Esther Williams

Esther Williams: The Woman Who Invented Swimming Cinema

She broke her neck falling from a 115-foot tower into a studio tank and spent seven months in a body cast. She ruptured her eardrums from sheer time spent underwater. She once nearly drowned because a set designer had painted a tank's walls and ceiling black and she could not find the trapdoor. Esther Williams was, on the evidence, the most physically endangered star on the MGM lot in the 1940s — and she was appearing in comedies about girls in bathing suits. The genre she carried, the "aquamusical," did not exist before her and did not survive her.

Inglewood

Esther Jane Williams was born on 8 August 1921 in Inglewood, California, in the living room of a modest house, the fifth and youngest child of Louis Stanton Williams and Bula Myrtle Gilpin. The family had moved to Los Angeles after an actress spotted her older brother Stanton; Stanton died at sixteen in 1929 when his colon burst. She graduated from Washington High School in Los Angeles in 1939, where she was elected class vice president and then president, and went on to Los Angeles City College.

The Fastest Girl in the Pool

Swimming with the Los Angeles Athletic Club, Williams set regional and national records in her late teens. By sixteen she had won three United States national championships across breaststroke and freestyle. In 1939 her medley team set the 300-yard relay record at the Athletic Club, and she swam the 100-metre freestyle in 1 minute 9.0 seconds.

She was aiming at the 1940 Summer Olympics. The war cancelled them. That single accident of history redirected her entire life: with no Games to swim, she joined Billy Rose's Aquacade in San Francisco, replacing Eleanor Holm and performing for roughly five months alongside the Olympic champion and screen Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller.

MGM

Scouts found her there, and she signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1941. Her contract was unusual in ways that tell you the studio knew it had something it did not understand: she was given nine months of training before she appeared on camera at all, and guest privileges at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool so she could keep swimming. She left her hand and footprints at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on 1 August 1944.

Her debut came in *Andy Hardy's Double Life* in 1942, but the film that established the formula was *Bathing Beauty* in 1944. What followed was one of the most commercially reliable runs of the studio era. *Thrill of a Romance* (1945) was the eighth highest-grossing film of the year. *Neptune's Daughter* (1949) was the tenth; *Take Me Out to the Ball Game*, released the same year, was eleventh. Between 1945 and 1949 Williams appeared in at least one of the twenty highest-grossing films every single year. American exhibitors ranked her the 24th most popular star in 1947, 11th in 1948, 8th in 1949 and 1950 — second in the United Kingdom that year — and fifth among female stars in 1951. She won the Golden Globes' Henrietta Award as World Film Favorite in 1952.

The films came steadily: *Easy to Wed* (1946), *Fiesta* and *This Time for Keeps* (1947), *On an Island with You* (1948), *Duchess of Idaho* and *Pagan Love Song* (1950), *Texas Carnival* (1951), *Skirts Ahoy!* and *Million Dollar Mermaid* (1952), *Dangerous When Wet* and *Easy to Love* (1953), *Jupiter's Darling* (1955), *The Unguarded Moment* (1956).

What It Cost

The public saw effortlessness. The reality was industrial-scale physical risk. It was on *Million Dollar Mermaid* in 1952 — the film that gave her her own nickname — that a 115-foot tower dive broke her neck, putting her in a body cast for seven months and leaving her with headaches for the rest of her life. The submersion work ruptured her eardrums. The near-drowning in the black-walled tank was a design failure nobody had thought through, because nobody had made films like this before.

She walked away in 1956 rather than take the lead in *The Opposite Sex*, forfeiting close to $3 million in deferred contract payments. It was an extraordinarily expensive act of refusal, and she made it in her mid-thirties.

The Businesswoman

What she did next is the part of the story most often left out. Williams invested in a service station, a metal products plant, a swimsuit manufacturer, property and a restaurant chain called Trails. She licensed her name to swimming pool manufacturing and to retro swimwear lines, both of which outlived her film career by decades. She produced instructional swimming videos for children and served as a commentator for synchronized swimming at the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Her private life was harder. Of her first marriage, to Leonard Kovner, she later wrote that she had found "much to my relief, that all I needed for my emotional and personal security was my own resolve and determination." Of her thirteen years with Fernando Lamas she said she had lived "in total submission to him," unable to have her children live with her. Her 1999 memoir *The Million Dollar Mermaid*, written with the critic Digby Diehl, disclosed an affair with Victor Mature and claimed that Jeff Chandler was a cross-dresser — assertions colleagues disputed and which coloured her late reputation.

Why Esther Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on craft and physical mastery, not intellect, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Williams was a genuine elite athlete — three national championships by sixteen, a national relay record, a 1:09.0 hundred-metre freestyle — and what she added to that was the ability to perform strenuous, precisely choreographed movement underwater while appearing to breathe, smile and act. Almost nobody can do this. Swimming for speed and swimming for the camera are opposite disciplines: one optimises for efficiency, the other for the illusion of ease under conditions of oxygen debt, chlorine, ruptured eardrums and a lens that punishes any visible effort. Williams solved that problem from scratch, because no one had solved it before her, and in doing so she created a film genre that had no precedent and no successor. That is a real form of originality, even if it is closer to what we credit in a choreographer than in a scientist.

The counter-case is straightforward. Her films were not artistically ambitious; she was a reliable box-office property in vehicles built around a single gimmick, and when audiences tired of the gimmick the career ended. She did not direct, write or design. The word "genius" would embarrass her contemporaries if applied to her acting. What is defensible is narrower and still substantial: a rare athletic intelligence, an unusual tolerance for physical danger, and the business sense — the pools, the swimwear, the walk-out from a $3 million contract — to turn a fifteen-year novelty into a name that still sells product.

Legacy

Williams was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1966 and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1560 Vine Street. She died on 6 June 2013 in Beverly Hills, aged 91. Her handprints have been set in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre since 1944, her name still appears on swimming pools and swimsuits, and the aquamusical remains a genre with exactly one star. Hollywood built her entirely underwater, and never managed to build another.