• • •
Throughout that month, a world away at the lavish Geyer-Werke film studios on Harzer Strasse in Berlin, Leni Riefenstahl was peering, day and night, with weary but zealous eyes, through the double magnifying lenses of her small Lytax film-editing machine. Dressed in a white smock, she sat at her editing table for up to sixteen hours a day, often until three or four in the morning, seldom eating, surrounded by thousands of filmstrips dangling from hooks in front of backlit glass walls. The immediate task at hand was to carefully review, cut, and splice selections from the four hundred thousand feet of raw film she had shot at the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg.
The film that would eventually emerge from her labors, Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), would come to define the iconography of Nazi Germany. To this day it stands as a monument to the ability of propaganda to foster absolute power and to justify unfettered hatred. And Riefenstahl would be celebrated for it for the rest of her life.
The Nuremberg Rally of 1934 was itself an anthem to power and a carefully designed tool for further concentrating and advancing it. From the moment Adolf Hitler’s airplane descended from the clouds into Nuremberg on September 4 of that year, every movement he made, every detail of the imagery that unfolded, every word he and his minions spoke, was carefully calculated to reinforce the notion that the Nazi Party was invincible. And more: that it was the only legitimate object of not just political but religious fervor. And still more: that this new German religion was embodied and made incarnate in the person of its leader.
The rally’s principal choreographers were Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, who designed the massive movie set Nuremberg became; Joseph Goebbels, who controlled the overall propaganda value of the event, its “messaging” in modern parlance; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose job it was to capture on film not just the rally itself but, more important, its underlying spirit—to amplify its message and convey it to an audience far wider than the three-quarters of a million party members who were actually in Nuremberg that week.
It was a tense, strained alliance, particularly between Riefenstahl and Goebbels. As Riefenstahl’s influence continued to grow, Goebbels increasingly struggled to comprehend how a woman could occupy such a situation, much as he struggled to understand why his wife objected so strenuously to his many affairs.
After the war, Riefenstahl said she initially hesitated to make the film, fearing interference from Goebbels and his powerful Ministry of Propaganda. In her enormously self-serving and revisionist autobiography, she asserted that she agreed to make the film only after Hitler promised to keep Goebbels at bay. She also claimed that she had already had to keep Goebbels at bay on a more personal level—that he had become so smitten with her charms, so determined to have her for his mistress, that he had come to her apartment one night and flung himself on his knees at her feet, begging her to have him, only to be unceremoniously shown the door. Goebbels, she said, never forgave her for the humiliation of the rejection.
Despite all this, and regardless of the veracity of Riefenstahl’s account of her relationship with Goebbels, the 1934 rally and Riefenstahl’s film in particular were enormous successes. Triumph of the Will was everything Riefenstahl hoped it would be, and it is still considered by many to be the most successful propaganda film of all time. With a staff of 172, including 18 cameramen dressed as SA men so they would blend into the crowd, Riefenstahl shot the week’s events from every conceivable angle, using techniques that had never been tried in a documentary before—cameras on dollies moving along tracks, cameras mounted on elevator platforms for dynamic aerial views, cameras in pits dug at ground level for shots upward at the looming Nazi figures. And the cameras caught it all: a half million uniformed party members marching in thunderous lock step, standing in massed rectangular formations, perfect in their uniformity and conformity; the speeches by Rudolf Hess, Goebbels, and Hitler himself, pounding on the podium, eyes ablaze, spittle flying from his mouth; Speer’s monumental architecture, the ponderous stone buildings lending their weight and solidity to the impression of overwhelming might, the vast open spaces suggesting unlimited ambition; the eerie torchlight parade of the SA men on the second night, with flickering torches and magnesium flares and bonfires illuminating their gleaming faces against the black night; the ranks of black-shirted SS men goose-stepping past bespectacled, crab-faced Heinrich Himmler; enormous banners emblazoned with swastikas, fluttering in the background of nearly every shot. If you have in your mind any image of Nazi pageantry and power, it likely comes, directly or indirectly, from Triumph of the Will.
