Me Tarzan. You Jane.
By her own admission, she could not sing, dance or act, yet in the 1940s she was second only to Betty Grable as the world’s biggest female boxoffice draw. India named her its No 1 pin-up. What she did superlatively well was swim like an aquatic Fred Astaire and her studio, MGM, capitalised on this, turning her into a one-woman movie genre in her own right. As queen of the swimming musical she had no competition. Her only - distant - rival was the Olympic skater Sonja Henie, who carved out an equally improbable Hollywood career on the ice.
For MGM scriptwriters, the challenge was to keep Esther in the water as long as possible. Impossibly protracted underwater ballets - one in Dangerous When Wet (1953) seemingly in partnership with the cartoon characters Tom and Jerry - were written into the screenplays to defer the moment when she must step ashore and be herself. The truth, as comedienne Fanny Brice once bluntly put it, was that “Wet she’s a star; dry she ain’t”.
MGM always left the swimming scenes, which the star herself referred to as “the wet stuff”, until the end of shooting. Many of her male co-stars could not swim a stroke and, in case of accident, it was deemed prudent to ensure that “the dry stuff” was already in the can. If the actor drowned, the swimming scenes could always be covered by stand-ins or doubles.
In reality, however, Esther Williams often swam for her co-stars, using a one-armed back stroke that enabled her to support her weaker partners underwater with the other arm. In rare cases, MGM would build a platform beneath the surface so that the actor would appear to be swimming while in fact walking along the bottom of the pool. This device, however, was used only for “really sinkable men”.