Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) - IMDb IMDb 17 January 2017 4:34 PM, UTC NEWS There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error Biopic of Australian swimming champ and entertainer Annette Kellerman. After overcoming polio, Kellerman achieves fame and creates a scandal when her one-piece bathing suit is considered indecent. Director: Famous Directors: From Sundance to Prominence From Christopher Nolan to Quentin Tarantino and every Coen brother in between, many of today's most popular directors got their start at the Sundance Film Festival . Here's a list of some of the biggest names to go from Sundance to Hollywood prominence.

a list of 35 titles created 07 Aug 2012 a list of 42 titles created 14 Feb 2014 a list of 46 titles created 02 Jun 2014 a list of 31 titles created 11 months ago a list of 43 titles created 4 months ago Title: Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) 6.6/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 1 nomination. See more awards » Photos A swimsuit fashion designer is determined to protect her scatterbrained sister from a South American heart-breaker, but a case of mistaken identity complicates matters. Director: Edward Buzzell A contrived misunderstanding leads to the breakup of a songwriter and his fiancée. She returns to work as a gym teacher at an all-girls school, but a legal loophole allows the man to enroll as one of her students. Director: George Sidney A swim teacher and a wealthy businessman are married after a brief courtship.

A charming war hero falls in love with this newly-married woman, after her husband abandons her on their honeymoon for the sake of a business meeting. Director: Richard Thorpe An Aquatic performer tries to attract the man she loves. Director: Charles Walters While shooting on location in the South Pacific, a movie star is pursued by a handsome Naval officer who is convinced she is the girl for him. Director: Richard Thorpe A young woman enters a contest to be the first to swim the English Channel. Director: Charles Walters A man from Ohio inherits a coconut plantation and falls in love with a half-American, half-Tahitian beauty. Song-and-swim musical ensues in the tropical paradise. Director: Robert Alton The Wolves baseball team gets steamed when they find they've been inherited by one K.C. Higgins, a suspected "fathead" who intends to take an active interest in running the team. But K.C. ... See full summary » Director: Busby Berkeley When a matador leaves town to focus on his music, his twin sister takes on his identity in the bullfighting ring.

Director: Richard Thorpe A Scottish knight in France to facilitate a marriage between a rich and beautiful countess and his aging uncle becomes involved in court intrigue. Director: Richard Thorpe A multimillionaire decides to boycott "filthy" forms of entertainment such as Broadway shows. Directors: Ray Enright, Busby Berkeley Stars: Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler Screwball comedy has wealthy mystery writer Paula Bradford using her doctor ex-husband's non-payment of alimony to coerce him into a reconciliation. Director: Stephen Roberts Edit Storyline Million Dollar Mermaid tells the story of Australian swimming sensation Annette Kellerman, who overcame childhood polio to go on and achieve fame as a professional swimmer and film star in the early decades of the 20th century. At the same time, she scandalized the world by wearing a one-piece bathing suit on public beaches long before the style was accepted in polite company, and made waves in other ways as well. The story was a perfect vehicle decades later to showcase the star quality of Esther Williams in the 1950s, and Kellerman's moniker was picked up by Life Magazine when it named Ms. Williams the "Million Dollar Mermaid" herself.

Written by Tedosan Inspired by the true story of bathing beauties! (Million Dollar Mermaid) See more » Genres: 13 March 1953 (Australia) See more » Also Known As: A Rainha do Mar See more » Filming Locations: Considered by many to be one of the best examples of Technicolor cinematography. See more » Goofs Annette Kellerman (Esther Williams) tells the judge that her swimsuit "will cover the entire body except the *forearms* and the head." However, the swimsuit she exhibits in court and which she wears in the following scenes does not cover *any part of her arms*. See more » Connections (United States) – See all my reviews as has been stated, this movie definitely is not a good biography, but this is Hollywood. in truth Annette really was put on trial for her scandalous suit, though i wouldn't say she did it to be sexy. she did to be practical. and can you blame her?

still, the water ballets are lovely, and they are especially special since the actress was a real synchronized swimmer who did it all herself, like how johnny Weissmuller does all of Tarzan's's water stuff(and everything else). parts are humorous, others not, but if you are looking for a classic this is a classic that most people don't know about. it is worth it to see a new classic, with that old charm. and, as has been said, the swimming scenes were fabulous. and the beginning, when Annette is a little girl, can just make you practically cry. when you come across stories such as these, it can be rather hard to pass them by. 8 of 12 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) – The Blonde at the Film • ( 21 Comments ) Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) This is my contribution to the Classic Movie Blog Association’s Fabulous Films of the 50s Blogathon which runs May 22-26. I’m thrilled to be participating, and it’s been great to read all the wonderful entries! Check them out here .

My fabulous film of the 50s is Million Dollar Mermaid starring Esther Williams as real-life Australian swimming star Annette Kellerman. Million Dollar Mermaid has a very interesting production history and some of the most spectacular swimming numbers you’ll see in any of Williams’ films. It’s extra-fascinating because it’s a biopic of a woman who essentially paved the way for the existence of “Esther Williams’ movies.” via: Unless otherwise noted, all images are my own. As an added bonus, Williams’ daughter, Susan, was kind enough to talk to me about this movie. She gave me great insights into Dangerous When Wet , so it was a pleasure to get her take on this film, too! Be sure to check out the official Esther Williams website ! Now for a bit of background. Annette Kellerman was born in 1886 to musician parents. Little Annette had a weakness in her legs which necessitated the use of metal braces. Her mom and dad made the fateful decision to enroll Annette in swimming classes to help strengthen her legs; this exercise helped so much that her limbs were “normal” by age thirteen. But swimming became more than just physical therapy.

By age fifteen, Annette was swimming competitively and giving diving exhibitions. At sixteen, Annette got serious. She set records in the 100 yard and mile swims, and turned her talents to entertainment. She started performing “mermaid” acts swimming in tanks, and wowed crowds with high diving displays. She continued her competitive swimming and became famous for long-distance feats. Soon she was an international star performing water ballets (and basically inventing synchronized swimming), at the New York Hippodrome with its huge glass tank, challenging swimsuit norms in her “one-piece suit” when women still wore bloomers and long-sleeve dresses, and appearing in films in the teens and twenties. Very few of her movies still exist, unfortunately, but you can watch clips here and here . Like most biopics from Hollywood’s Golden Age, Million Dollar Mermaid is, well, quite liberal with the facts of Kellerman’s life, but it gets the essentials right. Usually. Who could play Kellerman in a movie? No one but Esther Williams, of course! Williams was thrilled to make this movie.

