It was at Aquacade that Williams first attracted attention from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scouts. MGM's head, Louis B. Mayer, had been looking for a female sports star for the studio to compete with Fox's figure skating star, Sonja Henie.[26] Williams signed her contract with MGM in 1941. [27]
In her contract were two clauses: the first being that she receive a guest pass to The Beverly Hills Hotel where she could swim in the pool every day, and the second that she would not appear on camera for nine months to allow for acting, singing, dancing, and diction lessons. Williams wrote in her autobiography, "If it took nine months for a baby to be born, I figured my 'birth' from Esther Williams the swimmer to Esther Williams the movie actress would not be much different."[28]
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While top stars at the studios such as Judy Garland, Betty Grable, and Shirley Temple took part in bond tours during the war, Williams was asked to take in hospital tours. At this point, Williams had achieved pin-up status because of the number of photographs of her in bathing suits.[29] To prepare, Williams and her publicity assistant would listen to Bob Hope and Jack Benny's radio programs, retelling the funniest jokes while at the hospitals. Williams also invited GIs to dance with her on stage and take part in mock screen tests. The men would receive a card telling them their lines, and they would act out the scene in front of the other soldiers. These tests were always romantic scenes to which the men were required to refuse multiple times. When the men said the final, "No", Williams would pull at her tear-away skirt and sweater leaving nothing but a gold lamé swimsuit. The scenes would always end with the men giving in and kissing her after that stunt.[30] Her hospital tours continued into the 1950s.[31][32] A (forged) signed, waterproof portrait of Williams was circulated among men in the United States Navy for a "capture the Esther" competition.[17] This competition continues to this day in the Royal Australian Navy, which holds in its archives an "original" forged signed portrait while maintaining a "capturable" image for use in the fleet.[citation needed]
1940s
Three weeks after Williams signed her contract, George Sidney directed her first screen test. According to Williams's autobiography, the studio used this test to get Lana Turner back in line with the terms of her contract and as punishment for Turner's having eloped with Artie Shaw. Williams screen tested with the leading man, Clark Gable, for the film Somewhere I'll Find You.[33] However, when Turner divorced Shaw after four months of marriage, she rejoined the film.[34] Following several short subject films, Williams appeared as Sheila Brooks in Andy Hardy's Double Life. Sheila was a coed with whom Andy falls in love.[35][36] Next was a small part in the film A Guy Named Joe, starring Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne. It was here she first worked with Van Johnson, with whom she would partner in five films.[37]
Bathing Beauty, previously titled Mr. Coed, starred Red Skelton as a man who enrolls in a women's college to win back his swimming instructor fiancée, played by Williams. This was her first Technicolor musical. The studio changed the title of the film to showcase Williams. Almost all of the film's posters featured Williams in a bathing suit, though the swimming sequences make up a small portion of the film. Her date to the premiere at the Astor Theater in New York City was future husband Ben Gage. For the event, MGM publicity set up a six-story-tall billboard of Williams diving into Times Square with a large sign that said "Come on in! The story's fine!"[38]
Williams appeared in the film Ziegfeld Follies as herself.[39] This was followed by the musical Thrill of a Romance. Van Johnson co-starred as a decorated war veteran who falls in love with Williams while on her honeymoon. Thrill of a Romance was the 8th highest-grossing film of 1945.[2] Williams had to help Johnson swim, and she placed her hand under his back to keep him afloat. The studio's publicity department tried to put the two together in public as much as possible in the hopes of encouraging a romance, even though Williams was involved with Gage at the time. When asked why they didn't date, Johnson replied, "because I'm afraid she can't get her webbed feet into a pair of evening sandals."[40]
Williams tried a more serious role in The Hoodlum Saint (1946), with William Powell and Angela Lansbury. Audiences expected Powell's Nick Charles persona and rejected the idea of a romance between Williams and Powell onscreen due to their age difference.[41] She also appeared in Easy to Wed, a remake of 1936's Libeled Lady, with Johnson and Lucille Ball.[42] It was the first singing part in a film for Williams, who had Harriet Lee as her singing teacher.[43]
Fiesta (originally called Fiesta Brava)[44] starred Williams as Ricardo Montalbán's twin sister, Maria, who pretends to be her bullfighting brother in hopes of luring him back home. Audiences, and Williams, thought the film was silly, as Williams and Montalbán had vastly different accents. Montalbán was born in Mexico and was a native Spanish speaker while Williams had a mid-western accent picked up from her Kansas-born parents. Production was difficult with a multitude of problems. By 1947, Gage and Williams were married. Gage had traveled to Mexico for the making of the film. He got into a fight with an employee of the cast's hotel, was arrested, and subsequently thrown out of the country.[45] The director of photography, Sidney Wagner, and one other crew member died of cholera from eating contaminated street food. Many of the film's stuntmen were sent to the hospital after being gored by bulls. Director Dick Thorpe hadn't wanted the bulls killed (as they usually were at the end of a bullfight) because he believed them to be too expensive to replace.[46]
