I owe Esther Williams an apology but unfortunately I’m seven years too late to deliver it (she died in her sleep at the venerable age of 91 in 2013). On the few occasions I caught her show-biz aquatic act from clips of her at-the-time blockbuster movies — Neptune’s Daughter, On An Island With You, the one everyone remembers her for, Million Dollar Mermaid and much later, as herself, in That’s Entertainment! III — I lumped her in with the unadulterated set of Hollywood leading ladies like Doris Day and Donna Reed whose onscreen personas were so pure, they could have been surrogate moms for an entire generation.
Miss Williams’ frank and disarming memoir gives us movie buffs (those “wonderful people out there in the dark” in Norma Desmond’s immortal phrase) a glimpse of what it was really like bringing those gargantuan musicals with literal casts of thousands to the neighborhood theatre.
She deftly fast-forwards through her hard scrabble childhood in depression-era California and Utah, when the family’s hopes for deliverance were pinned on her older brother Stanton, a budding child actor (“discovered” in a true Schwab’s-Drugstore-style moment of being in the right place at the right time) who died suddenly and unexpectedly at 16, dashing their dreams of a better life. It was after this watershed event that his 7-year-old sister Esther stepped up to become the family’s strength and meal ticket, eventually becoming a champion teen swimmer with 3 US National wins and a berth on the 1940 Olympics US swimming team (cancelled due to the opening salvos of World War II) while on a trajectory to becoming one of Hollywood’s leading female box-office stars of the 40’s and 50’s.
Williams writes unflinchingly about the dark side of her offscreen life and later reign as “America’s Mermaid”:
- For two years beginning at age 13, Esther was raped on a regular basis by an orphaned neighborhood boy “adopted” into the Williams home by her grief-stricken but misguided parents Lou and Bula to fill the void left by Stanton’s death. (When Esther finally got up the nerve to tell her parents, their initial response was a classic of the enabler’s mental state of denial: he was a “sweet, sensitive” boy who would never do such a thing);
- With the encouragement of fellow actor Cary Grant, Williams became one of the earliest patients to use LSD as a form of psychotherapy. Suffering from severe depression and the psychic dislocations of celebrity, she took many “trips” under a doctor’s supervision and credits the drug with saving her sanity. “Suddenly…a revelation hit me, and I knew what my life was all about. Everything that had happened to me after Stanton’s death came to me with a new maturity that had not been mine prior to his loss.”
- Her marriage to second husband Ben Gage, a failed nightclub singer and father of her three children, who in trying to manage her finances ended up over time squandering $10 million and pushing them to the edge of bankruptcy. (Esther only learned of her dire economic straits on a shopping trip to buy clothes for her children’s upcoming school year and being declined in a humiliating public scene by the store’s credit department over outstanding bills that hadn’t been paid in two years). Ben had been too busy playing golf, staying drunk and enjoying the perks and free travel that come with being the spouse of a Hollywood legend;
- Struggling to “be there” for her problem son Kimball Austin Gage during the height of her Hollywood fame, as he descended into a self-destructive life of drugs and a near-fatal motorcycle crash. (He died in 2008 from a brain tumor.)
Yet being Hollywood’s chosen queen of water musicals had its lighter moments (if you will):
- the spectacle of autocratic MGM studio chief Louis Mayer rolling on the floor of his palatial office and shrieking at Esther like a spoiled kid whenever she stood up to his unrealistic demands;
- when Aquacade teammate and future Hollywood he-man Johnny Weissmuller would whip off his trunks to tempt her (unsuccessfully) with his “remarkable genitalia” as they swam underwater beneath the stage of the traveling extravaganza. As Williams laconically remarks, “Weissmuller didn’t just play Tarzan. He thought he was Tarzan.”
- her Neptune’s Daughter co-star Red Skelton balking at a director’s order to shave his chest hair for a scene, an impasse relieved only after a distraught phone call to his wife “Momma” and countermand that the shaved hair be saved in a baggy for his personal collection;
- leading man Victor Mature (with whom she had a dalliance while they filmed Million Dollar Mermaid) roaming backstage for a bottle of ketchup, then slathering some on a piece of cardboard which he proceeded to wolf down;
- fellow MGM contract player Marlene Dietrich‘s delight in upsetting the makeup department’s gay hairdresser by showing up for her sessions in the nude (her preferred state of (un)dress whether the occasion was public or private, according to Williams);
- the surreal scene as Williams left the studio late one night, only to be drawn back by a commotion on one of the soundstages, which turned out to be aging diva Joan Crawford, decked out in a comical bird outfit for a hoped-for comeback in Torch Song, pleading in the dark to rows of empty theatre seats why audiences had stopped paying to see her films. “Why have you left me?”, Mildred Pierce wept to the cavernous void. “Why don’t you come to my movies? What did I do? What did I say? Don’t turn your back on me!” It was after this chilling interlude that Williams began planning for life after Hollywood before her own star had faded;
- fending off a drunken Gary Merrill‘s indecent proposals during a soiree at the home of Merrill and wife Bette Davis during their stormy short-lived marriage, as Davis screamed from an upstairs window, “Gary, get up here, you sonofabitch! I know what you’re doing!” (Esther’s husband Ben was in no shape to defend her honor that night, as he was passed out dead drunk in the tub of an adjoining bathroom);
As an avid swimmer from the age of four, I grew over the course of reading The Million Dollar Mermaid to have a new respect for and awe of Miss Williams, who reinvented herself over the years as a winning competitive swimmer, Hollywood star, wife, mother, savvy businesswoman and innovator of synchronized swimming (which was eventually accepted as an Olympic-level competition). And that is to say nothing of her lifelong unsinkable ability to bounce back from adversity, whether it be from heartless studio heads and directors who regarded their bankable actors as soulless ATM machines to coin hit movie after hit movie, until the viewing public tired of the formula and tossed them aside; or an alcoholic overgrown boy for a husband who frittered away her fortune while she worked 12-to-14-hour days at the studio.
Miss Williams, I salute you.