Hollywood’s Dark Mermaid

Hollywood’s Dark Mermaid

Esther Williams’s passionate affair with Jeff Chandler ended in a scene so scandalizing she kept it a secret for years. It wasn’t until she published her shocking tell-all that the breakup’s sordid details came spilling out. Esther Williams was the undisputed queen bee of one of the most baffling Hollywood subgenres: the aqua musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. No one rose out of the pool’s depths with a smile, no less quite like Williams. But who was she really? A competitive athlete, a pretty pinup, a feisty feminist, or a kept woman? Williams somehow managed to be, at different times in her life, all of these things and more. Let’s dive a little deeper into these facts about Esther Williams, Hollywood’s mermaid.

Before Esther Williams’s birth, her family had relocated to Los Angeles because of her big brother’s burgeoning film career. Esther was born soon after the move, and her dad hadn’t had a chance to build any bedrooms in their new home. So, in 1921, the living room became the delivery room for baby Esther. But even that iniquitous beginning almost never happened. When she got older, Esther Williams made a disturbing discovery. She learned that she was an unwanted child. She was the fifth of five, and her mother was done raising children. When she was carrying Esther, Beulah Williams tried to end the pregnancy. Her unsuccessful attempts included going horseback riding and jumping from furniture. Beulah didn’t lose Esther, but she did get her wish in her horrifically twisted way.

Esther Williams wasn’t the only star in the family. Her older brother Stanton actually had a Showbiz break of his own. Academy Award-nominated actress Marjorie Rambeau noticed him and thought he had a chance in movies. Stanton made two films, but then the unthinkable happened. Stanton’s colon suddenly burst, and he didn’t survive. Sadly, there was more tragedy awaiting the Williams family. About five years after Stanton passed, Williams’s mother, maybe in an effort to replace her lost son, invited 16-year-old Buddy McClure to join the family. McClure had recently lost his mother, and so the fit seemed perfect. But McClure was hiding a terrifying dark side. Late one night, McClure caught young Esther alone and raped her.

Esther kept what had happened to herself, living in fear of her parents’ houseguest for two long years. But the ordeal didn’t end there. Williams finally confessed what had happened to her mother, who confronted McClure. While he did admit to her what happened, she took mercy on him at first. Eventually, she kicked him out, and the family never saw him again. Esther Williams needed an outlet to move on, and she eventually found one that would change her life altogether. Williams found solace in the water and became interested in competitive swimming. While the ocean was fine, she preferred pools and took a job counting towels to ensure her admission at the local one. She also found a quick leg up by learning strokes that other female swimmers didn’t practice, including the butterfly.

After Esther Williams won three US national championships in swimming, impresario Billy Rose noticed her skill and beauty. Rose was running a show called Aquacade, which was an over-the-top music, dance, and swimming extravaganza. Rose offered Williams a part in the show to replace a departing performer. A stunned Williams jumped at the job, but she soon ran into trouble. While working in Aquacade, Williams co-starred with Olympic swimmer and actor Johnny Weissmuller. Later in her memoir, Williams spilled the tea about her heartthrob co-star. Williams wrote that Weissmuller was constantly trying to seduce her, but the Tarzan portrayer’s blatant attempts at courtship didn’t impress Williams. She ended up turning him down repeatedly.

Besides, Williams had her eye on someone much more dependable than a Hollywood actor. When attending Los Angeles City College, Esther Williams had met doctor-in-training Leonard Kovner and fell hard. The two tied the knot on June 27, 1940, near San Francisco. But their whirlwind romance wasn’t the fairy tale that Williams expected. She said of her husband that he was smart, handsome, dependable, and dull. Williams tried, but their union couldn’t stand the test of time, and they divorced after four years. Unfortunately, there was more disappointment in Williams’s future. By 1940, Esther Williams had set her sights on the Olympic Games. That year, Japan was the host city. But then tragedy struck.