After filming was completed on Fiesta, Williams appeared in the romance This Time for Keeps (1947) with singer Johnnie Johnston. In 1948, Williams signed a contract with swimwear company Cole of California to appear as their spokesperson, and Williams and the other swimmers in her films wore Cole swimsuits. Since the aqua-musicals were an entirely new genre, the studio's costume designers had little experience creating practical swimsuits.[47] William's plaid flannel swimsuit for This Time for Keeps was so heavy that she was dragged to the bottom of the pool, and had to unzip the suit, swimming naked to the edge of the pool to avoid drowning. Cole swimsuits used latex, which meant zippers were no longer necessary. While filming Skirts Ahoy! (1952), Williams discovered that members of the WAVES program received thin, cotton, shapeless swimsuits as part of their uniforms. Williams modeled a Cole swimsuit for the Secretary of the Navy and explained that the new swimsuits helped support women's figures. The United States Navy ordered 50,000 suits immediately.[48]
Filming Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949) was, according to Williams in her autobiography, an experience of "pure misery." A period musical starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, the two male leads' characters were players in a baseball team owned by K.C. Higgins, Williams's role. She claimed that Kelly and co-writer Stanley Donen treated her with contempt and went out of their way to make jokes at her expense. The film was well-received critically and became a major commercial success, raking in $3.4 million in rentals and becoming the 11th highest-earning film of the year.[6] Williams made Neptune's Daughter (also 1949) around the same time with co-stars Ricardo Montalbán, Red Skelton and Betty Garrett, who had also been in Take Me Out to the Ball Game. [49] In the film, Williams sings "Baby, It's Cold Outside" with Montalbán. The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 22nd Academy Awards. Williams and Montalbán were originally slated to sing "(I'd Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China", but studio censors thought the song was too sexual (interpreting the word "get" as "have") and instead gave them "Baby, It's Cold Outside."[50] Neptune's Daughter became the 10th highest-grossing film of 1949.[6]
1950s
Williams made Duchess of Idaho (1950), shot on location in Sun Valley, Idaho, co-starring Van Johnson and John Lund.[51] MGM paired her with Howard Keel for three films, Pagan Love Song (also 1950), Texas Carnival (1951) and later Jupiter's Darling (1955). They both had cameos in the film Callaway Went Thataway (1951).[52]
In Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), Williams portrayed Annette Kellermann, a real-life Australian swimming and diving star. Williams co-starred with Victor Mature, who played Kellermann's husband and manager, James Sullivan. The two engaged in a passionate affair during filming. Williams often called this her favorite film and named her autobiography after it.[53] Williams also won the Henrietta Award at the 1952 Golden Globes, for World Film Favorite – Female.[54] Easy to Love (1953), also with Van Johnson, was filmed on location in Cypress Gardens, where a swimming pool in the shape of the state of Florida had been built specifically for the film. Williams was pregnant during shooting, but still performed all her own waterskiing stunts.[55]
In Dangerous When Wet (also 1953), Williams worked with three important males – Tom and Jerry and future husband Fernando Lamas. During casting, Lamas told Williams he did not want to star in the film with her because he only wanted to be involved in "important pictures". His part had to be rewritten to persuade him to take part in the film.[citation needed]
In 1953, Williams had been on maternity leave for three months while pregnant with daughter Susan, and assumed she would go straight to work on the film Athena when she returned.[56] However, production started without her, and the studio cast Jane Powell in the lead role,[57] rewriting much of the premise that Williams and writers Leo Pogostin and Chuck Walters had come up with. The studio moved her to Jupiter's Darling. Two more films were planned, Bermuda Encounter and Olympic Venus, about the first Olympic swimmers; however, these were never made.[58][59][60]
Many of her MGM films, such as Million Dollar Mermaid and Jupiter's Darling, contained elaborately staged synchronized swimming scenes, with considerable risk to Williams. She broke her neck filming a 115 ft dive off a tower during a climactic musical number for the film Million Dollar Mermaid and was in a body cast for seven months. She subsequently recovered, although she continued to suffer headaches as a result of the accident. Her many hours spent submerged in a studio tank resulted in ruptured eardrums numerous times. She also nearly drowned after not being able to find the trapdoor in the ceiling of a tank. The walls and ceiling were painted black and the trapdoor blended in. Williams was pulled out only because a member of the crew realized the door was not opening.