She wrote in her autobiography The Million Dollar Mermaid that “For once, swimming was really part of the story and didn’t have to be shoehorned into the rest of the plot. I loved the idea of playing Annette Kellerman, a real person, rather than a superficial character created to give me an excuse to swim” (213). Fun fact: Annette Kellerman visited the set of this film and met with Esther Williams. Williams asked Kellerman what she thought about Williams playing her in the movie, and Kellerman’s only answer was that she wished that Williams was Australian. Williams answered, “I’m the only swimmer in the movies, Miss Kellerman. I’m all you’ve got.” (The Million Dollar Mermaid 214). And it was very true! Victor Mature (perhaps best known for his “loincloth” roles in Biblical epics of the 1950s) plays Kellerman’s manager, American Jimmy Sullivan, and Walter Pidgeon is Kellerman’s father. Mervyn LeRoy directs, and Busby Berkeley was in charge of the water ballets (he also directed the water extravaganzas in Easy to Love ).

To the film! We open with young Annette ( Donna Corcoran , who plays Williams’ youngest sister in Dangerous When Wet ) watching a ballet class on the grounds of her father’s conservatory in Sydney. (For some reason, this movie completely erases Annette’s mother from the story. Also, no one even attempts an Australian accent. Pidgeon and Williams sound exactly as they always do.) The camera pulls back to reveal stout steel braces on Annette’s legs, and her wistful gaze at the other little girls frolicking on the lawn becomes more poignant. But Annette has a secret: she’s taught herself to swim! Her father finds her at the pond. I suppose it is more exciting for Annette to learn to swim in secret and “accidentally” heal her legs rather than the truth, which is that her parents sent her to swimming class for that very reason…The lesson here is don’t watch this movie to get the real story about Annette Kellerman. Watch it to get MGM’s unapologetically altered version. Mr. Kellerman wants to forbid Annette from swimming, but she convinces him that she’s getting stronger, and that she loves being in the water.

So he relents. Little Annette gets very good and her legs get all the way better! Soon she is winning races in that cute red swimming cap. Through a brief montage, we see Annette grow up into Esther Williams. The trophies have gotten bigger, too, but that red cap is still in use! Here is Esther Williams in an uncharacteristically frumpy but accurate bathing suit between takes for this scene. via: Annette returns home from her big victory to learn that the Kellerman Conservatory is closing. There’s a financial crisis in Australia, so people have cut back on things like music and dance lessons. Her father tells her that his friend has offered him a job at a music school in London. Annette handles this momentous news pretty well. In fact, it’s almost amusing how quickly this scene goes from dismay to excitement! Exposition must move quickly; after all, we’ve got Busby Berkeley waiting with smoke cannons! Next thing we know, the Kellermans are sailing from Australia to England.

Their quiet stroll on deck is interrupted when a boxing kangaroo comes bouncing along, chased by his trainer, Doc (Jesse White, who was in just about every TV show ever, including Seinfeld!) and his owner/promoter Jimmy Sullivan ( Victor Mature ). The kangaroo’s name is Sydney, and Jimmy is hoping that he will take London by storm. Jimmy is always hoping that something will be his golden ticket. He meets the Kellermans, and he seems very intrigued when he learns how many thousands of people came to watch her swim… I’m intrigued by the blatant coordination between Williams’ and Mature’s costumes. Pops of red, anyone? Nice foreshadowing, Mr. Plunkett. It’s rather like what you see in Summer Stock and My Sister Eileen where costumes coordinate/clash and signal the couples before they are even formed. Walter Plunkett designed the costumes for this film, though Helen Rose designed Williams’ sparkly swimsuits. Plunkett was a prolific designer with special brilliance for historical films (he designed Gone with the Wind (1939)), and Rose worked with Williams on several of her films, including Easy to Love , Duchess of Idaho , and Dangerous When Wet.

Anyway, later on, Jimmy joins Annette on the moonlit deck. She is looking lovely in her white dress with pink bows and diaphanous wrap. She assumes he has come to romance her, when in fact he has another kind of proposal in mind. He wants to manage her. I like watching her face in this scene when Jimmy starts elaborating on her potential as a swimming attraction: Annette’s father steps in, assuring Jimmy that Annette is not a trained seal who will swim around for an audience’s amusement. She plans to study ballet and music in London, and that’s that! (This is another of MGM’s little twists. Remember that Annette Kellerman began performing as a teenager while still in Australia!) The Kellermans arrive in London only to find that the music school is closed–there is no job for Mr. Kellerman. Annette pawns her trophies, one by one, while her father gives music lessons, but it’s not going well. So when Jimmy and Doc show up at the Kellerman apartment one evening, Annette is very willing to hear their plan. They want to stage a five or six mile swim in the Thames to drum up publicity for Sydney, the kangaroo.

(I’m not sure how Annette swimming the Thames would make people care about a boxing kangaroo, but they seem to think it’s a grand idea!) Annette’s only qualm is that Doc and Jimmy aren’t thinking big enough: The real Annette Kellerman was a long-distance champion, so this idea is less farfetched than it sounds. Fun fact: Kellerman did actually swim the Thames as a publicity stunt. She also attempted to swim the English Channel three times, each unsuccessful, and she swam in races and other free swims in the Seine and Danube, among many others. So, without telling Mr. Kellerman, Annette, Jimmy, and Doc embark on the Thames swim. The plan is to swim down the river to Greenwich, where Sydney is performing in a carnival. It’s a lot like Dangerous When Wet ‘s Channel swim sequences. (I’m glad that Annette’s red swim cap made the journey to England.) Jimmy is dismayed when the press doesn’t show up as they begin the swim, but eventually they attract attention. These boatmen are stunned to meet a young woman swimming to Greenwich!

Soon the news spreads and Annette’s father finds out: He rushes to the Thames in time to see his daughter swim by Parliament. The current is with them and Annette is feeling good, just hungry. They don’t have the cool wire food baskets we see in Dangerous When Wet , though. Then the current shifts, and it’s been hours and hours, and miles and miles… Jimmy is about to pull Annette into the boat when Greenwich appears through the fog. She makes it! The swim is a success, but not for Sydney. As anyone might have guessed, the reporters are far more interested in the pretty young swimmer than in the random boxing kangaroo. The next morning, Jimmy fields several job offers for Miss Kellerman, everything from stunt swims to lectures and personal appearances. But he has an idea for an show! Now that he invented synchronized swimming, Jimmy suggests they go to New York and try to get Annette booked at the Hippodrome. He sells Sydney and off to America they go! The Hippodrome producer Alfred Harper (David Brian) likes the idea but turns them down. The Hippodrome was currently staging massive dramas, as you can see from the marquee.