Tensions that were leading to World War II caused the IOC to cancel the Olympics. Williams’s dream of winning gold was completely shattered. So she did what any resourceful athlete would do: she switched to acting. 20th Century Fox and MGM were studio competitors. It turned out that 20th Century Fox had an athlete in its acting corral, figure skater Sonja Henie, and so Louis B. Mayer wanted one for MGM. Mayer reached out to Williams and offered her a contract, but Williams was no pushover. She had the guts to make Mayer agree to two demands. Williams took one look at Mayer’s contract and made him propose two things. First, she’d get nine months to learn how to sing, dance, and most importantly, act. Williams wanted to really take Hollywood by storm.

But it was Williams’s second demand that showed her true passion. She wanted a pass to the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool. I guess the love of chlorine was still in her blood. Williams was soon ready for her big screen break, but sadly, it would take another star’s downfall to make it happen. Screen legend Lana Turner had just eloped with musician and all-round womanizer Artie Shaw, and MGM didn’t like it. Turner was up for a leading role opposite Clark Gable, but MGM suddenly retracted it and offered the part to Williams. There was just one problem. Turner really wanted to be in the movie, and so she’d do almost anything to make it happen. But this wasn’t just a simple feud between starlets.

MGM was using their position to manipulate both women. See, they’d only offer the part in Somewhere I’ll Find You to Williams in order to get Lana Turner to do what they wanted. But Turner was committed and eventually found her way back into the film, leaving Williams high and dry. She needed something to jump-start her career. Luckily, it was just around the corner. The same conflict that had taken her Olympic dreams away now provided Williams with a break. Because of World War II, US servicemen needed entertainment. Williams wasn’t an A-list actor, so she received the less than glamorous role of entertaining in hospitals. To find material, Williams and her publicity assistant tuned into the radio shows of comedians Bob Hope and Jack Benny and literally copied their jokes. Anything for the US Army.

But Williams also came up with a few hilarious bits of her own. Part of her hospital routine involved dragging servicemen on stage to do fake screen tests. The scenes for the tests were very romantic in nature, but the lines the servicemen had to say were always rejecting Williams’s amorous advances. This, of course, would cause the injured audiences to erupt in laughter. But then Williams would do something that made it impossible for the GI to refuse her. Just as the serviceman had denied Williams’s flirtatious advances many times, Williams pulled her tearaway clothes—both sweater and skirt—and revealed her outfit underneath: a gold lamé swimsuit. At this point, no man could say no, and the scene would end with a playful kiss.

Williams’s popularity with men in service was rising, but no one expected what came next. In 1943, a signed photo of Williams became part of an international and very unofficial competition. The servicemen in the navies of various countries fought over the photograph in a series of competitions, but they went way too far. One of the competitions left four men hospitalized. All this fuss over a single photograph of a woman in a swimsuit and the signature on it! Esther Williams never actually signed the photograph that there’d been such a fuss over. There were two friends in the Royal Australian Navy, and one of them, as a joke, signed a photograph of Williams to his friend. He wrote, “To my own George, with all my love and a passionate kiss.”

The competition for this forged photograph became so famous the story was retold in a documentary in 2007. Still, it got her name and face out there, and people found it hard to forget. In 1944, Esther Williams finally got her chance to shine on screen. She appeared with comedic actor Red Skelton in a film that was supposed to have the title Mr. Coed. The story was about a man who, in order to get back with a swimmer fiancé, enrolled in a women’s college. The studio was so impressed with Williams’s work on the film that they changed the title to Bathing Beauty to take the focus away from Skelton and onto Williams. And boy, did it ever work! To promote Bathing Beauty, MGM flooded the media with photos of Williams in her bathing suit, even though there weren’t that many swimming scenes in the actual movie.

For the premiere at the Astor Theater, MGM ordered up a billboard an enormous six stories high. On it was Williams diving straight into Times Square. The ad’s cheeky slogan read, “Come on in, the story is fine.” Williams had found her niche, and MGM was going to exploit it. Bathing Beauty went on to become a huge commercial success, and MGM saw a future in swimming-themed films. They invested some serious money into Williams as a box office draw. On the MGM lot, they constructed a pool. But it wasn’t just any ordinary pool; it was an enormous square, 90 feet by 90 feet and 25 feet deep. The pool cost a quarter of a million dollars and also had a special camera that followed Williams’s every stroke.

