Million
Dollar
Mermaid
Esther Williams
(with Digby Diehl)
(Simon & Schuster)
I was fifteen, and the years of hard swimming had packed muscle on my frame and made me very strong. Not as strong as a football player, but strong enough to inflict heavy damage. He had to know that I was through being his trembling, passive victim...Our eyes locked and I refused to look away. Sudenly his face crumbled and he sank to his knees.
Already, she's beautiful woman who has the power "to inflict heavy damage." With the combination of feminine looks and her no-nonsense muscles --- it takes muscles to swim as gloriously as she did --- she puts an end to the first threat to her psyche.
Soon after, with that same combination of beauty and power, she is on her way to the top --- beginning with Billy Rose's Aquacades at the 1940 San Francisco World's Fair, and then, shortly after, as a rising young star at MGM. Swimming, always swimming; and smiling, always smiling.
She was the first real on-the-screen swimmer. She was good at it. It was pure power. It was her livelihood. And there were the aesthetics of it, too. In one of the few lyric passages in The Million Dollar Mermaid, she tells us about being on camera, in the water:
I began lolling underwater, rolling over and over very languidly in that pretty little suit...It was as if I were at home. And of course I was --- I genuinely loved swimming and being underwater...It appeared as if I had invited the audience into the water with me, and it conveyed the sensation that being in there was absolutely delicious.
"As if I had invited the audience in with me." They came quickly; soon enough she was a star; soon enough she was married, the breadwinner, the man of the family for her "child-like" husband, and three children --- bringing in, over the next fifteen years, some $10,000,000. That's in 1950s dollars.
The second key event in her tale comes with what we now call a "mid-life crises." She's almost forty. Under the pressure of television, MGM --- which has been her training ground, her main support, her source of fame --- is falling apart. She wasn't minding the store, either. Ben Gage, her husband, has, somehow, managed to squander all $10,000,000, and more --- on bad investments, booze, the horses.
After everything disappears (her marriage, her job, her youth, her money) she finds herself on the edge:
I was single again, and at a crossroads in my life. I was deeply in debt, with a career on the ropes, and I had three small children I was going to have to nuture and support. It was at this time that I read about Cary Gran't use of LSD under a doctor's supervision, and how it had given a new direction to his life.
In those days, LSD-25 was still an experimental drug, and was often used by doctors to help bring people out of terminal depression. A clinic in Hollywood administered the drug to her in a controlled setting, and, shortly afterwards, looking in the mirror, this is what she saw
I was startled by a split image: One half of my face, the right half, was me; the other half was the face of a sixteen-year-old boy. The left side of my upper body was flat and muscular, like the chest of a boy. I reached up with my boy's large, clumsy hand to touch my right breast and felt my penis stirring. It was a hermaphroditic phantasm that that held me entranced as I discovered my divided body. It don't know how long I stood there touching and exploring, but I was not afraid.
The two-in-one, the arsey-versey, the perfectly bifurcated soul. Esther Williams is still a gorgeous woman, but there is too, hidden somewhere there within her, as with all women, a man.
In psychological jargon, it's called the animus. Inside all of us, Carl Jung wrote, lies our opposite. For men, it is the anima, the female part, "relatedness, emotionality, spontaneous and unplanned approach to life" (as psychologist Yoram Kaufman would later describe it).
For women, it is the animus,
to judge and to act, for discipline and aggressiveness...The animus is symbolized by male figures appearing in a woman's dreams and fantasies, as a husband, son, father, lover, Prince Charming...
This vision produces the two other key events that turn up in William's autobiography. The first we might call "The unveiling of the animus." She's in love with Jeff Chandler, the handsome leading man from the 50s. They are thinking about getting married. They're in his house. She's cooking supper. She goes upstairs to find him
Jeff was standing in the middle of the bedroom in a red wig, a flowered chiffon dress, expensive high-heeled shoes, and lots of makeup.
She screamed. And screamed. And screamed.
"'Take that off! Take that all off now!' I yelled and started screaming again."
Most critics have taken this passage as a wonderful joke. What a laugh! Hunky Jeff Chandler, dressed in drag. The gossip columnists have had a field day with it.
But it's a five page scream, and it goes beyond normal terror.
