The Baby Mermaid

Thank you for so many lovely, supportive comments on The Mermaid and Me! I am excited to share more of my Esther Williams biography. Without further ado, here is excerpt 2 of The Mermaid and Me, an early section about Esther’s family and first years.

Esther Williams splashed onto movie screens in 1942, and over the next thirteen years she starred in twenty-two films at MGM. Audiences adored the national champion swimmer-turned-celluloid-mermaid, and her movies made millions and propelled her to the heights of movie stardom. Esther’s sparkling “swimming musicals” also had an unexpected legacy as the elaborate water ballets helped invent modern day synchronized swimming. Esther even appeared as a commentator at the synchronized swimming competition at the 1984 Olympics. But if you had told a teenage Esther that one day she would be a movie star, she probably would have laughed before diving back into the swimming pool.

Unlike other actors who dream of movie stardom as youngsters (or who accidentally befriend big shots in the industry), Esther burst into show business quite by accident, and even against her better judgment. She was destined, but not determined, to be star. 

Esther Jane Williams was born on August 8, 1921, in Inglewood, California, about ten miles south of Hollywood Boulevard. She was born at home in a $100 house surrounded by truck farms. Her father and mother, Louis and Bula Williams, had moved the family from Salt Lake City just the previous year to enable their son, Stanton, to pursue a career in the movies. 

Esther was the youngest of five and the third daughter in the Williams’ clan. A thirteen-year age gap separated Maurine, the oldest child, and Esther. So Esther grew up as the baby of the family enjoying a slightly more spoiled, slightly more neglected childhood than her siblings. She had to work a little harder for attention, though Esther eventually found more than she ever could have imagined onscreen. 

*

Esther was descended from tough pioneer stock. She was named after her maternal grandmother, Esther Ann Yarrington, who married a Civil War veteran (2nd Regiment, Iowa Cavalry) named Samuel Gilpin in 1866. The bride was sixteen; the groom was 31. Esther and Samuel left Iowa soon after their marriage and traveled west in Conestoga wagons until they settled near Dodge City, Kansas. That’s where the Mermaid’s mother, Bula Myrtle Gilpin, was born in 1885. She was the ninth of twelve children and arrived on her father’s fiftieth birthday.   

Louis “Lou” Stanton Williams, Esther’s father, also grew up in Kansas. His parents, Benjamin and Jannie, were both born as the Civil War began. They married in 1882 and settled on a farm outside of Dodge City. Lou was the first of their four children, born in January, 1886. 

Lou and Bula met when they were thirteen-years-old, and the pair courted for a decade. After they finished school, Bula became a teacher and Lou worked on the family farm. Bula’s mother was against the match because she didn’t want her daughter to marry a farmer, but in 1908 Lou and Bula eloped and headed west. 

They hoped to buy a farm in California, but ran out of money in Salt Lake City. Lou found work as a sign painter, and the young couple started a family. They would eventually get to California, though not the way they expected.

The Williams’ first child, Maurine, was born in 1909, followed by a son named Stanton in 1912. Baby June arrived four years later, and David was born three years after that in 1919.

That same year, the Williams’ lives took an unexpected turn when Stanton caught the eye of Broadway legend Marjorie Rambeau. She was in Salt Lake on tour and Stanton snuck into the theater during a rehearsal while his dad painted lobby cards in his studio next door. Rambeau was rehearsing a scene with a child actor who was supposed to cry, but the poor kid was struggling to produce tears.

The actress was frustrated and told the director “I’ll bet even he can give me more than the kid you cast,” pointing at a stunned Stanton in the audience. The flustered director called six-year-old Stanton onto the stage, and the little boy wept on cue immediately. Rambeau insisted that Stanton play the part, and when it came time for the company to leave Salt Lake City, she asked him to come along.

And so Stanton became a member of her touring troupe. When the tour ended, Rambeau encouraged the Williams family to bring Stanton to Hollywood. They did, and Rambeau helped Stanton get a contract with Garson Studios. He appeared in several silent films beginning in 1920, and the Williams family began a new life in their small house on 88th and Orchard in south Los Angeles.