There was, however, a more dangerous entity lurking in the pool’s depths. At the center of MGM’s pool was a hydraulic lift, which they used to raise Williams out of the water 50 feet above the surface of the pool. The contraption was an accident waiting to happen, as we’ll see, and it eventually made a victim of Williams. MGM was becoming aware that swimming movies were box office gold, so they took any old script they had lying around and changed it into a swimming movie. Williams later said that all MGM did was change her leading man and the water in the pool. Williams knew she was making money for MGM, and it seemed to be going to her head.

MGM head honcho Louis B. Mayer was a scary man. When he scolded his stars, they usually just took it, but not Esther Williams. She once told a stunned Mr. Mayer to stop yelling at her and that he couldn’t scream at her until he could reach the end of the pool faster than her. And Mayer wasn’t the only recipient of her rage. Williams understood that she wouldn’t be receiving any nods from the Academy for her acting, but she was also acutely aware of how much money her films were making for MGM. She once told Deborah Kerr, who appeared in more serious films for MGM, that all she had to do was make one of her lowbrow water movies and it would pay for two of Kerr’s more highbrow ones. Boom! Williams knew her worth.

Well, at least she did at work. Elsewhere, that was a different story. Williams’s first marriage ended because her husband was dull, so for marriage number two, Williams did a complete U-turn. Ben Gage was a singer and actor who Williams had three children with, but their supposed happily ever after had a chilling dark side. Gage was also an alcoholic and a parasite who wasted $10 million of her money. In 1947, Esther Williams was busy in Mexico working on Fiesta with Fantasy Island star Ricardo Montalban. That’s when her wild husband Gage decided to show up on location, presumably to make Williams’s life miserable. Gage got into a fight with a staff member of the hotel and then got taken away by local authorities. The next move, the Mexican government asked Gage to leave the country and never return again.

But this wasn’t the worst problem on the set of Fiesta. While filming Fiesta in Mexico, Williams witnessed a series of disturbing catastrophes. More than a few of the stuntmen were actually gored by the bulls, which they miraculously survived. But more dangerous than the bulls was the cuisine. The director of photography and another crew member decided to try the local street food. Both of them contracted cholera and subsequently passed away. But there was more danger in store for Williams in her next films. Films which included swimming were new to Hollywood, so the costume designers were often at a loss as to how to create outfits that could tolerate getting soaked.

One such outfit was a plaid flannel piece for 1947’s This Time for Keeps. The thing got so heavy when it got wet that it dragged a horrified Williams to the bottom of the pool. Williams was stuck at the bottom of a pool, weighed down with her flannel swimsuit. The young star was running out of air and realized she only had two choices: drown or do it. Of course, Williams chose the latter, but had to shamefully resurface wearing nothing but a smile. All this swimsuit frustration led Williams to a new career. In 1952, Esther Williams noticed that the women in the US Navy had rather shapeless swimming suits as part of their uniforms at the time. Williams was a spokesperson for Cole swimwear, and she put forward a Cole design as a potential replacement.

After Williams modeled the suit for the Secretary of the Navy, they immediately bought 50,000 of the Cole swimsuits. Sadly, this did not fix her problems in the film industry. The film was 1952’s Million Dollar Mermaid, a biopic about Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman. The first problem was the costume. The designer used 50,000 gold sequins, which was a lot of weight, especially if you’re swimming in it. To make matters worse, she also had to wear a crown made of aluminum. It wasn’t heavy, but it was rigid. Then there was the dive. While wearing this elaborate outfit, director Mervyn LeRoy expected Williams to perform an outrageous stunt. He wanted her to dive from a height of 60 feet. Williams agreed, and the hydraulic lift carried her up.

Williams was already worried about the aluminum crown, but she bravely continued with the stunt. Once she reached 60 feet, LeRoy shouted, “Jump!” She did, but it was a huge mistake. Director LeRoy watched Williams dive with appreciation, called cut, and then said it was time for a lunch break. As the crew was heading for the food wagon, someone who was working in the wardrobe department heard a quiet cry for help. It was Williams. She was at the side of the pool in obvious pain and in need of an ambulance. Esther Williams later said that when the crown on her head hit the water, she heard a snapping sound from her neck and knew something was terribly wrong.

