by Terry Frei
“Kind of careless, I guess you could say,” Smith said.
Glenn dropped the picture on the floor. Okay, so the guy driving him was in the Gestapo, too. Not great, but…
Unfazed, Smith said, “The funny thing is, as near as we can tell, the Gestapo had about three of her cameramen on the payroll, anyway, so they were keeping an eye on her from a lot of angles. I guess we should be a bit insulted that they didn’t know we were doing the same thing . . . if to a little lesser extent.”
Reaching out with another picture from the first folder, Jones said, “Speaking of which . . . this was the man talking to us. Or at least the one we can tell you about now.”
The next shot was of Stephan, Leni’s young film editing assistant, on a Berlin street. Smith said, “When they figured out he was reporting to us, they picked him up, tortured him, got out of him what they could—which wasn’t all that much, other than that he’d told us some things about your Fraulein and the Führer’s visit to that film lab—and then they blew his head off. That’s one I truly feel bad about. What he told us in the big picture wasn’t all that important. And we had bigger plans for him.”
Glenn wondered, “Like . . . ?”
Smith shrugged. “Something bigger.”
Jones raised the second folder, showing it to him as if he were challenging him to guess what it held. “Okay, here are the last ones,” he said. “Go ahead. They’re an eyeful.” He dropped the folder on the coffee table. Glenn wanted to simply wave a hand and announce he wouldn’t even look at them, but he couldn’t resist. As Glenn reached for the folder, Jones said, “If it’s any consolation, this is from last year . . . and we don’t think it started until then.”
For perhaps thirty seconds, nothing was said as Glenn was frozen, holding the closed folder in his hand.
The two men waited.
Finally, Glenn sighed and opened the folder. He flipped through a small stack, looked at each one, growing sicker each second. Suddenly, he dropped the pictures, jumped up and ran toward the bathroom as fast as he had on the track at Berlin.
He didn’t make it in time.
Epilogue
Glenn Morris didn’t make another movie.
His wife obtained a quickie Nevada divorce in August 1939, when she was about to begin a teaching job in Wyoming. She married a Denver businessman in November 1940.
In 1940, at age twenty-eight, Morris made the roster of the National Football League’s Detroit Lions as a reserve end. The Lions’ young star was another Coloradoan, Byron “Whizzer” White. By then, Morris was so unheralded that the wire-service lineup information appended to game accounts listed him as “Morse” for his first two games. Glenn played in six of the first eight games, starting two. His only statistic was one interception, for twenty yards, and he also made a tackle that produced a safety in a 43-14 victory over the Chicago Cardinals. But with the Lions out of championship contention with a 3-4-1 record, Detroit pared the roster with three games remaining, and Glenn was one of five Lions released on November 5, 1940. The Associated Press story that ran in the Denver newspapers didn’t even mention his Olympic accomplishment. As the season wound down, he briefly joined the Columbus Bullies of the American Football League, one of several operations using that name over the years. That was the end of his pro football career.
After returning to Colorado, Glenn sold insurance in Denver.
At thirty, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in October 1942 and became a lieutenant junior grade on the attack troop transport USS Banner in the Pacific. Although he often showed officers clippings of his Olympic glory, he mostly was aloof. A beachmaster, he went ashore during battle in the Philippines and seemed to crack up, accusing fellow navy men of stealing his gas mask. In truth, he had left it on the landing craft. He also was involved in landings at Okinawa. Most who knew him felt he came out of the service emotionally scarred, and some—perhaps not realizing how bruised emotionally he already was when he entered the service—later would say it was posttraumatic stress syndrome. After leaving the Navy in 1947, he lived mostly in Northern California and worked as a steel rigger for the Atomic Energy Commission and at construction. A heavy smoker and drinker, his health deteriorated and he was diagnosed with emphysema, high blood pressure, and an enlarged heart. Another marriage didn’t work out. When he was inducted into the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame in 1969, it was said he was too ill to travel and attend the banquet. By early 1974, he was in a veteran’s hospital full-time. He was sixty-one. He looked eighty. His hair was silver; he was overweight and constantly short of breath. He died on January 31, 1974. He is buried in Skylawn Memorial Park in San Mateo.