Harper doesn’t want to risk staging a “water ballet” with an unknown star and no story. He doesn’t mention Annette’s Easter-on-steroids bonnet, but it’s hard for me to see anything else. Jimmy and Annette are disappointed, but they quickly (as in just a few steps outside of the Hippodrome) come up with another idea. Why not stage another stunt swim and use the publicity to start their own show? Jimmy has a friend at Revere Beach in Boston, so they decide to start the swim there. No one tells Annette that her one-piece bathing suit is not appropriate in proper old Boston! She steps on the beach and it’s mayhem. Scandalized ladies and creepy gentlemen stare at her exposed limbs in shock! Annette just wants to start her swim and get away from the gasps and horrified gazes. Her bathing suit certainly is a departure from those old-fashioned bathing costumes with their petticoats, stockings, long sleeves, and drawers! But before Annette can dive into the surf, a policeman arrests for indecent exposure! The shame! Backed by Jimmy and her father, Annette decides to fight the charge. The case becomes a nationwide phenomenon and a feminist cause.

Annette gets her day in court and doesn’t back down in the face of an obnoxious prosecutor. She even presents a modified suit, her trusty one-piece with stockings sewn on to cover her legs, and asks if it would be allowed under the current law. The judge sides with Annette and drops the charges! Fun fact: Most of this did happen to the real Annette Kellerman. She was arrested at Revere Beach in 1908, acquitted on all charges, and became famous as the “One-Piece Suit Girl.” Riding Annette’s notoriety, Jimmy, Doc, and Annette open their own water show. (Mr. Kellerman provides the music.) The show is a popular attraction with diving, swimming, and of course the infamous bathing suit: Here’s the real Annette Kellerman in the suit she made famous: via: #!O5625 Although it seems so silly now, the one-piece bathing suit was very controversial at the time, and Kellerman paved the way for bathing suits as we know them.

As Esther Williams’ daughter pointed out, when you watch Williams doing her thing in a gorgeous suit, remember to give credit to the original One-Piece Bathing Suit Girl! Susan found this great photo of her mother and Annette Kellerman on the set. Without Kellerman, Williams might not have been able to wear suits like that! Annette draws in the audiences with swimming and diving displays: Jimmy watches, thrilled with the box office and with Annette. Who can blame him? She’s pretty thrilled with him, too. They are in love! And it’s not just acting. In Esther Williams’ autobiography, she confesses to enjoying an affair with her handsome leading man during the making of this film. She’d never fallen for a leading man before, and both she and Mature were married to other people, but they went for it anyway. She wrote : “Fictional desire and real desire blended during the making of Million Dollar Mermaid, and it’s obvious, to me at least, in every scene of that film…we were shameless and happy” (213). Their affair didn’t last past the making of this movie, and she didn’t think it would, but she claimed not to regret even a moment.

“Romances with beautiful leading men don’t last forever, but don’t knock it until you’ve had one,” she wrote (222). Back to the fictional world. Jimmy is sure that Annette is the girl for him. He even buys an engagement ring! But just as he’s about to propose, Annette drops by the carnival with a classy lecture promoter who wants her to give a series of talks about health and the body with perhaps some tasteful ballet thrown in. Jimmy can hardly contain his laughter. He’s clearly threatened at the idea of Annette moving on to bigger and classier things without him, so he cuts her down to size by reminding her that she’s just a pretty swimmer doing a tank act. Both Annette and the man are offended, naturally. The man insults Jimmy’s current show: So Jimmy almost throws him into the tank. But Annette stops him. Later, Jimmy comes back to Annette’s dressing room, ostensibly to apologize. But when she brings up the lecture idea again, he just makes things worse with this gem: Annette heads home, quite upset.

But a happy telegram awaits her: She hurries back to the carnival to tell Jimmy the wonderful news, but he’s already moved on with a new act, a flyer in a rickety plane. He has left for Florida without a word to Annette. He works quickly, that Jimmy! Annette is devastated, but fortunately she has a fantastic job waiting for her at the Hippodrome. She might be billed last, but she’s with Pavlova, Marceline the clown, and Sousa, in the world’s largest theater! Ready for some Busby Berkeley madness, executed as only Esther Williams and MGM could? This first number proved to be one of the most notable in Williams’ career. We start with a view of the Hippodrome before a spotlight picks out Annette in a sparkling gold bodysuit and crown atop the hydraulic lift. (MGM got its money’s worth out of its giant tank with its 50 foot hydraulic lift, geysers, pyrotechnics, and other special effects on this film.

For more on the tank, read my post on Esther Williams .) Annette executes a lovely, shallow dive and off she goes, diving like a dolphin and paddling gracefully amidst fountains: After swimming around for a while, she emerges from the churning water and rises on the hydraulic lift. Up, up, up! She was supposed to do a swan dive into the tank below. She writes in The Million Dollar Mermaid that when the lift shuddered to a stop, she felt a sudden onslaught of vertigo. Her ear drums had been ruptured so many times from all of her underwater exploits that her equilibrium was gone. Fifty feet in the air, perched on a tiny Lucite disk attached to the lift, she suddenly couldn’t tell if she was leaning or straight. She froze. Berkeley yelled: “We’re waiting, Esther! Jump!” (219). She “forced a smile for the camera” (219) and dove. On her way down, she realized that something horrible was about to happen. The crown on top of her head was made of aluminum–no big deal when doing shallow dives and frolicking in the water, but incredibly dangerous on a stunt like this.

When her head hit the water, the crown snapped her head back, she heard something pop in her neck, and she knew she was in bad shape. But they’d gotten the shot, so the director called for the lunch break and the crew skedaddled. No one thought to check on Williams–why would they? She was practically SuperWoman! So Williams was left in the pool, in tremendous pain and unable to move her upper body , frantically treading water with her legs to keep from sinking. She remembers imagining the headline: “Esther Williams Drowns in MGM Studio Pool,” and crying for her wardrobe lady, Flossie, the only crew member left on set (The Million Dollar Mermaid 220). At first, Flossie thought that Williams was joking when she said that she couldn’t get out of the pool, but she finally believed that Williams was in trouble. She ran to get help. Some men lifted a crying Williams out of the pool and called for an ambulance. While they waited, Flossie carefully removed the gold-sequined bodysuit. Williams wrote later that the 50,000 gold sequins being rolled off her body felt like tiny knives.

