THE MILLION DOLLAR MERMAID: An Autobiography

(Simon & Schuster; September 14, 1999).

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Esther Williams swam her way into the hearts of millions as the All-American star of some of the most exuberant and innovative movies of all time. Now she tells readers what it was really like to work at MGM, the premier studio during Hollywood's Golden Age.

 With warmth, humor, and uncompromising candor, Williams discusses her unique career, her often-troubled love life, and many other legends of the studio era, including Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Johnny Weissrnuller, Lana Turner, Mickey Rooney, Greer Garson, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Rex Harrison, Victor Mature, Jeff Chandler, Ava Gardner, Van Johnson, and Louis B Mayer.

She speaks of her long and sometimes difficult marriage to her third husband, Fernando Lamas, who demanded that she stop being Esther Williams the movie star, and the financial difficulties she experienced after her second husband managed to lose $10 million of her money. But she also writes of the wonderful new life she has created for herself in recent years; her role as the “godmother” of the Olympic sport of synchronized swimming, her sponsorship of a successful swimsuit line, her reconciliation with her three children, and her happy marriage to her fourth husband, Edward Bell.

Growing up in modest circumstances in Los Angeles during the Depression, Williams kicked and stroked her way through hundreds of miles of water to a national swimming championship in 1939 at the age of seventeen.  Williams' lovely face, radiant smile, and beautiful figure attracted the attention of impresario Billy Rose, who thrust her onto the stage of his Aquacade and made her a media darling overnight. (In the meantime, in the pool, Esther was fighting off the advances of the first Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, who constantly tried to grope her and had a penchant for removing his swimsuit...) Not convinced that show business was an altogether dependable or wholesome enterprise, Williams returned to her job as a clerk at an exclusive Beverly Hills clothing store (where

Marlene Dietrich once forced her to model clothes while lounging in the nude) and married a young medical student For nearly a year, she turned down Louis B Mayer's attempts to sign her at MGM, but Mayer was not a man accustomed to taking no for an answer. When she did sign with the studio, she insisted on training and acting lessons before going in front of the cameras. Many of the pretty women signed by the studios were there because a producer hoped to get them in bed. Esther, however, was intent on a career when she finally had a screen test her partner was Clark Gable, who walked into the studio with Carole Lombard on his arm, threw out the script, told her to respond “No" to everything he said, and ultimately, kissed her passionately three times. It was Gable, in fact, who first called her 'The Memiaid" - a nickname that would stick with her throughout her movie career.

Like other legendary stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland, Williams entered “MGM University”, where she was taught how to walk, talk, and dress. The first screen test came about because Mayer wanted her first film appearance to be as Clark Gable's co-star in Somewhere I'll Find You. Williams, however, knowing she wasn't ready for such an assignment, turned him down. Although the diminutive Mayer pitched one of his famous fits, throwing himself on the floor and rolling around in a white suit, she held her ground and invoked an unusual clause in her contract, which guaranteed her nine months of training before she appeared in her first film.

 Williams' first featured role was as Mickey Rooney's girlfriend in Andy Hardy's Double Life. She created a sensation with her graceful underwater swimming, and especially with an unscripted, open-mouth kiss that she initiated with Rooney. After he mouthed the word "Woo!" into the camera, the MGM publicity machine dubbed her "Woo-Woo Girl, The Girl Who Had It AlI.” The studio built her a $250,000 swimming pool set more than the yearly salary of most stars in those days and launched a series of films, including Bathing Beauty, Dangerous When Wet, Texas Carnival, Easy In Love, and Million Dollar Mermaid, that would make her one of the world's ten top box office attractions.

