The Million Dollar Mermaid: An Autobiography
Esther Williams with Digby Diehl
Simon and Schuster £17.99, pp416
A few years after she'd made her name as the glamorous swimming star of Hollywood musicals, Esther Williams began to get sick of being typecast. She longed for what she calls, in this autobiography, 'dry land parts'. She envied Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner the roles they were offered, but most of all, she wanted to do Shakespeare.
She found a serious Russian drama coach and showed him the script to a musical she was about to start shooting, starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. The Russian looked at it with some bemusement. 'How can you sing while you're underwater?' he asked. 'I don't,' Williams replied, 'I sing when I'm on top of the water... But what I want to learn from you is how to perform Portia's speech from The Merchant of Venice.' The man looked at her blankly and sent her away: 'Anyone can do Portia,' he said, 'but I don't know anyone except you who can sing and swim at the same time.'
Poor Esther. She was doomed from the moment of her very first screen test, when she was dismissed with the line, 'Get back in the pool'. She claims to regret having told a journalist: 'I know I can't act; I know I can't dance. And I can't sing.' But she needn't feel guilty - audiences would have cottoned on to that even without her own admission. What can't be diminished is her contribution to postwar filmic fantasy, and her endurance as a kitsch icon ever since. While the wounded returned, she emerged from a tank adorned with pink seahorses - smiling, tanned, and perfectly synchronised.
Williams came to Tinseltown via the LA Athletic Club. She was a national sprint champion, and blames her ambition on two childhood tragedies: the death of her brother, and her rape by a boy who came to live with the family. From then on, she went through life toughened and undaunted. She was hired to swim alongside Tarzan hero Johnny Weissmuller at San Francisco's World Fair, and was later courted assiduously by MGM studios. 20th Century Fox had made a fortune by using Olympic figure skater Sonja Henie in their movies, and Louis B. Mayer was not to be outdone: 'Melt the ice, get a swimmer, make it pretty!' he is reported to have said.
MGM built a $250,000 pool for Williams on Sound Stage 30 ('never had plumbing been put to more glamorous use'), and their efforts paid off. Bathing Beauty, the first movie they shot there, made more money internationally than any film except Gone With the Wind.
From then on, the formula was set. All her films had the same plot (geeky boy meets wholesome swimming instructor, and reality gives way to a grand Technicolor finale involving balletic dives, hydraulic seashells, and underwater smiles). Many of them had the same co-star (Van Johnson). And all of them required her to wear the same attire. 'Wait a minute!' Williams thought upon receiving a new script, 'Haven't I already made this movie at least once?'
But there was a purpose behind this: by being predictably All-American when to be Un-American was considered a serious crime, Esther Williams fought the Cold War. It was who she was: for Skirts Ahoy! in 1951 she got the US Navy to redesign their official swimsuits so she could star in uniform; when asked what colour scheme she would like for her dressing room she replied, 'red, white and blue'. But even a formula can be infected with hysteria: as time wore on, the stakes in the swimming numbers got higher. Busby Berkeley was enlisted to orchestrate the spectaculars: he had her jumping from trapezes through multicoloured smoke, singing on waterskis and diving from a helicopter.
One of the great pleasures of this book is reading about the secrets behind the scenes. Williams (or her co-author, Digby Diehl) has a camp and bitchy twinkle in her turn of phrase. The Million Dollar Mermaid is pacily written, and full of good stories too lengthy to retell here - Joan Crawford in a bird outfit, weeping to an imaginary audience; Clark Gable showing up for a screen test, kissing Williams repeatedly and dubbing her a 'mermaid'.
Williams reveals the scaffolding behind the glitz: for her underwater scenes her hair had to be drenched in a newly devised concoction of warm baby oil and Vaseline, with false plaits and interlocking hairpins that kept it in place. The usual make-up washed off and floated in the pool, so her entire body was caked in coloured waterproof cream. And one day Esther learned how the studios dealt with older stars. A script called for her to slap William Powell, who was then in his mid-fifties. As she did so, half his face crumbled. It turned out that he was covered in little rubber bands which met at the top of his head and were masked by thick foundation: it was an instant face-lift.
But her best anecdotes and snappiest lines are reserved for the men in her life. At 77, Ms Williams is not a prude. She reveals that Johnny Weissmuller had 'remarkable genitalia which he loved to exhibit'. He would 'splash and grunt' as he chased her. Williams concludes: 'I think maybe he took that jungle character a little too seriously'.
She has been married four times, once to her Argentinian co-star Fernando Lamas, 'a black belt in the bedroom arts', whom she had had her eye on for some time. She had even held a glass up to the wall on one occasion so she could listen to him making love to Lana Turner in the neighbouring room. Perhaps her most swoon-inducing liaison, though, was with brilliantined hunk Victor Mature, who had such an insatiable appetite he was known to eat cardboard if it had ketchup on it. They 'unleashed [their] hunger' after filming 'a steamy love scene' in the 1952 extravaganza Million Dollar Mermaid. Williams describes him as 'the first leading man who lived up to the title'.
In 1956, after 15 years in the top 10 at the box office, the swimming star left MGM. She turned to designing bathing suits, she got married, she got fat. After a lifetime in silver lamé, her mermaid days were over. Or, in Esther Williams's own immortal phrase: 'Nobody was going to make multi-million dollar aqua-musicals ever again.'
