Torched

Olympic Dreams to Hollywood Screens

Episode Summary

Esther Williams, a champion swimmer whose success on the big screen made her an international sensation, introduced moviegoers to synchronized swimming. Williams would become a trailblazer for other athletes and put her body through the wringer while doing it. Follow along as we explore how her legacy still makes waves as the sport continues to evolve. Hosted by Molly Bloom. Produced by FilmNation Entertainment in association with Gilded Audio.

Episode Notes

Hear the tale of Esther Williams, a champion swimmer whose dreams of Olympic success were shortchanged due to a world war...and how she turned her trailblazing prowess in the pool into a sensational Hollywood career.

Episode Transcription

[00:00:00]

[CLIP: Pagan Love Song]

Molly: The year is 1950. The film is Pagan Love Song, a major motion picture from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It’s a vehicle for the swimmer-turned-actress Esther Williams.

[MUSIC CUE]

As Robert Keel, the leading man, looks for the source of the enchanting music, a woman in a white bathing suit swims into view. It’s Esther. The background is a deep blue that could be the ocean or the sky. There are clouds, and there are bubbles.

The swimmer bends her body toward the camera. She 

[00:01:00]

stops, suspended, treading water. And then she smiles at us.

Then her legs begin to kick again, and as she travels upward through the blue, she fades away.

[MUSIC OUT]

By the time she made Pagan Love Song, Esther was an established Hollywood star. But that was never her dream.

[MUSIC IN]

Vicki Valosik: She saw herself first and foremost as an athlete. Not as someone who was going to become an actress… So she was very disappointed when it didn't work out… And she's often said something like, fame was her consolation prize for not getting to be an Olympian.

That’s Vicki Valosik [vuh-LOSS-sick], a faculty member at Georgetown University, who’s writing a book on the history of aquatic performance, from vaudeville to Olympic synchronized swimming. 

And as Esther herself told the film historian Robert Osborne in an interview later in life, her dream as 

[00:02:00]

a teenager had been to swim in the Olympics.

[CLIP: Esther Williams interview]

Esther: One thing at a time. I wanted to win my races in the Olympics. I wanted to win the 100 meter freestyle, which I had qualified for. I had discovered that I was a champion at butterfly breaststroke, when nobody else was doing it, no other women, and I was going in the record books.

Nobody else was doing it – but Esther was a national champion at age seventeen, assured of a place on the 1940 United States Olympic women’s swimming team.

But the 1940 Olympics never happened.

[MUSIC OUT]

[CLIP: GERMAN INVASION OF POLAND]

Announcer: Poland. September 1939. The German foe begins its ruthless march of conquest, and sets the stage for World War II.

[MUSIC IN]

This propaganda clip showcases the early days of the war – a war that meant no Olympics for eight years. Decades later, during her interview with Robert Osborne, you could hear that Esther still felt that loss.

[00:03:00]

[CLIP: Esther Williams interview]

Esther: When those Olympics were canceled because of World War II … I was really lost. I thought, “You’ve taken away goal number one.”

Esther was a child of the Great Depression. She was practical. So when the war crushed her Olympic dream, she got a job at a luxury department store in San Francisco called I. Magnin [eye MAG-nin]. She would never compete on the world’s biggest stage. But then, she was called to a different stage.

[MUSIC CHANGE “THE FIRST SNOW”]

Vicki: She was really a pioneer. No one had done anything like what she was doing in movies before.

[MUSIC CHANGE]

Esther went on to an unlikely Hollywood career that lasted nearly two decades. Her films inspired countless people to get in the pool, and popularized the young and relatively obscure sport of synchronized swimming.

Decades later, in 1984, it all came full circle — when she participated in the broadcast of the first-ever Olympic synchronized swimming event. It wasn’t the way she’d 

[00:04;00]

envisioned it all those years ago, but Esther Williams finally made it to the Olympics:

[CLIP: Olympics - 1984 Los Angeles - Synchronized Swimming Doubles]

Donna de Varona: No question about it. The crowd knows it, they know it, they’ve won the first gold medal ever in this sport of synchronized swimming.