Since it was Flossie’s job to keep the costumes in good repair, it never even occurred to her to just cut the damn thing off! (220) Turns out that Williams broke three vertebrae in her neck, getting about as close to “snapping [her] spinal cord and becoming a paraplegic as you could without actually succeeding” (220). She was encased in a body cast from her neck to her knees, for SIX MONTHS. Williams eventually recovered, but according to her daughter, she suffered from neck pain, headaches and a smaller range of motion for the rest of her life. But she also knew how fortunate she was to escape with those relatively minor issues, especially after Christopher Reeve’s accident (221). Filming stopped on Million Dollar Mermaid until Williams healed. They’d already shot too much of the movie to call it off, or to replace Williams; besides, there was no one who could replace her! It was pretty common practice to shuffle actors around if they were sick, pregnant, troublesome, whatever, but there was no replacement for Esther Williams.

Williams wrote: “The fact that they had to wait for me was, in its way, quite a compliment as well as a comfort” (221). What’s odd is to watch the fateful dive, knowing that she broke her neck, and then see Williams rise from the water a moment later as part of a shimmering tableau for the finale…Movie magic! But it gives me the creeps. Williams saw this experience as an incredibly awful reminder that she couldn’t count on anyone else to look out for her. She didn’t blame Plunkett and Rose for the metal crown–how would they know it was so dangerous? Her director, Berkeley, and the rest of the crew also would not have known the danger, either. Williams was the only one who might have caught it, but she didn’t think about it until it was too late. She took this lesson into her next films, especially Easy to Love with its Berkeley-directed water-skiing insanities. As I mention in my review of that movie, everyone just assumed that Williams could do anything, and her safety seemed very far down the list of priorities. Susan, Williams’ daughter, says that her mom used to joke about how the filmmakers were always trying to kill her!

Williams had to look out for herself, because no one else was. via: #tcmarcp-140842-140833 Anyway, Annette becomes a star at the Hippodrome. There’s a beautiful ballet interlude featuring Maria Tallchief as Pavlova performing Swan Lake. Annette watches from the wings, utterly entranced, and meets the ballerina backstage. She tells Pavlova how she’s always wanted to dance like that, but Pavlova tells her that what Kellerman does is just as special! It’s a pleasing high-art validation of the new water ballet phenomenon, and it’s lovely to see Tallchief dance, too. She was one of the first major American ballerinas, plus the first Native American prima ballerina. She danced in Europe before Balanchine invited her to be his prima ballerina in his newly founded company, New York City Ballet, in 1946. We get to see her dance “The Dying Swan” solo. It’s a fun bonus in this film. Next, we get a montage showing just how famous and fabulous Annette Kellerman has become.

In an intertextual twist, alternating with images of Kellerman’s increasing billing at the Hippodrome are moments from Esther Williams’ previous films’ water ballets, including Bathing Beauty (1944) and This Time for Keeps (1947). You can watch the original Bathing Beauty clip here . I suppose it was a lot cheaper and easier to raid MGM’s library of water spectaculars than to film new ones! But we do get some new ones, too, like this next ballet inspired number with garishly colored borders. Annette dances in front of a mirror in her pearly tutu while her father, who was hired as maestro of the orchestra, conducts. Fortunately, we get some shots without the bright red crystal border: Then Annette loses the tutu and shoots over to a giant clamshell. It’s all gorgeous pearls and underwater frolics until we get a shot of Mr. Kellerman collapsing as he conducts. He dies, but Annette doesn’t know so she keeps swimming. It rather puts a damper on the rest of the water ballet, though. The red border turns green, and the shell closes with Annette inside.

It’s enough to give you claustrophobia and make you gratefully suck in oxygen as you watch. Fun fact: It was during this shell sequence that Williams almost died, again! Here is what happened: Each underwater shot was carefully storyboarded and timed. During the actual shot, someone would hold up cards showing Williams how long she needed to stay underwater. Most shots were about 45 seconds long, but that was 45 seconds of actual filming, so it didn’t count the time it took Williams to get underwater, hit her mark, and wait for “Action!” She was therefore underwater for much longer than 45 seconds at a time. Williams’ lungs would expand as she worked, so “whatever I could do at 9:00 in the morning, I could do double that by 4:00 in the afternoon” ( The Million Dollar Mermaid 216). She would string two 45-second shots together to save production time and avoid the necessity of a cut, which is why sometimes it seems as though she has grown gills!

Anyway, she must have been pushing herself during this giant pearl sequence, because suddenly she started experiencing something like “the rapture,” that weird, trancelike state that scuba divers can get. It happens when there is too much carbon dioxide and not enough oxygen, and it can make you want to fall asleep even as you’re running out of air. Williams, in the grip of the rapture, sat on the shell and rested her head on the pearl…and stayed there. The director, Mervyn LeRoy, didn’t know about the rapture or that Williams was about to drown, but he knew that the storyboard did not include Annette Kellerman taking an underwater nap! He began yelling through the underwater speaker, “Get your head off that pearl! It’s just been painted and the paint may come off!” (217) Williams was confused but LeRoy’s nagging shouts brought her out of the trance and she managed to swim to the surface. Yet another life-threatening moment on the set of this movie! Poor Annette finishes the pearl number and finds out that her father passed away. But the movie can’t linger on this. It uses Mr.

Kellerman’s death to reunite us with Jimmy and Doc: Doc reads of Mr. Kellerman’s death as Jimmy works on his airplane. Jimmy is no longer managing flyers, now he is doing the flying himself! Cut back to the Hippodrome where LeRoy employs the same newspaper trick. Annette and the Hippodrome producer Alfred (they’re good pals) arrive at the theater and read about an airplane contest. It doesn’t mean much to Annette until she sees Doc waiting backstage. He has come to tell her that Jimmy is one of the twelve aviators attempting the almost absurdly dangerous flight. He begs her to stop him, somehow. She promises to try, but first she has a show to do. Smoke cannons, go! In Tony Thomas and Jim Terry’s The Busby Berkeley Book, Berkeley described this number : ” [I] used one hundred boy and girl swimmers and for the background I had nothing but red and yellow smoke streams shooting up fifty feet. The effect was made by four hundred electrically controlled smoke pots.

