A woman who played a commanding role in one of history’s darkest chapters, Leni Riefenstahl Hitler’s favorite filmmaker went on to deftly rewrite her own history. But lies have a way of catching up with liars. In a pair of new biographies, Riefenstahl, perhaps the single most controversial filmmaker who ever lived, has been found out. Moreover, JŸrgen Trimborn’s newly translated Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, first published in 2002 in Germany, and Steven Bach’s Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl share a common theme: To know Riefenstahl is not necessarily to love her or even like her.

So why read about her? Because Riefenstahl who died at age 101 in 2003 remains one of the most fascinating and important figures of the 20th century. Uncompromising in her personal and professional lives, Riefenstahl used her forceful persona and the politics of the day to further a career that enshrined the FŸhrer and celebrated the strength of the Nazi party. In doing so, she forever expanded the scope of documentary filmmaking. No filmmaker has been more adept at evoking powerful persuasive images than the Third Reich’s Riefenstahl. Any stunningly produced TV or film project about sports is indebted to her aesthetics, including her superb editing skills. Feature filmmakers as diverse as Orson Welles and George Lucas have been influenced by her. As to which of the two books to read, it depends on your interest. Trimborn is an authority on films of the Third Reich, and his tome is the most assured in examining Riefenstahl’s climb and eventual lofty berth in pre-war and wartime Germany. Trimborn also had the benefit of having interviewed Riefenstahl; at one point he even thought his book would have her cooperation. (He ultimately realized this was not to be, as Riefenstahl’s version of the truth detracted from other versions.) Still, he gives Riefenstahl her artistic due, even tracing the latter years in which she became an acclaimed still photographer. But Trimborn’s translated text isn’t as smooth nor as easily enjoyed as that of Bach. As the biographer of Marlene Dietrich and Moss Hart, and former head of worldwide production for United Artists which led to his first book, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film that Sank United Artists Bach’s Leni also has a cinematic edge, complete with revelations about Riefenstahl’s secret dealings with Hollywood.

What is underscored by both books is that Riefenstahl was a fiercely independent woman driven by the need to succeed, whatever the cost. A superb lifelong athlete, she parlayed her physicality into an early career as an expressionist dancer. When an injury cut short the dance, she turned to acting though she would go on to deny a particular bare-breasted bit player role. (Bach offers photographic proof of her undraped participation in Ways to Strength and Beauty.) It was the mountain film, a popular German genre involving nature themes and alpine locales, that enshrined Riefenstahl’s athleticism and beauty, and led to her interest in working behind the camera.

Her life took a fateful turn after she heard Hitler speak at a National Socialist rally in Berlin in 1932. She daringly wrote him a letter to request a meeting. As she later admitted, I had been infected, no doubt about it. As her Jewish filmmaking colleagues fled the country their names erased from film credits she went on to chronicle Hitler’s rise. Then came her much-studied propaganda spectacle, Triumph of the Will, and Olympia, her groundbreaking salute to the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin.

At war’s end, Riefenstahl was more concerned about the ownership of her films than what had transpired under Hitler. She also downplayed her relationship with him and his regime, claiming ignorance of the horrors of the Holocaust. Trimborn and Bach provide documentation to the contrary (including her presence at the Polish front, where she witnessed a Jewish massacre). There is also a thorough examination of her use of Gypsies found at a forced labor camp as film extras. Many went on to die at Auschwitz. Riefenstahl shrewdly used the courts and litigation to protect her name and reputation. She claimed she was the one being persecuted. She also went on to be alternately celebrated and damned by film critics and film societies, even as they introduced her work to new generations. (In film schools, the study of Riefenstahl’s work is de rigueur.) Ever searching artistically, she was doing underwater photography while in her 90s (after having learned to scuba-dive at 71). If her moral conflicts were minimal, her artistry knew no limits.

Author Pat H. Broeske also works in television, as a field and segment producer for the Court TV program, Video Justice.

A woman who played a commanding role in one of history’s darkest chapters, Leni Riefenstahl Hitler’s favorite filmmaker went on to deftly rewrite her own history. But lies have a way of catching up with liars. In a pair of new biographies, Riefenstahl, perhaps the single most controversial filmmaker who ever lived, has been found out. Moreover, JŸrgen Trimborn’s newly translated Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, first published in 2002 in Germany, and Steven Bach’s Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl share a common theme: To know Riefenstahl is not necessarily to love her or even like her.