Esther: What a moment! 

[MUSIC OUT]

INTRO

[THEME MUSIC IN]

Molly: I’m Molly Bloom, and this is TORCHED, a show about the heat of competition, and the cost of greatness both on and off the Olympic stage.

Today, the story of Esther Williams, a champion swimmer whose success on the big screen made her an international sensation. Esther seized a rare opportunity for women athletes, watched one dream disappear into thin air, then continued to become a trailblazer who put her body through the wringer.

She created fantasies for a society that took a long time to realize exactly what it 

[00:05:00]

took to present the graceful image that they demanded of her. She introduced moviegoers to synchronized swimming. And her legacy still makes waves as the sport continues to evolve.

[END INTRO] 

I. MODERN MERMAIDS

Swimming was part of the very first modern Olympics in 1896. But in the early 1900s, it wasn’t a part of most Americans’ daily lives.

Vicki: There was a massive effort to teach Americans to swim, because drowning rates at the turn of the century were abysmal, especially among women, who were even less likely than men to know how to swim.

[CUE MUSIC]

In the Victorian Era, Western societies had embraced the importance of fitness and exercise. But that didn’t really extend to women.

Vicki: People didn't like to see women exert themselves. They didn't like to see women sweat. They thought women should be much more demure and sort of remain lady-like at all times.

These sexist and misinformed attitudes closed a lot of lanes for female athletes. But one that remained 

[00:06:00]

open was the swimming pool, where everything looked pretty, and you couldn’t see the sweat.

Vicki: It made sleek figures, and also it was considered a graceful sport that people enjoyed watching. The water was considered clean and hygienic and it hid the exertion involved. So even though swimmers were actually of course working very, very hard in the water, that effort is not quite so visible as watching someone run on a racetrack or play tennis.

[MUSIC OUT]

Esther learned to swim at a local pool near her home in Inglewood, California. She started off with a job stacking towels, but couldn’t stay out of the water. 

[MUSIC IN]

When her husband, Ed Bell, shares memories of his late wife, he says that the water was Esther’s natural element.

Ed: She took the element of water and made it safe to be in, and you felt safe in the water. You felt that you could do this as well.

By age fourteen, Esther was swimming with the Los Angeles Athletic Club. And at eighteen, she had won multiple 

[00:07:00]

national championships and set a record in the 100-meter freestyle. She was also known for mastering multiple strokes — including the butterfly, which had previously been viewed as only for men.

Vicki: It wouldn't have been the graceful look that they thought women athletes should have, so that it just gets back to the elegance of, or inelegance of it, and seeing it as sort of a more violent stroke, instead of a gentle stroke that would be appropriate for women.

Famous swimmers — like Annette Kellerman, who wore the first one-piece bathing suit, and Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel — challenged Victorian attitudes toward female athletes. But to many at the time, swimming — especially women’s swimming — was more of an art form than a sport.

[MUSIC OUT]

Vicki: You could really appreciate the female form as well as the male form … so it was really a chance to kind of appreciate the human form without being vulgar, because swimming was considered wholesome.

[00:08:00]

All audiences — not just men or women — were drawn to the spectacle of the era’s great swimmers, going in crowds to swimming pools.

[POOL CROWD SFX]

This led to the rise of something called rhythmic swimming, a precursor of modernized synchronized swimming. A Chicago swimming instructor named Katherine Curtis was the first person to set swimming to music:

Vicki: She got the inspiration to add music because there was a record player, a gramophone, they called them, sitting on the pool deck … 

[MUSIC WALTZ IN]

So she would play waltzes, and at first used it as a kind of a nice background ambiance for the swimming. But soon found that, of course, she could start to coordinate the movements with the music, rhythmically. And she called that rhythmic swimming.

Rhythmic swimming got its big break at the 1934 World’s Fair. Organizers were looking for a way to demonstrate a new technology: underwater lights. So they asked Curtis to put on a show.

Vicki: She put 

[00:09:00]

together some of her current and former students into a show called the Modern Mermaids, and they performed there all summer long, to packed audiences. So tens of thousands of people saw the show … So it was women floating in patterns. It was graceful. It wasn't very fast. It was, you know, to a waltz, live accompaniment by a 12-piece band.

