Esther Williams

Wet, she’s a star. Dry, she ain’t!

—Fanny Brice on Esther Williams

We don’t really do gimmick actors anymore. Oh, there’s still a bit of a professional wrestling-to-acting pipeline, arguably stronger now than it’s ever been. But we don’t have singing cowboys anymore. No figure skaters gone from Olympic gold to the silver screen. Hell, we don’t even have comedians who only appear with one another. Presumably all these people have migrated to TV or YouTube or TikTok, presumably because there’s no place for them in the modern adaptation-obsessed theatrical landscape. I don’t know if this is a loss or not, really, but there was a charm of a sort to them, even if the movies tended to be as predictable as an episode of Three’s Company.

Esther Williams was not an Olympic champion, through no fault of her own. The year she would have most likely made the team was 1940, which was not a great year for Olympic dreams. Williams was the youngest of five. Her parents had eloped from Kansas, planning to travel to California, but they ran of money and settled in Salt Lake City. Her oldest brother had been discovered by actress Marjorie Rambeau, and the family finally finished the move to Hollywood, where Esther was born. Stanton died of a ruptured colon. Marjorie, another of the Williams children, taught Esther how to swim, and Esther worked counting towels to pay for the entrance fee at the Manhattan Beach pool.

Billy Rose hired her to replace Eleanor Holm in his aquacade. From there, she was discovered by MGM scouts; Louis B. Mayer was looking to compete with Sonja Henie, and what is ice but hard water? Her contract included a pass to swim at the Beverly Hills Hotel and nine months of lessons in acting, singing, dancing, and diction. After that, she made her feature debut in Andy Hardy’s Double Life. In which, yes, she swam. She swam in most of her appearances; Take Me Out to the Ball Game is one of the exceptions, because Gene Kelly apparently refused to do an aquatic number.

Honestly? She’s not bad. She’s no worse than a lot of other starlets of her era. So sure, it’s the swimming that made her a star, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. A lot of Hollywood greats made their career on something they weren’t as good at. And better “a romantic comedy where the heroine has to swim for reasons” than whatever the hell Gymkata is. (Did Kurt Thomas kill the “Olympics to Hollywood” pipeline? Maybe! Not that, goodness knows, he was a bad gymnast.) She isn’t even terrible in the movies where she stays dry.

She was also a smart woman. So okay, a D in algebra kept her from getting a scholarship to USC. On the other hand, she was smart enough to actually invest her earnings. She retired from acting in 1968 and lived until 2013 on the earnings of various of her properties, such as swimwear, a service station, and the restaurant chain Trails. She was a sexual assault survivor, and it sounds as though her relationship with Johnny Weissmuller was on the line. Fine, okay, her personal life seems to have been a hot mess, but she’s hardly the only smart person with that kind of history, now, was she?