October 3, 1999

Liquid Asset

A memoir by Esther Williams, whose all-American good looks and talent in the water turned her into a Hollywood star.

Related Links At Home With Ester Williams: Swimming Upstream (Sept. 2, 1999) First Chapter: 'The Million Dollar Mermaid'

By ROBERT GOTTLIEB

THE MILLION DOLLAR MERMAID By Esther Williams with Digby Diehl. Illustrated. 416 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster

here are movie actors and there are movie stars, and then there are performers who are entire genres in themselves: their films could not have existed without them. Without the dimpled Sonja Henie, 20th Century Fox's ice skating musicals could never have been made. And when MGM decided to trump Fox's ace with swimming extravaganzas -- '' 'Melt the ice, get a swimmer, make it pretty!' cried Louis B. Mayer'' -- it was Esther Williams who made them possible. MGM knew it, too. As Williams tells it in her fresh and convincing autobiography, ''The Million Dollar Mermaid,'' after she became a swimming champion at not quite 17 and a hit in Billy Rose's Aquacade in the 1940 San Francisco World's Fair, the studio practically hijacked her from her steady and congenial salesgirl job at I. Magnin.

Esther Williams was not only a terrific swimmer, she had pinup proportions and the perfect 1940's all-American look. She couldn't act, she couldn't dance, she couldn't sing. But she had what it takes in the water; and the qualities of character that had made her a champion in a highly competitive sport -- self-discipline, strength of will, clear-headedness -- were the qualities essential for survival in the studio system. She stood up to her treacherous swimming coach, to the rascally Billy Rose, to the priapic Johnny Weissmuller in the Aquacade (where ''everyone seemed to be in heat'' and where ''under the stage, he'd whip off his trunks so I could see that he was beautifully equipped'').

She stood up to her swindling agent, to Louis B. Mayer's tantrums, to Howard Hughes (''Don't even try, Howard, I'm too athletic''), to tyrannical directors and egomaniacal co-stars. Even the Secretary of the Navy didn't daunt her. Modeling her Cole of California Esther Williams bathing suit, she asks, ''Mr. Secretary, could you make this the official swimsuit of the U.S. Navy?'' ''Consider it done.''

You can enjoy Esther Williams musicals (I do) and you can find them ludicrous (I do), but you can't dispute her determination. No star ever worked harder, often under perilous conditions (''I think Esther Williams is dead,'' her wardrobe lady shouted once. ''She can't get out of the pool''). And her hard work paid off; quickly she became a top 10 box office attraction. The formula of her movies was cut and dried -- what she calls the mismatched-lovers plot punctuated by gigantic aquatic production numbers. Sometimes she had fun -- appearing often opposite that other all-American, Van Johnson. Sometimes it was hell, as when Gene Kelly tormented her during the making of ''Take Me Out to the Ball Game.'' The problem was that ''as much as Kelly resented the fact that I was not a dancer, he resented my height even more.'' Typically, when things got really bad, she laid it on the line: ''Gene . . . I have perfect proportions in a swimsuit, and that's why I'm here making movies at MGM. I'm sorry that my physique doesn't fit in with your plans.'' 

So how did it happen that this formidable professional led such a disastrous personal life? She begins her book by revealing that in 1959, following the example of Cary Grant, she took LSD to ''find some answers.'' She was 37 years old. Her second marriage -- to the alcoholic and compulsive gambler Ben Gage -- was over, but he had left her owing $750,000 to the I.R.S. And with MGM crumbling, nobody was going to make multimillion-dollar aqua-musicals ever again. The LSD helped explain her to herself by making her relive the moment -- she was 8 -- when her adored 16-year-old brother, Stanton, the pride and hope of the Williams family, died without warning. ''Suddenly . . . a revelation hit me, and I knew what my life was all about. . . . His talent, his good looks, his ambition had been our only chance to break out of poverty. . . . Now that he was gone, somebody had to take his place or we would all be lost. . . . I looked about me and realized that . . . I would have to be that rock. . . . If my shoulders weren't strong enough as yet, then I would make them strong.''

She proved strong enough to survive being raped repeatedly by a 16-year-old boy her parents had taken into the family (this began when she was 13 and went on for two years). She survived a foolish early marriage. She even survived Ben Gage; she had to -- they had three children, and he certainly wasn't going to provide. Luckily, her mother was a source of unsentimental common sense. (''I heard the voice of my mother, Bula, in the back of my mind. 'Esther,' she asked, 'what part of the problem are you?' '') Nor did it hurt that she was healthily sexual -- enjoying romps with at least two of her leading men, Victor Mature and Jeff Chandler, although the latter relationship ended when he cheerfully revealed himself as a confirmed cross-dresser. Even then, she kept her sense of humor and her cool, explaining to him, ''I can't be married to a matron,'' and leaving him with a useful fashion tip: ''Jeff, you're too big for polka dots.''

Yet this is the point when her story takes a deeply disturbing turn. In 1960, Fernando Lamas, her leading man seven years earlier in ''Dangerous When Wet,'' re-enters her life. For the next 22 years, she lives in total submission to him -- it would be fair to call it bondage. Their deal is simple: she will stop being ''Esther Williams''; only ''Fernando Lamas'' matters. She will recede from public view, be a housewife, have no wishes or will of her own. And no other man must look at her -- in fact, it's better when she gets fat, so that no man will want to. In return, he will be faithful.

Lamas's peculiarities apparently stemmed from immense vanity covering profound insecurity, and some of them can be seen as amusing. ''He absolutely hated wrinkles. If we were driving to a party, he often would get behind the wheel nude from the waist down, with his perfectly pressed English gabardine pants on a hanger behind him. When we got within a couple of blocks of our destination, he'd find a secluded spot, leap out into the bushes and put on his trousers.'' (Why didn't I ever think of that?) But no one could find amusing his refusal to have anything to do with his wife's three children. They were not welcome in the Lamas household, and chillingly Williams relates how she spent years surreptitiously cooking for them and driving the food to where they were staying, helping them with their homework and scurrying nervously home. Only in 1982 does she turn back into the Esther Williams we thought we knew, defying Lamas by insisting on going to her daughter's wedding. And at this very juncture, he is stricken by the cancer that swiftly killed him.

This is a dreadful story, and Williams tells it honestly. But does she really understand how and why it happened? She insists that she made a sacred pledge to care for Lamas until death, to make up to him for the traumas of his childhood. (''I have always been a person of my word, and only death could set me free from the vows I took.'') But surely there is more to it than that. Perhaps this was the price she paid for being the family rock. Perhaps she found psychic advantages to being trapped in a pumpkin shell. Happily, since Lamas's death she has regained her energy and drive, making a good fourth marriage, re-emerging as a successful businesswoman and becoming, as she puts it, ''godmother to a sport'' -- synchronized swimming.

And she has written, with the help of Digby Diehl, this interesting and engaging account of her life, and of the Hollywood she knew.

Her account is peppered with anecdotes about the great and the near-great -- Dietrich, Crawford, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, even the Windsors: she describes a dinner in Spain where the Duke was passing out from drink until ''finally the Duchess took him into a bathroom upstairs and emerged with him on her arm. He wasn't steady by any means, but at least he was vertical. 'I used your favorite thing,' Wally shouted to me proudly. . . . 'I threw water in his face!' ''Water had certainly carried Esther Williams a long way.

Robert Gottlieb is the former editor in chief of Knopf and The New Yorker.