9 The Art of Swimming

     Halfway across, I start to sing—not aloud, not to freak out the fish or spook another swimmer or leak water into my lungs—just to myself, a jolt from the jukebox playing in my head. The music syncs my stroke; the words press me forward:

You gotta swim
And swim when it hurts
The whole world is watching
You haven’t come this far
To fall off the earth.

The song is called “Swim.”

Yeah you’ve gotta swim
Don’t let yourself sink
Just find the horizon
I promise you it’s not as far as you think.

     I’m so drawn to the message, so haunted by the melody, I’ve adopted it as my anthem for this journey. And the back story is every bit as heroic as what happened here in the Hellespont. Andrew McMahon, the talented young composer/pianist who fronts the band Jack’s Mannequin, wrote it after a terrifying year and a half undergoing treatment for leukemia. He’d been diagnosed at age twenty-two, while he was on tour. “My doctor said it was a fifty-fifty shot,” Andrew tells me. It was “a brutal experience, with some pretty dark moments.” When he came out the other side he was physically healed but emotionally despairing, his self-confidence drained. One night he came across the word “swim” and scrawled it on a piece of paper on his bedside table. The next day he sat down and wrote—“very fast, a one-sitting song,” he recalls. “The word ‘swim’ is so powerful, and it just sort of unfolded itself: ‘You’ve got to swim; you’ve got to swim.’” The song was an instant hit, with references to greedy politicians and lost love broadening the appeal during turbulent times. “There was an air of things ready to fall apart,” Andrew says. “I felt it wasn’t just me that was struggling. It wasn’t just a song about myself; I tried to connect it back to the people around me. Maybe I wanted to feel that I wasn’t alone.”
     “Swim” broke Andrew’s writer’s block and became a fixture at every concert, where thousands have come up afterwards to show him the lyrics—his lyrics—tattooed on their ankles and shoulders and chests. SWIM FOR THE MUSIC. JUST KEEP YOUR HEAD ABOVE. SWIM. Right there in black ink. I see a few myself at a twilight performance in New York’s Central Park, as the mostly twenty-something audience sings along with him, their sunglasses propped on their heads, their voices rising and falling with the rolling waves of the melody. “It’s the most inspirational song I know,” says Jennie, twenty-five, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. “I always sing it when I’m having a bad day.” I ask if she swims. “Yes,” she says, beaming. “I can walk in the shallow end of the pool.”
     Andrew also loves to swim, especially in the surf of Southern California that is now his home. “Being inside of a massive body of water hammers home how infinitely unimportant each of us [is] as individuals, and how much more important each of us [is] in connection to the whole,” he says. That connection is what drives him. At a healthy twenty-nine now, a sunny, spirited blond with a radiant grin, who looks as if he were born in blue jeans, he is delighted with the reaction to “Swim.” “It’s become a letter to people in hard times,” he muses. “I didn’t want to write this and have it be a cancer song. I wanted it to be a human song. About struggle in general and finding the hope inside. Luckily, I feel like that’s what my fans have taken from it.”
     I am also a veteran of the cancer wars, and I know something about struggle. “Swim” is definitely a human song. Which is why it is carrying me across the Hellespont.

     In the hands of an artist, the world of swimming, already magical, becomes monumental. Pools transcend gunnite under the brush of David Hockney. The rhythms of the Rhine shimmer in Wagner’s “Prelude” to Das Rheingold, a series of undulating notes that paint the flow so distinctly, a blind person could see the water. And smart coaches, of both swimming and life, would gladly trade their clipboards for the go-get-’em poetry of Walt Whitman:

     Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
     Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
     To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout,
     and laughingly dash with your hair.

     This from a man who teased that his forte was floating. “I was a first-rate aquatic loafer,” Whitman, a strong swimmer, once remarked.
     Swimming is a perfect setting for romance, especially when it’s tragic. Even tragicomic. In Christopher Marlowe’s lusty Elizabethan fantasy of Hero and Leander, when the naked Leander emerged from his solo swim (his cloak, you’ll recall, still firmly tied to his head), the virgin Hero “screeched for fear. . . . And ran into the dark,” a scenario worthy of Jerry Seinfeld, although there is no known Renaissance equivalent of “shrinkage.” Marlowe explains Hero’s girlish panic with patronizing care: “Such sights as this to tender maids are rare.” Two centuries later, Lord Byron included Leander in his self-referential “Don Juan” while describing the Don’s own aquatic abilities:

A better swimmer you could scarce see ever,
He could, perhaps, have pass’d the Hellespont,
As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did.

