The Million Dollar Mermaid
Esther Williams and Digby Diehl
Simon & Schuster, £17.99, 416pp
Buy it at BOL

In 1955, Esther Williams had her red, white and blue star dressing-room on MGM's Hollywood lot redecorated to wipe clean the slick of Nivea and Vaseline which had kept her skin unwrinkled and her hair sleek doing her daily work in chlorinated water. She packed her old bathing caps, pinned a welcome note on the door for Grace Kelly and drove out the studio gate. Fade out. Titles.

Esther was 33 and had been a MGM money-maker for over a decade, in daft films confected to showcase her strong grace as an Olympic-class swimmer; but she understood that fashions in absurdity change, and did not want to end up dead in the water like Joan Crawford, who was coming apart just down the corridor.

That is one vivid little scene from an autobiography that is full of them - few filmable under the pre-1966 Hollywood production code. There's under-16 Esther, raped repeatedly by a boy her parents took into their family as a substitute for their dead hero son, defying him at last when she realises the robustness she has gained in training. There's Esther, 17, in an aquacade show, dodging priapic, trunkless Johnny Weissmuller (the original Tarzan). There's Esther, 18, fending off for a while MGM's offer of a movie career, unfazed by Louis B Mayer's carpet-chomping rages or attempted seductions by executives who didn't come up to her handsome bosom, eventually to graduate from MGM's finishing school in an Andy Hardy film.

Now, I don't believe a word of the dialogue in these scenes (either Esther or her ghost has no ear for the speech of the period), but I don't care. They're horribly funny, like films of her era updated by directors from our lewder time.

In a sequence which dropped jaws on the book's US publication last year, Esther hopes to find in her lover, the ludicrously macho actor Jeff Chandler (a proto-Richard Gere hunk with white Brillo-pad haircut), a supportive third husband and father for her kids. She is in a sunsuit, cooking chicken cacciatore in his kitchen, when he summons her to his bedroom, posing for her approval in red wig, Gucci shoes, chiffon gown and too much slap. She sees Jeff off with the funny-sad line that he is too big for the polka dots he adores on his every expensive girly garment. It's Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedy, but remade by David Lynch.

That makes Esther sound as if she has the self-awareness, the paralyising investment in image now encountered in Vanity Fair interviews with, say, Sharon Stone. Not so. This isn't a movie life in which the star observes herself from far enough away to understand her own signals. In the decade after the second world war, Esther's all-over tan (actually a tinted grease) defined an American freedom for the rest of the word: one look at her white-water smile and everybody understood that the US of A was a rich land where suburban homes had swimming pools, swimming costumes were of new, sagless Lastex and no military debris rusted on beaches. If MGM could spend all that money building a permanent aqua-stage just so Esther could shoot up on fountain jets in flimsy films, the US sure had resources to spare for the Marshall Plan and H-bomb research.

But as actually lived, stardom before the old studios broke apart seems for women to have been an early version of the modern corporate life - the bulge of the babies Esther conceived with her second husband had to be hidden under draped seaweed and gardenias, no interrupting the filming schedule; once born they were publicity props while she had to get back in shape for the next idiocy onscreen.

Esther was her only asset, and she only had herself to tend that asset. The second husband was a profligate drone who drank, gambled and misinvested what money she banked from a studio skilled at constructively dismissing employees.

Her various directors knew far less than she had had to teach herself about dangerous stunts: she only rarely said no and told them who to hire as stand-in and for how much. Otherwise she jumped from helicopters and planes and learned to water-ski when pregnant, just saving herself and baby from being carved up by the propellors of Busby Berkeley's camera craft; she dived from trapezes, almost drowned in an underwater room constructed by a technician not part of her team, and nearly broke her back swan-diving from six storeys up wearing a inflexible metal crown.

At least as she relates it, she was far more alone than a Mel Gibson or a Kevin Costner, with their trainer, dietician, accountant, publicist, personal assistant and their stunt teams, let alone doubles. Onscreen she pretended to be a fun gal flippering along with Tom and Jerry or "swimming pretty" - meaning high in the water, demanding extreme upper-body strength - as Howard Keel serenaded. Off screen, she never knew how to use her strengths, possibly because she tried to behave in accord with the 1946 ruling that women ceased to be capable the day they were no longer economically needed to weld and rivet for the war effort. Joan Crawford's wide, war-years shoulders had been pads designed by Edith Head; Esther Williams's were muscle, not easily doffed.

When the career and the marital life fell apart, she still had the sea - "a good swimmer owns the water" is the best line in the book. The scene from Dangerous When Wet that I adored as a small girl had her swimming the Channel, encouraged by her screen lover (the gorgeous but narcissistic Fernando Lamas), who leaps into the surf to scoop her into his arms once she's crossed the finishing line. They were in the icy, choppy Pacific all day shooting it: every time he clutched her she slid through his grasp because she was coated in authentic goosegrease; finally, in the car back to Culver City, he grabbed her hand and kept it on his exceptional erection the whole way. A few years later, she married him and dwindled into a fat wife, faithful but abject, for over 20 years until his death. I'm glad I didn't know the reality when I used to act out the movie sequence, doing a length of the family tin bath in front of the kitchen fire on Friday nights.