Esther Williams

At 91 years old, Esther Williams has this physical status:

Esther Jane Williams (September 8, 1921 – June 6, 2013) was an American competitive swimmer and actress.

In her late teens as part of the Los Angeles Athletic Club's swimming team, Williams set multiple national and regional swimming records.

Because of the outbreak of World War II, she joined Billy Rose's Aquacade, where she played the role vacated by Eleanor Holm after the show's change from New York City to San Francisco.

She spent five months in the city swimming with Olympic gold medalist and Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller.

At the Aquacade, Williams attracted the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scouts.

Williams made a series of films in the 1940s and early 1950s that featured intricately synchronised swimming and diving in various small roles, including Mickey Rooney in an Andy Hardy film and future five-time co-star Van Johnson in A Guy Named Joe. Williams had at least one film on the year's top-grossing films, from 1945 to 1949.

Williams appeared in her first biographical role in 1952, as Australian swimming star Annette Kellerman in Million Dollar Mermaid, which went on to become her nickname while at MGM.

Williams left MGM in 1956 and appeared in a handful of failed feature films, followed by several extremely popular water-themed network television specials, one from Cypress Gardens, Florida. Williams was also a highly respected businesswoman.

And before returning as an actress, she invested in a "service station," a metal fabrication plant, a bathing suit manufacturer, several showrooms, and a huge restaurant chain called Trails. At the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, she lent her name to a line of swimming ponds and retro swimwear, instructional swimming videos for children, and served as a commentator for synchronized swimming.

Early years

Esther Jane Williams was born in Inglewood, California, on August 8, 1921. She was Louis Stanton Williams' fifth and youngest child (January 19, 1886-1968) and Bula Myrtle (née Gilpin; October 8, 1885 – December 29, 1971). The two lived on neighboring farms in Kansas and enjoyed a nine-year courtship until about 1908, when they eloped and headed for California. However, they ran out of money in Salt Lake City, Utah, and settled there. Stanton, Esther's brother (September 4, 1912 – March 3, 1929), was discovered by actress Marjorie Rambeau, who later found the family (including sisters Maurine and June) and brother David) in the Los Angeles area to be near the studios. Louis Williams bought a small piece of land in the southwest section of town and had a small house built there. Esther was born in the living room, which was also where the family slept before Louis Williams was able to add bedrooms. Stanton Williams died in 1929 after he had suffered from a colon burst. He was 16 years old at the time.

Bula Myrtle Williams invited 16-year-old Buddy McClure to live with her family in 1935. McClure had recently lost his mother, and Bula was still mourning over Stanton's death. Esther recalled in her autobiography that one night, while the majority of the family was visiting relatives in Alhambra, McClure, raped her. She was afraid to tell anyone about the incident and waited two years before finally telling her parents that the truth was not in question. Williams' mother was uncertain about her own, claiming McClure was "sensitive" and sympathic toward him after he confessed guilt. Bula Williams was then banned from her house, but she later ruled him out. McClure joined the United States Coast Guard, but Williams never saw him again.

Personal life

Williams was a registered Republican.

Williams has married four times. While attending Los Angeles City College, she met Leonard Kovner, her first husband. "He was smart, handsome, dependable, and dull," she wrote in her autobiography The Million Dollar Mermaid. I admired his intelligence and his contribution to a future in medicine. He loved me, or at least asked me to marry him," he said. On June 27, 1940, they were married in Los Altos, a San Francisco suburb. "I discovered, to my surprise, that all I needed for my emotional and personal safety was my own resolve and determination on their split." I didn't need a wedding or a ring. I had to discover that Leonard Kovner was not a man I could ever love." They divorced on September 12, 1944.

Susan Tenney and Ben Gage married on November 25, 1945; they had three children together, Benjamin Stanton (born August 6, 1949), Kimball Austin (born October 1, 1953) and Susan Tenney (born October 1, 1953). She portrayed Gage as an alcoholic parasite who squandered $10 million of her income in her autobiography. In 1952, Gage and Williams married in April 1959, but they divorced in April 1959.

Williams discovered she was pregnant with her third child while filming Pagan Love Song in Hawaii and alerted the studio in California. Gage had encountered a man at the hotel who possessed a ham radio and begged him not to let them use it to call California. However, they didn't know at the time that anyone could be watching their conversation, and the announcement of her pregnancy was broadcast to the entire West Coast.