[MUSIC OUT]

The show was a hit, and it wasn’t long before a theater impresario named Billy Rose realized rhythmic swimming’s showbiz potential. 

[MUSIC IN]

Rose bet that audiences would flock to a show that featured picturesque athletes, performing fantastic feats, in form fitting swimsuits. And he was right.

Vicki: They combined the elements of musical review, vaudeville variety shows and burlesque, to some extent, and really, they provided a chaste but sexy version

[00:10:00]

 of the girly show. So it was flirtatious and fun, but still family friendly. 

… The first one in Cleveland seated, 7,000 people a show. And the one in New York seated 10,000 people per show. And they would often be lines down the amusement zone at the world's fairs to get into his shows. So they were incredibly popular. 

Billy Rose was also a Broadway producer, a songwriter, and a club owner. He knew that a successful show needed a draw, and so he set out to build a new stage called the Aquacade, featuring the world’s most accomplished swimmers.

Vicki: He had Olympians in his show, and so they were also sort of wholesome, but they were superstars at the same time. So people were really drawn in to see Eleanor Holm who had reached notoriety by becoming a gold medalist in the Olympics. They came out in droves to see her and Johnny Weissmuller, who was, an Olympian, but also even more famous because he had 

[00:11:00]

been in the Tarzan movies.

[MUSIC OUT]

That’s right, this guy:

Johnny Weismuller Tarzan Call

[MUSIC CUE]

That famous yell came from the throat of Johnny Weismuller, a swimmer born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After winning five gold medals at the 1924 and ‘28 Olympics, he made the move to Hollywood, where he played Tarzan. He became one of the biggest stars of Billy Rose’s Aquacade.

At various points, the Aquacade featured Weismuller, Holm, Ederle, and Buster Crabbe, another Olympic gold medalist who’d transitioned to acting. Naturally, he wanted to recruit Esther Williams, the record-breaker who should’ve gone to the Olympics. 

But Esther didn’t know who Billy Rose was. And she’s never been shy about explaining that she really didn't care. When he telephoned to get her to audition for the aquacade, here’s how she replied:

[CLIP: Esther Williams interview]

Esther: “Well tell Mr. Rose that I have a 

[00:12:00]

job, I have a future here and I'll come over when my lunch time. “Mr. Rose is catching a plane, he cannot wait for you!” I said, “Well that's the way it goes, I guess I won't ever meet Mr. Rose,” and they called me back and said, “He will wait,” and so I borrowed a bathing suit from the swimsuit department and I went over to the Ambassador Hotel.

As heard here, Esther was confident enough in her value to make him wait for her. Rose offered her a job starting at $150 a week, a fortune compared to what she was making at I. Magnin. But working for the Aquacade came at a cost: now that she was getting paid to swim, Esther was no longer an amateur in the eyes of the International Olympic Committee. She would never swim in the Olympics, because being an amateur was a requirement at the time. The 1944 Olympics would eventually be canceled, anyway, but it was at this moment, 

[00:13:00]

accepting a job with Billy Rose, that Esther officially let her Olympic dream go.

[MUSIC OUT]

MIDROLL

II. ANSWERING THE CALL

Even though Esther Williams was swimming with Olympians, the first lesson she learned was that this type of swimming was very different. Here’s Ed, Esther’s husband.

Ed: He said to her, “Get in the pool and swim.” Okay. "Get across the pool." And she got in the pool and he said, “I know you can swim fast, but can you swim pretty?” And she said, “Well, I think you have to swim fast to know how to swim pretty.”

It so happened that, while Esther was perfecting the art of swimming pretty, which Rose called “water ballet,” MGM Studios was looking to the water for the next big thing. 

A rival studio had made huge profits by casting Sonja Henie, an Olympic champion figure skater, in a series of skating-based movies with titles like Thin Ice and Happy Landing. And Louis Mayer, the Mayer in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer – 

[00:14:00]

a.k.a. film studio MGM – wanted to keep up.