In 1940, after World War II had begun, Leni Riefenstahl began filming Tiefland, envisioning it as her triumphant return to feature films. She was producer, writer, director, and star. Incredibly, given the cost of the war effort, the German government put up seven million reichsmarks for the project. Filming continued in fits and spurts until 1944, and Leni used Gypsies interned in concentration camps as extras.
After the end of the war, she was detained under house arrest for several years by the Allies and interrogated, most notably by the very skeptical writer Budd Schulberg, working for the Office of Strategic Services. She claimed to have known nothing of Nazi atrocities until after the war. She was tried several times, but received only the relative slap on the wrist of being labeled a “fellow traveler” of the Nazis.
She managed to complete Tiefland and it was released in 1954.
Two years later, she was seriously injured in a truck crash in Kenya while looking for possible filming locations for a feature film that was never made, and was in a coma for a time, but recovered.
In later years, her reputation was somewhat rehabilitated as she turned to still photography, shooting such figures as Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger and animal trainers-magicians Siegfried and Roy. She spent considerable time living with the Nuba Tribes in Sudan and published best-selling books of her photos of them in 1974 (The Last of the Nuba) and 1976 (The People of Kau). Also in the mid-1970s, she obtained a scuba-diving license, lying about her age to do so, and also released several books of marine-life photos and a 2002 film, Impressionen unter Wasser—or Underwater Impressions.
She was married twice, first to German officer Peter Jacob from 1944 to 1946. Then, on her 101st birthday on August 22, 2003, she wed her driver, photographer, and companion of thirty-five years, Horst Kettner. She died seventeen days later in Pöcking, Germany.
Author’s Afterword
In May 2010, I heard from former newspaperman Tony Phifer, a senior writer for Colorado State University’s Division of External Relations. Tony and I share an appreciation of history and serve together on the selection committee for the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame. Tony suggested that an upcoming ceremony on the CSU campus in Fort Collins might be in my wheelhouse for a Denver Post story. CSU was going to plant an oak-tree seedling to salute Glenn Morris, the school’s former student-body president and football and track star who won the 1936 Olympic decathlon at Berlin. I had heard of Morris, knew of that gold-medal accomplishment, was aware he was from the small Colorado town of Simla, and had looked at the display honoring him in the Hall of Fame, located in the Denver Broncos’ stadium. I knew that one other successful athlete was from Simla—former University of Colorado All-American and ex-San Francisco 49ers punter Barry Helton, who earned a Super Bowl championship ring when his NFL team routed the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXIV. But I had to admit, to Tony and myself, that I didn’t know much about Morris beyond the highlights.
Why an oak tree?
Tony explained that the German Organizing Committee officials handed out seedlings for the gold medalists to take home and plant, preferably in their hometowns or at their universities. As the trees grew, they would be reminders of the Olympic spirit. Less trumpeted was that they also could be considered links to mythology’s Thor and his “Donar Oak.” Tony found a picture that proved Morris presented his t
ree to CSU president Charles Lory in September 1936. By the twenty-first century, though, nobody seemed to know where it had been planted, if it had been planted at all, or what had happened to it. Tony wrote stories for university publications on the mystery, and he hooked up with Don Holst, the 1968 Olympic team’s decathlon coach and an Olympic historian who lives in Chadron, Nebraska. Holst sought to trace the few known surviving Berlin trees, produce second- and third-generation oak seedlings, and then replant them at various sites tied to the 1936 Olympians around the country. In May 2010, it was CSU’s turn—in honor of Morris.
I did considerable preliminary reading about Morris, most of it on microfilm in the Post library. Tony suggested I contact Dr. Morris Ververs, who at Simla High from 1967 to 1984 first taught and later served as principal. He was retired and living on a small ranch just outside of town. His wife, Verna, was related to Morris—her father was Morris’s first cousin—and Dr. Ververs had become a trustee and advocate of the Olympic champion’s legacy in his hometown. My plan was to visit Simla several days before the Fort Collins ceremony and write a profile of Morris in advance, then attend and plug in information from the tree-planting ceremony, and file the story for the next day’s paper.
