ESTHER WILLIAMS WAS SHINING.
It was 1947, and while filming one of her signature swimming sequences for her movie This Time For Keeps, the MGM star found herself plummeting to the bottom of a 20-foot-deep pool. As it turned out, her glamorous new swimming costume, made of thick, plaid flannel and embroidered with heavy sequins, had absorbed so much water that it was dragging her under. The outdoor tank was crowded by excited bystanders assembled to watch Williams work; she very nearly drowned under the unwitting noses of hundreds of fans. Instead, she acted fast, unzipping the suit, swimming to the surface in the nude, and courageously emerging, hidden by a quickly-handed-over towel. From that point on, she would always approve of her costume designs. In her line of work, even a bathing suit could kill you.
You may not have heard of Esther Williams, but you’ve seen something that wouldn’t exist without her. Concentric circles of synchronised swimmers, legs kicking outward in unison, shot from overhead in a blue pool? A series of grinning women in glistening matching swimsuits, diving into the water one by one in a hypnotic rhythm? Films and TV shows as varied as the Coens’ Hail, Caesar!, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and this summer’s In The Heights have paid homage to the spectacular visuals of her movies. Williams was a champion athlete, the queen of the MGM swimming pool, who had an entire genre built around her talents in the late 1940s and early ’50s.
That genre was called the aqua-musical, and she was its only real star. There were no imitators who possessed her combined skill-set, and the genre would reach the height of its popularity in the post-war years, after the release of her first Technicolor film, 1944’s Bathing Beauty, made her a star. They were lighthearted entertainment designed for a warweary audience, typically featuring thin-ondry-land romantic-comedy plots, but also a circus-like parade of swimmers on swings, entire orchestras, ‘water ballet’ and plumes of coloured smoke, with Williams in the centre, often diving from over 50 feet in the air. They were complicated, expensive, and often dangerous to execute, requiring ingenuity from everyone on set, from underwater tracking set-ups right down to the make-up artists forced to invented waterproof mascara.
Today, these movies are more often treated like footnotes than timeless movie classics. But at their best, the swimming sequences are gobsmackingly beautiful and poetically choreographed, a combination of athletic skill and artful showmanship that, in the days long before CGI, required dedication that’s hard to imagine. And they continue to cast a spell on those who see them, like In The Heights director Jon M. Chu, who drew on Williams’ work for a major sequence in his film set at a public swimming pool. “The Esther Williams-busby Berkeley frames, they’re just so influential in how you capture dance, or how you can show a volume of people, and what happens when you bring them together,” he tells Empire. “And they are jaw-dropping moments. They crafted this vocabulary that we could take advantage of.”
In her 1999 autobiography The Million Dollar Mermaid, named after her film biopic of Aussie swimmer Annette Kellerman, Williams
put it more matter-of-factly: “No-one had done a swimming musical before. So we made it up as we went along.”
BORN 100 YEARS AGO TO A BLUE-COLLAR Kansas family, Williams was raised during the Great Depression and was, from a young age, drawn to the local swimming pool. Like many professional swimmers, she took to the water instinctively. By the time she was 16, she had won three national championships, and had her sights set on swimming competitively abroad. Her hopes of competing in the 1940 Olympics were waylaid by war in Europe. And it was not, by any stretch, an easy road to stardom — athletic or otherwise. When she was eight, Williams abruptly lost her teenage brother Stanton, a blow to the family from which her parents never fully recovered. Later, according to her autobiography, the Williamses decided to take in another teen boy, who would secretly rape a 13-year-old Williams. She would be haunted by the trauma for years, and sadly, given her future career in mid-20th-century Hollywood, it would not be her only encounter with abusive men.
By 17, she had auditioned and been chosen for a job which would change her life: the female lead, opposite Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller, in a live swimming spectacular known as ‘Billy Rose’s Aquacade’. It was here where the idea of ‘swimming pretty’ was first introduced to the competitive Williams, whose primary goal in the water up until now had been speed. It took enormous endurance to keep head and shoulders above the water, smiling all the while.