So why read about her? Because Riefenstahl who died at age 101 in 2003 remains one of the most fascinating and important figures of the 20th century. Uncompromising in her personal and professional lives, Riefenstahl used her forceful persona and the politics of the day to further a career that enshrined the FŸhrer and celebrated the strength of the Nazi party. In doing so, she forever expanded the scope of documentary filmmaking. No filmmaker has been more adept at evoking powerful persuasive images than the Third Reich’s Riefenstahl. Any stunningly produced TV or film project about sports is indebted to her aesthetics, including her superb editing skills. Feature filmmakers as diverse as Orson Welles and George Lucas have been influenced by her. As to which of the two books to read, it depends on your interest. Trimborn is an authority on films of the Third Reich, and his tome is the most assured in examining Riefenstahl’s climb and eventual lofty berth in pre-war and wartime Germany. Trimborn also had the benefit of having interviewed Riefenstahl; at one point he even thought his book would have her cooperation. (He ultimately realized this was not to be, as Riefenstahl’s version of the truth detracted from other versions.) Still, he gives Riefenstahl her artistic due, even tracing the latter years in which she became an acclaimed still photographer. But Trimborn’s translated text isn’t as smooth nor as easily enjoyed as that of Bach. As the biographer of Marlene Dietrich and Moss Hart, and former head of worldwide production for United Artists which led to his first book, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film that Sank United Artists Bach’s Leni also has a cinematic edge, complete with revelations about Riefenstahl’s secret dealings with Hollywood.

What is underscored by both books is that Riefenstahl was a fiercely independent woman driven by the need to succeed, whatever the cost. A superb lifelong athlete, she parlayed her physicality into an early career as an expressionist dancer. When an injury cut short the dance, she turned to acting though she would go on to deny a particular bare-breasted bit player role. (Bach offers photographic proof of her undraped participation in Ways to Strength and Beauty.) It was the mountain film, a popular German genre involving nature themes and alpine locales, that enshrined Riefenstahl’s athleticism and beauty, and led to her interest in working behind the camera.

Her life took a fateful turn after she heard Hitler speak at a National Socialist rally in Berlin in 1932. She daringly wrote him a letter to request a meeting. As she later admitted, I had been infected, no doubt about it. As her Jewish filmmaking colleagues fled the country their names erased from film credits she went on to chronicle Hitler’s rise. Then came her much-studied propaganda spectacle, Triumph of the Will, and Olympia, her groundbreaking salute to the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin.

At war’s end, Riefenstahl was more concerned about the ownership of her films than what had transpired under Hitler. She also downplayed her relationship with him and his regime, claiming ignorance of the horrors of the Holocaust. Trimborn and Bach provide documentation to the contrary (including her presence at the Polish front, where she witnessed a Jewish massacre). There is also a thorough examination of her use of Gypsies found at a forced labor camp as film extras. Many went on to die at Auschwitz. Riefenstahl shrewdly used the courts and litigation to protect her name and reputation. She claimed she was the one being persecuted. She also went on to be alternately celebrated and damned by film critics and film societies, even as they introduced her work to new generations. (In film schools, the study of Riefenstahl’s work is de rigueur.) Ever searching artistically, she was doing underwater photography while in her 90s (after having learned to scuba-dive at 71). If her moral conflicts were minimal, her artistry knew no limits.

Author Pat H. Broeske also works in television, as a field and segment producer for the Court TV program, Video Justice.

Biography fans will devour Louisa May Alcott, Susan Cheever’s briskly paced examination of the Little Women author, who died at age 55 in 1888. Even if Alcott’s background hadn’t included writing an enduring classic of American literature, her life would have made for a rollicking read. It’s an opportunity that Cheever does not squander.

In her short life, Alcott was neighbors with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (where she wrote Little Women), served as a nurse in the Civil War, worked as a teacher, seamstress and magazine editor, possibly inspired Henry James’ Daisy Miller and lived through America’s shift from an agricultural- to an industrial-based society.

Most of the drama in her life came from her large family—specifically from her father, Bronson, a principled, domineering education reformer who managed to wear out his welcome everywhere. The Alcotts were perpetually impecunious, and they relocated as if they were musicians on a never-ending tour. Alcott wrote for love and to get her family out of debt. Her generosity continued after the phenomenal success of Little Women: She wrote to provide security for her two fatherless nephews, and when her sister May passed away, she became the guardian of her infant niece.