At Simla High, Ververs took me to the glass-covered display cases honoring Morris outside the gym. Next, we went to Ververs’s home, where we spoke at length. He showed me Glenn Morris’s gold medal, held in trust by the school district. Eventually, Ververs popped a VHS tape into a TV-VCR and showed me the segment of Leni Riefenstahl’s famed documentary Olympia that featured Morris and the decathlon.
I went to the CSU oak-tree ceremony the next week, and my story appeared in the newspaper on May 11, 2010. I also did a blog with additional information. In both, I mentioned the Morris-Riefenstahl affair. I saw a couple of pictures of the two them together during the Games; much later, I would see more, including several I eventually concluded almost certainly were taken during his return to Berlin for supplemental filming and pictures. Those pictures, and many others of Leni or Glenn separately, are all over the Internet. I was aware of Riefenstahl and Triumph of the Will and Olympia, but had seen only snippets of those films. Ververs told me that he and his wife visited Glenn’s brother, Jack, in San Diego in the late 1970s, and that Jack passed along that Glenn had confirmed the relationship in brother-to-brother discussions. “Jack told us that when Glenn died, he said on his deathbed, ‘I should have stayed in Germany with Leni,’” Ververs told me. Glenn also told Fort Collins businessman Sparks Alford, one of the athlete’s sponsors during his college days, about the affair with Riefenstahl.
While writing that 2010 newspaper story, I committed the sin of assuming archival pieces were correct. In many cases, I was to discover, they weren’t. Sportswriters wrote few personality profiles of college athletes in those days, so there wasn’t much on the record about Glenn during his football and track career at Colorado Agricultural College. In the rush to tell America about this man who seemed to come out of nowhere to decathlon prominence, reporters seemed to buy into any fairy tales tossed their way about Morris. Multiple-part series about him in the Denver papers in 1936—one as the Olympics approached, one after—read like Jack Armstrong novels and, curiously, only indirectly and unreliably quoted Glenn himself. That started a cycle of myth that continued as other writers, including me, later used the clippings as reference material.
In April 2011, I returned to the CSU campus to attend another ceremony honoring Morris. The school renamed the South College Field House, where Glenn did much of his track and field training, the Glenn Morris Field House. Ververs that day loaned Morris’s gold medal to CSU, where it’s now stored. In his remarks during the ceremony, CSU president Tony Frank acknowledged that Morris’s life was troubled after his Olympic accomplishments. But he also was correct when he told me of the renaming decision: “Like most universities, we typically name things in response to philanthropic contributions. But we also name things for accomplishment. . . . I don’t think anybody can question Glenn Morris’s accomplishments. I think he was fairly unarguably the greatest athlete in Colorado State University history. If we’re not going to name a facility after that level of accomplishment, especially involving something as historic and symbolic as that gold medal at that Olympic Games, then I don’t know where you’re going to set the bar.”
By then, a book about Leni and Glenn was on my short list of possible projects.
In the many books written about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Morris usually is minimally mentioned. More recent works at least usually added Riefen-stahl’s disclosure of the affair in her 1987 memoirs, translated into English and published in Great Britain in 1992 and the United States in 1993. To start with, she claimed that Erwin Huber introduced her to Morris on the second day of the decathlon, that she was “transfixed” on first sight, and that the attraction was obvious and mutual. Several of the most-often seen pictures of Leni and Glenn together are similar and were taken in one photo siege during the decathlon. Those shots show them lounging on the ground with Jack Parker and Bob Clark. The one used on this book’s cover, showing her reaching to Glenn’s forehead, was obtained from the National Archives via Double Delta Industries. Leni also said that she subsequently called upon Glenn to help line up the pole-vaulters for additional filming the day after their event—or, actually, the next night in an attempt to duplicate (with her extra lights) the conditions that existed when Earle Meadows ultimately claimed the victory in the poorly lit stadium. She said Glenn went to the dance hall and “dragged” the pole-vaulters to her at the stadium.
