“At that time the Daily Mirror was pioneering the use of photographs in newspapers,” says Cox. Then she became a teenage champion of the pool, breaking records in long and short distances. Required to wear steel braces, she started swimming to strengthen her legs. Many false reports over the years have claimed she was inflicted by polio as a child in fact Kellerman was diagnosed as having the bone disease rickets.

And if you did make it up, probably nobody would believe you.”Ĭox curated the Sydney Powerhouse Museum’s Million Dollar Mermaid: Annette Kellerman exhibition, which celebrates Kellerman’s life and charts her journey from fragile Sydney youth to bona fide international superstar. (Sept.Like many larger-than-life figures, particularly those famous at the time of Kellerman’s celebrity (when the ‘golden age of magic’ was in full swing, legends such as Harry Houdini performing in packed-out theatres) there has been 'a tendency for exaggeration or misrepresentation in many accounts of her life”, according to Kellerman expert Peter Cox. Williams speaks of her own ''zest for life'' she and collaborator Diehl demonstrate it many times over in this tremendously entertaining life story. Later chapters cover Williams's work for TV, her swimsuit licensing and her years with jet-setting, tyrannical third husband Fernando Lamas. When, during the rain-drenched filming of Pagan Love Song, Williams cables from Kauai to tell her studio head she's pregnant, the announcement reaches all the ham radio operators in California. Her sparkling anecdotes alternate the scandalous, the charming and the ridiculous. Williams had to deal with disastrous marriages, manipulative moguls and life-threatening water stunts. Williams's movie years constitute the colorful core of the book, displaying life inside a major studio during Hollywood's Golden Age and showing screen legends with their pants down-sometimes literally. Competing in swim meets at 15, Williams became a national champion in 1939, costarred in Billy Rose's Aquacade with the drunken, exhibitionistic Johnny Weissmuller and signed with MGM in 1944. Williams and Diehl (Tales from the Crypt) backstroke through a flood of memories, giving a fluid treatment to ''hundreds of hours of conversations that are the basis for this book.'' Williams opens by describing the LSD trip she took in 1959 (Cary Grant helped her score the acid), then dives into her traumatic early life: a brother died at 16, and a boy the same age raped the young Williams repeatedly.

MGM swim-femme Williams delighted millions in choreographed aqua-movie-musicals during the 1940s and '50s: her unbuttoned autobiography examines both her splashy, sunny public image and the murky waters of her private life.

The million dollar mermaid book