Alcott’s closeness to her family was almost suffocating. Her relationship with Bronson was especially thorny. “But although she never spoke a word against her father, against his irresponsibility or his bullying or his prejudice against her, she took her revenge in a far more effective and literary way,” Cheever writes. “She left him out of her masterpiece.”

Cheever—who, as the daughter of John Cheever, is from a literary lineage herself—succeeds at eliciting emotion from the research and tying America’s changing cultural and political scene to Alcott’s own evolution as a writer and woman. Though she sometimes slows down the story’s momentum by venturing into first-person interludes and theorizing (was Alcott gay?), that doesn’t tarnish her vivid profile of a well-lived whirlwind of a life.

Cleopatra was queen of a large, rich, highly sophisticated country for more than 20 years, yet almost everything we know about her comes from a legend created by her most deadly enemy, the Roman emperor Augustus.

As author Stacy Schiff points out, it’s as if our only information about Napoleon came from 19th-century British historians: “She effectively ceases to exist without a Roman in the room.” Schiff, the much praised biographer of Vera Nabokov and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, adeptly evens the score in Cleopatra: A Life by exploring the queen’s Egyptian context and reading the Roman sources with a keen eye for Augustan propaganda.

Schiff’s Cleopatra is not the sexually voracious, treacherous poisoner who seduced Julius Caesar and destroyed Mark Antony. Rather, she is an intelligent, able ruler who did nothing that male kings didn’t do routinely. She tried to protect her own and her country’s interests in the face of Roman aggression. If Antony had been more clever than Augustus, her children with Caesar and Antony would have ruled the East.

Did she seduce Caesar and Antony? Both men were hardened lifelong womanizers. Was Antony too besotted with her to make sound decisions? It seems unlikely; he wrote a letter to Augustus at the height of his alliance with Cleopatra referring to her with ugly vulgarisms. His mistakes were his own.

Schiff persuades us that the queen’s liaisons with both men were mutually beneficial. She got expanded territory, protected by Roman legions, while her lovers got her money. And for Caesar, Antony and Augustus, it was all about Egypt’s wealth, not the color of Cleopatra’s eyes.

Certainly, even a Cleopatra seen with fairness was no George Washington, and Schiff doesn’t ignore her ruthlessness. Cleopatra lived up to her family tradition by having her siblings killed. She also executed her political opponents—and so did Antony and Augustus.

Schiff brings alive not only the personalities but the ambience of the gilded Hellenistic Middle East and still-crude Rome. Her writing beautifully evokes Cleopatra’s stupendous capital Alexandria, “a city of cool raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons.” Male Roman writers may have hated Cleopatra because she wasn’t the virtuous Roman matron of their own myths, but she was consistently popular with the cultured Alexandrians.

As Schiff concludes, Cleopatra did many things right, but got the main thing wrong: She backed the less talented Roman politician. In the end, Augustus used her captured treasure to make Rome more like Alexandria.
 

Laura Hillenbrand first encountered Louis Zamperini while researching her 2003 bestseller Seabiscuit—and how lucky for us that she did. You may not know his name, but Zamperini was famous in his day, an Olympic runner who was secretly held in Japan for two brutal years during World War II after a plane crash left him stranded at sea, presumed dead. How he survived—and how his family never lost hope for his return—is the epic story at the heart of Unbroken.

Zamperini grew up a mischievous trouble magnet in Southern California. Steered toward competitive running by his brother, he earned a spot on the 1936 U.S. Olympic track team and competed in Berlin. He didn’t medal, but he was on his way to becoming a world-class athlete. Many thought he would be the first man to run a four-minute mile.

Then Germany invaded Poland, and everything changed. Drafted into the Army Air Corps, Zamperini was stationed on Oahu as a bombardier. When his B-24 crashed into the Pacific during a rescue mission, he spent 47 days huddled in a raft, battling sharks and the equatorial sun, before being captured by Japanese forces.

Most Pacific POWs were held with little regard for the protections of the Geneva Convention. Zamperini’s hellish experiences came at the hands of Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a sadistic man who mercilessly and systematically beat, starved and degraded POWs. At his lowest, a battered Zamperini found himself forced to clean a pig pen with his bare hands: “If anything is going to shatter me, Louie thought, this is it. Sickened and starving, his will a fraying wire, Louie had only the faint hope of the war’s end, and rescue, to keep him going.”

