Her death was announced by her publicist, Harlan Boll.
From “Bathing Beauty” in 1944 to “Jupiter’s Darling” in 1955, Ms. Williams swam in Technicolor pools, lakes, lagoons and oceans, cresting onto the list of Top 10 box-office stars in 1949 and 1950.
“Esther Williams had one contribution to make to movies — her
magnificent athletic body,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote. “And for
over 10 years MGM made the most of it, keeping her in clinging, wet
bathing suits and hoping the audience would shiver.”
In her autobiography, “The Million Dollar Mermaid”
(1999), Ms. Williams spoke of movie stardom as her “consolation prize,”
won instead of the Olympic gold medal for which she had yearned. At the
national championships in 1939, Ms. Williams, who was 17, won three
gold medals and earned a place on the 1940 United States Olympic team.
But Hitler invaded Poland, and the 1940 Olympics were canceled with the
onset of World War II.
At a time when most movies cost less than $2 million, MGM built Ms.
Williams a $250,000 swimming pool on Stage 30. It had underwater
windows, colored fountains and hydraulic lifts, and it was usually
stocked with a dozen bathing beauties. Performing in that 25-foot-deep
pool, which the swimmers nicknamed Pneumonia Alley, Ms. Williams
ruptured her eardrums seven times.
By 1952, the swimming sequences in Ms. Williams’s movies, which were
often elaborate fantasies created by Busby Berkeley, had grown more and
more extravagant. For that year’s “Million Dollar Mermaid,”
she wore 50,000 gold sequins and a golden crown. The crown was made of
metal, and in a swan dive into the pool from a 50-foot platform, her
head snapped back when she hit the water. The impact broke her back, and
she spent the next six months in a cast.
Ms. Williams once estimated that she had swum 1,250 miles for the
cameras. In a bathing suit, she was a special kind of all-American girl:
tall, lithe, breathtakingly attractive and unpretentious. She begged
MGM for serious nonswimming roles, but the studio’s response was, in
effect, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Audiences rejected her in
dramas like “The Hoodlum Saint” (1946) and “The Unguarded Moment” (1956). Her only dry-land box-office success was “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”
(1949), with Ms. Williams as the owner of a baseball team whose players
included Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly (although even in that film, she
was seen briefly in a swimming pool).
The men who played opposite her in a dozen lightweight comedies full of
misunderstandings and mistaken identity were almost interchangeable.
Johnny Johnston in “This Time for Keeps” (1947), John Carroll in “Fiesta”
(1947) and Peter Lawford in “On an Island With You” (1948) were male
ingénues whom the studio was hoping might turn into stars. In terms of
star power, she was matched on screen only by Victor Mature, with whom
she had an affair when they were making “Million Dollar Mermaid,” and by
MGM’s all-American boy, Van Johnson, who wooed or was wooed by her in “Thrill of a Romance” (1945), “Easy to Wed” (1946), “Easy to Love” (1953) and “Duchess of Idaho” (1950).
“Just relax,” she recalled Mr. Johnson telling her after the first few
days on “Thrill of a Romance.” “It’s your naturalness that’s going to
make you a star.”
Esther Jane Williams was born in Los Angeles on Aug. 8, 1921, the fifth
and last child of Lou and Bula Williams. Her father was a sign painter;
her maternal grandparents had come west to Utah in a Conestoga wagon
after the Civil War. Unwanted by a mother who was tired of raising
children, Esther was turned over to her 14-year-old sister, Maurine. The
family’s chief breadwinner was her brother Stanton. A silent movie star
at the age of 6, Stanton died of a twisted intestine when he was 16 and
Esther was 8.
That summer she learned to swim. From the beginning, Ms. Williams wrote
in her autobiography, “I sensed the water was my natural element.” She
counted wet towels at the neighborhood pool to earn the nickel a day it
cost to swim there. The male lifeguards taught her the butterfly, a
stroke then used only by men, and, at the Amateur Athletic Union
championships in 1939, the butterfly won her a gold medal in the
300-meter medley relay.
Three years earlier, 20th Century Fox had signed the Norwegian ice
skater Sonja Henie, a three-time Olympic gold medalist, and turned her
into a movie star in a series of skating movies, and Louis B. Mayer, who
ran MGM, wanted to match Fox. The studio found Ms. Williams performing
in Billy Rose’s Aquacade at the San Francisco World’s Fair. She was, as
she put it, learning to “swim pretty” in tandem with Johnny Weissmuller,
a former Olympic gold medalist who was already the star of MGM’s “Tarzan” films.
At first, Ms. Williams was one of two dozen MGM contract players who
had, she wrote, “a look, a voice, a sparkle or a smolder.” Few lasted
more than a year. To test audience reaction to her, Ms. Williams was
given the role of Mickey Rooney’s love interest in an Andy Hardy movie.
Half a dozen starlets — including Lana Turner, Judy Garland and Kathryn
Grayson — had already been tested that way. Fan mail response to the
film, “Andy Hardy’s Double Life” (1942), was unequivocal: Audiences loved the girl in the two-piece swimsuit.
At 17, Ms. Williams married Leonard Kovner, a pre-med student whom she
supported by working as a stock girl at a fancy department store. It was
the first of her four marriages, and he would demand $1,500 — all the
money she had saved from the Aquacade — before he would agree to a
divorce.
Her 13-year second marriage, to the singer Ben Gage, would bring her
three children and cost her considerably more money. According to Ms.
Williams, Mr. Gage frittered away $10 million of her money on alcohol,
gambling and failed business ventures. He also neglected to pay taxes
and left her in hock to the Internal Revenue Service for $750,000 by the
time they divorced in 1959. By then, Ms. Williams wrote, “I was 37 and
there was not much mileage left in my movie career.”
A decade later she married Fernando Lamas, the Argentine-born actor and director, who had helped her to swim the English Channel in “Dangerous When Wet”
(1953). He was the first man who gave Ms. Williams money rather than
taking it from her, but he exacted a heavy price. Her three children
were not allowed to live with them or even to come to their wedding.
That marriage lasted until Mr. Lamas’s death in 1982. Six years later
she married Edward Bell, a professor of French literature 10 years her
junior, with whom she introduced a collection of swimwear. She also put
her name on a line of successful aboveground swimming pools.
She is survived by Mr. Bell; a son, Benjamin Gage; a daughter, Susan
Beardslee; three stepsons, the actor Lorenzo Lamas, Tima Alexander Bell
and Anthony Bell, three grandchildren and eight stepgrandchildren.
Asked once who her favorite leading man was, Ms. Williams offered a simple and unsurprising response: “The water.”
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