She admitted in her autobiography that she had an affair with actor Victor Mature while they were working on Million Dollar Mermaid, citing that she had been in danger and lonely, she turned to Mature for love and affection, and he gave her all she wanted. The affair came to a halt while Williams was recovering from her fall during the shooting of Million Dollar Mermaid. She was romantically linked with Jeff Chandler. Chandler was a crossdresser and she ended the relationship, according to her autobiography. Many family and coworkers of Chandler's rebutted Williams' assertions, according to the Los Angeles Times. "I've never heard of such things," Jane Russell said. I would not expect Jeff to do cross-dressing. He was a sweet guy and a good guy."

Fernando Lamas, an Argentine actor/director, married her on December 31, 1969. She later admitted that she had been in total submission to him for 13 years. She had to get out of "Esther Williams" and she could not have her children live with her. He would be faithful in return. Nonetheless, they were married until Lamas died of pancreatic cancer on October 8, 1982.

She and her actor husband Edward Bell, who she married on October 24, 1994, lived in Beverly Hills.

Cary Grant told Look magazine in September 1959 that he had taken LSD under doctor's care, and it had changed his life. Mortimer Hartman, Grant's therapist, referred to LSD as "a spiritual energizer that emites the imagination and sparks emotion and memory a hundred times." Grant said he had "found [he] had a tense inner core of strength" when he was younger and that he was "highly dependent on older men and women while young." Now, people [came] to [him] for assistance." Williams confessed that she wished to be one of those people. "I honestly didn't know who I was at the time, I guess I didn't know who I was," she said in Million Dollar Mermaid.

Was I that glamorous femme fatale?

Was I just another broke divorcée whose husband left her with all the bills and three children? She called Grant just after reading the story. He called his doctor and made an appointment for her. According to Williams, LSD seemed to be like instant psychoanalysis.

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Career

Williams was excited about swimming in her youth. Maurine, her older sister, took her to Manhattan Beach and the local pool. She worked at the pool counting towels to pay the five-cent entry fee, and, although there, received swimming lessons from the male lifeguards. She learned the "male only" swimming strokes, including the butterfly, which would later break records.

The medley team set the national AAU champion in the 300-yard relay at the Los Angeles Athletic Club in 1939, while also a national AAU champion in the 100 meter freestyle in a record-breaking time of 1 minute 9.0 seconds. Williams had won three national championships in breaststroke and freestyle swimming by age 16, by the time 16.

Williams graduated from Washington High School (now known as Washington Preparatory High School) in Los Angeles, 1939, where she served as class vice president and later president. Williams, on the other hand, had never participated in swimming before.

Williams earned a D in her algebra course, preventing her from receiving a scholarship to the University of Southern California during her senior year of high school. She enrolled in Los Angeles City College to retake the class. Williams expressed an interest in getting a degree in physical education in 1939 in the hopes of teaching it one day. Williams worked as a stock girl at the I. Magnin department store, where she also designed clothes for customers and appeared in newspaper advertisements.

Although Williams was stationed at I. Magnin, Billy Rose' assistant called her and invited her to audition as a replacement for Eleanor Holm in his Aquacade show. Williams impressed Rose and she was given the opportunity to play her role. Williams was partnered with Olympic swimmer and Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller, who, Williams wrote in her autobiography, often attempted to seduce the Aquacade, and she was a participant in the Golden Gate International Exposition. Despite this, Williams stayed with the show until it closed on September 29, 1940. Williams had intended to participate in the 1940 Summer Olympics, but they were cancelled due to World War II's outbreak.

Williams first attracted the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scouts in Aquacade. Louis B. Mayer, MGM's chief, had been looking for a female sports actress for the studio to compete with Fox's figure skating actress Sonja Henie. Williams first signed her MGM deal in 1941.

There were two clauses in her deal: the first was that she would get a guest pass to The Beverly Hills Hotel so she could swim in the pool every day; the second was that she would not be on camera for nine months to allow for acting, singing, dancing, and diction lessons. "If it took nine months for a baby to be born, I figured my 'birth' from Esther Williams, the swimmer, to Esther Williams the film actress would not have been much different," Williams wrote in her autobiography.