In spite of honing Williams’ talents and putting her on the radar of MGM talent scouts, her experience in the Aquacade was a doubleedged sword. It also subjected her to what she describes quite plainly in her memoir as sexual harassment, from Billy Rose and co-star Johnny Weissmuller, who groped her, and presenter Martin Downey, who verbally abused her.
“I was a 17-year-old girl and Morton Downey was a powerful man. It never crossed my mind to complain; I figured his mouth just went along with the deal,” she wrote, sounding eerily familiar all these decades later in the wake of #Metoo. She found escape in the water, but too often she was forced to accept harassment simply because she was a pretty girl in a swimsuit.
Maintaining that image was a challenge in itself. New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme, who has recorded a special-guest podcast of You Must Remember This on Williams, says, “Her life was one of such contradictions. She was this Olympic-level athlete, who then became a Hollywood glamour icon, and she had to square the two constantly. Her identity was wrapped up in her physical strength, but also in her ability to make that strength look accessible to people on screen: beautiful, manicured, effortless.”
As a 5’8” pro swimmer and swimsuit model, who had broken swimming records at home while still a teen, Williams was a striking new addition to the movie business. And unlike the vast majority of studio-era movie stars, who could sing, dance, and vamp well enough to stand in for each other if the occasion called, she was uniquely irreplaceable, doing most of her own stunts. Yet the rules of thumb for most Hollywood starlets applied to Williams, too — dance, diction, and drama lessons at what she referred to as ‘MGM U’. As she says in her book, “One thing I learned for sure is that everybody looked at everybody else in that studio, and you had better look your best when they see you. I knew that from now
on, whenever I came through that commissary door, I was going to have my make-up on straight and every hair in place.”
Even under the MGM thumb, though, Williams had a reputation for being plainspoken. She campaigned to star opposite a high calibre of leading men, and for better scripts, and at one point, a drama coach. Remarkably, she handled not only the demands of what it meant to be a rising female star at MGM, but the formidable pressures of being a stuntwoman, swan-diving from vertiginous heights. And, like a swan, she maintained a lacquered, waterproofed and smiling facade above water, while paddling frantically beneath the surface to keep afloat.
DURING MGM’S GOLDEN AGE, HEALTH AND safety regulations during production were what we might now call lax. Williams often stayed in a pool for over 12 hours per day, waterlogged and uncomfortable in tight swimwear, with metal rods under her hair to keep it in place underwater. Her continual diving on Stage 30, an enormous soundstage tank roughly 20 feet deep, ruptured her eardrum seven times. During the production of 1952’s Million Dollar Mermaid, she broke three vertebrae after a 50-foot dive in some heavy headgear snapped her head back on impact with the water. Her neck healed, but the injury left her with chronic headaches for the rest of her life. She nearly drowned at least twice, sometimes pulled out by watchful crew members in lieu of distracted or indifferent directors. On another occasion, on the set of Jupiter’s Darling (1954), her refusal to do a stunt involving a horse leaping from a cliff resulted in the stuntman who replaced her, Al Lewin, breaking his back.
Her aqua-musicals were made by the biggest studio in Hollywood at enormous production costs: the swimming tanks and pools alone cost $250,000 to build, and were constructed especially for Williams. Hydraulic lifts were carefully disguised so as to make her appear supernaturally lifted into the air by jets of water like some kind of aquatic goddess. For hit movies like Neptune’s Daughter (1949) and Million Dollar Mermaid, she and her fellow performers practically invented synchronised swimming, to the extent that she is often credited as one of the great swimming pioneers of the 20th century.
Production designer Jess Gonchor, who recreated Williams’ water spectaculars for a sequence featuring Scarlett Johansson in Hail, Caesar!, explains the difference between now and then. “Everything has changed. The fact that they had her diving from 50 or more feet in the air, it seems crazy they would do that.” For the Coens’ 1950s-set film, Gonchor had to pay attention to the filtration of the water and be careful not to allow foreign objects in with the performers. But back then, it seems unlikely that similar safety measures were taken. “I can’t imagine people didn’t get hurt,” he says. “They might have been trained swimmers, but they weren’t stunt people. I’d be interested to know what the injury rate was for Esther Williams’ movies.”