On each side of the pool, I had forty-foot-high ramps, from which the swimmers slid down at a terrific pace, standing up and carrying yellow lighted torches as they entered the water.” Are you ready? Girls slide face-first through the legs of red diaper-clad men and into the pool as yellow, hopefully not sulfurous, smoke chokes the air. Then, in a sequence that reminds me of the Neptune’s Daughter finale with its slipping swimmers and streamers, the flag toting men slide down this tilted slip-n-slide, somehow managing to keep their feet until they dive into the pool at the very last moment. Eventually, Annette emerges from thick smoke in a flame-suit and headdress. She pauses at the top of a blue chute before sliding down into the water. I’m pretty sure it’s not Williams doing the slide, though. It looks more like Williams’ double, diver Edith Motridge. But it’s definitely Williams who emerges from the deep and gets pulled forward by an underwater line. Soon Annette is joined by yellow-clad ladies and gentlemen, and everyone gets pulled along. A synchronized forward flip with lovely pointed toes: And it’s off to the air!

Berkeley remembered that for this sequence “I also had twelve long swings that swung down from high in the air through the smoke, and from which twelve girls and boys simultaneously dived into the water. Esther was also the center of attention in this number. I dropped her from fifty feet into the mass of swimmers below, which exploded into a Ferris wheel effect on the water.” This part actually makes me a little dizzy. Swimmers swing back and forth through opaque smoke on these huge trapeze swings before diving into the pool quite a ways below them. Yikes! Then it’s Annette’s turn. She swings forward out of impenetrable smoke, smiling broadly. Fun fact: In truth this was a very unpleasant stunt. The smoke was so thick that it was disorienting and difficult to see where one was; especially nasty conditions in which to swing and then dive! Williams actually broke a toe from clutching the swing so hard with her feet! To add extra tension, Berkeley shot a pistol to signal when each swing should be released and when each group should dive! Williams (or is it her double?) dives into the pool: But the number isn’t over yet!

Williams still has to rise from the water above Busby Berkeley’s favorite human kaleidoscope designs. And then she lets go, hoping she’ll fall right in that dark, deep circle and not land on one of the swimmers! Yikes! Fortunately, a broken toe was the most severe injury sustained during the filming of this water ballet. Just like the gold one before it, this one ends with a slowly rising tableau. But this one was played back in reverse so that the sparklers light as they rise from the water! It’s a neat effect. After some smiles and posing, the whole thing sinks back beneath the water, but not before Annette blows us a kiss. You can watch the whole water ballet here . Here’s the suit worn by Edith Motridge for this water ballet: via: Unfortunately, this is the last big spectacle in the movie. To me, this film’s trajectory slopes up to these crazy Busby Berkeley/Esther Williams extravaganzas, before swiftly sliding back down into pseudo-biopic territory. How can Jimmy and Annette’s seemingly doomed romance compete with floating kaleidoscopes, breathtaking dives, and 50,000 sequins? But we’ll continue, anyway.

Annette keeps her promise to Doc and goes to the airfield to try to stop Jimmy from flying off into almost certain death. He doesn’t listen, and even her legal attempt to stop him (something about missing money from the carnival days: he used it to buy the engagement ring, which he then hands to Annette unceremoniously) fails. She watches him fly off in a rickety plane. She looks very sophisticated and wealthy in that dark purple suit with attached capelet! Some time passes and Annette learns that Jimmy has crashed. She tries not to care too much, especially since she is engaged to Alfred! But she calls the hospital and learns that Jimmy will be fine. On their way to Hollywood to make a movie, Annette and Alfred run into Doc and Jimmy on the train. Jimmy is hawking Indian blankets, and Doc is his “brave.” It is embarrassing for everybody, for many reasons. Jimmy is also managing a dog named Rin Tin Tin…(a complete fabrication; the real Sullivan had nothing to do with Rin Tin Tin.) We get a fun look at MGM’s version of early Hollywood when Annette arrives to make Neptune’s Daughter.

Fun fact: Kellerman did make a movie of that name in 1914. You can watch a clip here (skip to the two-minute mark for diving.) And Esther Williams also made a movie called Neptune’s Daughter in 1949! via: There is only one more scene to shoot. The tank is all ready, the mermaid back-up swimmers are in position, and Annette is excited to finish the film and marry Alfred. She climbs up a really tall ladder and gets ready to dive. Action! And we’re off! There’s a clichéd director in riding boots with a megaphone, and “mood music” just out of frame! It’s going great, but we’re wary because a crew member mentioned that the tank is only built to hold a certain amount of water, and the glass won’t withstand much more… Just as we feared, the glass begins to crack. The alarm is sounded, and it’s very scary with screaming mermaids and panicking crew members. Annette isn’t sure what’s going on, but she sees everyone running around and screaming. By the time she realizes she needs to get out, it’s too late.

The tank shatters and she’s pushed out in a great wave. Fun fact: The tank did break during the filming of Kellerman’s Neptune’s Daughter. According to an eyewitness : “We saw them [Kellerman and Herbert Brenon] take a deep breath and once more go under the water. Hardly had they disappeared when there was a ‘Boom!’ like the echo of a firing cannon and immediately the canvas passage was swept away and tons of water rushed through the smashing glass. Their bodies lay motionless among the wreckage. They were shockingly cut and bleeding and we thought them surely dead.” They were badly cut, but fortunately both Kellerman and Brenon recovered and were able to finish the movie. Cut to the hospital. Jimmy and Alfred are there and talk with the doctor. We find out that the doctor is cautiously optimistic, but there is a chance that Annette won’t ever walk again. As I just mentioned regarding the Neptune’s Daughter accident, the real Kellerman did not suffer a spine injury, just bad cuts. I don’t know if that major change from real life to this movie plot was inspired by Williams’ injury during the making of this movie? I’d like to see some scripts.

What happens next is a given, even though I’ve always liked sweet Alfred and distrusted Jimmy. We don’t know if Annette will recover or not, but the movie ends on a positive note. Fun fact: Million Dollar Mermaid premiered in December 1952, and in January Esther Williams was voted the number one female movie star in fifty countries by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the Golden Globe people.) Williams was the million dollar mermaid, a nickname that stuck with her and that she chose as the title of her autobiography. Williams was aware even as she was making this movie that she owed a lot to Annette Kellerman: “Here was a woman whose career foreshadowed my own, who started out as a champion swimmer but ended up in the movies…” ( The Million Dollar Mermaid 211). It was a thrill for Williams to get to bring Kellerman’s (altered) story to the screen, and to swim in the one-piece bathing suit of the legendary Australian mermaid! Esther Williams and Annette Kellerman on the set of Million Dollar Mermaid. Image scanned from The Million Dollar Mermaid Here’s the trailer –enjoy!

For more, visit my tumblr , pinterest , Twitter , Instagram , and Facebook ! Thank you to Esther Williams’s daughter Susan for talking with me about this film! You can buy this spectacular movie here . As always, thanks for reading! Esther Williams - The Million Dollar Mermaid - YouTube Esther Williams - The Million Dollar Mermaid Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Uploaded on Jul 7, 2008 Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for fair use for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. I experimented with a fun opening for this one, dedicated to Esther Williams, known as The Million Dollar Mermaid for her performances in MGM aqua-musicals.