Hillenbrand is undoubtedly a terrific reporter and storyteller, with an eye for details that make each page sing. But her truest gift may be her innate respect for her subjects. Hillenbrand never deifies Zamperini, who returned from war a broken man prone to flashbacks and barroom brawls before a chance encounter with evangelist Billy Graham turned his life around. Unbroken is a spellbinding celebration of resilience, forgiveness and the human capacity for finding beauty in the unlikeliest places.

Many words have already been expended in striving to ascertain the truth about Mickey Mantle. The Mick was certainly a sports hero—the statistics and on-the-field achievements bear that out. His image was helped immeasurably by playing baseball in New York when television was becoming a huge force, and those factors also helped to ascribe to him the elements of tragedy and courage, soldiering on as he did through numerous injuries during an 18-year career. As for the evidence that Mantle was a profane, bumpkinish and usually drunken galoot, Jane Leavy’s new bio The Last Boy tends to back that up as well, though the ultimate effect of her generally serious effort is also to evoke pity for one of America’s most iconic public figures.

Smartly, Leavy uses Mantle’s games primarily as a framework for her investigations, but she finds newly fertile ground in researching his legendary home run, struck in 1953 in Washington, D.C., as well as the critical knee injury he suffered in the 1951 World Series, which is said to have changed the course of history, making a mere mortal out of a would-be god. This latter episode leaves the impression that if only Mantle had had access to more advanced surgery, he might have reclaimed most of his unearthly powers.

Leavy’s contradictory portrait of the personal Mantle compels: At once generous and caring to many, his behavior toward his long-suffering wife and sons was damaging and distant, much of his time off the field spent instead with buddies and booze and indulging other appetites. (Howard Cosell is quoted as calling Mantle a “whoremonger.”) Leavy also details Mick’s later years effectively, when he lent his name and image to casinos and corporate concerns, becoming a king of the sports memorabilia circuit. Those pursuits continued to earn him a good living, but Mantle’s personal life was an essential cipher, and he kept drinking until it was too late.

The big revelations here are about Mantle as the victim of childhood sexual abuse, plus Leavy’s tabloid account of her attempted 1983 interview with him, when Mick groped her and acted like a drunken fool. Though many will see Leavy as further besmirching Mantle’s image, she also evokes a sense of sadness about a life that might have been more but simply wasn’t.

Photographs tell the story in Paul Newman: A Life in Pictures, a celebratory look at the Hollywood iconoclast, race car driver, family man, philanthropist and salad dressing king. Co-authors Pierre-Henri Verlhac and Yann-Brice Dherbier created this hefty coffee table book with the approval of Newman, now 81. From his days at the Actors Studio, circa 1955, to the present, the book reflects a journey that, happily, continues to this day. Los Angeles-based writer Pat H. Broeske is the co-author of biographies of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.

One of Hollywood’s most likable stars, James Stewart was far more complex than his aw, shucks demeanor suggested. Marc Eliot has culled previously published information, Stewart’s personal notes and diaries, and a smattering of new interviews notably with Stewart’s daughter, as well as co-star Kim Novak for the insightful Jimmy Stewart: A Biography. Stewart’s personal life included romances with dazzling leading ladies (including Ginger Rogers and Marlene Dietrich), as well as heroic World War II military service and a patriotic devotion that didn’t waver with the death of his eldest son in Vietnam. His career spanned seven decades, and included a successful string of films with Alfred Hitchcock, as well as beloved classics like the Frank Capra-directed holiday chestnut, It’s a Wonderful Life. As Eliot’s book reveals, it truly was.

Los Angeles-based writer Pat H. Broeske is the co-author of biographies of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.

As for that other Hepburn, according to Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, she worked largely on behalf of herself, especially in regard to honing a meticulously crafted image. Author William J. Mann, a chronicler of gay Hollywood, reveals that Hepburn connived to create her public persona, perpetuating her near-mythic relationship with Spencer Tracy the better to offset her many close (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) friendships with women. A decidedly different take on the great Kate, Mann’s book never lets us forget that, as a child, Hepburn had an alter ego named Jimmy. Or that the various men with whom she was involved tended to be troubled and needy, which meant she was more a caretaker than a lover. Some claims are more curious than convincing. (Spencer Tracy a homosexual? Macho man John Ford? C’mon!) Some come as no surprise. After all, Katharine Hepburn was one of Hollywood’s most unconventional stars. Los Angeles-based writer Pat H. Broeske is the co-author of biographies of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.