Esther Williams

Clark Gable was the first to have called me a mermaid.

I always took it for granted that there would be life after Hollywood.

We can't all win Olympic medals. Even I never won one.

Traveling to swimming meets took me beyond my small-town existence, gave me a hint of the exciting world outside of my own home.

Everything about my teenage life was almost ideal.

Three events. Three gold medals. I was news, big news, in the sports world.

The newspapers loved pinup pictures of pretty young swimmers, and as a national champion, I got more than my share of space in the sports pages.

Life magazine ran a page featuring me and three other girls that was clearly the precursor of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues.

I took my daily swim at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool despite the presence of onlookers.

What the public expects and what is healthy for an individual are two very different things.

I was all in gold sequins for Million Dollar Mermaid, 50 feet in the air.

By the time I got home at night, my eyes were so chlorinated I saw rings around every light.

With two little boys in diapers, I had to keep it simple if I were going to have a life at all.

I ended up buying a restaurant. Already we had invested in a gas station and a metal products plant.

There was a policy at Hughes against drinking at lunch, but the men ignored it.

Howard Hughes himself was a regular at the restaurant, and in a way it became his headquarters, too. Howard had recently relocated to Las Vegas, so when he wanted to do business in Los Angeles, he went into the back of our restaurant to use the telephone.

Even though I had a lucrative contract with MGM, I had a husband who was drinking and gambling our money away faster than I could make it.

My training in Science of Mind had begun with my mother. She took me to a different church every Sunday, and she encouraged me to question the minister afterward.

Once I married Fernando, I became invisible.

Somehow I kept my head above water. I relied on the discipline, character, and strength that I had started to develop as that little girl in her first swimming pool.

Victor Mature was a big man; he had a great swagger. I liked him and I knew we'd be good together on screen.

Which Esther Williams do you want to hear about?

I took a job at the pool in order to earn the five cents a day it cost to swim. I counted wet towels. As a bonus, I was allowed to swim during lunchtime.

I always felt that if I made a movie, it would be one movie; I didn't see how they could make 26 swimming movies.

I never walked the streets of New York hoping to be a musical comedy star. For one thing, they would have thought I was too tall, because l was five feet eight and a half, and they were all little bitty things running around in the studio at that time.