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Nothing Personal
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Swimming through the looking glass
In which onetime movie mermaid Esther Williams turns on, meets the man in the mirror, drops out.

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By Lorenzo W. Milam

Oct. 18, 1999 | Two seminal events crop up at the beginning of "The Million Dollar Mermaid," Esther Williams' recently published autobiography. One occurs when Williams faces down a young man who had been living with her family, and raping her, regularly, for over two years:

"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. Suddenly his face crumbled and he sank to his knees."

Already, she's a beautiful woman who has the power "to inflict heavy damage." With her will and her no-nonsense muscles -- it takes muscles to swim as gloriously as she did -- she puts an end to this early threat to her well-being.

The Million Dollar Mermaid Esther Williams (with Digby Diehl) Simon & Schuster, 404 pages Nonfiction Buy The Million Dollar Mermaid by Esther Williams (with Digby Diehl)

Soon after, with the 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-screen swimmer. She was good at it. It was pure power. It was her livelihood. And then there were the aesthetics of it. 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." And they came quickly, too. Soon enough she was a star; soon enough she was married, the breadwinner, the man of the family for her "buffoonish" husband and three children -- bringing in, over the next 15 years, some $10 million in 1950s dollars.

The second key event in Williams' tale comes with what we now call a "mid-life crisis." She's almost 40. Under the pressure of television, MGM -- which has been her training ground, her main support and her source of fame -- is falling apart. She wasn't minding the store, either. Her husband, somehow, managed to squander all $10 million 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 nurture and support. It was at this time that I read about Cary Grant's use of LSD under a doctor's supervision, and how it had given a new direction to his life."

In those days, LSD 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 held me entranced as I discovered my divided body. I don't know how long I stood there touching and exploring, but I was not afraid."

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