Mayer’s office but refused his first offer to make her a star. With the diminutive Hyde beside her, Williams made a jaw-dropping entrance to MGM chief Louis B. At the time, she was married to a USC medical student and making $78 a week. After a year of being hounded by the studio and William Morris agent Johnny Hyde, Williams finally agreed to a screen test that paired her with Clark Gable. MGM executives who saw her in the Aquacade were impressed. Following an audition at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, Williams was chosen from a casting call of 100 hopefuls. He needed a female lead to star opposite former Olympian and Tarzan screen star Johnny Weissmuller in his San Francisco and Los Angeles Aquacade reviews. It didn’t take long for showman Billy Rose to notice the photogenic champion. ![]() Magnin in downtown Los Angeles. With her stunning good looks and tall, muscular frame, she was a standout. However, because of the escalating war in Europe, the Olympics were canceled, and Williams went pro, modeling at I. Olympic team that was headed to Helsinki, Finland, for the 1940 Games. A sportswriters’ favorite, she qualified for three spots on the U.S. Athletic Club while earning three national championships in the breaststroke and freestyle. She won the Women’s Outdoor Nationals in the 100-meter freestyle, added crowns in the 100- and 50-meter breaststroke events and swam the anchor lap for the team that cut nine seconds off the world medley relay record.īy age 16, she represented the L.A. She earned an hour of swimming for each 100 towels counted.īy age 14, she won a municipal swimming championship and was recruited by former Olympian Aileen Allen, the city’s leading women’s coach at the powerful Los Angeles Athletic Club who helped Williams develop her style. She grew up swimming in playground pools and surfing at local beaches and got her first job at 8 counting towels at an Inglewood pool that her mother campaigned to have built for the neighborhood. 8, 1921, in Los Angeles, the fifth child of Lou and Bula Williams. Like Norwegian ice skater Sonja Henie before her, Williams was one of the few female athletes to cross over to widespread entertainment success. “Esther Williams did more for a bathing suit than John Wayne ever did for a cowboy hat, Tom Mix for a horse, Errol Flynn for a sword, Ronald Colman for a pith helmet or Cary Grant for a tuxedo,” the late Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray once wrote. Throughout her illustrious career, Williams swam more than 1,250 miles in 25 aqua musicals for MGM and continually proved that she was a champion in the pool and at the box office. Million Dollar Mermaid is renowned for its spectacular sequences that include fountains, flames and a spewing volcano. I ad-libbed all my own underwater movements.”īathing Beauty, a Technicolor dream that co-starred Basil Rathbone and Red Skelton, was the most successful film of 1944. ![]() ![]() “No one had ever done a swimming movie before,” she once said, “so we just made it up as we went along. Over the years, MGM concocted dozens of pretenses for getting her in water, calling on the great Busby Berkeley to design lavish production numbers to show off Williams’ assets. A special 90-foot-square, 20-foot-deep pool was built at Stage 30 on the MGM lot, complete with hydraulic lifts, hidden air hoses and special camera cranes for overhead shots.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |