Sleeping with Leni

AS A BIOGRAPHER, I am sometimes asked how I aim for objectivity and balance, and my stock reply is that a well-told life should be neither autopsy nor worship at the shrine. But I should own up to something else at the outset: I sleep with my subjects.

That may sound flippant, opportunistic or unprofessional, but it could hardly be more serious, blameless or to the point. I speak, of course -- quite literally -- of dreaming, of intimacies in the dark that are unbidden and involuntary. What they are is a kind of occupational hazard.

They signal that the author’s subject has abandoned the shoulder over which he or she has been scrutinizing the whole laborious project and has invaded the author’s unconscious.

Now, it is one thing to endure, as I once did, half a dozen years of Marlene Dietrich ankling her way into my brain pan to purr seductively of decades gone by; or to eavesdrop in the dark on Moss Hart and hear him polish up firecracker strings of Broadway wisecracks. It is something else again to spend the better part of a decade wrestling with Leni Riefenstahl, the beautiful, ambitious dancer and film star who became “Hitler’s filmmaker,” a prized ornament of his inner circle and history’s most gifted (and notorious) propagandist.

Riefenstahl, the daughter of a Berlin plumber, catapulted to world fame as the director of “Triumph of the Will,” her record of Nuremberg’s 1934 Nazi rally, and “Olympia,” her epic account of Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Games, films still regarded as two of the greatest documentaries ever made. Her portrait of Adolf Hitler on film was “glorification” (her word) and established him as a charismatic, godlike figure for the millions who would willingly, even enthusiastically, follow him on a path that led directly to catastrophe and the Holocaust.

Still alive when I began writing about her (she died in 2003 at the age of 101), Riefenstahl invaded my sleeping hours and (to paraphrase Ernest Lubitsch) did to my slumbers what her fuhrer did to Poland. Writing about her required me to immerse myself in a life of formidable strengths and frailties, and into the dark heart of one of the most brutal and dishonest epochs in recent human history. Thus do dreams become nightmares.

Richard Schickel intuited this in referring (in his review of my book in this newspaper) to “the biographer’s nightmare, trapped for a decade with a loathsome subject.” I don’t know if I would choose the word “loathsome” to describe Riefenstahl, but I can’t say I wasn’t warned that she would be difficult, even excruciatingly so. The faces of friends and colleagues fell when I mentioned I was writing about her. My longtime agent recoiled.

A distinguished colleague who writes significant lives and wins significant prizes was especially discouraging. When I asked if she ever had moments of revelation in her research that shocked or gave her pause, moments that caused genuine emotional distress, she replied with withering sang-froid that emotional reactions were inappropriate to the art and craft of biography and that were she to be so afflicted, she would return her publisher’s advance and turn to career plan B.

I felt instructed and more than a little frustrated. I knew the lofty rules and ideals of the craft, especially the ones about objectivity and detachment, but for me the biographer’s emotional receptiveness -- even vulnerability -- seemed not only appropriate but human, a way of gaining traction on the life I felt compelled to examine.

To deny that my subject aroused intellectual or emotional responses that were considerably less (or more) than neutral would have been as false as the avalanche of denials she herself trotted out to justify her life of great achievements and appalling transgressions of humanity in the name of Art.

Riefenstahl portrayed herself as an apolitical artist first and as history’s innocent victim second, and she was tireless in reiterating how she had suffered at the hands of enemies who failed to understand her art. But in reality, she didn’t suffer. Her reputation was kept alive by images that won -- and continue to win -- accolades for innovation and aesthetic beauty. She kept working to the end of her life, and it is worth noting that she could never extend to the fuhrer’s victims the sympathy she demanded for herself. Loathsome or not, there is something terribly sad about such blindness, or willful self-delusion.

I needed -- wanted -- to say that; I wanted to be as forthright about Riefenstahl as she had never been about herself. Objectivity was a spurious concept if it meant withholding my evaluation of the very subject I had spent years and hundreds of pages exploring.

A biographer is, of course, a narrator, not a judge. But my subject was a gifted artist who spent the rest of the century after the fall of the 1,000-year Reich trying to dissociate herself from the moral consequences of her art. In another time and place, perhaps she would have distinguished herself as an artist at less cost to those around her, but that would have required a respect for truth and the beauty of truth that eluded her to the end.

Her era was what it was and, like our own, it was complicated, baffling and not deficient in treacheries. As I was writing, Riefenstahl’s influence seemed everywhere present. Our lives are saturated with images of persuasion -- many of them technically beautiful, as hers were -- from spinmeisters who use propaganda in ways that would astonish Orwell.

Transparency and truth are at a premium now as then, and low and dishonest men still tell low and dishonest lies. To look away from all that, as Riefenstahl encouraged millions of her countrymen to do, is nothing less than denial, it seems to me. So is an “objective” refusal to judge, for Riefenstahl’s life is an object lesson in which we can see where that nightmare leads.