But perhaps the most horrifying images from Riefenstahl’s film were seemingly the most innocent. They were shot on the third day of the rally, as Hitler addressed tens of thousands of boys from the Hitler-Jugend, the Hitler Youth, and its junior branch, the Deutsches Jungvolk. Service in the Hitler Youth was not yet compulsory, as it would later be; these were boys who were already true believers and they had been indoctrinated with a fierce anti-Semitism. Dressed in short pants and khaki shirts and neckerchiefs, looking for all the world like Boy Scouts with swastikas on their armbands, they ranged in age from eighteen down to ten. Many of them were destined to become members of the SS or SA.
On the podium, Hitler addressed them directly, jabbing at the air with one arm, his fist clenched. “We want our people to be obedient,” he ranted, “and you must practice obedience! Before us Germany lies. In us Germany burns. And behind us Germany follows!” On the field, Riefenstahl’s cameras moved slowly up and down the ranks of the boys, lenses angled slightly upward toward their faces. A gentle autumn breeze tousled their mostly fair hair. Their eyes shone with zeal, illuminated by trust. Their faces were so full of grace, so free of blemish, so perfect, that even today, even in the old black-and-white film, you can almost see the pink blush of their cheeks. And yet many of these were the faces of young men who would someday pull sobbing children from their mothers’ arms and herd them into gas chambers; who would order Polish women to strip naked, line them up at the edge of trenches, and shoot them in the back; who would lock all the women and children of the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane in a barn and set it on fire.
Leni Riefenstahl did her work well, and Hitler was pleased. A little less than two years later, in 1936, she had an opportunity to make another propaganda film, one that would again revel in images of youth and beauty and grace, and that would again perpetrate a great and sinister fraud upon the world.
• • •
As the fall quarter at the university wound down, Joe headed home to Sequim to spend Christmas with Joyce and her family. All fall he had been looking forward to winter break, and to spending time with Joyce somewhere other than in the dreary student cafeteria.
As he got ready to leave town, though, a headline in the Daily caught his attention: “Senior Men Face Life with Debts, Few Jobs.” The article made his heart sink. The average debt among graduates was two hundred dollars, it said, and the average four-year tab was more than two thousand. Both were staggering amounts of money for someone like Joe in 1934. But what surprised him most, as he read on, what he remembered years later, was the revelation that “more than half the men interviewed are receiving their university education at no expense to themselves, their expenses being paid by parents or relatives who expect no reimbursement.” The whole premise of Joe’s struggle to stay in school was the prospect of a more promising future afterward. It had not occurred to him that doors wouldn’t just open for a man with a college degree. And once again it was pounded home to him how many of his classmates apparently did not even have to think about money, how many had people watching out for them, shelling out thousands of dollars they never expected to see again. It stirred up the old anxiety and self-doubt that always threatened to bubble to the surface. And it added something new to the mix—a toxic dash of jealousy.
PART THREE
1935
The Parts That Re
ally Matter
Joe and Joyce in Seattle
CHAPTER NINE
One of the first admonitions of a good rowing coach, after the fundamentals are over, is “pull your own weight,” and the young oarsman does just that when he finds out that the boat goes better when he does. There is certainly a social implication here.
—George Yeoman Pocock
The boys sat on hard benches, shivering in their mismatched shorts and cotton jerseys. The sun had already set, and the vast interior space of the shell house was drafty and uncomfortable. Outside, it was a bitterly cold night. The panes of glass on the great sliding doors were frosted at the corners. It was the evening of January 14, 1935, the first crew turnout of the new year. The boys and a handful of reporters were waiting for Al Ulbrickson to lay out his plan for the upcoming racing season. After a long, uncomfortable wait, Ulbrickson emerged from his office and began to talk. By the time he finished, nobody in the room was cold any longer.
