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| September 2,
1999
AT HOME WITH
ESTHER WILLIAMS
Swimming Upstream - By TODD S. PURDUM
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BEVERLY
HILLS, Calif. -- On the spreading terrace of the hilltop house,
there's a pretty blue pool and an Esther Williams-brand
whirlpool spa. There's a panoramic view to the Pacific Ocean and
a custom-made Esther Williams kick board propped on the lawn.
There's Perry Como, on an unseen stereo, singing "Fly Me to the
Moon," and Judy Garland insisting, "I've Got a Right to Sing the
Blues."
Esther Williams today, in her element.
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Dennis
Keeley for The New York Times
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But nothing quite prepares a visitor for the sight of Esther
Williams herself, in short white shorts, black flats, black tube
top and white cotton blouse adorned with a rhinestone-speckled
applique of a top hat and gloves on the front. She emerges from
the shade of her living room in full-body makeup, legs firm and
posture perfect, smiling that 1,000-watt waterproof smile, and
asks politely, "Would you like to take a swim?"
The offer is tempting, but there are no trunks and the task at
hand is talk. The topic is Miss Williams' new memoir, "The
Million Dollar Mermaid" (Simon & Schuster), a ribald account of
her years as MGM's aquatic sensation, the godmother of
synchronized swimming and one of the top 10 box office stars in
the world. The book, which she wrote with Digby Diehl,
chronicles her journey from genteel poverty in southwest Los
Angeles through amateur swimming championships in the late
1930s, four marriages, failed romances, lecherous co-stars,
sadistic directors, broken eardrums, fractured vertebrae, family
tragedies and a movie career that ended nearly 40 years ago, a
victim of changing tastes and times.
Perhaps the book's most explosive story is its account of how
Jeff Chandler, the silver-haired macho star with whom Miss
Williams had a passionate affair in the late 1950s and who died
in 1961, had a secret life as a cross-dresser. Miss Williams
writes that after discovering her lover in makeup and flowered
chiffon, she first declared, "You look like Betsy Bloomingdale,"
then broke off the romance with this parting shot: "Jeff, you're
too big for polka dots."
"I haven't ever talked about any of this," Miss Williams says,
by way of explaining why now, at 76, she decided to disgorge a
flood of secrets, many of which are still too salacious to be
more than swiftly summarized in this newspaper. The Chandler
story drew a scolding from the gossip columnist Liz Smith as
unseemly, and Miss Williams says she "gave a lot of thought"
before deciding to tell it and other tales from a long-vanished
time.
But for all her memoir's confessional mode, and for all her
relaxed, unpretentious manner, she remains every inch the studio
star that MGM made her, capable of deflecting any question with
a friendly anecdotal filibuster. Eventually, it emerges that she
first considered this autobiographical exercise 15 years ago, as
a television movie.
Her third husband, Fernando Lamas, the Latin lover who inspired
Billy Crystal's "You look mahvelous!" routine, had just died
after a relationship of more than 20 years in which, she writes,
he had controlled her every move, forced her to choose between
him and her three children from a previous marriage and expected
her to wait on him hand and foot. She planned to end the movie
with his death.
Then she got a telephone call from Edward Bell, a former French
literature professor and sometime actor 10 years her junior, who
was helping arrange some events for the 1984 Olympics in Los
Angeles. He reminded her that her life was far from over, and he
was right, because he became her fourth husband and now the two
say they hope the book's publication might finally prompt that
television movie after all.
"My mother once said to me, 'There's something that should be on
a needlepoint frame in your house: "Every age has its
compensations," "' Miss Williams says. " 'You may get older, but
you'll know more.' And I guess I didn't have the view from the
bridge. Fernando had to stop being so in control of my life. I
couldn't have written this book with him alive. He'd've had to
see every page and OK it. I think it's so funny when people
think they can't control a movie star. They can. We're just
women, you know."
Miss Williams' life story is a tale of the tug of war between a
resilient, resourceful woman and the men she says managed to
exploit her. There was the foster brother who repeatedly raped
her when she was a teen-ager, and the MGM moguls who plucked her
from the Aquacade at the 1940 World's Fair in San Francisco to
make her a swimming version of the skating movie star, Sonja
Henie. There was the first husband, a medical student who left
her when she decided to pursue a film career, and the second, a
hard drinker who lost millions of dollars of her earnings
through bad investments and gambling. She found great passion
with Fernando Lamas, her Argentine co-star in "Dangerous When
Wet," but says he was so jealous that he tore out any page of
her scrapbooks that contained pictures of her children and
refused to let them live with her, though she took in his son,
Lorenzo, by the actress Arlene Dahl.
Just why Miss Williams had so much hard luck with men is
difficult to fathom. In the book, she explains how her mother, a
teacher who later became a psychologist, had not wanted a fifth
child and tried to induce a miscarriage while pregnant with
Esther. But in the book, and in a two-hour conversation, she
raises these presumably traumatic details only to dismiss them
with rueful asides like, "Four would have been enough for me,
too."
"I've thought a lot about that, because writing a book is like
therapy," Miss Williams says of her man trouble. "And of course
I had that wonderful mother who, when I was just 5 years old
coming home from kindergarten, would say: 'I wonder why it is
people hit you in the nose, Esther. What part of the problem are
you?'
