The Pool’s the Thing
Esther Williams got a lucky break in some respects last year when she fell down a dozen stairs in her Beverly Hills home and shattered her right ankle.
As she lay injured on a landing, looking up at a painting of herself in a swimsuit as the star of one of 26 movies she made from the early ‘40s to the late ‘50s, she said, “Well, MGM, you got all you could out of those legs.”
The injury forced her to stay home for months and think, not so much about her heyday as MGM’s “Million Dollar Mermaid,” but about what she wanted to do once she healed.
The answer surprised her. More than 40 years since her last movie, at a time in life when most people take it easy, Williams has a new career.
She will work as co-producer with entrepreneur Daniel Flannery of “Aquaria,” a $30-million Las Vegas water spectacle opening in 2003.
Williams, who will be honored Thursday by the California Design College as a trendsetter in film fashion, also will work with a fashion designer to create costumes for “Aquaria.”
Williams says she was “a test pilot for swimsuits” when making movies. Her first starring movie, “Bathing Beauty” in 1944, launched a genre of film known as aqua musicals. MGM came up with the idea to compete with the successful 20th Century Fox films featuring ice skater Sonja Henie.
Today, Williams is enthusiastic about her input on “Aquaria” swimwear. “It’s a different world than you dry people live in. There are fabrics I can’t wait to try.”
When she tries them, chances are it will be in her pool, although she calls it “a skinny-dipping pool, one in which you needn’t wear a stitch.”
Designing for “Aquaria,” Williams will strive to get a nearly nude look in a suit for the swimmers, who will portray gods and goddesses in an adaptation of a Greek myth, which will also feature gymnasts and ice skaters as characters.
Part of the story will focus on water ballet and synchronized swimming, which Williams popularized almost as much as stylish swimsuits and backyard pools. After the war and a few of Williams’ aqua musicals, there was a boom in the building of pools along with new housing, especially in Southern California.
Williams’ pool in her Beverly Hills home of 28 years is not nearly the size of the one that was built for her in the ‘40s by MGM. That pool, which had a pedestal on a hydraulic lift used to raise the actress 50 feet out of the water in preparation for a dive, was 90 feet wide, 90 feet long and 25 feet deep.
“My pool is small, because you don’t mess with topography,” she said. Her house and pool are on a half-acre knoll.
“Yes, I still swim,” she said. It’s a question she is asked so much that she had business cards made up with that phrase. A daily swim has been, in fact, part of her physical therapy after her ankle injury.
Williams bought the house in 1973 with her then-husband, actor Fernando Lamas. They were married for about 20 years until he died in 1982.
Williams calls Lamas her only leading man who could swim. He was a swimming champion in Argentina before coming to Hollywood. He once said to her, “You don’t realize that I am one of the five fastest men in the world.” She replied, “I know that, but can you swim?”
The couple had lived together for several years before he suggested getting married. Williams agreed if Lamas would give up other women. He agreed if she would give up being Esther Williams, the star. “Fernando became synonymous with the word ‘hiatus,’ ” she said.
They lived in Bel-Air before buying in Beverly Hills. “I told Fernando, in Bel-Air we had an Olympic-sized pool. Now we have an Olympic-sized view.”
The house, which she describes as a villa, focuses on the pool, the large patio around it and the city-to-ocean view. On a clear day you can see Catalina Island, Baldwin Hills, Park La Brea and the Beverly Center.
On the patio are several chaise longues and patio tables with umbrellas as well as pots filled with geraniums, bougainvillea, roses and impatiens. The windows are covered with awnings.
“It has been a wonderful house,” Williams said, “especially considering that we bought it for $140,000.” She figures the home, built in 1963, is worth $2.5 million today.
When she moved there, actor Rock Hudson lived next door. Later, Hudson’s house was purchased by director John Landis and then billionaire Paul Allen, who spent nearly three years building a tennis pavilion and recording studio on the neighboring property.
Williams frowns at the thought of the massive project but is philosophical. “There was nothing I could do about it.”
Williams, who loves to cook dishes that are “good hot or cold like Chinese noodles,” has remodeled her kitchen and turned a dog run into a 60-foot-long porch.
