Esther Williams by jekky
Early years Born in Inglewood California Williams was the fifth and youngest child of Louis Stanton Williams and Bula Myrtle Gilpin October 8 1885 1975 Louis Williams was a sign painter and Bula Williams was a psychologist The two were lived on neighboring farms in Kansas and carried on a nine year courtship until June 1 1908 when they eloped and set off for California However they ran out of money in Salt Lake City Utah and settled there William s brother Stanton September 4 1912 March 3 1929 was discovered by actress Marjorie Rambeau which lead to the family including sisters Maurine and June and brother David moving to the Los Angeles area to be near the studios Louis Williams purchased a small piece of land in southwest area of town and had a small house built there Williams was born in the living room which was also where the family slept until Louis Williams was able to add bedrooms In 1929 Williams brother Stanton Williams died after his colon burst Williams at the Los Angeles Athletic Club in 1939 In 1935 Bula Williams invited 16 year old Buddy McClure to live with her family McClure had recently lost his mother and Mrs Williams was still grieving over the death of her son One night when the rest of the family was visiting relatives in Alhambra McClure raped Williams Williams was terrified to tell anyone about the incident and waited two years before finally revealing the truth to her parents They seemed unsure of Williams s story claiming that McClure was sensitive and were sympathetic towards him when he admitted his guilt After Williams stood up to him and banished him from her home McClure joined the Coast Guard and Williams never saw him again Williams was enthusiastic about swimming in her youth Her older sister Maurine took her to the beach and the local pool She took a job counting towels at the pool to pay the five cent entry fee and while there had swimming lessons from the male lifeguards From them she learned the male only swimming strokes including the butterfly breaststroke with which she would later break records Williams planned to compete in the 1940 Summer Olympics but it was canceled due to the outbreak of World War II Williams graduated from Washington Preparatory High School in 1939 where she served as class Vice President During her senior year of high school Williams received a D in her algebra course preventing her from getting a scholarship from the University of Southern California She enrolled in Los Angeles City College to retake the course To earn money to pay tuition Williams took a job as a stock girl at I Magnin department store where she also modeled clothing for customers and appeared in newspaper advertisements While Williams was working at I Magnin she was contacted by Billy Rose s assistant and asked to audition as a replacement for Eleanor Holm in his Aquacade show Williams impressed Rose and she got the role The Aquacade was part of the Golden Gate International Exposition and Williams was partnered with Olympic swimmer and Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller who as Williams wrote in her autobiography repeatedly tried to seduce her during the show s run Despite this Williams remained with the show until it closed on September 29 1940 Career It was at Aquacade that Williams first attracted attention from Metro Goldwyn Mayer scouts MGM s head Louis B Mayer had been looking for a female sports star for the studio to compete with Fox s figure skating star Sonja Henie Williams signed her contract with MGM in 1941 In her contract were two clauses the first being that she receive a guest pass to the Beverly Hills Hotel where she could swim in the pool every day and the second that she would not appear on camera for nine months to allow for acting singing dancing and diction lessons Williams wrote in her autobiography If it took nine months for a baby to be born I figured my birth from Esther Williams the swimmer to Esther Williams the movie actress would not be much different A pin up of Williams from a 1945 issue of Yank the Army Weekly While top stars at the studios such as Judy Garland Betty Grable and Shirley Temple took part in bond tours during Williams was asked to take in hospital tours At this point Williams had achieved pin up status due to the number of photographs of her in bathing suits To prepare Williams and her publicity assistant would listen of Bob Hope and Jack Benny s radio programs and retell the funniest jokes while at the hospitals Williams also invited GIs to dance with her on stage and take part in mock screen tests The men would receive a card telling them their lines and they would act out the scene in front of the other soldiers These tests were always romance scenes and included Williams begging the men to make love to her character to which they were required to say refuse multiple times When the men said the final no Williams would pull at her tear away skirt and sweater leaving nothing but a gold lam swimsuit The scenes would always end with the men giving in and kissing her after that stunt Her hospital tours continued into the 1950s 1940s Three weeks after signing her contract George Sidney directed William s first screen test The studio was impressed and when Lana Turner eloped with Artie Shaw Williams screen tested with the leading man Clark Gable for the film Somewhere I ll Find You However Turner divorced Shaw after four months of marriage and rejoined the cast of the film After several short subject films Williams appeared in Andy Hardy s Double Life as Sheila Brooks a coed with whom Andy falls in love This was followed by a small part in the film A Guy Named Joe which starred Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne It was there that she first worked with Van Johnson with whom she would later partner in five films Bathing Beauty previously titled Mr Coed starred Red Skelton as a man who enrolls in a women s college to win back his swimming instructor fiance played by Williams This was her first Technicolor musical and the studio changed the title of the film to showcase Williams Nearly all of the posters for the film featured Williams in a bathing suit though the swimming sequences make up a small portion of the film Her date to the premiere at the Astor Theater in New York City was future husband Ben Gage For the event MGM publicity set up a six story tall billboard of Williams diving into Times Square with a large sign that said Come on in The water s fine Williams Van Johnson and Carleton G Young in Thrill of a Romance Williams appeared in the film Ziegfeld Follies as herself which was followed by the musical romance Thrill of a Romance Van Johnson co starred as a decorated war veteran who falls in love with Williams while on her honeymoon Thrill of a Romance was the 8th highest grossing film of 1945 