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 \o7fuhrer\f7 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.
