Esther Williams

Across town at 20th Century Fox Darryl F. Zanuck had a smashing success by hiring Norwegian Olympic ice skater Sonja Henie to his roster of stars and featuring her in 10 films where she twirled and romanced some of the studio's brightest stars.  MGM's Mister Big Deal, Louis B. Mayer, wanted his own cash cow so he had his talent scouts comb the Los Angeles area and one of them came up with a shapely swimmer by the name of Esther Williams.  Sonya and Darryl only wished for this kind of success. 

As a kid, I was rather giddy over the wet one and I saw every movie she ever made.  The year of my betrothal with the movie world, 1952, is the year she made her best movie (by far), Million Dollar Mermaid.  She liked the title so much she used it for her 1999 autobiography.  Critics have carved her up one side and down the other for her less-than-stellar acting but I beg to differ.  Don't get your knickers twisted... I'm not saying that her comrades at Metro... Kate, Liz, Judy... needed to feel threatened.  But for an athlete and someone who hadn't harbored notions of becoming a movie star, I thought she did a credible job.

And a movie star she indeed became.  Don't faint but for several years she was the top-grossing star at the studio.  Take that Kate, Liz and Judy.  The public flocked to her films, strictly entertainment pieces referred to as aqua musicals.  They all contained at least one major production number and while on land she fussed and feuded with one if not two suitors.

The most amazing thing about her aqua musicals was how long she could stay underwater.  I was gasping for breath in my seat.  And she did it with a perpetual smile and her eyes open.  Some incredibly greasy product kept her hair in an up-do while she swam through whole underwater cities, Roman columns and even with those beloved cartoon adversaries Tom and Jerry.  As I kid I sat in those dark theaters wide-eyed at the things she was given to do and when I occasionally catch one of her movies on the tube, I feel the same.

Her Midwestern parents moved to Los Angeles so their eldest child, Stanton, having been discovered by actress Marjorie Rambeau, could have a career in movies.  Another son and two daughters were born before Esther came along in 1921 in Inglewood, California.  When he was 16, Stanton died suddenly of a ruptured colon, an event that sent the family into a tailspin from which the parents never recovered.

Partly as a way to get out of a sad household, she took up swimming at age eight.  Learning it at a newly-built neighborhood swimming pool, she won a medal there and carved out a new life for herself.

She learned a great deal about swimming in the huge pool at the L.A. Athletic Club.  Soon she was swimming all over Southern California and winning medal after medal in both relay races and individual competitions.  She always used time in the water (including the ocean) to get away, to think clearly, to spend time alone.  It was the only place she was truly happy.

More great unhappiness came to her at age 13 when a 16-year old family friend, who had just lost his mother and was staying with the Williams family, raped her.  It happened a number of times before she got the strength to tell him off and tell her mother who kicked him out of the house.

By the time she turned 16 she was beautiful and statuesque at her full height of nearly 5'9".  Swimming had made her physically strong and with that came a strong personality.  She became  ambitious and determined to make something of her life and shed every vestige of poverty she had ever known.  While she hoped swimming was her key, she felt the more sensible approach was to become a physical education instructor and she was planning on studying for that.

She worked at I. Magnin's and did some modeling for them.  A photograph of her made its way to showbiz impresario Billy Rose who hired her for a starring spot in his already successful Aquacade show.  She was often partnered in the show with swimmer/actor Johnny Weissmuller.  She was also practicing a great deal in her off hours for the 1940 Summer Olympics and was devastated when they were cancelled due to the outbreak of WWII.  In 1940 she married a college chum she didn't love.  The union lasted four years.

You haven't forgotten those talent scouts who were out looking for a rival to Sonja Henie, have you?  Well, one of them came across our talented athlete at one of the Aquacade shows and got her photo to Mayer.  The studio signed her to a contract quicker than it took her to come up for air.  So they had a swimming star but how to showcase her kept them all guessing..  All they knew was they already had an enormous pool on the lot... built for Weissmuller years earlier.  Williams would spend the next 15 years in that pool.