When Bula became pregnant with Esther, she was too worn out by childbirth, mothering, and the recent move to California to feel particularly excited. Esther’s brother David was barely three-years-old, and Bula didn’t think she could handle a fifth child. She later told Esther that she tried to end the pregnancy with horseback riding, physical exertion, and even hot mustard baths; despite her efforts, Esther was a strong and healthy baby. 

After Esther was born, Bula handed the baby to her thirteen-year-old daughter Maurine and took a step back from raising the child. Bula became more of a grandmother figure with Maurine taking on the maternal role. Unsurprisingly, Esther internalized her mother’s initial reluctance and later detachment, and did her best to be an easy child who made people laugh: “You’ve got to win popularity contests so that they won’t say, ‘Throw her back. This one we don’t want.’”

Lou Williams earned a modest living painting lobby displays for theaters, but money was usually tight. Stanton’s bright future in movies had dimmed since they’d arrived in Hollywood. He was cast in plays and appeared in films for Garson Studios, Mayflower Studio, and Weber Productions, but most mentions of Stanton come in 1919-1921. It seems as though his movie career stalled as he got older.

Meanwhile, Esther grew into a “husky mite off which measles, mumps and whooping cough bounced.” A 1946 biography in the fan magazine Modern Screen even noted with magnificent understatement that she was “bumped by a passing automobile once and even that didn’t hurt.” Esther was a tough little girl who loved the dollhouse her father built for her, but spent most of her time trying to keep up with her brother David. 

A picture of the Mermaid as a three-year-old shows a round-faced, plump toddler with a flippy page boy haircut and big eyes sitting in a brocade armchair. She smiles shyly at the camera as she clutches a bouquet of flowers in what were probably grubby hands. She wears knee socks and Mary Janes, and a pale short sleeved dress. If you squint, you can see flashes of the young woman this eager-to-please toddler would become.

She started school at Manchester Avenue Elementary, about two blocks away from her house. A little girl named Edna Mae Durbin, born just a few months after Esther, was also a student there.

Edna Mae had a beautiful, surprisingly mature singing voice, and in 1936 she became a star at Universal Studios under the name Deanna Durbin. Esther and Edna Mae’s teachers at Manchester Avenue and later Bret Harte Junior High probably would never have guessed that two of their pupils would go on to movie stardom.

Esther’s normal if unglamorous childhood was shattered on March 3, 1929, when sixteen-year-old Stanton abruptly died from a burst colon. The golden child, everyone’s favorite, was fine in the afternoon but dead by the evening. The family was devastated, including eight-year-old Esther who had worshiped her older brother. 

She saw the effect of his death on her parents and resolved in her child-brain to replace Stanton as much as she could. But Esther didn’t replace her brother as the family’s acting hope, nor did she ever seem to consider that route. Instead, Esther resolved to be strong, to be pleasing, and to carry her family in any way she could. As she wrote later,  “The little girl, who already had learned that to find her place in the sun she would have to please, would have to compete for attention and would, if possible, have to give what was wanted from her. That little girl now also had to take Stanton’s place and become strong.”

About a year after Stanton died, Bula Williams became involved in the plans for improving their neighborhood playground when public funds became available. She campaigned for a swimming pool along with the proposed baseball diamond, telling city officials that she had three daughters who needed someplace to play. Girls didn’t play baseball, but a pool might be just the thing.  

To remedy that minor detail, Bula sent Maurine and Esther on the Red Car trolley to Manhattan Beach. Esther remembered her first excursion into the waves: “I had absolutely no fear, and although I couldn’t swim yet, I could almost immediately ride the waves. Somehow, I sensed, the water was my natural element. It was where I belonged.”

After a few days with Maurine at the ocean, Esther could swim. And when the Manchester Playground Pool opened, a few hundred people were there to applaud as little Esther belly-flopped into the water and thrashed her way to the other side, successfully and adorably inaugurating the new pool. They had no idea that they were witnessing the first public performance of the Mermaid.

One wonders how Esther’s life would have been different if Bula had campaigned for a tennis court…

Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for the next excerpt!

Categories: History

Tagged as: 1940s, 1950s, Deanna Durbin, Esther Williams, Marjorie Rambeau, MGM, Technicolor, The Mermaid and Me