Leni Riefenstahl was a major force at St. Martin's Press, the small house that was quickly becoming a midsized one during my apprenticeship. She'd become our shot at entering the grown-up world of bestsellers about infamous personalities from history that give a house prestige and win awards. The attention over a hardcover edition drives sales, and a major hit is something a house can make a profit from for years, which meant everyone who could get involved did so most vocally.
I was first introduced to her in the art department. One of my friends was jealous that another art director he considered less talented was designing the cover, and in our back-stabbing world of "celebrity" designers, you're only as good as your last cover design. It wasn't lost on me at the time that we mirrored her world of uneasy alliances made in service to art and design, because she'd worked as a filmmaker during Hitler's regime.
After the hardcover edition went to paperback, my friend finally got to revise the design to meet his standards, and that's when we talked about Nazi Germany; at his computer, while he colorized her cover photo. He told me he could relate to her conversion to fascism (!!) through the carefully fabricated military outfits. "How seductive it must have been to a poor farm kid back then", he said to me as the son of Chinese immigrants who owned a laundry business. The leather boots, those sharp shoulders on the jacket that fit just so...
Huh. That's....eerie, dude. The first "Leni" art director would come out of the closet years later, after dumping his very masculine wife and their adopted Asian baby, before my friend finally came out as ADHD and OCD. On the heels of those twin disclosures, I could finally see what kind of monst...er, person, would be attracted to stage sets full of blond boys in matching military dress, and just like then, I still don't like what I heard as an excuse for genocide through collusion. What horror!
It brought me back to the importance of authenticity, and how very important it is that we tell the truth about our histories, hard as that may be. For my family, we finally got the happy ending we were seeking, not that we had sat around waiting for validation from anyone. My father's family had told us the truth about our Acadian Metis origins as the first generation of Europeans to intermarry with the Micmac people of Nova Scotia, because that's exactly what my dad's East Asian/Native American DNA reflects: the time period of first contact in Canada between 1780-1600s. BTW, my little native percentage showed up as a Yakutian from East Siberia before our ancestors crossed the Bering land bridge many moons ago.
And so it was no surprise to me that I remembered hearing the art directors talk about Leni Riefenstahl's fake autobiography, because it was said she had her birth certificate forged so she could profit from Hitler and the Nazi Regime as an artist. So, that isn't actually in the book? I had to know our culpability. The art director told me the editor wanted it in the epilogue, but he'd been shot down. Well...what is it? "She lied about not being Jewish, and he's Jewish, too." Oh. That's kind of big deal.
As I wrote this piece to you, I thought about my part in the process when I relieved myself of debt from a honest lifetime spent on basic food, clothing, and shelter, bought at the time with my bargain salary of $19,500/year. I know I've paid it back in full, and then some.
The real question is: have you?