     The story has long captured readers’ imaginations, including that of a young British pauper named Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Sometime around 1786, while walking down London’s Strand, he windmilled his arms as if swimming and accidentally came in contact with a gentleman’s waistcoat. When the man seized the lad and accused him of trying to pick his pocket, the terrified youngster explained that he’d been daydreaming, imagining himself Leander swimming across the Hellespont. The gentleman was so taken with his intelligence, he paid his entrance fees to the library, allowing Coleridge “to indulge his love of reading,” according to his biographer. It was his ticket to education, and Coleridge ultimately helped create the Romantic Movement. Thus was created the world’s first swimming scholarship, enabled by the artful tale of Hero and Leander.
     They have also inspired a sequence of oil paintings by Cy Twombly, who used “waves of brushstrokes,” according to the Tate Modern, “which cascade across the canvasses.” Symphonies and ballads have mourned them through the ages, and a modern artist, Adam Guettel, sings an emotional “Hero and Leander” that soars and sighs with the spray.

     The combination of sex and the sea has always been irresistible to songwriters, and nowhere does it resonate more merrily than in popular music that accompanied Americans’ giddy discovery of the seashore at the turn of the twentieth century. From the 1890s through the 1920s, song after song turned moon-June-spoon into beach-peach-teach, a simple formula that required only a sunny day, a handsome lifeguard, and a pretty girl who wanted to learn how to swim. “Paul, Won’t You Teach Me the Crawl” sings one “little lass, with plenty of class,” her suit “just a trifle too small.” By the end of the second verse they get married, and “the baby’s now learning to crawl.” Art speeds up everything.
     Every now and then the tables turn, and it’s the girl, not the guy, who can swim. When Jimmy O’Donnell takes Nelly O’Connell down to the beach one day, it’s Nell who “took to the water just like Neptune’s daughter / Jim couldn’t swim a stroke.” As you might imagine, the swimmer Nell takes up with is someone Jim “wanted to choke.” Nell, however, has room in her heart. She urges, “Hurry up, Jim,” and the chorus of “Splash! Splash! Splash!” suggests that he has a chance. Another seriously radical woman is Betsy, “the belle of the bathers / Swimming’s considered her forte.” The women are jealous, especially the fat ones (I am quoting here), “For all of them men shun / and pay no attention / whenever fair Betsy is near.” Not surprisingly, no one lives happily ever after in this song.
     In this tittering milieu of double entendres and daring courtship, the rhymes give the clues: The occupant of a bathing suit is usually a beaut. And what she needs to know about water is that no one oughter tell her mother what’s going on. Mothers are key in beach parlor music. “Don’t Go in the Water, Daughter,” urges one song—“A girl’s a sight / And looks a fright / The moment she gets wet.” No chance for romance there. “Don’t Take Your Beau to the Seashore,” commands another (this one by Irving Berlin), rhyming the role of a petticoat (to “conceal”) with the reality of a bathing suit (to “reveal”), bad news for imperfect bodies. Uh-oh. Reality is never more brutal than in “The Handsome, Brave Life Saver,” in which Miss Liza, who “rav’d about the wave / And every Sunday went to bathe” never doubted that if she swam too far the (yes) “handsome, brave life saver” would bring her in. Except that one day she “strayed” beyond where she could “wade / She “grew afraid,” called him “to her aid,” in fact “cried for help three times or more. / But he was busy on the shore.” Turns out “his wife was standing near / That’s why he couldn’t hear.” Sometimes life sucks, even at the beach.
     My favorite sheet music of the time is less callous, more suggestive, and far more generous to the sensibilities of both the big guy and the cute (“in her bathing suit”) gal. The loving couple would meet every summer at the beach and—well, let’s let the lyricist tell it:

And she’d say to him, Come on let’s go in
So he’d take her by the hand.
Then they’. . . .

CHORUS:

Swim for a while, out in the ocean
Then down they would go—way down below
Nobody knew what they went down there to do
But they’d come up laughing in a minute or two
Then they’d swim for a while, out in the ocean
And down to the bottom once more
When the water got rough,
She’d holler, John, that’s enough
Then they had to swim back to the shore.
Ev’ry single minute of the day
They’re either swimming or loving away
They ride the donkeys, chute the chutes
They don’t care what happens to their bathing suit. . . .

     You get the idea. Even swimming has its scandales.
     In 1935 a more urbane composer produced an even more delectable song. Cole Porter, a suave regular at society’s finest pools and lidos, collaborated with Moss Hart on the musical comedy Jubilee, a witty (although now dated) spoof on an unnamed royal family that could only reside at Buckingham Palace. Bored with their regal lives, each goes off to satisfy a private fantasy in the common world. The queen’s dream is swimming. She arranges to meet “the naked swimmer who went into the films”—an actor nicknamed Mowgli who is a biting caricature of the Olympian-turned-Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller. By the end of Act I the queen is in the pool with Mowgli and his mermen, jubilantly proclaiming the value of her newfound activity:

There’s nothing like swimming for trimming the old physique,
For giving the torso that certain chic;
There’s nothing that hustles the muscles and makes ’em tauter
Than gaily doing your daily dozen with Neptune’s daughter.