"I'll bet if I compare notes with Junie Allyson and Debbie
Reynolds and anyone else who's had more than one marriage, the
fact is that you fall in love and it's so wonderful to think
about something other than yourself and whether the script's
right for you and who's going to be your leading man, that you
don't really ask yourself questions about the fellow. He's just
wonderful looking and he dances well and you have a wonderful
time and it's fun to go out and all of a sudden you're in a
lifelong marriage."
Miss Williams tried therapy, but says she gave up when two
successive psychiatrists sat gaga before a movie star. In 1959,
her career at a seeming end and her second marriage over, she
did try LSD under the direction of Cary Grant's psychiatrist,
and had a hallucinatory experience in which she envisioned
herself in the body of her older brother Stanton, a child movie
actor who had died years earlier as a teen-ager. She begins her
book with an account of the trip.
"That was like solving a mystery," she says quietly now. "I
realized that my mother and father had not filled in the
blanks," in their lives, "and the reason was that it was because
it was such a shock to live without that wonderful boy. So I
became that boy. Cary told me LSD was like instant psychiatry,
and I was sorry the kids got a hold of it and made it a
recreational drug, but I think it needed to be clinical for a
long time, tested and tested."
Miss Williams herself was repeatedly tested. She arrived at MGM
self-conscious enough about her abilities to demand a clause in
her contract stipulating that she could not be forced to appear
in a movie for at least nine months. "I told them when I went to
MGM, I don't sing, I don't dance, and I've got to learn to act,"
she says. "So they immediately started me singing."
In "Neptune's Daughter," with Ricardo Montalban, she was
supposed to sing Frank Loesser's "I'd Love to Get You (On a Slow
Boat to China)" but the MGM censors decided that "get" meant
"have" and banned the song. "So then I went to Frank, and said,
'Have you got anything else?"' The result was "Baby, It's Cold
Outside," which went on to win the Academy Award as best song of
1949.
The hoity-toity of Hollywood, including Gene Kelly, loved to
poke fun at Miss Williams, and one MGM veteran from those years
recently recalled that studio wags used to describe her acting
by striking the sides of their heads with their hands, as if to
shake water out of their ears. But because her movies were
wildly popular, the studio seldom gave her a chance to stretch
her water wings. Even her most talented colleagues were awed by
her grace and skill in the pool.
"Once my front doorbell rang when I lived in Mandeville Canyon
and it was Danny Kaye and he's standing in my doorway with his
daughter, Dena," she recalls. "I'd never met him. And he said,
'I want you to give my daughter a swimming lesson.' And I said,
'If she'd showed an interest in piano, would you go to Arthur
Rubinstein or Horowitz?' He said, 'Yes, I would,' without any
hesitation, so I gave Dena her first swimming lesson. Happened
again with Candy Bergen and her Chloe."
Miss Williams' relationships with her own children were not
always so buoyant. She writes with some guilt of shuttling "the
only station wagon in Bel Air that smelled of gravy" between her
house and her former husband's in Santa Monica, taking her
children meals and then returning to Fernando Lamas.
"Mom was always there within touching distance, but she was very
busy and Fernando was very difficult," says her daughter, Susan,
who grew up mostly living with an aunt and her father and is now
an administrator at a nonprofit counseling center in the San
Francisco area. "We used to meet in grocery store parking lots
and talk. Fernando wouldn't let us come to the house. Once I got
older and was able to confront him and ask him why he did that,
he was very clear: we were the evidence that my mother had slept
with another man."
The first Christmas after Fernando's death from pancreatic
cancer, Miss Williams tearfully apologized to her children and
promised to try to make up for lost time. She says they are now
close, and her daughter says that "we've found a relationship
that's so precious to both of us, and because of what we've been
through it feels invulnerable," though she says it was still a
bit of a shock to read in the book of her mother's affair with
Victor Mature, her hunky co-star in "Million Dollar Mermaid."
Miss Williams says she now also has far more time to keep up
with old pals in the "big club" than she ever did when they were
all working. She loves to visit with June Allyson and Ann
Miller, whom she drove to James Stewart's funeral two years ago,
getting a traffic ticket on the way.
Though the Turner Classic Movies channel on cable television has
helped her movies reach a new generation (the channel plans a
daylong Williams festival on Sept. 15), these days, Miss
Williams' bread and butter is business: licensing arrangements
for above-ground swimming pools and a line of swimsuits for
mature women, based on some of her classic costumes and sold at
department stores like Nordstrom and Dayton Hudson.
"Women worldwide are fighting a thing called gravity," says Miss
Williams, who still swims every day in her backyard pool and
writes that she had a face lift before appearing as a
commentator at the 1984 Olympics. "I say to women when I talk to
them, 'You girls of 18 have until about 25, 30 at the most, and
then you have to report to me.' My suits are quality fabric."
"I don't know," the old star says bluntly. "It just seems so
crazy to have a bra made out of a piece of cotton that could
double as a napkin on the table. And the thongs! God, we've
spent our lives trying to keep our underwear out of that spot,
and all of a sudden they want to put a fish line there? I have
very definite ideas about what a swimsuit should be: it should
be swimmable."
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