 Impressed by her success with a line of bathing suits sold under her name, Life magazine dubbed her the "Mermaid Tycoon," the perfect homemaker, the Hollywood glamour queen, and a sex symbol in a bathing suit - all rolled into one, a kind of post-World War II version of Martha Stewart. "But it was all a Hollywood PR fantasy," Williams writes. “Behind that public facade was a woman in deep emotional pain." For most of her film career, Williams was working twelve-hour days in that huge pool at MGM, creating movie fantasies, and then coming home each night to a personal life that seemed to unravel more each day. After divorcing the medical student, who adamantly    opposed her movie career, she married a handsome band singer and bon vivant named Ben Gage, who fathered her three children. But Gage,. who seemed to have no ambitions of his own, drank and    gambled away her hard-earned fortune. A passionate affair with Victor Mature fell victim to Mature’s obsessive womanizing, and a strong attraction to Jeff Chandler ended when Williams discovered in the most shocking way possible that he was a cross-dresser.

In THE MILLION DOLLAR MERMAID, Williams shares the many highs, lows and laughs of an extraordinary life, including:

One of the darkest times in her life came in 1959, after her divorce from Gage. Seeking help, on the advice of her good friend Cary Grant, she took LSD under the direction of a psychiatrist in order to achieve some clarity, and found it an enlightening experience.

 Her need for achievement arose from her desire to fill the void left by the loss other older brother, a promising child actor whose untimely death threw her financially struggling family into despair.

 She was nearly killed several times in the making of her movies. Once she was trapped in a black underwater compartment with no visible exit. Another time she was nearly dashed into sharp coral while aboard an outrigger canoe in Hawaii. On still another occasion, she took a 50-foot dive with an aluminum crown on her head, which snapped her neck back when she hit the water and almost rendered her a quadriplegic.

The time she had to wear a flannel "lumberjack" swimsuit for a film set in rustic Michigan, which looked fetching but got so heavy in the water that she had to strip naked in the pool and let it fall to the bottom.

How Billy Crystal modeled his famous Fernando character (“You look rnahvelous!") on her husband Fernando Lamas's many appearances on “The Tonight Show.”

How Lamas disliked her children, and prevented them from living with their mother by building a lavish home with only one bedroom suite.

The time Bette Davis got furious at her because Davis's then husband, Gary Merrill, made a pass at her.

Her bitter feud with MGM studio chief Dore Schary, who succeeded Mayer.

The time Williams, along with half of Hollywood, helped "Sexy Rexy" Harrison, then married to Lily Palmer, conceal an affair he was having with starlet Carole Landis.

How Gene Kelly tormented her mercilessly during the making of Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

The evening she watched Ava Gardner, who wore no underwear, dance the flamenco on a tabletop in Spain.

How Busby Berkeley choreographed some of the most memorable water sequences in her movies, including one in which he  inadvertently threatened her life by running the camera boat too close to her when she was on water skis.

The time she witnessed an aging Joan Crawford, wearing a  turquoise bird outfit, begging an empty theater not to abandon her.

Her marriage to the dashing Lamas - she felt sheltered and secure, but also shackled. Still, She stayed with him for twenty-two years, determined to heal the hurt little boy within him.

How she reinvented herself after Lamas' death by getting into shape, losing weight, and becoming a television commentator for the Olympics.

The wisdom and contentment she has discovered in her later years, even as a "Mermaid Without Portfolio.”

Not since David Niven's best-selling “The Moon is a Balloon” and it’s sequel, “Bring on the Empty Horses”, or Shelley Winters' sensational tell-all “Shelley, Also Known as Shirley”, has a member of the  Hollywood pantheon so frankly portrayed life inside one of Tinseltown's classic dream factories.

Like Esther Williams herself, THE MILLION DOLLAR MERMAID is witty, acutely perceptive, and utterly entertaining.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Esther Williams, retired from the screen since the 1960s, lives in Beverly Hills, where she heads up a flourishing line of bathing suits. Her coauthor, Digby Diehl, is a popular media critic and writer. He lives in Los Angeles.

 ABOUT THE BOOK

 THE MILLION DOLLAR MERMAID - By Esther Williams, with Digby Diehl

Published by Simon & Schuster - Publication date: September 14, 1999

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