Bliss, Remembered (14 page)

Yeah, him. He made Eleanor the star of his Aquacade at the World’s Fair in 1939. But once again, Teddy, you’re lettin’ me get ahead of myself. What mattered here is The Year of Our Lord 1936, and Avery Brundage had had enough of her shenanigans on the Good Ship Lollypop and threw her off the team. It was a huge story. As soon as I got the telegram, I called Mother, and she brought the newspaper home, and the story was headlined.

Now what Eleanor told me later was that she simply didn’t believe Brundage was serious—especially after he got a petition signed by about two hundred of her teammates pleading with him not to expel her. She was sure he was bluffing, but when she went to appeal to him, he told her he meant business. She said, well then, she at least hoped somebody else would get her place. See, the swimming didn’t start till the second week of the Olympics. So there was plenty of time for another backstroker to get to Berlin to compete.

Eleanor told me she just said that off the top of her head, but Brundage took hold of it, and he asked her who’d finished fourth. Eleanor replied, “Oh, don’t send her, Avery, she hasn’t got a prayer for a medal. But if you send that girl I introduced you to at the Trials, that Sydney Stringfellow—now that kid has the potential to maybe put it all together and win something.”

Actually, Eleanor told me, she still thought Brundage was going to come to his senses and back down, but he was dead serious. Why, he threw Jesse Owens himself out of amateur athletics a little later—hardly a week after Jesse was the toast of Berlin—just because he said he might turn pro. You see, as far as the Olympics were concerned, Brundage pretty much made up the rules on the fly, so he just went ahead and fired that telegram off to me.

Well, Teddy, Mother was terrified. “Trixie,” she said, “are you really prepared to go up to New York and get on a foreign ship, where they’ll be speaking German—not the king’s English, mind you—and go off to Hamburg all by yourself and trust that someone can get you to Berlin? You really are brave enough to do that?”

The fact is, I was scared myself, but it was such an amazing opportunity, so somehow I got my courage up and told Mother I was prepared to go. All by myself. She took a deep breath and said, “All right, Trixie, if you can promise me your father won’t roll over in his grave.”

That made me think about Daddy and all the things we’d done together, out fishing, shooting ducks and doves, playing ball—and, Teddy, that just evaporated any fears I had. Stoutly, I told Mom, “I’m sure Daddy would want me to be his girl and go.”

So she drew in a deep sigh and said, all right, she’d ride with me on the Bullet up to Wilmington, where I’d catch the train for New York. We called Western Union and wired Avery Brundage that I’d be on my way. It cost, I think, ten cents a word, but Mother splurged, because she added one more sentence, seventy cents worth: “PLEASE BE SURE MEET AT HAMBURG PIER.”

That was all that really worried me, getting off the ship in a foreign land. The rest seemed pretty easy. After all, Teddy, at this point, I was gettin’ to be quite the veteran traveler, a regular Baedeker. Why, I’d been to Chicago and New York City, and I’d ridden in subways and called for taxi cabs, and now I was goin’ back up to New York and then across the ocean all by myself. But sometimes, it isn’t that you grow up. Sometimes I think it’s just that you’ve already grown up, only you don’t realize it till something faces you down.

That’s what happened to me that summer of ’36. If I’d looked back then, say in September, I would’ve hardly recognized that girl I’d been a few weeks ago. So much had happened to me. I wasn’t a different person, you understand. And it wasn’t a matter of just changing my name from Trixie to Sydney. It was all of me. But, of course, I didn’t look back, because by then I was looking forward. That’s the whole point of growing up, isn’t it?

It’s funny, isn’t it, Teddy? Here Eleanor gets thrown off the team, but it turned out to be a terrific thing for her. She told me that herself. By the time I got to New York, she was on all the front pages. You don’t get that no matter how pretty you are and no matter how fast you can swim backstroke. So Avery Brundage was the best thing that ever happened to Eleanor. And me, too, of course. He changed my life for forever and a day. You’ll see.

But then, if you’ll excuse me, Teddy, he was still a total horse’s ass till the day he died.

Well, sure enough, Teddy, I got to Berlin without any difficulty at all. The ship sailed across the ocean blue, and, as promised, I was met right at the pier in Hamburg and taken directly to the women’s dorm. We were kept separate from the men. They had a large village about five miles away, but no girls were allowed in. As far as I know, the only woman who ever got into the village was Leni Riefenstahl. Do you know her, Teddy?

