Esther Williams, 22, hazel-eyed, streamlined Hollywood aquabelle, became an unwitting accessory to crime last week when one Allen Artenchuck confessed the theft of six reels of Esther’s film, Bathing Beauty, from a Brooklyn theater on the grounds that “Esther Williams is the most gorgeous creature I have ever seen. When I could not have her, I made up my mind to get the film.” —TIME, Dec. 11, 1944 Such was the effect of a pretty girl in a bathing suit, not just on a besotted Brooklynite but also on the mass of moviegoers at the American midcentury. In a popular series of MGM musicals from Bathing Beauty to the 1955 Jupiter’s Darling, Esther Williams would doff her robe, revealing a sleek one-piece swimming costume, dive into a pool and, as film critic James Agee wrote, go “lolloping in a friendly way before underwater cameras.” And, like Mickey Rooney — who, in Williams’ feature-film debut Andy Hardy’s Double Life, is so stirred by the girl’s charms that he falls twice into a swimming pool — movie fans got all wet over Esther. Williams, who died Jun. 6 at 91 in Los Angeles, had set a national record for the 100-meeter freestyle as a teenager, but in movies her appeal wasn’t speed, or overt sexuality, but rather an easy, self-assured radiance, in or out of the water. Where a Rita Hayworth would stoke men’s lust with the allure of exotic danger, and Jane Russell was a sullen face over two bazookas, Esther suggested the pretty girl next door, if you were lucky enough to live in an Orange County or John Cheever suburb where everyone had a backyard pool. Sleek as a seal and imperiously tall (5’8½”), with gorgeously toned arms, a beachcomber’s tan and a lustrous smile, Williams exemplified the athletic young dazzler to a country weary of war. In the 1953 Easy to Love, Van Johnson rapturously defines Esther as “all that’s beautiful, clean, decent, desirable, wholesome and commercial” — the postwar dream of the all-American girl. She was Doris Day, underwater. (READ: … Continue reading Bathing Beauty: The Wet and Wild Life of Esther Williams