I couldn't stop myself...It's a scream that has no logic. It is sheer, uncontrolled panic. I just stood there in the center of the doorway and screamed. It was the kind of scream that...has one tone to it. It doesn't go into any bars of music. It's not a movie star scream, but the kind you make when your mind shuts down.
What is it about Jeff Chandler in drag that creates such an explosion in Esther Williams? She's no dummy. She has seen lots of strange sights in show biz. There was Johnny Weismuller:
Under the stage, (out of the audience's sight)...he'd whip off his trunks so I could see that he was beautifully equipped, and if he caught me, he'd try to get my suit off.
Or Morton Downey:
I had to listen to Morton Downey as I walked out onstage for each entrance...in sotto voce, heard only by me, Morton spewed four-letter words, regaling me with graphic descriptions of what he would like to do on and to my body.
She's been hustled by countless stars, and producers: Victor Mature, Billy Rose, Desi Arnez. She's acted with dozens of boys: Mickey Rooney with his temper tantrums; Gene Kelly small, petty, and merciless cruel to her; Red Skelton crying because, in one sequence, he's going to have to shave his chest hair.
What's different about this new vision is that she's fresh from her LSD experience, one of the most powerful experiences that one can have. On acid, she saw herself in the mirror not only as a woman, but a strong young man, a man whose "clumsy hand" touched her breast, as she "felt my penis stirring."
When Williams saw Jeff Chandler dolled up (high heels! chiffon dress!) she was, looking in the mirror, as she had on LSD, but this time she saw something different.
She saw the man in Esther Williams --- the man in woman's clothing. And the vision scared the bejesus out of her.
Shortly after, she found a way to deal with it, for within months, she took up with the actor Fernando Lamas. It was a marriage that was to last for twenty-two years.
Like almost all of the men she was associated with, Fernando was a boy. But he had something different going for him. It's the kind of boy they call macho.
They made an agreement. They would have a perfect MGM married life. She knew those well, because she had acted them out in dozens of movies, with names like Thrill of a Romance, Neptune's Daughter, Easy to Wed, Fiesta.
The script was simple. There would be a beautiful husband, a beautiful housewife, and a big house. He wouldn't play around. He would be faithful. She'll play her part. Married woman. No children (she had children, but he wouldn't let them in the house.)
She won't make any movies. Fernando didn't like competition --- from within, or from without.
Most of all, she would always let him be the man. She would never cross him. Once she tried it. She called him "stupid." He grabbed her dress
and wrenched it down, ripping both side seams down to the waistline. The dress was completely ruined, and I was sitting in the parking garage exposed and humiliated by what had now become a public display.
The unmasking. Before, she had been the bifurcated man-woman. No longer permitted. When she tries to assert herself, Lamas rips off her dress, in front of everyone. Look, he is saying. You are a woman. You don't believe me. Look. And if you ever doubt it, or me, I will always unmask you.
And now everyone knew that she was no longer the mermaid (torso that of a woman, lower half that of a fish). Under Lama's tutelage, she's just a woman, a married woman, a hausfrau, who cooks, and takes care of the house; who won't ever touch another man; who will grow fat, so no one will ever want to touch her.
"If a positive conscious relationship cannot be maintained toward the animus," writes psychologist Kaufmann, "we meet the notorious animus-ridden woman."
For twenty-two years Esther Williams lived like that. The perfect MGM marriage, learned from all those happy films she made. Perfect strong husband, perfect passive wife. For Lamas was quick to recognize his main competitor, inside of her. He was even quicker to stamp it out. And she was eager to cooperate. Because she had looked in the mirror and didn't like what she saw.
The East Coast media has gone quite gooey over The Million Dollar Mermaid. Interview on National Public Radio. Fond review in The Washington Post, fond review in The New York Times --- with a follow-up interview, a nice squishy one, by Todd S. Purdam.
"Nothing quite prepares a visitor for the sight of Esther Williams herself," Purdam tells us,
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?"
We're back in 1950 again, on a MGM lot, aren't we?
At one point, he questions that she would stay with the controlling Lamas for so long. "I think it's so funny when people think they can't control a movie star," she says, smiling brightly. "They can. We're just women, you know."
Right. Just women. And mermaids. And, in the mirror, these strange passionate young men.
This review originally appeared in salon.com