When adding a porch above the kitchen and laundry room, she cantilevered the addition because the ground was covered with decomposed granite. “I had visions of the house sliding down the hill, so I also had I-beams put under the living room,” she explained.
Williams’ house has three bedrooms, three bathrooms and an office in slightly more than 3,000 square feet.
There is a two-car garage. In it: a 1969 Rolls Royce and a 1970 Mercedes convertible. The cars, both gold, date back to Williams’ days with Lamas.
She has a number of mementos of her movie days: a porthole from the old MGM pool, through which the cameramen shot; a small, crystal MGM lion, which all the female MGM stars received; a mammoth memory book of her movie career filled with clippings and photos collected by her father, Louis Stanton Williams; and a photo from her first MGM screen test, taken by the late director George Sidney, who also directed “Bathing Beauty.” It aired in May on Turner Classic Movies, which has introduced Williams and other MGM stars to a new generation of film buffs.
The old days at MGM were a time that Williams cherishes. Another was motherhood. “I like children,” said Williams. A painting in her living room is of her daughter as a child. Another depicts little girls at the beach. Williams, the youngest of five, grew up in southwest L.A.
She has three children from a marriage prior to Lamas and three stepchildren, including actor Lorenzo Lamas. Williams has five grandchildren.
She is now married to Edward Bell, a former actor and producer whom she met in 1984. He was coordinating special events for the Summer Olympics in L.A. and asked her to be the hostess for a reunion of the athletes from the 1932 Olympics. In her 1999 autobiography, “The Million Dollar Mermaid,” after the title of one of her MGM movies, Williams writes that she reminded Bell that she was not an Olympic champion, but he countered: “You qualified [for the Olympics]. That’s close enough for me.”
At age 17, Williams qualified for the 100-meter freestyle in the 1940 Summer Olympics, but due to World War II, the games were canceled until 1948. By then she was a star at the box office.
In recent years, with Bell as her partner, she has been known as a businesswoman with her Esther Williams Swimsuit Collection and Esther Williams backyard pools.
Now, with “Aquaria,” she is returning to the entertainment world through a production that makes her think back to her first experience in show business as Johnny Weismuller’s co-star in Billy Rose’s San Francisco Aquacade, which was part of the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair.
Williams represents what “Aquaria” co-producer Flannery describes as “the legacy of what we are doing.”
He expects to break ground in 60 days on a 2,000-seat theater to house the extravaganza. The theater, to be built on the Las Vegas Strip, will have a swimming pool as a stage. Williams will help pick the headliners from a worldwide competition that will be televised.
“We went to the master,” Flannery said. “[Actor] Donald O’Connor said it best--’There have been actresses, singers and dancers, but there has been only one Esther Williams who made her kind of movies.’ That genre of entertainment stopped when she did, but she has the passion and has been waiting for this.”
“Imagine me doing this at this stage of life,” Williams said. “The party’s supposed to be over.”
It’s far from over, judging from Williams’ ongoing recognition at such events as the California Design College’s evening to benefit the Actors’ Fund and the Mannequins of the Assistance League of Southern California.
In a flier for the college’s 11th annual graduation fashion show and dinner at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Williams is lauded as “the goddess of modern American swimwear.” Among nearly 20 stars in the college’s “Tribute to Hollywood Icons of the Silver Screen,” Williams will be singled out for designing film fashions, not just wearing them.
“This award is particularly appealing to me,” she said, “because I am being honored for being part of history.”
While making “Bathing Beauty,” Williams realized that swimsuits needed to stretch to be attractive, but the only stretchable material at that time was not available due to World War II. Williams and an MGM costume designer persuaded a textile firm to incorporate latex into fabric.
The result was the hot-pink, satin suit that she wore in the movie. Women across the country soon wanted swimsuits like it, and the look of swimwear changed dramatically, even in the military. WAVES (Women Accepted in Volunteer Emergency Services) didn’t wear hot pink, but Williams talked the U.S. Navy into using the more practical and flattering swimsuits.
The ones issued by the government were like “old sweaters you’d paint the house in,” she said. “It was enough to quit the Navy if you had to wear one.”
