"I Like Champagne"

Up to last week U. S. preparations for the XIth Olympic Games in Berlin this month had included international discourtesy, financial trouble, interminable bureaucratic bickering (TIME, Nov. 4, 1935 et seq.). Last week they were enlarged to include a lurid and unnecessary scandal which made front pages on two continents.

Protagonists of the scandal were Eleanor Holm Jarrett, 22, ablest and best-looking swimmer on the U. S. team; Playwright Charles MacArthur fresh from a Chicago courtroom where his first wife, Cinemacritic Carol Frink, finally withdrew an alienation of affections suit against his second wife Actress Helen Hayes (TIME, July 13); and Avery Brundage, chairman of the U. S. Olympic Committee.

Trouble started last fortnight when Chairman Brundage announced that some of the 334 Olympic athletes had been roistering in the bar of the S. S. Manhattan on which they were en route to Germany. He threatened to dismiss second offenders from the team, remarked darkly: "This trip is no joyride!"

The scandal broke when Chairman Brundage announced last week as the ship docked at Hamburg that Mrs. Jarrett, Olympic backstroke champion, had been dismissed from the team for drinking. Nosy sportswriters announced that her drinking companion at an "all-night party" had been Playwright MacArthur, without his wife. This MacArthur irritably denied from London, saying, "I was at a bar at the other end of the ship."

The scandal reverberated for three days while debates on every conceivable question in connection with it, and interviews with all the persons who were and many who were not concerned in it, dwarfed all other sports news in the U. S. and Germany.

First stage in the reverberations were interviews with Swimmer Jarrett, her husband, Crooner Art Jarrett, whom she married in 1933, and her mother, Mrs. Charlotte Holm of Brooklyn. Said Swimmer Jarrett, who was offered a Ziegfeld Follies job at 16, worked for nine months as a Warner Brothers cinemactress, quit when a scheduled swimming role endangered her amateur status and hence her chance to defend her Olympic title. "I've been nightclubbing . . . for the last three years. . . . The night before the final tryouts I was up all night partying with my husband. . . . I've never made any secret of the fact that I like a good time and that I am particularly fond of champagne. . . . I'm on the spot now but I'll train and not touch another drop if I'm given another chance. . . ."

Said Crooner Jarrett in New York: "It may have been necessary for the morale of the team. . . . Eleanor isn't a 10-year-old. . . . Those fellows have a job on their hands taking care of that Olympic crowd. ... I don't know whether they were right or wrong. . . ."

Said Mrs. Holm : "You can say what you like about the damned thing. . . ."

Second stage was comments by Chairman Brundage, who two years ago tried to have Swimmer Jarrett declared a professional; Track Coach Dean Cromwell of Southern California; Nazi newspapers. Said Chairman Brundage. onetime University of Illinois hammer thrower who has stayed in the spotlight as president of the Amateur Athletic Union: "We had no alternative in the circumstances. None regrets the necessity for such drastic action more than I and my associates, who considered all possible grounds for leniency and found none. . . ."

Said Coach Cromwell: "She asked for it. ... We cannot get the reputation of being boozers. . . ."

Nazi newspapers, which had given Swimmer Jarrett more publicity than any other member of the U. S. team, headlined the affair, congratulated Chairman Brundage and his committee on their stand.

Asked Columnist Westbrook Pegler: "What sort of Sunday school outing is this . . . that a lot of male Aunt Hatties are permitted to put their heads together . . . and dirty up the name of a decent young married woman with a public order of dismissal for drinking? . . ."

On the train from Hamburg to Berlin Swimmer Jarrett apologized to the Olympic Committee, begged for another chance. Said Chairman Brundage: "It would wreck the American Olympic team." Even a petition drafted by Mrs. Jarrett's teammates asking for her reinstatement failed to budge the Committee. Deprived of her uniform and definitely out of the Games, unhappy Mrs. Jarrett blasted away at the Committee as follows:

"I wasn't the only athlete to break training rules or stay up after the curfew sounded. There were at least a hundred offenders. . . . [Why] condemn me because I was unwilling to make a secret of the fact that I like champagne. . . . Officers accompanying the team who were presumed to be setting a good example . . . failed to do so. Cocktail parties were a nightly occurrence. . . .

". . . Officer members of the Olympic party disgraced themselves during a performance given for the benefit of the athletes. I refer to the mock marriage and mock trial ... so shocking that many athletes walked out of the social hall. . . . The trial was presided over by Gustavus T. Kirby who so handled the dialog having to do with marital situations that it was open to questionable interpretations and altogether unsuitable for youthful ears. . . ."

Retorted Treasurer Kirby of the U. S. Olympic Committee: "Only an evil mind could see anything improper in the performance. . . . We were all merry and the whole thing was done in a spirit of fun. . . ."

Greatly agitated by such general talk of misconduct, Chairman Brundage loudly deplored "this unpleasant affair," took a final fling at Mrs. Jarrett: "At the second [committee] meeting more than an hour was devoted to ascertaining the facts as to reports that Mrs. Jarrett, occupying a room with two young swimmers, could not be aroused by the team's physician and the ship's doctor."

Meanwhile in Warsaw, Polish Shotputter Zygmunt Heljasz backtalked to a doctor who was examining him. He was dismissed from his team for "misconduct."

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