Vicki: MGM had looked at Fox and what Fox had done with Sonja Henie, the ice skater, and how they had made these ice skating-themed films. And they had done so well that someone in MGM said, “Let's melt the ice and put a girl in the water.” So then they started looking for the girl to put in the water.

Mayer asked Esther to audition, just as Billy Rose had done. And once again, she was skeptical. She enjoyed swimming with the Aquacade, but it wasn’t exactly a luxurious life.

Ed: He said, “Well, you can work at this studio and we could treat you royally. And she said, “That's what Billy Rose said to me. And he gave me this dressing room that looked like a shelter!”

Mayer was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. He was used to getting his way. But it took him a year to convince Esther to appear in his movies. Looking back, Esther matter of factly said that her dramatic experience with Billy Rose had prepared her to deal with men like Mayer. Here’s Esther candidly describing her brash 

[00:15:00]

experiences with Mayer, which prepared her for everything else to be a “piece of cake”:

[CLIP: Esther Williams interview]

Esther: The tantrums were really spectacular …  because he would throw himself on the floor. How are you gonna be frightened of a fellow that throws himself on the floor and kicks his feet in the air? I mean it's like, you know you can't send him to his room, you know, like a kid.

Despite the tantrums, Esther finally and eventually signed with MGM. 

[MUSIC CUE]

In 1942 and ‘43 she appeared in a few small roles, but in 1944, her big break arrived. Originally titled Mr. Co-Ed, the film was a big-budget musical shot in Technicolor.

Esther’s character, a swimming instructor named Caroline Brooks, was supposed to be the leading man’s love interest. But after test audiences showed more interest in Esther, MGM reworked the movie to focus on her character, and gave the movie a new title:

Ed: Bathing Beauty. That was the first big musical. 

[00:16:00]

Her co-star, Red Skelton, hated seeing Esther promoted over him. But Mayer stood behind Esther as the movie’s big draw.

Ed: He went to the head office with Louis B. Mayer and he said, “You get that damn swimmer out of here. I'm the star of this movie! You're going to name that movie after me. You're not going to call it about her.” And Louis Mayer said, “Well, all the cards that came in at the previews talked about the swimming in the movie.” He said,  “I don't care. You put her name first and put that title on. I'm going to quit.” He never did. It was one of the highest grossing films of that year.

Swimmers lined up in bright, sequined suits, dive — one after the other — into the water. Esther descends a set of stairs like a Roman goddess, and dives gracefully into the pool, while the others swim in circles and star-shaped patterns around her. 

Vicki: She was often sort  of a powerful character. She’s 

[00:17:00]

also physically powerful just to see, like this athlete's body, often the physical equal, or even taller than her male love interest in the film. These are all kind of these sort of new women of the era.

Underwater, filmed through a window in the pool, she moves in circles, twisting in time with the music and smiling invitingly at the audience. When she surfaces, she’s at the center of a circle of splashing swimmers, still smiling.

Vicki: They were eye candy at a time when people were still sort of recovering from the great depression, they were reeling from war, from World War II. And it just, they were beautiful, huge productions.

Ed: They were so beautiful, such fantasy movies of people, swimming underwater and people swimming in general. Everybody swam, everybody was a swimmer and … 

Esther’s movies were the perfect spectacle for the moment. Lighthearted and designed to take full advantage of new technologies like Technicolor. Their plots might have been a little thin, 

[00:18:00]

but no one was complaining. 

[MUSIC OUT]

In an era of extravagant, splashy filmmaking, no one made more of a splash than Esther Williams.

Vicki: So in some of the films, she was a swimming coach and some, she was the star of an aquatic show, kind of like an Aquacade. In some one, she was a Navy enlistee who signed up for swimming lessons. There's always teaching someone to swim. There's always a reason to get her in the water. And then it usually is built around a love story of some sort.

Ed: Those were fantasy movies in the pool, water movies, exquisite. It's an element. That's, you know, we come from water. 

Before long, Esther was a Hollywood mainstay.

III. DANGEROUS WHEN WET

Esther had entered Hollywood with few illusions, and treated it like any other job. But it wasn’t really like any other job.