The result was 100 times worse than she could have imagined. Williams had three cracked vertebrae and needed to spend six months in a body cast. Something good, however, came from this film. Esther Williams often stated that Million Dollar Mermaid was her favorite film. Williams’s co-star in the film was the ruggedly handsome Victor Mature, who played a manly caveman in One Million B.C. Williams later admitted that the two had a passionate affair during the filming of Million Dollar Mermaid. Sadly, the body cast put an end to that. With Williams, however, there was always someone waiting in the wings. Williams met Argentine heartthrob Fernando Lamas while filming Dangerous When Wet, but the meeting almost never took place.

Lamas was only interested in making important pictures, and in his mind anyway, this was not one. Producers really wanted him, so they rewrote the film to his liking. Williams was still married to Gage at the time, but she kept her crush on Lamas long after filming concluded. Esther Williams had made over $80 million for MGM, but that didn’t stop them from treating her badly. After one of her films flopped—the movie was 1955’s Jupiter’s Darling, which had Williams playing a Roman woman named Amytis who helped the military commander Hannibal across the Tiber River—the film tanked, and MGM fired Williams without fanfare or even a simple thank you.

Don’t worry though. She wasn’t one to let something like that go. Two decades later, Williams finally went head-to-head with the studio who treated her so poorly and put her life in danger. It seemed that MGM used scenes from her films in their compilation movie That’s Entertainment. Williams became outraged when she realized the studio had neither consulted nor given her any profits from the film. MGM settled with her out of court. After MGM dumped her, Williams’s marriage to Gage was definitely on the rocks. She’d already had her affair with Victor Mature. Next was Jeff Chandler. Chandler was on contract with competing studio Universal Pictures and was one of their most bankable stars. Williams and Chandler were on the verge of tying the knot until Chandler gave her the surprise of her life.

Williams tells the story of walking into her bedroom and seeing Chandler in a way she’d never seen him before: dressed in a gown, wig, and high heels. Williams ended the relationship immediately and told no one—well, until her autobiography came out. Shortly after the shocking end to the relationship with Chandler, Williams was looking for help. She’d heard that fellow Hollywood star Cary Grant had found an unusual way to deal with his mental problems. Williams immediately contacted Grant and found out a secret: it was psychedelics, which Williams later called instant psychoanalysis. By 1959, Esther Williams had finally had it with her husband’s mishandling of her hard-earned cash.

With Gage watching the books, they were in debt to the IRS for the sum of $750,000. Williams wanted a divorce, so she stated her case to the judge. What she said was unforgettable. She told him, “I’m really tired of being what my husband does for a living.” What could the judge say? He granted the divorce. Remember how Williams had put a pin in Argentine actor Fernando? Well, now that she was single, she was ready to remove that pin and enjoy herself, especially after her miserable existence with her crooked ex-husband Gage. So, in 1961, Williams and Fernando became official companions. And fortunately, Fernando was not without his quirks.

He wanted a wife that would do all the cleaning and cooking and fetch him drinks when he ordered them. He even burned all of Williams’s pictures of her ex-husband. Before Fernando would agree to marry Williams, she asked him to do something extreme. Wait, actually, Fernando made an ultimatum: cut ties with the children or lose him forever. Shockingly, Williams chose Fernando over her children. So there she was: no career, no children, just her husband. You’d think this marriage didn’t have a chance, but Williams’s description of it was jaw-dropping. She said her marriage to Fernando was “the apple in the sky.” Williams stayed with Fernando until he passed from cancer in 1982.

Once Fernando was out of her life, Williams got back into hers. First, she got back with her kids, which must have been a long-overdue reunion. The next stop was her career. She no longer wanted to act, but she took the opportunity to launch her own line of swimwear, which is still on sales racks today. In 1994, Esther Williams walked down the aisle for a final time. Her husband was actor and writer Edward Bell, who was 14 years her junior. The two remained married until Williams’s passing from natural causes on June 6, 2013. In a fitting tribute to Williams’s love of spending time in water, she arranged to have her ashes tossed in the Pacific Ocean.