He had started off simply, announcing a change of basic strategy. Instead of taking it relatively slow for the first few weeks of winter quarter, as they generally did, working on details of form and technique while waiting for the weather to improve, they were going to row all out every day, right from the outset this year, weather be damned. They were going to work themselves into top physical condition first and then worry about refining technique later. More than that, though, all of them—not just the sophomores—were going to start out by racing one another in set crews rather than in constantly changing mixtures of men. And the races would be for the highest of stakes. This was not going to be an ordinary season. “At one time or another,” he declared, “Washington crews have won the highest honors in America. They have not, however, participated in the Olympic Games. That’s our objective.” The push to go to Berlin in 1936, and to win gold there, was to begin that night.
Casting aside his usual reticence, and despite the presence of reporters in the room, Ulbrickson then began to grow animated, almost emotional. There was more potential in this room, he said, than he had ever seen in a shell house in all his years of rowing and coaching, more than he ever expected to see again in his lifetime. Somewhere among them, he told the boys, was the greatest crew that Washington had ever seen. Better than the great 1926 crew that he had himself stroked to victory at Poughkeepsie. Better than the great Cal crews that had won Olympic gold in 1928 and 1932. Maybe the best Washington would ever see. Nine of them, he wound up declaring, as if it was a certainty, were going to be on the medal podium in Berlin in 1936. It was up to each of them whether he would be there or not. When he finished, the boys leapt to their feet and cheered, applauding with their hands held over their heads.
The performance was so uncharacteristic of Al Ulbrickson that everyone in Seattle with any interest in rowing took note. The next morning the Seattle Post-Intelligencer exulted, “A New Era in Washington Rowing. Possible Entry in the Olympic Games in Berlin!” The Washington Daily reported that “despite the intense cold, the shell house radiated more fire and spirit last night than has been the case for many a year.”
All-out war promptly broke out in the shell house. The sullen rivalries that had arisen during the fall season now turned into outright battles. Eyes that had been coolly averted from one another before now locked in icy stares. Accidental bumping of shoulders turned into open pushing matches. Locker doors were slammed. Curses were exchanged. Grudges were nursed. Brothers Sid and George Lund—one in the all-sophomore boat, one in a JV boat—now barely greeted each other with grunts each afternoon.
The nine boys in the all-sophomore boat were sure that Ulbrickson had been talking directly to and about them. They changed their “M-I-B” rowing chant to “L-G-B.” When asked what it meant, they smiled and said, “Let’s get better.” It didn’t. It meant, “Let’s go to Berlin.” It became a kind of secret code embodying their ambitions. But they were still listed on the chalkboard as boat number four out of five, no matter what they chanted out on the water. And Ulbrickson, publicly at least, seemed to have other boys at the front of his mind these days. In particular, over the next few weeks he seemed to make a point of talking to any reporter he could find about the golden prospects of a potential stroke oar for the varsity, a boy named Broussais C. Beck Jr. Beck’s father had been the manager of Seattle’s iconic Bon Marché department store and a fierce opponent of organized labor, famous for hiring spies who infiltrated the unions and reported back to him. He had also been an outstanding stroke on the Washington crew of his day and later chairman of the Board of Rowing Stewards at Washington. His own father had been one of Seattle’s most prominent pioneers, establishing a large homestead in the city’s Ravenna Park area, just north of the university. The business community and a good number of alumni very much wanted to see the young Beck stroking the Washington varsity now. He may or may not have had the kind of potential Ulbrickson talked about, but there was no doubt that he was the kind of boy coaches liked to keep around to make the alums happy. Joe, for one, took note of it. Beck was pretty clearly one of the boys who didn’t have to worry about money, or about a clean shirt to wear. Joe wondered if he had to worry about much of anything.
• • •
Ulbrickson’s plan to have the boys row themselves quickly into fighting form ran into trouble starting the day after his fiery speech. The Daily’s next headline told the tale, or at least the beginning of it: “Sweepsters Turn Out with Icicles on Their Oars.” The weather, which had been wet and blustery since late October, now turned arctic. On the night of Ulbrickson’s talk, cold north winds blew enormous breakers in off Puget Sound, pushing salt water two blocks inland at Alki Beach and along the waterfront in West Seattle. Over the next several days, temperatures dropped into the teens, snow flurries turned into light snowstorms, which in turn became full-scale blizzards. The siege went on almost continually, well into the third week of January. As he had in the fall, Ulbrickson had to keep his crews in the shell house day after day, or at best turn them out for quick sprints up and down the Cut, rowing in the snow until their hands grew so numb they could no longer hold the oars. He never said so, but he must have begun to wish he had some of those indoor rowing tanks they had back east. The eastern boys at least were at their oars, while his sat cooped up in a shell house, staring out the windows at some of the best rowing water in the world.
