

  She turned to Glenn. “I told him I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  When they were done with lunch, the other two men made
their excuses and left. Glenn didn’t move. She leaned forward.

  “It took me six months to get over you, Glenn Morris,” she said slowly. “Six months! It was a knife. You stuck it in. Then Goebbels twisted it. It gave him such pleasure to show me the stories about you returning home to your girl and putting a ring on her finger and all that.”

  “I’m sorry, Leni. The reason I’m getting divorced is that I couldn’t hide that I knew I made a mistake marrying her and not going back to you. Plus, she’s a smart girl. She figured it out. And she had a lot of other people telling her, too.”

  “You talked about me in your sleep, didn’t you?”

  He couldn’t help himself. He laughed darkly. “Well, yeah.”

  “So whatever happened to Alice?”

  “Alice?”

  “The girl you talked about in your sleep with me.”

  Alice was his first, the Simla girl who cried.

  “I saw her in Simla at Glenn Morris Day there. Two kids. Fat.”

  Leni stood. “Good,” she said. They still hadn’t touched after the initial hug. “So, Glenn Morris,” she said, “you said you know you made a mistake. So what did you decide would have happened if you had done what you promised to do? If you had come back to me?”

  “I’m not completely sure, but we . . .”

  She cut him off. “Let me tell you what would have happened,” she said. “Olympia, a one-part Olympia, would have opened a year ago, in Europe. It would have been before the Anschluss. It would have been before Kristallnacht. The film—and Leni Riefenstahl—would have been embraced around the world. Leni and Glenn, a joint German-American production, would have come out earlier this year and we would be basking in it. It would be loved in both countries . . . and more. It would have been, and it would be, a real-life love story, the sort the world loves. It would be better than the Duke and Duchess of Windsor! There would have been some obstacles, but we could have overcome them and set in motion what couldn’t be overturned. Nothing Hitler has done the last few months would have changed anything. Now, the world would be debating what you and me, the lovers, would do if it becomes apparent that our nations are going to war again. Then they’d go back and see the film again.”

  Glenn tried to take that all in. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Maybe.”

  Leni said it slowly, for emphasis. “That is what would have happened,” she insisted.

  “Nothing we can do about that now,” Glenn responded, shrugging. ”The question is: What now?”

  “Can we agree that we both want Olympia to get national distribution in America?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “Then you and I appear at a press briefing here at the hotel next week. Whenever Ernst thinks best. You say you’ve seen the film and then you say what you think of it. The truth. You say you believe the American people are being cheated out of a chance to see a wonderful film. You refuse to get into politics, and you say that’s the point. This is about friendly competition and goodwill and art, not politics.”

  Glenn could see the wheels turning in Leni’s head. By now, he knew what she was. He knew how manipulative, phony, conniving and even hateful she could be. Yet that all sounded good to him. He could say all she suggested he say. He believed it, too. For all her faults, she had made a good film. And one that could help him to climb out of the pit his life had become.

  That night, in Leni’s bedroom, Glenn talked about Alice in his sleep. Alice again was sixteen and skinny and crying.

  Leni shook him awake. “I should be offended,” she said. “But I guess I have it coming.”

  Leni told him she had meetings scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, and that it was best if he didn’t know whom with. He returned home Monday morning, to await Jäger’s call about the press briefing at the hotel, or Leni’s summons to return.

  He had two beers and got out the photos Leni had given him. He had a third beer as he flipped through the prints. He was starting to feel uneasy again. He knew what Leni was. What are you getting into? Maybe this isn’t such a hot . . .

  The doorbell rang. When he saw who it was, his mouth dropped.

  “Hi, Glenn,” said Mr. Smith, who had become grayer in the past two years.

  “Hi, Tarzan,” said Mr. Jones, who had become no less insolent in the past two years. “Where’s Jane?”

  Glenn tried closing the door, but Jones, with a decisive reach, prevented that. “Now what kind of hospitality is that?” he asked. “We have things you’re going to want to see . . . and hear! And we’ve come a long way to enlighten you!”

  Smith said, in what bordered on the soothing, “It’s either here or we find a reason to be able to take you downtown.”

  Glenn stepped aside.

