Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Sad moms scarf Jif
This is Marie Osmond off drugs; music lovers to Nancy Kerrigan: "Why you?"; and Mark Harmon, potty mouth. Plus: Mare and Rho return!
By Amy Reiter
[10/18/99]

Rogues' Gallery
Lawsuits, flamingos and the spin doctor bombs
No "cheesy, sleazy, one-night stand behavior" for Sharon Stone; PR from the Unabomber: I may be a killer, but I'm no kook!
By Douglas Cruickshank
[10/16/99]

People Feature
The kid's alright
Harmony Korine strikes a dissonant chord with grown-up America.
By Daniel Kraus
[10/16/99]

Nothing Personal
Four score and seven votes ... tops
The "higher consciousness candidate" on calling dead presidents, the IQ of corpses and insect diplomacy. Plus: Gary Coleman, plaything of the press?
By Amy Reiter
[10/15/99]

People Feature
To hell with curfew
That's no gang of thugs terrorizing midnight's mean streets, it's a congregation of God's children reclaiming souls on the swing shift.
By Carina Chocano
[10/15/99]

Complete archives for People

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

In psychological jargon, it's called the animus. Inside all of us, Carl Jung wrote, lies our opposite. For men, it is the anima, the female part, "relatedness, emotionality, a spontaneous and unplanned approach to life" (as psychologist Yoram Kaufman would later describe it).

For women, it is the animus, "to judge and to act, for discipline and aggressiveness ... The animus is symbolized by male figures appearing in a woman's dreams and fantasies, as a husband, son, father, lover, Prince Charming ..."

Williams' acid-induced vision produces the two other key events that turn up in this autobiography. The first we might call "The unveiling of the animus." She's in love with Jeff Chandler, the handsome leading man from the '50s. They are thinking about getting married. They're in his house. She's cooking supper. She goes upstairs to find, "Jeff was standing in the middle of the bedroom in a red wig, a flowered chiffon dress, expensive high-heeled shoes, and lots of makeup."

She screamed. And screamed. And screamed. "'Take that off! Take that all off now!' I yelled and started screaming again."

Most critics have taken this passage as a wonderful joke. What a laugh! Hunky Jeff Chandler, dressed in drag. The gossip columnists have had a field day with it. But it's a five-page scream, and it goes beyond normal terror. "I couldn't stop myself ... It's a scream that has no logic. It is sheer, uncontrolled panic. I just stood there in the center of the doorway and screamed. It was the kind of scream that ... has one tone to it. It doesn't go into any bars of music. It's not a movie star scream, but the kind you make when your mind shuts down."

What was it about Jeff Chandler in drag that created such an explosion in Esther Williams? She's no dummy. She has seen lots of strange sights in show biz. There was Johnny Weismuller: "Under the stage (out of the audience's sight) ... he'd whip off his trunks so I could see that he was beautifully equipped, and if he caught me, he'd try to get my suit off."

Or Morton Downey: "I had to listen to Morton Downey as I walked out onstage for each entrance ... in sotto voce, heard only by me, Morton spewed four-letter words, regaling me with graphic descriptions of what he would like to do on and to my body."

She's been hustled by countless stars and producers: Victor Mature, Billy Rose, Desi Arnaz. She's acted with dozens of boys: Mickey Rooney with his temper tantrums; Gene Kelly: small, petty and mercilessly cruel to her; Red Skelton crying because, in one sequence, he's going to have to shave his chest hair. What's different about this new vision is that she's fresh from her LSD experience, an extraordinarily powerful one. On acid, she saw herself in the mirror not only as a woman, but as a strong young man, whose "clumsy hand" touched her breast, as she "felt my penis stirring."

When Williams saw Jeff Chandler dolled up (high heels! chiffon dress!) she was, again, looking in the mirror, as she had on LSD -- but this time she saw something different. She saw before her Esther Williams -- a man in woman's clothing. And the vision scared the bejesus out of her.

Shortly after, she found a way to deal with it, for within months, she took up with actor Fernando Lamas. It was a marriage that was to last for 22 years. Like almost all of the men she was associated with, Fernando was a boy. But he had something different going for him. He was the kind of boy they call macho.

They made an agreement. They would have a perfect MGM married life. She knew those well, because she had acted them out in dozens of movies, with names like "Thrill of a Romance," "Neptune's Daughter," "Easy to Wed" and "Fiesta." The script was simple. There would be a beautiful husband, a beautiful housewife, a big house. Lamas wouldn't play around. He would be faithful. She'd play her part of a married woman. No children (she had children, but he didn't want them in the house; she complied.) She wouldn't make any movies, either. Fernando didn't like competition -- from within, or from without.

Next page | The unmasking