In her movie debut with Mickey Rooney

She could swim but could she act?  She was as unsure as everyone else was but not to worry.  They took good care of newbies at MGM.  They worked at everything... acting, singing, dancing, fencing, horseback riding and everything else the studio threw at them.  One other thing that they did for many young actresses was to put them in an Andy Hardy movie.  The enormously popular Mickey Rooney series was an aw-gosh, wholesome look at apple pie America where these young women got exposure to their craft and the public.  Andy Hardy's Double Life (1942) was Williams' claim to movie fame.

The next year she acquired even more visibility in a small role in the acclaimed war drama A Guy Named Joe.  It would be the first of six times she would work with her most frequent costar, Van Johnson.

In 1944 she made Bathing Beauty, the first of those swimming flicks she was hired for.  It certainly didn't hold a candle production-wise to her later extravaganzas but it was a start.  In 1945 she appeared in a segment of Ziegfeld Follies that showcased one of her best-ever water ballets. 

As a favor to you, we won't detail most of her films.  Her few dramatic outings weren't that great and most of the swimming pictures were all the same... change the leading man (unless it was Johnson), feature the two of them in a corny romance and throw in production numbers that tended to get bigger and bigger.  Frankly, the main reason to see her movies was to catch how bigger and better they got.  Crafty old Mayer knew that too.

Most of her male costars couldn't swim but there they were, wet and smiling, in such movies as Thrill of a Romance, Fiesta, On an Island with You, Neptune's Daughter, Duchess of Idaho, Pagan Love Song and Jupiter's Darling.  With titles such as these the public should have saved their money and stayed away but they most definitely did not.  She was treated like a queen and she didn't mind that at all.

She had a new leading man in real life in Ben Gage, a sometime-singer and wannabe actor whom she married in 1945.  I was never clear on why she did that although it's not much of a stretch to guess why he married her.  She said he gambled away 10 million of her dollars and was an alcoholic.  In seven years they had three children and then permanently separated although not divorced until 1959.  In her bio she is most thorough in describing her contempt for him. 

With Johnson and Ball in Easy to Wed

One of my two favorites of her movies is Easy to Wed (1946).  A remake of MGM's successful Libeled Lady (1934) which starred William Powell, Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy, the remake would be played, respectively, by Johnson, Williams, Lucille Ball and Keenan Wynn.  Both versions are zany comedies about a wildly elaborate scheme concocted by a newspaper reporter, his fiancée and a former employee to keep an heiress from suing the paper.  I'd go insane trying to detail how the plot unfolds but seeing the original is well worth your time and Williams' sequel ain't too shabby although Ball is what's best. 

Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949) is a delightful musical-comedy-romancy sort of thing that MGM did so well.  Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly are the stars.  Williams was billed over Kelly and that may have a lot to do with how shabbily he treated her.  You know... she the lightweight swimming star and he the dancer/singer/choreographer/director/actor.  She disliked him.

Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) was not only my favorite Williams film but it was hers as well.  For one thing it was her first and only time playing a real-life person, Australian swimming champ Annette Kellerman.  As a result it is better written than most of her movies.

Victor Mature perfectly fit his role as Kellerman's agent and lover and he performed the latter quite well off the set as well.  Her marriage was ending and she needed to be reassured of a number of things and Mature was always willing to be reassuring with his costars.  She spoke of their affair in her bio with obvious stars still in her eyes.

I think Million Dollar Mermaid contains her best swimming sequence which features some of the synchronized swimming for which Williams had become especially noted.  Unfortunately, in the sequence's final moments, she comes off a 115-foot tower and breaks her neck when she hits the water.  Take a moment to enjoy this full sequence (far better on the big screen, of course)...  

The movie that featured Tom and Jerry is Dangerous When Wet (1953) and it was such an imaginative moment.  Williams' costar this time, Fernando Lamas, could even swim since he was a former swimming champ in Argentina.  The two had a brief but intense relationship during the filming not knowing that 17 years later, most all of them apart, they would become husband and wife.

She refused a role in 1956 and MGM suspended her.  She walked out of her contract but was able to make financial arrangements with the studio (they owed her money) in order to settle.  Like many stars whose contracts at other studios ended, Williams wound up at Universal.

