Esther Williams, the star of MGM’s extremely popular aqua-musicals, has died in Beverly Hills at the age of 91. Hers was a singular talent. No one else among Louis B. Mayer’s charges would have dared to say: “I’m a swimmer not an actress,” or “I can’t act, I can’t sing, I can’t dance. My pictures are put together out of scraps they find in the producer’s waste basket.”
Williams was born in Inglewood, Los Angeles, in 1921. By the age of 16, she had won all the major American swimming championships, setting world records on the 100-meter freestyle (1 minute 09.0 seconds) and the 880-yard relay. She also worked as a stock girl at a department store, modeling clothing for customers and appearing in newspaper ads.
She was due to enter the 1940 Summer Olympics, but they were canceled because of the outbreak of World War II. While at the University of Southern California, she was persuaded to take part in the Aquacade at the San Francisco Exposition — alongside MGM’s Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller. She was spotted there by the studio’s talent scouts and signed by Mayer, who put her into the Mickey Rooney vehicle “Andy Hardy’s Double Life” (1942).
Her subsequent movies found ingenious and not so ingenious ways of incorporating swimming sequences, though it wasn’t until 1947’s “Fiesta” that she attained star billing. Possessed of one of Hollywood’s most fabulous smiles, she shone in richly colored comedies and elaborate musicals that included synchronized swimming sequences and underwater ballets. Busby Berkeley choreographed some of her films, restoring the flavor of his elaborate 1930s routines.
After a miserable experience on 1949’s “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” Williams starred with Ricardo Montalbán in “Neptune’s Daughter,” in which they duetted on Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” It won the Oscar for Best Song at the 1949 Academy Awards.
Her standout hit was 1952’s “Million Dollar Mermaid,” in which she played the Australian swimming and diving star Annette Kellerman. In 1953’s “Dangerous When Wet” she swam with Tom and Jerry and acted with Fernando Lamas, who would become the third of her four husbands. The taste for swimming musicals peaked with that movie. After leaving MGM acrimoniously over a contract dispute, she signed with Universal but failed to make the transition into dramatic parts.
Reuters’ obituary of Williams records her taking a more benign attitude to her screen persona than she had done previously.
“I look at that girl and I like her,” she said. “I can see why she became popular with audiences. There was an unassuming quality about her. She was certainly wholesome.”
That may be, but it reckons without the spectacle, ostensibly innocent, of Williams gliding, gyrating, and undulating in the water as if anticipating ecstasy. One imagines it gave as much pleasure to the GIs overseas as the more overt charms of Betty Grable, who was the only star to earn more than Williams in the late 1940s.