Although top actors in the studios, including Judy Garland, Betty Grable, and Shirley Temple, were able to participate in bond tours during the war, Williams was refused to participate in hospital tours. Williams had risen to pinnacle status due to the number of photographs of her wearing bathing suits. Williams and her publicity assistant will listen to Bob Hope and Jack Benny's radio shows, retelling the funniest jokes at the hospitals. Williams also invited GIs to perform on stage and take part in mock screen tests. The men will be sent a card detailing their names and then act out the scene in front of the other soldiers. These were always romantic scenes to which the male characters were expected to refuse multiple times. Williams would pull at her tear-away skirt and jacket jacket and jacket revealing nothing but a gold lamé swimming suit when the men said "No" in the final. After that stunt, the guys would always end with the guy giving in and kissing her. Her hospital tours continued into the 1950s. Within a "capture the Esther" competition, a signed, waterproof portrait of Williams was circulated among men in the United States Navy. The Royal Australian Navy's annual competition continues to this day, which holds a "original" forged signed portrait in its archives while still maintaining a "capturable" image for use in the fleet.

George Sidney conducted her first screen test three weeks after Williams signed her deal. The studio used this technique to bring Lana Turner back to work, as a punishment for Lana Turner's elopement with Artie Shaw, according to Williams' autobiography. For the film Where I'll Find You, Williams screen tested with leading man Clark Gable. However, Turner revived the film when she divorced Shaw after four months of marriage. Williams appeared in Andy Hardy's Double Life, following several short subject films. Sheila was a coworker with whom Andy is in love with. Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne appeared in A Guy Named Joe, the next act was a small part. It was here she first met Van Johnson, with whom she would appear in five films.

Mr. Coed, the former actor of Bathing Beauty, starred Red Skelton as a man who enrolls in a women's college in order to recover his swimming instructor fiancée, played by Williams. This was her first Technicolor musical. Williams was the film's title changed to showcase Williams. Almost all of the film's posters featured Williams in a bathing suit, but the swimming sequences made up only a small part of the film. Ben Gage, the future husband of New York City, was the first to attend the premiere at the Astor Theater in New York City. A six-story billboard of Williams diving into Times Square with a large sign that reads "Come on in!" MGM publicity sponsored the event.

The story's fine!"

Williams appeared in the film Ziegfeld Follies as herself. The musical Thrill of a Romance was followed by this. Van Johnson co-starred as a hero from wartime who fell in love with Williams while on her honeymoon. The Thrill of a Romance was 1945's highest-grossing film. Williams was forced to assist Johnson in his swim, and she held her hand under his back to keep him afloat. Even though Williams was involved with Gage at the time, the studio's public relations team attempted to bring the two together in the hopes of sparking a romance. When asked why they didn't date, Johnson replied, "I'm afraid she can't get her webbed feet into a pair of evening sandals."

Williams took part in The Hoodlum Saint (1946), alongside William Powell. Audiences awaited Powell's Nick Charles persona and dismissed the possibility of a match between Williams and Powell due to their age differences. She appeared in Uncomforte Wed, a 1936 remake of Libeled Lady with Johnson and Lucille Ball. It was the first singing role in a Williams film, with Harriet Lee as her singing instructor.

Maria Williams, Rigo Montalbán's twin sister who pretends to be her bullfighting brother in the hopes of luring him back home, appeared in Fiesta (originally named Fiesta Brava). Audiences and Williams thought the movie was silly, as Williams and Montalbán had radically different accents. Montalbán was born in Mexico and was a native Spanish speaker, but Williams had a mid-western accent picked up from her Kansas-born parents. Production was challenging due to a slew of obstacles. Gage and Williams were married by 1947. Gage had to fly to Mexico for the film's making. He was arrested and later barred from entering a cholera from eating contaminated street food. After being bitten by bulls, many of the film's stuntmen were sent to the hospital. Director Dick Thorpe didn't want the bulls killed (as they often were at the end of a bullfight) because they were too costly to replace.

Williams appeared in the romance This Time for Keeps (1947) with singer Johnnie Johnston, after filming was finished on Fiesta. Williams signed a deal with swimwear firm Cole of California to appear as their spokesperson in 1948, and Williams and the other swimmers in her films wore Cole swimsuits. The costume designers in the studio had no expertise in making practical swimsuits because the aqua-musicals were a new genre. William's plaid flannel swimsuit for This Time for Keeps was so heavy she was pulled to the bottom of the pool and had to unzip the suit, swimming naked to the edge of the pool to prevent drowning. The zipper was no longer necessary in Cole's swimsuits, but not so late.

While filming Skirts Ahoy!

(1952) Williams discovered that as part of their uniforms, members of the WAVES programme received thin, cotton, shapeless swimsuits. Williams modeled a Cole swimsuit for the Secretary of the Navy and explained that the new swimsuits had aided in the promotion of women's figures. The United States Navy ordered 50,000 suits to be delivered immediately.