Oh, she was a piece of work. She’d been a big German movie star, and Hitler was crazy about her.

Leni Riefenstahl. I’m surprised you never heard of her, you being in the theater. Well, yes, there was some scuttlebutt about that, but the general consensus was, no, they were never lovers. Now, the Nazi bigwig all the movie stars had to worry about was Joseph Goebbels. Certainly you’ve heard of him?

He was the head of propaganda, so he got involved in movies, and he had what they used to call the casting couch.

Well, Goebbels was a creepy little guy with a limp. Now, please, Teddy, I’m not a mean person. I understand some very nice people have to limp, but it just added to his, uh . . .

Exactly, there’s just no other word for it. Now Hitler himself really wasn’t impressive. You know, he had that foolish mustache, and he wasn’t very tall, but he wasn’t creepy. He didn’t put you off. You certainly never thought: well, this fellow is the absolute personification of evil. I mean that just didn’t cross your mind when you were around him.

As close as I am to you right now. I was at Goebbels’ house, too. Well “house” doesn’t do it justice. His estate on an island. And there was a beautiful movie star there and everyone whispered that she was his mistress. Understand, Goebbels’ wife was right there, too. The movie star was named Lida something, and I kept trying to imagine her climbing into bed with that little creep, and it made my skin crawl. I thought, if you have to do that to be a movie star, well—

Dammit, Teddy, you’ve got me off the track again. I was talking about Leni Riefenstahl. She’d made this propaganda film for Hitler a couple years before, and now she was shooting one about the Olympics.

She’d just burst right into the men’s village to shoot her movie. She was crazy about men’s bodies. Not that I have anything against men’s bodies, Teddy. Even as old and decrepit as I am now. But Leni Riefenstahl—her whole movie featured men’s bodies, including a number of them in the altogether—carrying the Olympic torch, in the sauna, what have you.

Yep, when it came to Leni Riefenstahl, rules were made to be broken. I never saw a woman who could get men to do whatever she wanted better than she could. She’d cajole, she’d threaten. She could cry on cue. Well, of course, she was an actress.

She actually got a lot of the athletes to repeat their performances for her camera, pretend to run the whole damn race again, the total rigamarole, so she could get close-ups and so forth. Whatever Leni wanted. Of course, sometimes it was a two-way street. The American boy who won the decathlon—his name was Glenn Morris. After she finished shooting him, she got him into her bed. Of course, I don’t think Glenn fought very hard to avoid that particular destination. It would not be in the least bit fair to say she seduced him.

She did try to seduce Horst. Here he was only twenty, and she must’ve been thirty-five if she was a day, and she tried to seduce him. Now he told me she didn’t succeed, but, honestly, I couldn’t have blamed him, Teddy. It would’ve been very hard to reject the blandishments of Leni Riefenstahl. Especially for a young German boy. I mean, it would be like gettin’ into bed with the Queen of Sheba if you were a Sheba boy—a . . . Shebanese? Right?

Well, you get the picture. Now, I wanted to believe Horst when he said he’d managed to say no, but there was always a part of me—well, a very considerable part, to tell you the truth—that thought this one time he was fibbing. But I would’ve forgiven Horst. It was before he met me that she tried to seduce him, and, as I said, Teddy, no man could say no to Leni Riefenstahl.

Yeah, you’re right. What’s that word they always use now for that sort of thing?

You know, when you move from the one thing to another. Wait, wait. It’ll come to me. . . . Segued! That’s the word. I don’t ever remember people saying “segued” until very recently. Well, just now I guess I segued into Horst, through Leni Riefenstahl, but that’s appropriate, because it was because of her that I met Horst. His name was Horst Gerhardt.

He was my gold medal, Teddy.

Horst was my gold medal.

No, not right now. Before I get into Horst, I have to assemble my thoughts.

She had acted so precipitously that when she went into her bedroom I began to fear that she might’ve experienced some sort of crisis, or perhaps was in pain. But on the contrary: when Mom emerged, she seemed downright chipper and blithely suggested we go out to lunch. “I’ll treat,” she said. She had a favorite little restaurant in mind, one where we could sit outside in a pretty, covered courtyard. Very green; very northwest. As soon as we sat down, she called the waiter over and, bingo, ordered two Bloody Marys.

“You didn’t even ask me,” I said.

“If I’m going to be fortified, I want you to be, too,” she replied.

“You need to be fortified? Against what?”

“Well, it’s not fortified against, Teddy. It’s just that I wanna have all my ducks in a row.”