Williams had to help Johnson swim and she placed her hand under his back to keep him afloat The studio s publicity department also tried put the two together in public as much as possible in hopes of encouraging a romance though Williams was involved with Gage at the time When asked why they didn t date Johnson replied because I m afraid she can t get her webbed feet into a pair of evening sandals Williams tried a more serious role in 1946 s The Hoodlum Saint with William Powell Audiences were expecting Powell s Nick Charles persona and rejected the idea of a romance between Williams and Powell onscreen She also appeared in Easy to Wed a remake of 1936 s Libeled Lady with Johnson and Lucille Ball Williams as Maria in Fiesta Fiesta originally called Fiesta Brava starred Williams as Ricardo Montalbn s twin sister Maria who pretends to be her bullfighting brother in hopes of luring him back home Audiences and Williams thought the film was silly as Williams and Montalbn had vastly different accents Montalbn was born in Mexico and was a native Spanish speaker and Williams had a midwestern accent she had picked up from her Kansas born parents Production was difficult with a multitude of problems By 1947 Gage and Williams were married and Gage had traveled to Mexico for the making of the film He got into a fight with an employee of the hotel the cast was staying at and was arrested and subsequently thrown out of the country The director of photography Sidney Wagner and one other crew member died from cholera from eating contaminated street food and many of the film s stuntmen were sent to the hospital after being gored by bulls Director Dick Thorpe hadn t wanted the bulls killed as they usually were at the end of a bullfight because he believed them to be too expensive to replace After filming was completed on Fiesta Williams appeared in the romance film This Time for Keeps with singer Johnnie Johnston In 1948 Williams signed a contract with swimwear company Cole of California to appear as their spokesperson Because of this Williams and the other swimmers in her films wear Cole swimsuits Because the aqua musicals were an entirely new genre the studio s costume designers had little experience designing practical swimsuits William s plaid flannel swimsuit for Thrill of a Romance was so heavy that Williams was dragged to the bottom of the pool She had to unzip the suit and swim naked to the edge of the pool to avoid drowning Cole swimsuits used latex which meant zippers were no longer necessary While filming 1952 s Skirts Ahoy Williams discovered that members of the WAVES program received thin cotton shapeless swimsuits as part of their uniforms Williams modeled a Cole swimsuit for the Secretary of the Navy and explained that the new swimsuits helped support women s figures the United States Navy ordered 50 000 suits immediately In 1949 Williams began filming Take Me Out to the Ball Game It was a period musical which starred Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as players on a baseball team owned by Williams s character K C Higgins In her autobiography she described filming as pure misery claiming that Kelly and writer Stanley Donen treated her with contempt and went out of their way to make jokes at her expense The film was well received critically and became a major commercial success raking in 3 4 million in rentals and becoming the 11th highest earning film of the year Williams also made Neptune s Daughter that year co starring with Ricardo Montalbn Red Skelton and Betty Garrett who had also been in Take Me Out to the Ball Game In the film Williams sings the song Baby It s Cold Outside with Montalbn The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 22nd Academy Awards Williams and Montalbn were originally slated to sing I d Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China but studio censors thought the song was too sexual interpreting the word get as have and instead used gave them Baby It s Cold Outside Neptune s Daughter went on to be the 10th highest grossing film of 1949 1950s Williams as Annette Kellerman in Million Dollar Mermaid In 1952 s Million Dollar Mermaid Williams played Annette Kellerman an Australian swimming and diving star Williams co starred with Victor Mature who played Kellerman s husband and manager James Sullivan The two engaged in a passionate affair during filming Williams has often called this her favorite film and named her autobiography after it Williams also won the Henrietta Award at the 1952 Golden Globes for World Film Favorite Female 1953 s Easy to Love also with Johnson was filmed on location in Cypress Gardens where a Florida shaped pool had been built specifically for the film Williams was pregnant during shooting but still performed her own waterskiing stunts In Dangerous When Wet Williams worked with three important males Tom and Jerry and future husband Fernando Lamas During casting Lamas told Williams he did not want to star in the film with her because he only wanted to be involved in important pictures His part had to be rewritten to convince him to take part in the film Williams then made Duchess of Idaho shot on location in Sun Valley Idaho co starring Van Johnson MGM then paired her with Howard Keel for two films Pagan Love Song and Jupiter s Darling They both had cameos in the film Callaway Went Thataway In 1953 Williams had been on maternity leave for three months while pregnant with daughter Susan and had assumed that she would get straight to work on the film Athena when she got back However production started without her and the studio cast Jane Powell in the lead role and rewrote much of the premise that Williams and writers Leo Pogostin and Chuck Walters had come up with The studio moved her to Jupiter s Darling Two more films were planned Bermuda Encounterand Olympic Venus about the first Olympic swimmers however these were never made Many of her MGM films such as Million Dollar Mermaid and Jupiter s Darling contained elaborately staged synchronized swimming scenes with considerable risk to Williams She broke her neck filming a 115 ft dive off a tower during a climactic musical number for the film Million Dollar Mermaid which landed her in a body cast for seven months She subsequently recovered though she still suffers headaches as a result of the accident Her many hours spent submerged in a studio tank resulted in her rupturing her eardrums numerous times She also nearly drowned after not being able to find the trap door in the ceiling of a tank The walls and ceiling were painted black and the trap door blended in Williams was only pulled out because a member of the crew realized the door wasn t opening After MGM After years of appearing in musical comedies at MGM she moved to Universal International in 1956
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