One of her regular collaborators was legendary choreographer Busby Berkeley. He helped to create some of her most memorable sequences, using synchronised swimmers to capture the geometric formations that he had mastered with dancers on dry land. In films including Million Dollar Mermaid, crane and overhead shots would become de rigueur, as would ambitious stunts requiring intense focus from Williams, who would later have a falling out with Berkeley over what she felt was his disregard for her safety. Berkeley preferred not to use stunt doubles, and for one sequence asked her to hang from a trapeze hooked to a helicopter about 80 feet in the air, then drop into a ‘V’ formation of eight motorboats towing water
skiers. Williams, having narrowly avoided being killed or maimed on numerous occasions, flatly refused, and a stuntwoman had to be brought in.
Jon M. Chu suggests that even today, without overuse of CGI, achieving what Williams’ films did is very difficult. “The physical nature of that, the amount of dancers that she had — it’s an incredible amount. You can’t do that these days. The height you have to get onto the crane in a real pool? There were a lot of bottlenecks that prevented us from going all the way.”
In the case of most old Hollywood fare, from the Western to the film noir, there’s a modernday corollary — the neo-noir TV show, the revisionist Western — where the afterlives of the genre live on. But the aqua-musical is distinct in this sense, too: thanks partly to its many hazards, it is almost entirely a time capsule.
BY THE MID 1950S, THE VOGUE FOR Williams’ particular brand of rosy charm and watery spectacle had truly ended, precipitated by the financial hardships of major Hollywood studios and the changing tastes of youth markets. By 1959, as she herself pointed out, “No-one was going to make multi-million-dollar aqua-musicals ever again. I was 37 years old.
I was still working, but I knew there was not much mileage left in my movie career.”
This may have been true, but there was a lot left in her third act. In 1960, she appeared on a live television aqua-show that broke Tv-watching records in America. She started numerous businesses, including, in 1989, a swimwear line which she promised would support the female figure. (The line still exists today.) As late as 2013, the ‘Esther Williams Trophy’ was still in use, reward for a game played between Australian, US and British Navy fleets that was akin to ‘capture the flag’, the prize a photograph of a leggy young Esther. The practice began during World War II, when Williams rivalled Betty Grable for popularity with GIS abroad, and remained in place for decades, only being retired, as a mark of respect, when the actor died.
Perhaps the ultimate honour came in 1984, when, at the very first synchronised swimming competition at the Olympics, Williams was asked to commentate on the proceedings, in acknowledgement of her impact on the sport. “Swimming stars are like ice cream; they can melt away,” three-time US Olympic swimmingteam coach Chuck Warner tells Empire. “But Esther Williams kept the aquatic world in front of the public for her long, storied career. She made it more attractive to swim and especially to join synchronised swimming.” In the end, the decline of Williams’ film career did not mean a tragic end (like so many other women stars of her time), but instead an opportunity to share her love of swimming with a new generation.
She was never going to be nominated for an Academy Award; she was not considered a ‘serious’ actor. And yet her draw was immense, putting her in the top ten highest-earning box-office stars of 1949 and 1950. Her Take Me Out To The Ball Game co-star, Gene Kelly, once said that Williams was “the biggest star in Europe. Her grosses were bigger than anyone else’s. Bigger than Sinatra’s or mine or Judy Garland’s.”
And that star had serious charisma on screen. Even if her films were mostly fluffy, and her figure more celebrated than her considerable acumen in business and beyond, there was a strident, unspoken power in Williams’ displays. She embodied a certain muscular grace and power, a rare thing in the days of soft mid-century femininity. Neither did she need a romantic interest beside her to impress audiences. As she said, “People will ask me, ‘Who was your favourite leading man?’ The answer I give most often is, ‘The water,’ because the water really was my co-star. Technicolor made it so invitingly blue, and with the camera angle at water level as I swam, audiences felt as if they were swimming right beside me.”
The all-american mermaid was 91 when she died in 2013, and we have never seen anything like the MGM aqua-musical again. Maybe because a star as splashy as Esther Williams was never likely to come along twice.