TO DISTRACT US FROM this unexpected romantic triangle, the 1932 Olympic Games, the event Maurice and I had been eagerly awaiting for years, came to our own Los Angeles Coliseum. Further work on The Hollywood Reporter was out of the question. I asked for a leave of absence, so I could give full concentration to the Games.
The entire Hollywood community seemed almost as excited as I was. A meeting of film celebrities was held to choose hosts for the various foreign teams. Maurice Chevalier volunteered to give a reception for the French team and arrange a tour of the studio. Marlene Dietrich offered to serve in a similar capacity for the German contingent, not yet appropriated by the upstart Hitler. One by one each foreign group was spoken for. Finally it came little Latvia’s turn. Mother raised her hand. She, a daughter of Dvinsk in the heart of our homeland, would be proud to host the Latvian team. At the end of the meeting we were introduced to them, or rather him, for Latvia, we discovered, was represented by a single athlete, a marvelous-looking, ruddy-faced specimen bursting with muscles, energy, confidence, and handsome enough to be a leading man. In fact, Mother suggested half-seriously that after the Games she might get him a seven-year contract at Paramount. Of course Karl would have to learn English. He spoke and understood only his mother tongue. That gap was filled, barely, by the few words of English spoken by the small, paunchy trainer in a cheap double-breasted suit who accompanied our Latvian champion. From him we learned that Karl had become a national hero, the only athlete in the whole country who qualified for international competition. His best event was the pole vault, but he was also the best runner and jumper in Mother’s motherland. Since Latvia lacked funds to field an Olympic team, sending Karl and his trainer from Riga to Los Angeles had become a national cause. Peasants had dropped their meager coins into milk cans to raise money for their “team.” Thousands of Letts waving little national flags had seen him off on his two-week journey by rail and sea to our distant shores.
Overnight we became patriotic Latvians. Mother had said that she had been a babe in arms when the Jaffes were driven from their village by a pogrom, but now her memory of her Latvian childhood grew miraculously. I looked up our country’s history in the encyclopaedia. From the Middle Ages we had been dominated in turn by Poland, Russia, and Sweden, and by the German land barons. We had been badly mangled in the Great War. And the Germans had struck again and occupied us as late as 1919. But our little army had fought back, and with support from a motley alliance we had won our independence in 1920. Now the 12-year-old Republic had sent us Karl. He was our houseguest at Malibu, and I was proud to run with him on the beach as he underwent his early-morning conditioning. Mother gave a luncheon for him in the studio commissary, decorated with Latvian flags and attended by dozens of Paramount stars. Even though Father had been moved to his bungalow suite, the Schulberg name had not lost its magic, and we still had the run of the lot.
In his snappy blue blazer with the Latvian crest, Karl must have thought he had died and been reborn in a Baltic heaven. The famous of Hollywood rose to applaud him when he made his charming, halting thank-you speech, which Mother proudly interpreted from a pretranslated text. He spoke of his small Latvian village and of how he had learned to pole-vault by fashioning his own pole from a slender tree and soaring over the high fences of the local farms. His mother, he said, had bought her first radio so she and her neighbors could follow his progress in the Games. Hollywood has always been sentimental about this kind of “outside” celebrity: Movie stars flocked around our Latvian standard-bearer, inviting him to their beach houses and wanting his autograph. At Karl’s side, I basked in reflected glory.
On the day of the great event, the pole-vault competition, the Schulberg-Jaffe contingent was there to root the Latvian hope to record heights. The bar was put at 12 feet for warm-up jumps. At the head of the runway, Karl paused, took a deep breath to expand his powerful chest, struck a heroic pose, then went pounding down the path to the uprights, went up on his pole to a height of ten feet, ten-and-a-half… and fell clumsily into the pit under the bar. We looked at each other. Apparently Karl’s hand had slipped on the bamboo pole, an accident that could happen to anyone. By this time he was pounding down the runway again. This time he rose to a mighty height of almost 11 feet, trembled there a moment, and then went crashing into the bar which fell humiliatingly on top of him in the pit.
Our Latvian cheering section was tense and silent as Karl went back for his final try. He expanded his chest at least four inches, ran with grim purpose down the runway, vaulted straight into the bar and fell on his back with the splintered bar draped across his mighty chest.
That was the end of Karl at the Los Angeles Olympics. For weeks we had been wining and dining an athlete who could not have made our L. A. High School track team. In fact, a boy on our B squad had cleared 12 feet! As the vaulters cleared 13 feet and on up to a record 14, Karl picked up his pole and trudged off into the tunnel on his way to the locker room and oblivion. He was too humiliated even to say goodbye.
My own connection with the Games—through my classmate at L.A. High, Cornelius Johnson—was a happier experience. He was the same skinny, barely literate Corny whose copy I had doctored in Miss Carr’s journalism class.
The first day he had come out for track, in the high jump, I had advised him to try for the Class B team because we already had two six-foot jumpers on the varsity. A little later I was taking my laps when I noticed an unusual crowd around the high-jump pit. I was told that Corny had just cleared six feet on his first try, by what looked like half a foot! The bar was raised two inches, and again Corny flew over it without really seeming to try. At that point an awed Coach Chambers told Corny not to go any higher—he wanted to keep him under wraps.
Now, in the Coliseum, my Corny Johnson was up there with the greatest jumpers in the world. By some magic transformation, the L.A.H.S. letters on his chest now read U.S.A. I, who had once cleared five feet doing the old-fashioned scissors, concentrated, took a deep breath, loped down the runway toward the bar, and—secreted in Corny’s body—cleared six-four without even trembling the bar. I turned and hugged my date, Maurice’s cousin Polly, a very pretty girl signed as an ingénue at MGM, a warm, happy person with whom I felt safe. The bar went to 6 feet 5, and then to a fraction under 6 feet 6. The intense competition ended with Corny being edged out by a Canadian, a veteran from Southern Cal. Four years later, however, an athletically mature Cornelius Johnson would take the gold at the Berlin Games and go on to establish a world’s record.
Unfortunately, after the glories of the high bar, there was nowhere for him to go but down. Lost in alcohol, he’d be carried off a merchant ship during World War II, a wreck of the genius highschool athlete who had soared like a black angel almost seven feet above the ground.