     The peppy melody and brilliant rhymes (Porter couples the queen’s “regalia” with the crawl from “Australia”) are beyond charming; unfortunately, almost no one knows the song. It was dropped from the show before it opened on Broadway, and when Jubilee closed after only 169 performances, it was consigned to the archives. Today a number of revivals have restored this lost gem to their productions, but “There’s Nothing Like Swimming” has yet to find a slot on iTunes.
     Literature has always taken swimming more seriously, with a flood of established metaphors: the loneliness of the ocean, the flux of the current, the peace or finality of the deep. The sea is the womb, or our unconscious, or both. Pools make us happy, or vulnerable, or anxious. Swimming represents the possible and the impossible. It’s an obsession that cracks the glass surface of life, a river that gets you to places you only imagined. Learning to swim is a parable of survival; marathons conquer the challenge of distance. Water is holy, and swimming is a kind of communion, as Camus suggests in The Plague. Water makes you weird, as Alice learned in Wonderland. Water demands risk, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, turning the imagery onto his own craft: “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” Roger Deakin, whose book Waterlog chronicles his year swimming the wild water of Britain, described diving in. “You let yourself go, launch out, cross over some sort of boundary. Looking out at a black sheet of water is like contemplating a blank sheet of paper—but once you are in, you are in.”
     Writers who swim know the secret handshake. “Swimming is the apex of the day, its heart,” wrote John Cheever, whose 1964 short story, “The Swimmer,” makes the activity he loved the core of a searing allegory. It begins as a perfect summer Sunday for Neddy Merrill, a Connecticut exurbanite with an athlete’s body and a millionaire’s estate. “The day was beautiful,” Cheever writes, “and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.” Neddy’s course is unique: a “string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. . . . He would name the stream Lucinda after his wife.” It is an enticing plan—to swim home via his neighbors’ pools, a sapphire trail that only a real-life swimmer might have invented. But the Lucinda River weaves instead through raucous cocktail parties, old lovers, and older memories, a surreal journey taking Neddy through spiritual desolation to the abandoned wreck of his house. The last word of the story is “empty,” which perfectly describes Neddy’s life, clarified finally through the act of swimming.
     “My father loved pools,” the writer Susan Cheever tells me over dinner one night. “But he wouldn’t build one. He liked swimming in other peoples’ pools. He swam a very choppy crawl, never learned to breathe right.” She uses the same word—“choppy”—that John Cheever uses to describe Neddy’s stroke. And she goes on to decode the brilliance of the work. “It was a novel first,” she says. “But he burned it.” I am dumbfounded. Burned his own novel? How come? “Creative genius,” Susan explains definitively. “Then he turned it into a short story. That’s why it’s so good. By winnowing it down he gave it tremendous power.”
     The director Frank Perry turned “The Swimmer” into an equally searing film (completed by director Sidney Pollack), for which actor Burt Lancaster had to learn to swim, an ironic indication of how far swimming had fallen out of favor by 1968. Hollywood’s earliest swimming stars weren’t just curvy actors who could swim; they were authentic aquanauts whose movies were often about swimming itself. Annette Kellerman reinterpreted her vaudeville act for California’s new industry and made a dozen silent movies from 1909 to 1924—Neptune’s Daughter, Venus of the South Seas, Daughter of the Gods, to name a few. By today’s standards, most were sappy underwater fantasies, heavy on fairytale and exotic—sometimes outlandish—mermaid costumes. It was even a tough sell then. “What! A woman fish on the screen!” yelped one studio head, almost refusing the pitch. But the movies made money, lots of money, and Kellerman’s fabulous physique and gutsy maneuvers (she swam all her own stunts), along with a shoal of personally trained mer-chorus girls, kept the audiences buying tickets. Sometimes she forgot the fishtail, and the rest of the garb as well, a tribute to her perfect body that the studio was delighted to promote.
     “You won’t strain your eyes trying to follow the flitting forms of these darting divinities of the deep,” promised one industry magazine. “You get more than a flash—much more. This is the naked truth.” In 1917, she was cited as an example when censors banned nudity in future films.
     In Kellerman’s wake came a quartet of elite athletes who slid directly from the pool to show business. Eleanor Holm won gold in the backstroke at the 1932 Olympics but was banned from the next games because she drank champagne aboard the ship taking her to Germany, a moment of Olympic prudery that made her turn professional. Her only movie was Tarzan’s Revenge (1938), in which she executes a snappy backstroke and an Olympian crawl to escape from a crocodile in the jungle river. “They had wired the jaws shut, so I wasn’t bitten by it,” she told a reporter, “but it could swipe you with that big tail. I was scared to death!” The rest of Holm’s career centered on giant public stages, most notably as one of the headliners of the famed Aquacade produced by her second husband, Billy Rose, at the 1939 World’s Fair. Her costar there was another Olympian, the magnificently muscular Johnny Weissmuller.