Vicki: MGM had this great musical-making machine, star-making machine, and they were able to invest in 

[00:19:00]

making really spectacular scenes. For example, they built the pool that became Esther Williams' pool.

The studio built a custom pool for her, with underwater speakers and a window for the cameras. It was a 20 foot deep tank complete with a hydraulic lift in the center that allowed them to change sets for each movie. Esther loved it and treated it like it was her own. 

But she very nearly died there.

[MUSIC IN]

Vicki: She almost drowned when she got locked in an underwater tank once because the trap door she was supposed to come out of didn't didn't open and no one was paying attention.

Despite the risk, Esther grew to love being on-camera in the water. The scenes were laid out on storyboards, index cards showing her doing a particular action. She was supposed to surface after finishing one shot, then go back down to film the next one. 

But Esther loved being in the water. Based on her interview with Osborne, it sounds like she may have loved it too much at times, getting so carried away 

[00:20:00]

that she’d stay under water too long:

[MUSIC FADE OUT]

[CLIP: Esther Williams interview]

Esther: I’ll never forget it happened with Merv and Leroy and Million-Dollar Mermaid … there are microphones under the water and he says on the microphone “Esther, get off the bottom of the pool! … and I'm hearing him and he's actually saving my life, because I have no more oxygen. I've stayed too long.

[MUSIC FADE IN]

Over years of filming underwater scenes, Esther suffered repeated ruptures to her eardrums. And the worst injury of her career came during what might have been her biggest role.

Million Dollar Mermaid was a biopic, starring Esther as the real-life Australian swimmer, Annette Kellerman. Kellerman also made a career for herself as an aquatic movie star, and had suffered a spinal injury on set. And in a haunting way, Esther herself dodged death while shooting this movie about Kellerman’s life. 

Vicki: In Million Dollar Mermaid, there's a scene where she was doing a high dive and they had created sort of this metal crown for her to wear. … 

[00:21:00]

While she was on her way down, and was heading down to the water that she realized that this crown, what it was like, how it was going to affect her when she hit the water, but it was too late at that point to do anything about it. And the crown sort of, instead of breaking the water in a nice clean way, this heavy metal crown in her head sort of knocked her head back as she hit the water and snapped her neck really hard. And she wasn't able to move and she was just floating in the water and they had to actually pull her out. And she was in the hospital for a while after that. And she was really lucky that she didn't get paralyzed or killed.

[MUSIC OUT]

The accident left Williams in a body cast for months. She continued making films for several years, including some of her most famous ones, like Jupiter’s Darling and Dangerous When Wet. But, as she told Osborne, around this time she began to question if this life was still for her.

[CLIP: Esther Williams interview]

Esther: I went one August, I looked at the newsstand 

[00:22:00]

I was on 24 magazine covers. That's too many! And trying to figure out the stories to go with it because after a while the people with the magazines said can you think of anything more to say about you.

[MUSIC CUE]

Here, you get a sense of Esther’s complicated relationship with fame. She had no shortage of offers from showbiz men hoping to sweep her off her feet. She says she rejected the advances of many, including the Argentine actor Fernando Lamas. But as her thoughts turned away from Hollywood, she reunited with Lamas. She explained to Osborne that Lamas’ proposal, which had once sounded overbearing, now had a certain appeal.

[CLIP: Esther Williams interview]

Esther: He said, “Could you stop being Esther Williams?” I said, “Well I’ve been Esther Williams now for 38 years, might be interesting not to be her for a while. What would I do? Get off the pedestal and I put you on it and then we don't talk about Esther Williams anymore, we just talk about Fernando Lamas? Is that it?” He says, “Yeah that's it. I really would 

[00:23:00]

like that.” I said, “Yeah, I guess anybody would.”

Esther turned down a new contract with MGM. One day, she went into her dressing room, packed up her things, and left the lot forever.

Vicki: Musicals were becoming a little less popular heading into the 1960s. The swimming pool, which had been something so glamorous a decade before, it was becoming a bit more passe. People were, they have them at their homes and in their backyards. And, you know, anybody could go to one, it wasn't this glamorous thing anymore…

Esther would occasionally return to acting, but the days of the aqua-musical were over. However, she was far from finished with swimming.