As the weather worsened, Tom Bolles watched his freshman squad rapidly shrink from the 210 who had turned out in the fall to 53 on January 14. By the third week of January, the Daily noted, “Three more days of blizzard and Tom Bolles won’t have a frosh crew.” Bolles, though, seemed unperturbed. “Crew is one sport where a cut is not necessary,” he observed. And though Bolles wasn’t talking much about it yet, he was well aware that among those few boys who were showing up there was some outstanding talent. He was starting to think, in fact, that he might just put together a freshman crew that could beat even last year’s bunch.
By the time the snow finally turned to rain, in late January, the campus was mired in 532 acres of slush, and the infirmary was so overrun with students suffering from colds, flu, and pneumonia that all the beds were full and sick students were left lying on cots in the hallways. Ulbrickson hustled all five boatloads of varsity contenders back out onto the water in the wind and the rain.
The war that had been simmering in the shell house became a full-on naval engagement. On January 24 another item in the Daily got things started. Under a large photograph of Joe and the sophomores rowing the City of Seattle, a bold caption read “They Dream of Poughkeepsie and Olympics.” The accompanying headline read “Frosh Crew Champs of Last Year Look Good to Coach Ulbrickson.” Last year’s varsity boys were outraged. It had seemed for months as if Ulbrickson had been quietly favoring the younger boys, but it had been subtle. Now it was all out in the open, down in black and white, for them and their friends and, worse, their girlfriends to read. By all appearances they were going
to be shunted aside, humiliated for the sake of Ulbrickson’s all too precious sophomores.
One of the boys in the all-sophomore boat, Bob Green, had the habit of getting excited and shouting encouragement to his crewmates during races. It was something of a breach of protocol, as ordinarily it is only the coxswain who is at all verbal in a shell, and it had the potential to confuse the stroke, especially during a race. But it had seemed to work for the sophomores the year before, and George Morry, the usual sophomore coxswain, had put up with it good-naturedly.
It irritated the hell out of some of the older boys in the other boats, though, particularly Bobby Moch, the savvy little coxswain of what seemed to be shaping up to be the best of the JV boats. As the boats began to compete head-to-head for varsity status in February, Moch, a junior, grew more and more outraged by Green’s behavior. But he soon found that he could turn it to his own advantage. Whenever his boat came up alongside Joe and the sophomores, Moch quietly leaned toward his stroke oar and whispered, “Give me twenty really big ones, after five more.” Green meanwhile would be hooting and hollering at his own crew, urging them on. Five strokes later, Moch would direct his megaphone over to the sophomore boat and say, “Well, Green just opened his big mouth again. Let’s pass them!” By the time he said this, his own boat would already be starting to surge, as if by magic. In the sophomore boat, Green, angry at the name-calling, would start yelling even more loudly. In the coxswain’s seat, Morry would chime in, “Give me ten big ones!” but all the while Moch’s boat would be silently accelerating away from them. Each time Moch tried it, the sophomores did the same thing—all at once, collectively, and in unison, they lost their cool. They flailed at their oars, digging them too deep in the water or too shallow, out of time with one another, angry and desperate to catch up, losing all semblance of form. Time after time, they got, as Moch called it, “all bloody nosed.” And none more so than Joe, to whom the whole thing seemed like another joke at his expense, designed to show him up. But it always worked. Moch wound up each time sitting in the stern of his boat, looking back over his shoulder, chuckling at the suddenly hapless-looking sophomores as they fell out of contention, and giving them a casual farewell wave. Bobby Moch—as everyone concerned would eventually learn—was nobody’s fool.