She made two dramatic films with three of the studio's resident hunks.  For The Unguarded Moment (1956) there was George Nader and John Saxon.  All about a school teacher who was being stalked by a student, it wasn't as bad as has been written but the public didn't take notice of Williams out of water. 

The third hunk, Jeff Chandler, was her romantic leading man in Raw Wind in Eden (1958).  Filmed in Italy she played a plane crash survivor on a small island who insinuates herself into a local couple's relationship.  It wasn't anything great but she and Chandler oozed with sexual chemistry.  Apparently they thought so, too, because they began a two-year relationship that he hoped would end in marriage... that is, after their divorces were finalized.

Forty-one years later Williams would write about the end of their relationship in an indecent way... at least I thought so and so did many of her friends, his friends and a large segment of the public.  She claimed she was preparing dinner in the kitchen when he called her up to his bedroom and found him in women's clothes.  She had no idea he was a cross-dresser and she was so appalled that she left him.

While her take of the evening is highly-detailed, it didn't ring true to me and I doubted then and do now that Chandler was a cross-dresser.  More than anything, I wondered why she'd write about it.  Why sully his reputation which was her obvious aim?  But I recalled that I saw Williams in later years on a number of talk shows, often with other former MGM actresses, and found her to be gossipy and occasionally mean-spirited and the various hosts could never shut her up.  She would bring up some old MGM story that occasionally embarrassed her former coworkers while she seemed so delighted.  Maybe this was the approach to the Chandler story.  She certainly knew it would sell more books. 

Out on the town with Jeff Chandler

The marriage to Gage ended acrimoniously in 1959.  There were bankrupt business ventures to settle and enormous money problems including unpaid taxes, all of which she blamed on him, accepting little responsibility for allowing him to run amok.

Also in 1959 she called Cary Grant, whom she knew only casually, to ask him about his experience with LSD.  He had a good experience under a doctor's care but warned her it's not the same for everyone.  There was some concern that she was not in an especially good place in her life but she elected to go ahead with it.  She later called it instant psychoanalysis and claimed she understood so much more about her life and her role in it. 

She began working in all sorts of areas.  She appeared in some episodic TV and did some television spectaculars, one of which at Florida's Cypress Gardens, where two of her movies were made, attracted the attention of nearly half of all TV owners in the States.  She lent her name to a swimming pool company and became involved in swimming suit manufacturing.

She ran into Lamas again in the early 60's during that Cypress Gardens special.  They dated through much of the decade and married in 1969.  From all I've read, including her autobiography, of course, he was a first-class jerk but she says she loved being a Latin housewife.  He was extremely controlling.  He didn't want her to work any longer... her job would be to see to his needs.  He refused to allow her three children to live with them (they were all out of high school) and wanted her to limit seeing them period.  In exchange he promised to be faithful to her.  What a catch!  One rarely heard about her or from her for the 13 years of their marriage.  The spunky woman now lived a life of total submission.  

Mr; and Mrs. Lamas

In 1972 she was offered a role in producer Irwin Allen's disaster epic, The Poseidon Adventure but she turned it down and two years later he wanted her for The Towering Inferno but she turned that down as well.  Shelley Winters inherited the role in the former and Jennifer Jones in the latter.

After Lamas died in 1982, she began to get out more and occasionally made the news which usually dealt with her businesses, the Olympics or someone she was dating.  In 1984 she attended The Big O to see the inclusion of synchronized swimming for which she received a lion's share of the credit.  While there she met Ed Bell who was coordinating some events.  They began dating and he became her partner in several business ventures.  They married in 1994.

In 1999 came that autobiography.  I liked it because it was juicy... my favorite kind of showbiz bio, I confess.  Some said it was one page after another of TMI.  Sometimes I admit to wondering what was she thinking.  

She was still Mrs. Bell when she died at home in 2013 at age 91 of natural causes.

To the movie world Esther Williams was one of a kind, an absolute original.  No one else ever made her kind of movies.  She was a good athlete and the swimming world owes her a debt of gratitude.




Next posting:
An unexpected biography