Although her timetable often has been parroted in books, there’s a major problem with it. The pole vault was on August 5. The decathlon was on August 7 and 8. Glenn couldn’t have helped Leni the night after the pole vault if he didn’t meet her until two days later. I wrote this on the theory that Leni was correct about the pole vault filming taking place the next night, and that Glenn was involved as an intermediary, which means she met Glenn sooner than during the decathlon.
Leni’s claim in her memoirs that Morris received his gold medal after the decathlon ended and then tore off her blouse and kissed her breasts in front of a packed stadium was ludicrous, and not only because if her narrative was to be believed, this was before their physical relationship began. Nobody in the stadium, including the many journalists, noticed? It couldn’t have been that dark. She said she realized he was a “lunatic” then. That’s why I use that word in my passage about what happened that night. (I also should note that I’m realistic about the perils of translation from German to English.) So she thought he was a lunatic, yet she subsequently contacted him in Sweden after the Games, arranged travel for him back to Berlin, and then began an affair with him? As you read her accounts, the natural reaction is to marvel at the gall of Leni, the storyteller. Does she really think we’re going to believe this? Yet in her own way, she arguably believed it as she typed. That’s the way she was. Plus, she was writing (and all indications are that she did the writing herself) about incidents of a half century earlier. So even if she had wanted to be truthful and get the little details and timetable correct, that would have been impossible, absent a detailed journal or diary.
The decathlon medal ceremony, in fact, was delayed to August 9, the day after the completion of the event, and the three Americans involved wore their blazers and ties. Later stories, including mine in the Post, said that Eva Braun presented Morris with the gold medal and/or wreath, but I came to understand that the picture cited—it’s taken from behind the woman, and you can’t tell who it is—wasn’t taken at the actual ceremony, but later. In that picture, taken in the daylight, Morris is wearing his uniform, not his blazer and tie. The German public didn’t know of Eva Braun’s existence, much less her role in Hitler’s life (whatever it was), so at the very least, her involvement in any presentation to Morris wouldn’t have been flaunted.
I decided that when Leni brought Glenn back to Germany from Scandinavia after
the Games, it wasn’t just to do extra shooting—or maybe not even mainly to do extra shooting, both film and still. It was to restart an affair that began during the Games. After all, the supplemental film, when included, hurt the credibility of an otherwise amazing documentary. The restaged sequences of the pole vault and decathlon 1,500 meters looked more absurd each time I viewed those scenes in Olympia. Leni acknowledged there was electricity and passion between her and Glenn during his return to Berlin, to the point where they almost forgot to do the shooting before Glenn’s departure date arrived, and she said it took her six months to get over him.
I never seriously considered writing a “Glenn Morris biography.” Former Fort Collins newspaperman Mike Chapman’s The Gold and the Glory about Morris came out in 2003. In roughly sixty pages of text, he laid out what he could find through interviews and research. He was especially dogged in coming up with information about Morris’s military service and his crackup during the Philippines landing. He brought up Morris’s affair with Riefenstahl, and even sent her a letter, asking about the relationship, not long before her death. As he explained in his book, the return letter said she stood behind what she said in her memoirs about the American athlete. Understandably, that tended to be her stand about everything in her tome, which runs 656 pages in the North American editions.
Even after I started a young-adult novel planned to be the first book in a series, I sporadically did additional exploratory research about Leni and Glenn and another project on my short list when the mood struck. I made an additional trip to Simla, visited Ververs again, and listened to the tape of his visit with Jack Morris in San Diego. At that point, I still was thinking that if and when I did Leni and Glenn, it would be nonfiction with an asterisk—meaning that I would allow myself considerable leeway to speculate, hypothesize, and even entertain within that format. Eventually, though, I reached a group decision with Rick Rinehart and Kalen Landow of Taylor Trade. I might as well go all out. I would do Leni and Glenn as a speculative narrative, within the framework of my research. Mostly, I decided there was a story to tell here, questions to raise and try to answer, gaps to fill in, and it would be impossible to do it within the traditional parameters of nonfiction.