The original background music was her performing a duet with Ricardo Montalban, "Baby, It's Cold Outside", from the 1949 film "Neptune's Daughter", but I had to do an audioswap due to an alleged music copyright issue. Her visiting cards at her home read, "Yes, I Still Swim". Enjoy! Category The Million Dollar Mermaid | The Australian Ballet The Million Dollar Mermaid 04 February 2010 | By Anna Sutton When you hear the term synchronised swimming you may very well think of plastic women doing water aerobics in a swimming pool. They wear silly pegs on their noses and are crowned with evangelical smiles . But at the start of the 20th century, the sport was known as Water Ballet , named after the beautiful underwater dance sequences that Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman performed in glass tanks at variety theatre shows throughout the UK and the USA. Kellerman was successful across a number of fields, including swimming, fashion, film (where she often starred as a mermaid), and sport. One of the highlights of her career was replacing Anna Pavlova in The Big Show of 1916 at New York’s hippodrome.

She was everything a modern woman should be – self-possessed, independent and active. Kellermann is also credited with popularising the one piece swimsuit for women, after she was arrested for indecency in 1907. Her crime? Flaunting her bare legs on Revere Beach in Boston. Oh, the scandal! Her biography is told to great effect in the 1952 MGM musical, The Million Dollar Mermaid , starring actor Esther Williams (herself a champion swimmer). It belonged to a sub-genre called aquatic musicals whose spectacularly elaborate underwater production numbers paved the way for the fantasy film genre. The Million Dollar Mermaid’s splashy, hyperreal aquacades were choreographed by Busby Berkeley and featured Williams rising out of a cascading waterfall amidst a backdrop of gold lamé-suited mermaids, all spinning and spiraling like tangoing starfish to create a kaleidoscope of human pattern and movement. Production values included vast plumes of coloured smoke, fearless trapeze acts, and bathing beauties shooshing down waterslides lined with flag-waving and skimpily clad modern day gods.

In another memorable scene, Esther plays a pearl-like mermaid in a white tutu who treats us to a cross between an underwater pole dance and a classical ballet before retreating to the clandestine chamber of a giant clam shell. Esther Williams - The Million Dollar Mermaid: An Autobiography - Book Review | BookPage The Million Dollar Mermaid: An Autobiography The Million Dollar Mermaid: An Autobiography BookPage review by Pat Broeske She was known for Technicolor aquatic musicals, in which she emerged from lavishly adorned swimming pools on underwater hydraulic lifts nary a drop of running mascara, her hairdo marvelously intact. Over the years Esther Williams's watery movies have become kitsch classics. But as her entertaining autobiography reveals, there was more to the career and the personal life than water. At a time when women were not known for athletic ability, Williams was the U.S. 100-meter freestyle champ hoping for a chance at the Olympics when she was recruited by showman Billy Rose to appear in his Aquacade at the San Francisco Pan-Pacific Exposition of 1939. Later, when wartime ended her Olympic hopes, she worked as a stock girl and sometime model.

But she was also wooed by MGM, which wanted to launch a series of swimming pictures that would rival 20th Century-Fox's ice-skating odes to Sonja Henie. In titles like Neptune's Daughter and Dangerous When Wet, Williams displayed athleticism, beauty, and accessibility. Along with behind-the-scenes tales (Gene Kelly was a creep to work with; Van Johnson a sweetheart), she dishes about the studio's unforgettable stars Lana Turner, Marlene Dietrich, and Bette Davis. She also recounts her own dalliances, which included romances with actors Victor Mature and Jeff Chandler. She recounts that Chandler, known for his rugged Westerns, surprised her with the revelation that he was a secret cross-dresser. Along with flouncy chiffon dresses, he owned lots of polka-dotted attire. Therefore Williams left him with a fashion tip: Jeff, you're too big for polka dots. Pat H. Broeske is a biographer of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.

CNN - 'The Million Dollar Mermaid' - September 20, 1999 'Mermaid' recounts opulence, decadence of Hollywood 'The Million Dollar Mermaid' By Esther Williams and Digby Diehl Web posted at: Monday, September 20, 1999 5:53:56 p.m. EDT (2153 GMT) (CNN) -- There are few stars like Esther Williams. Her films are a perfect expression of Hollywood's excessive style -- opulent, extravagant, lavish and magnificent. She was the Million Dollar Mermaid. In her shimmering swimsuits, Esther Williams claimed the spotlight in MGM's opulent 'Aqua Musicals.' She was groomed to be a star in the Dream Factory and thrived in cinematic spectaculars. In "Million Dollar Mermaid, An Autobiography," Esther Williams shares her stories of glory in the limelight as well as the gossip and scandals that made her life a Hollywood legend. Chapter One: Esther Williams, Cary Grant, and LSD Which Esther Williams do you want to hear about? As I look back through the filing cabinet of my life while writing this book, I realize that there are many of us.

I love that sweet little child who grew up in the depression and, being the fifth child, felt the need to try so hard to please her family. I'm still rooting for that determined teenage swimmer who kicked and stroked her way through hundreds of miles of training in the water to a national championship. I'm awed by the kid with no theatrical training who walked onto the stage of Billy Rose's Aquacade at the San Francisco Exposition and became a media darling overnight. Of course, I have to chuckle as that same kid walks through the gates of MGM a year later and swims her way to movie stardom. That long-legged GI pinup was me! Sometimes I think that there must have been three different women who became Mrs. Leonard Kovner, Mrs. Ben Gage, and Mrs. Fernando Lamas. Sitting here today as the happy Mrs. Edward Bell, my heart goes out to all of them for the naive expectations, the misplaced trust, the passionate love, and the need for a safe haven. The world remembers me as a movie star, but most of my life I have thought about myself in various family roles -- as daughter, sister, wife, and, above all, mother.

The press portrayed me as a kind of post-World War II version of Martha Stewart -- "the Mermaid Tycoon," as I was dubbed on the cover of Life; the perfect homemaker; the Hollywood glamour queen; and a sex symbol in a bathing suit -- all rolled into one. Meanwhile, for most of that time I was working twelve-hour days in that huge pool at MGM, creating movie fantasies, and then coming home each night to a personal life that seemed to repeatedly unravel. Never was I more "unraveled" than in 1959, when being Esther Williams became an exercise in schizophrenia. On the surface, everything looked rosy. The gossip columnists couldn't stop buzzing about my supposedly fabulous love life since I had divorced Ben Gage. My last movie, Raw Wind in Eden, had come out the previous year. During the location shoot in Italy, I'd begun a relationship, with my costar Jeff Chandler, which was still continuing. I was also considering the possibility of jumping into television. NBC was courting me to shoot a special called Esther Williams at Cypress Gardens. But it was all a Hollywood PR fantasy. Behind that public facade was a woman in deep emotional pain.