[MUSIC OUT]

IV. “WHAT A MOMENT!”

Even after she left Hollywood, Esther Williams made a living from her star power. She became the face of a line of above-ground pools and a series of instructional swimming videos. After decades of uncomfortable swimsuits and costumes, 

[00:24:00]

Esther marketed her own line of swimwear.

But even if she never participated in the sport, per se, she’s remembered by many as something like the godmother of synchronized swimming. Esther’s aqua-musicals brought water ballet to the masses. And as a result of swimming’s popularity in pop culture, a competitive variant of the sport was born. It was dubbed “synchronized swimming,” or simply “synchro.”

At the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, a synchronized swimming team put on a demonstration. Although the sport itself was not an official event, Avery Brundage, the longtime International Olympic Committee president, wasn’t interested.

Vicki: He referred to it as “aquatic vaudeville.” He didn't dislike it, but he just thought it didn't have a place in the Olympics. He didn't think it was a sport. And he thought it was entertainment. So to him, even though Hollywood had played a great role in building this, it also had this effect of 

[00:25:00]

making the sport, not being seen as a sport, but being seen as more showbiz and entertainment.

Brundage may have thought synchronized swimming was more showbiz than sport, but that didn’t stop a lot of young swimmers from seeing Esther and wanting to do the same thing as her.

Vicki: She, she brought a lot of interest to the sport, even though she wasn't necessarily doing the sport herself, it was kind of like, “How can I do what Esther Williams is doing? Oh, there's water ballet in my community. There's a synchronized swimming team in my community.” So it made young girls and women who looked up to her want to be part of that.

Esther’s movies had focused on the spectacle that was visible to the camera: Fantastic choreography on top of the water, and what Esther, alone, could do, underwater. But as synchronized swimming grew in popularity, people came to understand the sheer athleticism of great swimmers like Esther — and the enormous challenge of swimming in unison with teammates:

Vicki: You have to cover the entire pool. So the movement of routines is just incredible,

[MUSIC CUE]

even 

[00:26:00]

while you're upside down, doing a hybrid, you might be doing a pattern shift. So actually shifting within your group and also the whole group is traveling down the pool. It's doing all these things at the same time while already out of breath, while counting the music, making sure you're doing the right moves at the right times and sort of spatially awareness of where your teammates are.

A generation of swimmers, mostly women, grew up with Esther’s movies: the Hollywood version of synchro. As that generation came of age, they pushed the sport to new heights and eventually, to the Olympic stage.

In 1984, when the Olympics came to Los Angeles for the second time, synchro was finally included as an official event.

Once again, Esther’s phone rang with an offer from a producer. This time, it was TV producer Ed Bell, who was searching for someone with the right mix of experience and celebrity to present synchronized swimming to American 

[00:27:00]

viewers. True to form, Esther didn’t rush to agree to the deal.

Ed: She was an hour late for a meeting. Now I was in a corporate world and no one was ever late and she appeared an hour later and I saw her come through the door. I had ordered wine and glasses and I jumped up and knocked everything off the table. Everything! Broke everything! She laughed and laughed and laughed. The whole restaurant applauded, and the rest is history.

A few months later, Esther leaned into the mic and introduced synchronized swimming on the world stage:

[MUSIC OUT]

[CLIP: Olympics - 1984 Los Angeles - Synchronized Swimming Doubles]

Donna: This afternoon is the first-ever final for the sport of syncrhonized swimming in duet competition.

And of course, with me, working with me, is the great Esther Williams. 

Esther, can you compare this sport with the other ones we’re going to see on the Olympic agenda?

Esther: Yes, Donna, Just imagine an athlete having to thave the lung power of a long-distance runner, the leg strength of a water polo player to get those out-of-the-water lifts, the grace and rhythm of a ballet dancer, working to music, a 

[00:28:00]

gymnast performing an entire floor exercise underwater, holding her breath, and then you add to that that she must do all that in perfect synchronization with her partner, and that’s synchronized swimming.

