Adam says there is not going to be any use denying that the two pair of women's feet on Edge's face—one black, one white—are Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington. As the sun comes up outside the

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hotel Larry raises a glass to Edge, star of the shoot. "To Reg!" Larry toasts, using the nickname insiders have given his famous nickname.

"To Reg!" the room replies.

Someone asks where Bono's gone.

"He's upstairs," Godley says, "furiously practicing his lead guitar."

The Olympic Stadium

Deciphering the fuhrer's charisma/ calling down the ugly ghosts/ bono does the goose step/ the architecture of sociopathology/ racing for the last plane home/ an ariel surprise party

entering the Olympic Stadium Hitler built to strut the master race's stuff effectively shuts the mouths of everyone in the U2 organization. It looks like the world has opened a gaping maw to reveal endless rows of concrete molars. I hail Bono on the grand stone steps as "Kaiser Hewson," but he just stares at the stadium, which spins down into the earth away from the light. The design is like an enor­mously inflated Athenian theater, but the sense of imposing dread is closer to what the Roman Colosseum could have been if Nero had had cement mixers. A ballpark such as this was built to function through a thousand-year reich and then serve as a tourist attraction for a couple of millenia more.

The stadium has more vibes than a xylophone factory. As we survey the grounds, everyone has the same observation: "Hitler was nuts!" You might suggest that this is not a fresh insight, but it sometimes takes a little firsthand scrutiny to fully appreciate the depth of even a world-famous maniac's eccentricities. Wandering between the giant statues of naked deutschmen holding back mighty stallions, looking across the vast expanse of manicured fields overhung by looming stone stadia, startled by the cement swastikas only slightly obscured by cosmetic glops of plaster, U2 realizes why Hitler, in the middle of a war with England, was cocky enough to turn around and invade Russia with his free hand while declaring war on the USA with his only gonad: sheer lunatic audacity. No offense to Neville Chamberlain, but one look at der Fuhrer's taste in architecture should have been the tip-off that this

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Dictator was a few schnitzel short of a smorgasbord. In his mind Hitler was not competing with Churchill, Roosevelt, or Stalin; in his mind he was competing with Caesar and the pharaohs.

After we've drunk it in, Bono asks what I think. "The scale's pretty inflated," I say. "It makes you think that Hitler had real problems of overcompensation. Maybe he wouldn't have needed to conquer Europe if he'd just been a little taller and had both balls."

Bono pulls himself up to his full five-foot-eight, glances nervously at his zipper and says, "Um, Bill ... there's something else about myself I've been meaning to tell you. . . ."

A gaggle of guilty-looking crew members shuffle by giggling. They proudly announce that they have filled the Olympic torch with explo­sives for the finale of "Desire."

Ian Brown, the "Numb" video producer, walks by drinking it in. "It's a lovely stadium, isn't it?" he says.

"Yeah," I say, "kind of makes you want to reconsider that whole anti-Nazi attitude."

Ah, I'm just being snotty. I think of this place as scary because of what we now know about the Nazis, but think how it must have felt to Germans, humiliated after World War I, frightened by the fall of the kaiser, and broken by the Depression. What to us is an almost lunatic massiveness must have seemed to them majestic. It's easy to understand wanting to be part of it.

"Oh yeah, yeah," Bono says. "I feel it. As I said at that peace conference, 'You must not underestimate the sex appeal in a Hitler.' That's what so much of this is all about."

U2 has been warned of stern penalties for breaking curfew in Berlin, but they have secretly decided to do it anyway. They want this show, above all others, to have the full force of all their technology right from the first song, and that means waiting till after dark to begin. As we are in Berlin and as this is the summer solstice, that means delaying U2's kickoff until 10 o'clock. The band announces, falsely, that the delays are due to technical difficulties. Then a great debate ensues in the dressing room about whether they want to make their usual entrance in front of the Zoo TV screens, or whether they want a spotlight to hit them descending the huge stone steps into the stadium. They go back and forth, radioing each yes, no, yes, no, to the increasingly nervous lighting desk. They finally decide, just before going out, not to have the spot-

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