I remember, in late August of that year, boarding an American Airlines flight from New York and being in a state of exhaustion. It was one of those hot, humid times in New York, when brownout was a constant fear, air conditioners labored to no effect, and the air felt too thick to draw into your lungs. I prayed that my seatmate on the plane would not want to talk, which mercifully was the case. As we rose through the clouds, I stared out of the airplane window and indulged in the fantasy that this white and blue landscape was a vast undersea world in which I could float and swim effortlessly. In my mind, I drifted out the window, trying to escape the realities of my life. But tears soon welled up in my eyes. My chest tightened as I tried to breathe naturally. I was surprised by my own reaction. Ordinarily I loved flying, and I loved the idea that the blue sky reminded me of the blue water that was my second home. Now, however, I was fighting off panic -- the same kind of panic you feel underwater when you're out of air.

My terror was only beaten back when the stewardess handed me a vodka on the rocks, which I gulped gratefully and sat back. That episode was a shot across the bow, a warning that I was in trouble on all levels of my being. During the years when I was making movies one after the other in rapid succession, so much was happening at such a pace that there was no time to think clearly about my life. But in that summer of 1959, I had a sense of gathering crisis. My divorce from Ben Gage had become final that spring, but I was just beginning to be hit with the fallout from that marriage. Ben had made my personal life a constant turmoil for years with his out-of-control, erratic, alcoholic behavior. I had three young children I loved and worried about constantly. Between Ben's drinking and the demands of a movie career, I saw them as fragile victims who needed a lot more of my help. Over the years I'd always shielded the children from seeing Ben at his worst -- passed out drunk in the car in the driveway, or staggering around the house. As a result, they never fully understood how hard he was to live with, or why I'd finally left him.

Now there was a new man, Jeff Chandler, in my life, which brought a new set of emotional baggage to three kids who already felt as if they didn't get enough of my attention. And then I found out I was broke. Ben had literally thrown away money as fast as I could make it -- no -- in fact, faster than I could make it. In a series of disastrous investments, he managed to lose nearly $10 million. And what he didn't lose that way, he gambled away at the track. Worse yet, he had hidden all of this from me and from the Internal Revenue Service. After the divorce I was left with three wonderful children and memories of happier times. But the IRS wanted cash. By their estimate, I owed three quarters of a million dollars in unpaid back taxes. Suddenly, I was without resources. To make matters worse, all of Hollywood was reeling from the rapid onslaught of television. My beloved MGM had all but crumbled after the departure of studio chief L.B. Mayer and the ensuing damage inflicted by Dore Schary. Nobody was going to make multimillion-dollar aqua-musicals ever again. I was thirty-seven years old.

I was still working, but I knew that there was not much mileage left in my movie career. I had tried to ignore all of that while I was in Italy filming Raw Wind in Eden. I knew that my marriage to Ben was over and that my life was collapsing, so I plunged into la dolce vita. My affections ricocheted between a charming Italian businessman with a fast Lancia and my ruggedly handsome costar Jeff Chandler, whose own marriage was disintegrating. Once I was back in the United States, however, the bleak realities were impossible to avoid, and I was forced to spend months focused on dealing with the wreckage of my finances and the needs of my children. Jeff kept asking me to marry him, but somehow it didn't seem right. At that point, I really didn't know who I was. Was I that glamorous femme fatale tearing up Tuscany? Was I just another broken-down divorc�e whose husband left her with all the bills and three kids? Had I spent so many years reading the fantasy press releases that Howard Strickling and his publicity team at MGM pumped out that I actually had come to believe them?

Had I lost touch with that fearless young swimmer or that devoted mother I once had been? Listlessly, I picked up a magazine. It was the September 1959 issue of Look, with Cary Grant's startling confession that he had taken a drug called LSD under a doctor's supervision and that it had changed his life. It seems he hadn't known who he was either! The drug had made possible an incredible recovery from psychological problems he was having, and he wanted to share his discovery with others. Hungrily, I read Cary's words over and over: "I am through with sadness. At last, I am close to happiness. After all those years, I'm rid of guilt complexes and fears." This sounded too good to be true, yet there he was, declaring himself a new man: "I've asked myself what do I want out of Life? Beautiful women? Fantastic houses? No, I'm finding courage to live in the truth, as I want to live, not to impress other people. Possessions don't make you happy. I take my sunny and foggy days with me....All my life I've been searching for peace of mind. I'd explored yoga and hypnotism and made attempts at mysticism.

Nothing really seemed to give me what I wanted until this LSD treatment." In the article, Cary's therapist, Dr. Mortimer Hartman, described LSD as "...a psychic energizer which empties the subconscious and intensifies emotion and memory a hundred times." Cary added, "I know that, all my life, I've been going around in a fog. You're just a bunch of molecules until you know who you are. You spend your time getting to be a big Hollywood actor. But then what? You've reached a comfortable plateau, and you want to stay on it; you resist change. One day, after many weeks of LSD, my last defense crumbled. To my delight, I found I had a tough inner core of strength. In my youth, I was very dependent upon older men and women. Now people come to me for help!" That day, I resolved that I would be one of those people. Cary and I had known each other for years, having spent time together at many parties and public events, although we never had been close friends. But movie stars all belong to a sort of secret society; we share a special understanding of the burdens and comforts of celebrity.

There is a shorthand we can use when we meet, and we empathize in ways other people cannot comprehend if they haven't stood in the spotlight. He came to the telephone immediately when I gave my name to his secretary. When I said, "Cary, I've got to see you right away about something," he invited me to come to his office at Universal the next morning. "Cary, I'm at the end of my rope," I told him the following day. "I'm deeply troubled about my life, and when I read what you said about how LSD had changed your life, I wondered if it might help me." "Esther, it takes a lot of courage to take this drug," he warned me. "You may not want to do it when I tell you what it's like, because it's a tremendous jolt to your mind, to your ego. Some people don't react well to it at all." "But it was so successful with you." "Yes it was," he admitted, with a flash of his glittering "Cary Grant" smile. "But it's only being used on an experimental basis.