The American team of Tracie Ruiz and Candy Costie won gold. As they celebrated in front of a sold-out crowd in Los Angeles, Hollywood’s Esther Williams was overcome by the moment.

[CLIP: Olympics - 1984 Los Angeles - Synchronized Swimming Doubles]

Donna de Varona: No question about it. The crowd knows it, they know it, they’ve won the first gold medal ever in this sport of synchronized swimming.

Esther: What a moment!

It had been a long journey for synchronized swimming, and for Esther. She’s credited with helping the sport achieve legitimacy, and proving its entertainment value. 

Vicki: Attracting TV viewers is a huge part of, you know, being a successful Olympic sport

In 2017, the International Swimming Federation (aka FINA) officially changed the sport’s name from synchronized swimming to 

[00:29:00]

“artistic swimming,” thinking that change might draw a bigger audience.

Vicki: The athletes weren't consulted, this was coming from the old boys club from men at the top of these two elite sport worlds, FINA and IOC.

But athletes in the synchro community weren’t so enthused about the name change. To them, the sport is about unmatched athleticism and immaculate teamwork — it doesn’t need to be dressed up for public consumption, especially not by a bunch of men sitting outside the pool.

[MUSIC IN]

In her career, Esther displayed the same level of passion for her version of synchronized swimming. She carried a sport through showbiz to its eventual Olympic debut. But the same attitude that kept synchronized swimming out of the Olympics for so many years, the belief that it was more about glitter and “swimming pretty” than real athletic capability, persists even today. It’s ironic, given Esther’s athleticism and the toll 

[00:30:00]

that swimming took on her, that she managed to make it look so effortless. That some people still don’t understand the challenges of synchronized, or artistic, swimming.

It turned out that Ed wasn’t like the other Hollywood men who had pursued Esther. Her third husband, Fernando Lamas, had died in 1982. She and Ed began a romance after the ‘84 Games, that sounds a bit like something from her movies.

Ed: She was a consummate athlete, swimmer. It's just amazing. I mean, I would swim in the ocean. I'd go out to the ocean with Esther …  I'd go just past the waves, cause I was worried, tides and all of that, I'd look way out in the ocean I'd see a hand flip up in the water and she was swimming way out, comfortably, quite something.

Esther had watched as her Olympic dream vanished in the fog of World War II. 

[00:31:00]

She had butted heads with producers who were not used to being stood up to, and with actors who weren’t used to a woman receiving top billing. She’d broken her back filming a dive. But her love of the water never wavered.

Ed: Oh, she loved swimming. She was wonderful in the water. She didn't have to have the music in the lights. She loved swimming. And what I know with Esther is whenever we, wherever we went in the world, we went swimming. We swam in the China sea. We swam off the coast of India. We swam in the, in the rivers in France, swimming … I swim every day because of her. Every single day.

Esther Williams died in her sleep at home in Los 

[00:32:00]

Angeles in 2013. She was ninety-one. Her legacy lives on, not only in her films and in the Olympics, but in the countless people who saw her take athleticism and artistry to new heights — and new depths — in the water.

[MUSIC ENDS]

END

[THEME MUSIC IN]

Torched is a production of FilmNation Entertainment in association with Gilded Audio. 

It's executive produced by me, Molly Bloom, Alyssa Martino, Milan Popelka, Andy Chugg and Whitney Donaldson. This episode was produced by Olivia Canny, Nicki Stein and Kelsey Albright. It was written 

[00:33:00]

by Stephen Wood. Additional story editing from James Boo. Editing and scoring from Ben Chugg. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Technical direction and engineering by Nick Dooley. Original music by James Lavino.

Special thanks to Alison Cohen and Matt Aizenstadt.

Molly: Next time on Torched, we talk with Auden Schendler about the difference between individual vs. systemic action, and the threat climate change poses to our favorite winter sports. 

Auden: If you just take the blame and reduce your carbon footprint, then you are complicit with the fossil fuel industry. And the reason I say that as that's what the fossil fuel economy and industry would want you to do. Not do anything disruptive, don't drive change.

Molly: That’s next time on Torched.

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See you next time.

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