After MGM
After 15 years of appearing in films, Williams was threatened with contract suspension from MGM after refusing the lead role in The Opposite Sex (eventually released in 1956), a musical remake of 1939's The Women. The role of Mary would have been rewritten to be an aquacade star (and was eventually filled by June Allyson as "Kay", a nightclub singer). Williams redecorated her dressing room to accommodate returning star Grace Kelly, packed her terry cloth robes and swimsuits and drove off the studio lot. As a result of leaving her contract, Williams lost almost $3 million in deferred contract payments, which had been taken from her paychecks over the previous 14 years and put aside as both a nest egg and a tax deferral. She was, however, still able to collect on the $50,000 signing bonus from when she first signed her contract.[61]
In 1956, she moved to Universal International and appeared in a non-musical dramatic film, The Unguarded Moment (1956). After that, her film career slowly wound down. She later admitted that husband Fernando Lamas preferred her not to continue in films. She would, however, make occasional appearances on television, including mystery guest appearances for What's My Line?, The Donna Reed Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and two aqua-specials, The Esther Williams Aqua Spectacle held in London at The Empire Pool Wembley in 1956 and Esther Williams at Cypress Gardens which was telecast on August 8, 1960.[62] More than half of all television sets in use in the United States were tuned in to watch the Cypress Gardens special.[63] In 1966, Williams was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame.[16]
Later years
Williams retired from acting in the early 1960s and later turned down the role of Belle Rosen, a character with a crucial swimming scene, in The Poseidon Adventure.[why?] (The role eventually went to Shelley Winters.)
She continued to lend her name to a line of retro women's swimwear. Williams said, "Women worldwide are fighting a thing called gravity ... I say to women when I talk to them, 'You girls of 18 have until about 25, 30 at the most, and then you have to report to me. My suits are quality fabric.'"[50] She went on: "I put you in a suit that contains you and you will swim in. I don't want you to be in two Dixie cups and a fish line."[64]
She was also the namesake of a company that manufactures swimming pools and swimming pool accessories. She came out with a line of Swim, Baby, Swim videos, which helped parents teach their children how to swim. She also appeared as a commentator for synchronized swimming at the 1984 Summer Olympics.[65] Williams met her fourth husband as a result of his calling her to coordinate her appearance.[50] She co-wrote her autobiography, The Million Dollar Mermaid (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), with popular media critic and author Digby Diehl.[53] In 1994 she made her first new big-screen appearance in 31 years as one of the hosts of the retrospective That's Entertainment! III.
In a 2007 interview with Diane Sawyer, Williams admitted that she had recently suffered a stroke. "I opened my eyes and I could see, but I couldn't remember anything from the past", she said.[66] In June 2008, Williams was able to attend Cyd Charisse's funeral, albeit in a wheelchair.[67]
In April 2010, Williams appeared at the first Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, California, alongside two-time co-star Betty Garrett.[68] Their film, Neptune's Daughter (1949), was screened at the pool of the Roosevelt Hotel, along with a performance of the Williams-inspired synchronized swimming troupe, The Waterlilies.[69][70] South Beach Miami's 2010 Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Swim, a showcase of designer swimwear, included a Williams suit, complete with a beach summer theme and sand palette with aqua accents.[71]
In 2000, an account of Williams's life and career appeared in the Swedish book Esther Williams — Skenbiografin (Esther Williams: The Fake Biography) written by Jane Magnusson,[72] in which the author shares with readers her own fascination for art swimming as a genre and, here, in particular, Williams as—to the author—both a bewildering and mesmerizing front figure and icon in this field.[73]