     Born in Romania, raised mainly in Chicago, Weissmuller won five golds and one bronze in two Olympics (1924, 1928) and set sixty-seven world records, with such a wicked crawl that a coach once told him he “fairly climbed out of the water.” When Weissmuller retired at twenty-five, he had never lost a race. He was handsome, too. And he became the definitive (but not the first) Tarzan, swinging through twelve movies to the accompaniment of his signature yodel-yell. Also swimming like a champ—with his head out of the water (the better for the camera to catch him) in Tarzan and the Ape Man (1932) and in the famously sexy underwater romp in the follow-up, Tarzan and His Mate. That’s the swim scene you really want to see—although it’s not clear whether costar Maureen O’Sullivan or her double, Olympian Josephine McKim, is the nude swimmer. Yes, nude. 1934. So much for the censors. Weissmuller, however, keeps his loincloth on.
     The other famous swimming Tarzan was Buster Crabbe, who became even better known for his roles as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. He was a formidable real-life action figure at two Olympics, 1928 (bronze) and 1932 (gold), after which he too swam in the Aquacade, opposite Eleanor Holm.
     There was one more Aquacade megastar, one more of these early crossover sports figures, a genuine celebrity who could bring folks to the edge of the water and drop their jaws, could open a movie and keep the audience asking for more. For many of us in the 1950s, there was only one movie mermaid, only one Hollywood photo on our walls. Every girl I grew up with wanted to be Esther Williams. Actually, I wanted to be June Allyson first but then decided that water proof hair and a sexy stroke were way more interesting than a smoky voice.
     You could run out of fingers counting the reasons Esther Williams remains a hero: her teenage records in freestyle and breaststroke, her smashing performances in the San Francisco Aquacade with Weissmuller, a body that was built to fill a bathing suit, and a smile that tested every shade of Technicolor. Her smooth strokes and elegant dives looked so effortless, you believed you could do them too. But the reason I most adore Esther Williams is because she played the game and beat them at it. As she tells the story in her hilarious autobiography, The Million Dollar Mermaid, she wasn’t looking for a career in show biz—she wanted only to swim and to win. Her first screen test, at 20th Century Fox, confirmed it. The casting director told her, “You’re a swimmer, right? Well, get back into the pool.” And so she did. When World War II cancelled America’s participation in the 1940 Olympics, Williams turned pro but figured the Aquacade was all the show biz she could handle. MGM had another idea. The popularity of a new movie sensation at 20th Century Fox—ice skater Sonja Henie and a series of films in which she glided across the frost to music—sparked the copycat instinct at MGM. They tried Williams again because the head of the studio, Louis B. Mayer, had issued a dictum: “Melt the ice, get a swimmer, make it pretty!” And that’s how Esther Williams became our hero—because Hollywood needed a new gimmick to outsell a proven gimmick and because she did it with style and skill and, always, that smile.
     Despite “being pushed around by little guys with big libidos,” Williams (five foot eight, often wearing three-inch heels) helped invent a new Hollywood genre: the swimming extravaganza, a musical comedy with an elaborate, multi-mermaid swimathon, choreographed by Busby Berkeley to showcase her talents and to be geometrically stunning from every single angle. Picking up where Annette Kellerman had left off, Esther Williams also turned synchronized swimming into a popular art form, ultimately helping to make it an official Olympic sport. She swam on-screen with everyone from Mickey Rooney (Andy Hardy’s Double Life) to cat-and-mouse team Tom and Jerry (Dangerous When Wet). She made the frothy escapism of Neptune’s Daughter and Bathing Beauty as mouthwatering as popcorn. And she was the natural choice to play the lead in Kellerman’s life story, Million Dollar Mermaid, in 1952. What she later told an interviewer about her predecessor defines her own life as well. “She knew there was more to being a woman than being kept in corsets,” Williams said of Kellerman. “She wasn’t content to float. She was determined to swim. What she did was to persuade women to get in the water. I’m a continuum of that.”
     In 1993, when Asphalt Green, a gigantic new swimming facility, opened in Manhattan, the ceremony included a tribute to Esther Williams. Jane Katz performed the synchro to honor the star and spoke with her just before the show. Williams’s advice is her legacy. “Swim pretty!” she said. That’s life imitating art.