  For three hours, with Glenn anchored to the couch, they read horrific summaries, news stories, and transcripts of eyewitness accounts of Kristallnacht. Setting up a projector, they showed him film of Nazi thuggery, saying it was both from Kristallnacht and earlier. They apologized for the quality of the film, noting it had to be taken surreptitiously and smuggled out of the country. Glenn repeatedly asked what it had to do with him, and they ignored him. They plowed on, and it was mind numbing.

  When the film ended, Jones walked over to turn on the lights. “That’s the regime and the movement your Fraulein is in bed with,” he said sharply. “‘Greatest man of all time,’ she said. Her ‘good friend,’ she said. She used to be at least a smart cookie; now she’s just a fucking bitch who thinks we’re all stupid on this side of the ocean.”

  Smith said, softly, “She really thinks she can talk Ford or Disney to step up for her, the poor persecuted and misunderstood artist.”

  Eventually, the two men set up a phonograph and began playing a record. It was Leni’s voice, muffled and unclear at times. She was speaking English and the conversation was with, apparently, an American. He sounded older. Smith explained that they left the man on there just enough to prove this was a conversation. Glenn didn’t recognize the voice.

  Leni ranted that the Jews had it coming. They had betrayed the Fatherland for so long, ruined the Fatherland, twisted the aims of the Fatherland for their own selfish purposes. And here in America, it was no different, and when were they going to do something about it? The American said it wasn’t that simple in this country, but allowed it was a problem. The Jewish cabal, he called it.

  “And now your fucking Jewish cabal,” she said, “is making sure Olympia will not be distributed and shown in your theaters. I was so careful to make it an international film. And that’s what it is! The rest of the world gets it. The rest of the world sees it. I believe most of America would understand that. But your Jewish bastards are going to make sure, with blackmail and economic leverage and their own power, that this film is not seen here. It is bad enough here, but I know it’s going to be even worse in Los Angeles . . . Hollywood. I will try, but I know what I will be facing.”

  The other voice asked: “How will you try?”

  Smith quickly said, “We cut out some passages here. About who your Miss Riefenstahl would see here. You don’t have to hear that. What you need to hear is . . .”

  Leni’s voice was back, and it was dripping with sarcasm.

  “And I will parade Glenn Morris in front of the reporters to say that even as a patriotic American, he recognizes the genius of the film and beseeches America to embrace the principles of free speech and artistic expression to give this a chance. Just give it a chance. Let America see it and vote with their money! When America realizes what a true masterpiece this is, how fair it is, how free of Third Reich control it is, Americans will fill the theaters.”

  “You trust him to say all that?” the other man asked Leni.

  “Well, we’d have to have him practice a few times. He has become a drunken fool now. An asshole who hits women. We have to hope the reporters won’t ask him about that, but he can say that he is unable to talk about it but the truth will come out. And to think I was so in love with him. To th
ink it took me so long to get over him.”

  “So you’re glad he didn’t stay with you in Germany?”

  “I didn’t say that! I would have molded him. We would have made a wonderful love story—in two languages. He wouldn’t have fallen apart, as he has. He can’t act, but that wouldn’t have mattered. And I am telling you”—there was a blip there, and as stunned as he was, Glenn was able to infer she had said the man’s name—“it could have brought Germany and America closer together. I don’t know how that would have affected events, both up to now and in the future, but I think it would have. I really do. I think he knows all that. That is why he has fallen apart. He knows he fucked up.”

  “Why don’t you just make Leni and Glenn now?”

  “That window has closed. In every way. It has to be Olympia.”

  “You really think he’ll do your bidding now?”

  “He will,” she said. “Even if I have to fuck him again to get him to do it.”

  The record went to silence. Smith turned off the phonograph.

  Glenn sat in stunned silence, leaning back, deep into the couch.

  Jones asked Smith: “Think we need to show him the pictures now, too?”

  “Probably not,” Smith responded. He paused. “But let’s do it anyway. After all, he has shown an ability to rationalize.”

  Jones pulled two folders out of his satchel. “Okay, I’m going to show you some of our pictures,” he said. “You look, you hand ’em back. Okay, first one . . . one of your German friends coming out of the Gestapo headquarters.”

  The picture he pulled out of the first folder and handed Glenn was of Kurt, the limousine driver.