According to Williams' autobiography, "pure misery" was filming Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949). Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra's characters appear in a period musical. K.C.'s owning a baseball team was a member of a team owned by the two male leads. Williams' role is Higgins. Kelly and co-writer Stanley Donen allegedly treated her with contempt and went out of their way to make jokes at her expense, according to she. The film was well-received critically and became a big commercial success, grossing in $3.4 million in rentals and becoming the 11th highest-earning film of the year. Neptune's Daughter (also 1949) was made at the same time by Williams, Rigo Montalbán, Red Skelton, and Betty Garrett, who had also participated in Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Williams sings "Baby, It's Cold Outside" with Montalbán in the film. At the 22nd Academy Awards, the song received the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Williams and Montalbán had intended to sing "I'd Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China," but studio censors dismissed the song as "have" instead of "have" (construing the word "get" as "have") and instead gave them "Baby, It's Cold Outside." The Daughter of Neptune became the tenth highest-grossing film of 1949.

Williams made Duchess of Idaho (1950), filmed in Sun Valley, Idaho, co-starring Van Johnson and John Lund. Pagan Love Song (also 1950), Texas Carnival (1951), and later Jupiter's Darling (1955) paired her with Howard Keel for three films, including Pagan Love Song (also 1950). In the film Callaway Went Thataway (1951), they were both cameos.

Annette Kellermann, a true Australian swimming and diving celebrity, was depicted in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952). Williams co-starred with Victor Mature, who played Kellermann's husband and boss, James Sullivan. During filming, the two actors became involved in a passionate affair. Williams used to say this her favorite film and even named her autobiography after it. Williams also received the Henrietta Award at the 1952 Golden Globes for Female Film Favorite. Easily to Love (1953), also with Van Johnson, was shot on location in Cypress Gardens, where a swimming pool in the shape of the state of Florida had been built specifically for the film. Williams was pregnant at the time, but she still did all her own waterskiing stunts.

Williams co-starred in Dangerous When Wet (also 1953), including Tom and Jerry and potential husband Fernando Lamas. During casting, Lamas told Williams that he did not want to star in the film because he was only interested in "important pictures." To persuade him to participate in the film, his role had to be rewritten.

Williams had been on maternity leave for three months when pregnant with daughter Susannah and hoped she'd return to film Athena. However, production began without her, with studio cast Jane Powell in the lead role rewriting much of Williams' premise that Leo Pogostin and Chuck Walters had come up with, as shown in the video. The studio was relocated to Darling, Jupiter. Two new films, Bermuda Encounter and Olympic Venus, were intended, but no one was ever made; however, these were never produced.

Many of her MGM films, including Million Dollar Mermaid and Jupiter's Darling, featured elaborately staged swimming scenes, posing a significant danger to Williams. During a dramatic musical number for the film Million Dollar Mermaid, she broke her neck filming a 115 ft dive off a rooftop, and she was in a body cast for seven months. She recovered after the accident, but she continued to experience headaches as a result of the accident. Multiple times, her numerous hours spent submerged in a studio tank culminated in ruptured eardrums. She was also nearly drowned after not being able to locate the trapdoor in a tank's ceiling. The walls and ceiling were painted black, and the trapdoor was incorporated into the trapdoor. Williams was only escorted out because a member of the crew discovered that the door was not opened.

Williams was suspended from MGM after refusing to play lead in The Opposite Sex, a musical interpretation of 1939's The Women, after 15 years of filming. Mary's role had been rewritten to be an aquacade (and was filled by June Allyson as "Kay," a nightclub entertainer). Williams redesigned her dressing room to accommodate returning actress Grace Kelly, packed her terry cloth robes and swimsuits, and sped away from the studio parking lot. Williams' deferred contract payments, which had been withheld from her paychecks for the previous 14 years, were deposited as both a nest egg and a tax deferral as a result of her resignation. She was, on the other hand, a $50,000 signing bonus was still available when she first signed her first job.

She went to Universal International in 1956 and appeared in The Unguarded Moment (1956), a non-musical dramatic film. Her film career began to decline after that. She later confessed that husband Fernando Lamas preferred her not to continue in films. She would, however, appear on television, including mystery guest appearances for What's Your Line, The Ed Sullivan Exhibition, and two aqua-specials, The Esther Williams Aqua Spectacle (1956), and Esther Williams at Cypress Gardens, which were telecast on August 8, 1960. More than half of all television sets in use in the United States were tuned in to watch the Cypress Gardens special. She appeared in an aqua-special at Wembley Stadium in London. Williams was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1966.

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