You'd have to be as desperate as I was to try it." I smiled back my own "Esther Williams" smile. "But I am as desperate, Cary," I said as calmly as I could. "I need to find some answers, fast. Would you call your doctor and make an appointment for me?" This conversation took place long before LSD became the recreational drug of the 1960s that Tom Wolfe wrote about in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and the Beatles sang about in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." The newspaper articles were always about the young people who misused it, and that is what most people remember today about LSD. We seldom heard about the benefits that people such as Cary and I experienced. All I knew was that my life was falling apart and I needed some answers. If LSD was the key, then I wanted it. The Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills was tucked away on one of those quiet back streets where no one noticed comings and goings. Dr. Hartman, a radiologist and internist who had undergone five years of classical Freudian analysis in New York, and his partner, Dr. Arthur Chandler, were the directors of the institute.

They had been conducting psychotherapy experiments with the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25), which was virtually unknown in the United States. After a cursory interview and explaining the procedure to me, Dr. Hartman asked, "Are you ready?" I answered with a fervent "Yes!" He led me to a small room in the back. It was darkened with blackout drapes and had a traditional psychiatrist's couch in one corner. He gave me five little blue pills with a glass of water and told me to lie down and close my eyes. "Now I'm leaving you alone for two hours. Let it take you wherever you want it to take you. Don't be afraid." Then he closed the door behind him. I was about to take the most amazing journey of my life. LSD seemed like instant psychoanalysis. With my eyes closed, I felt my tension and resistance ease away as the hallucinogen swept through me. Then, without warning, I went right to the place where the pain lay in my psyche. The first thing I saw was my father's face the day my brother Stanton died. My brother had been just sixteen when it happened; I was only eight.

I saw my father's face as a ceramic plate. Almost instantly it splintered into a million tiny pieces, like a windshield when a rock goes through it. The shards fell to the floor. He was left faceless. Then I looked at my mother. All the emotion had drained out of her, and her soft, kindly features had hardened. I began to relive the devastation to my two parents over the death of this wonderful, handsome boy. Stanton was their oldest son, and his good looks and acting talent had brought the Williams family to California, the place my parents had dreamed of when they left Dodge City, Kansas. My brother was going to be a star -- everyone said that. They had pinned so much hope and expectation on him that his sudden death left them without a reason to live. I lay there in the darkened room, spinning back in time, swirling through a host of unanswered questions. Why did my mother take me, the youngest, with her on the night of the viewing at the mortuary? Why did she take eight-year-old Esther, instead of sisters Maurine or June, or my brother David?

Why did she take me to watch her absolute nervous collapse as she threw herself across Stanton's coffin, sobbing, "Why did you leave me? Let me go with you"? I stood back in the shadows in that place of death, watching my parents fall apart. And I was a woman again, observing it from a distance as if I were acting in or watching a movie. Suddenly, with that double vision, a revelation hit me, and I knew what my life was all about. Everything that happened to me after Stanton's death came to me with a new maturity that had not been mine prior to his loss. I remembered that after returning home from that harrowing trip to the mortuary, I had, at the age of eight, come to the realization and a decision: Stanton had been our pride, our hope, our golden prince. His talent, his good looks, his ambition had been our only chance to break out of poverty; he had given us courage and kept us all together. Now that he was gone, somebody had to take his place or we would all be lost. My brother David was frail and asthmatic.

My sister Maurine suffered from emotional problems that I couldn't understand at my age, but which made her sadly overweight from compulsive eating; my other sister, June, was a malcontent. My mother took refuge in her spirituality while my poor father was barely able to bring home enough money to keep food on the table (this was during the depression). So I looked about me and realized that if none of them could replace Stanton as the rock on which the family stood, then I would have to be that rock myself. My mission in life was as clear and simple as that. I made that decision at the age of eight, and I made it without feelings of doubt, fear, or nobility. If my shoulders weren't strong enough as yet, then I would make them strong. I would become my family's hope; I would be the one to take care of them. Once I made that decision, I no longer felt eight years old. I said farewell to childhood, and virtually overnight I felt as though I was at least sixteen, Stanton's age. Suddenly this little girl was in a race against time to be an adult. At the end of the session, Dr. Hartman gave me another drug to bring me gradually out from under the LSD.

He warned, however, that some afterglow would stay with me, and that it wouldn't be until the next day that the drug would be out of my system. This LSD trip, which explained so much about my life's script, and which was such a breakthrough for me, had a bizarre epilogue. I returned from the doctor's office to my home on Mandeville Canyon to have dinner there with my parents, something I did about once a month. In a way, true to my mission, I had taken care of them since Stanton's death, first struggling to fill the emotional void, then, after becoming a movie star, making sure they lived comfortably. I put them on a payroll so they had no financial worries, and eventually they could collect decent Social Security. I paid for their trips to Europe, and -- the biggest treat of all for them -- I got them invitations to glittering movie premieres, especially to mine, where they could watch their youngest daughter on a screen forty feet high. At last, the LSD experience gave me insight into why I had taken on the role of the firstborn son. As I sat and looked at my parents at the dining room table, I saw into their souls.

I saw my mother's angry, self-involved countenance that had sealed out all expression of feelings after my brother died. I looked at my father's sad, empty expression, the facade that was left after his real face shattered like a glass plate. I understood them that night in a profound way, and while I sympathized, I was also sickened by their weakness and their resignation. I saw that they both simply had given up, which, no matter what life had in store for me, was something I could never and would never do. At least, so I thought, so I hoped. After dinner, I gently ushered my parents into the guest house for the night. Then I rushed back to my bedroom and locked the door. I needed to be alone. I went into the bathroom and looked at my face in the mirror. I couldn't see myself clearly. I scrubbed away all of my makeup. I splashed water on my hair and slicked it back because I couldn't stand to have anything soft around my face. I stripped off my clothes.

When I looked in the mirror again, 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. Finally, I understood perfectly: when Stanton had died, I had taken him into my life so completely that he became a part of me. Copyright � 1999 by Esther Williams RELATED STORIES: Million Dollar Mermaid - Official Trailer (1952) - YouTube Million Dollar Mermaid - Official Trailer (1952) Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.

Uploaded on May 13, 2011 Million Dollar Mermaid (also known as The One Piece Bathing Suit - UK) is a 1952 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer biographical musical film of the life of Australian swimming star Annette Kellerman. George J. Folsey received a 1953 Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography. "Million Dollar Mermaid" not only became Esther Williams' nickname around Hollywood, but it became the title of her autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), co-written with Digby Diehl. Williams has often called this her favorite film. Category

Question: Who was known as 'The Million Dollar Mermaid'?
Answer: Esther Williams