156: Esther Williams and the Birth of Waterproof Makeup (Make Me Over, Episode 5)

You Must Remember This

Karina Longworth

Tv & Film

4.6 • 15.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Esther Williams single-handedly helped popularize the pastime of swimming — first as the star swimmer of the San Francisco production of Billy Rose's Aquacade, and then as the star of Hollywood films like Bathing Beauties and Million Dollar Mermaid. Williams’s stardom — and the necessity to maintain her image as a grinning glamour girl, even while submerged underwater — led to the creation of several waterproof products and swimwear innovations, from waterproof foundation and eyeliner to bathing cap couture. Despite two decades of sustained celebrity and brand power, Williams eventually struggled to maintain the pristine bathing beauty facade. She lost her MGM contract in the 1960s and had to pay millions to the studio in damages. On her way down, she slapped her name on swimming pools and exercise videos, stumbled through four unhappy marriages and started to experiment with LSD for her depression. Drawing on previously untapped resources, Rachel Syme will tell the story of Williams' rise and fall, and the innovations in aqua-beauty she inspired, while also analyzing why we want to be waterproof, why we want to be so invulnerable to the elements and why putting swimming on-screen led to pressures for women to look put-together, even when sopping wet. This episode was written and performed by Rachel Syme, a writer, reporter and cultural critic living in New York City. She writes a regular column for The New Yorker on fashion and beauty. She is also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Vanity Fair and Esquire. She often writes about the complex intersection between fame, glamour, beauty and feminism.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for watching!
0:25.1	Welcome to another episode of Make Me Over, a special presentation of You Must Remember This.
0:33.3	I'm your host, Karina Longworth.
0:39.0	What you're hearing is a version of the song, pagan love song,
0:46.8	which was first introduced in a very early sound film called pagan boy,
0:51.8	which we discussed a while back in our episode on Ramon Navarro.
1:02.6	This version of the song comes from a 1950 technical or musical
1:07.5	called pagan love song, and it plays through a mostly underwater ballet performed by today's subject,
1:15.8	Esther Williams.
1:17.0	You can watch a clip of this scene on YouTube, and you should, because it's one of the most beautiful
1:24.0	things I've ever seen. At the beginning of the scene, Williams glides from the top of the screen
1:30.6	to the bottom as though she's falling from the heavens, and she swims almost in slow motion,
1:37.6	close enough to the camera to allow you to fully take in her lacquered beauty queen hair,
1:44.2	her permanent blinding white grin, and to contemplate. How does she look like that under water?
1:53.4	Today's storyteller is here to explain just that. Rachel Sime is a writer, reporter,
2:01.5	and cultural critic who writes a regular column for the New Yorker on Fashion and Beauty.
2:06.9	She's also a regular contributor to the New York Times magazine, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Esquire.
2:14.7	Rachel, why did you want to tell the story of Esther Williams?
2:18.2	Well, first of all, I saw bathing beauty in Million Dollar Mermaid to have her biggest films,
2:23.5	and I like you had said earlier, I was completely captivated by the visual spectacle of it all.
2:30.0	The choreography and the coordination that it took for those synchronized swimming,
2:34.8	whether all in the bathing caps and doing the sunbursts, and she's shimmering in this sort of long,
	...

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