The New Astarte

Esther Williams first saw the light in California, land of temperate climate and azure shores. Her father was an artist and her mother a professor of psychology; and she had scarcely reached the age of seventeen when she became the world champion in swimming.

She is a blonde whose splendid bodily beauty has earned her the title of the new Astarte (Venus). Her height is 6 feet 5 inches and her weight 125 pounds. She is pleasant company, cheerful by nature, wholly and utterly devoted to her work, keen of insight and expert in reading faces; and she claims to know the character of her friends, men and women alike, merely by looking at the lines of the palm... She has a passionate fondness for managing the various affairs of the household herself; she loves cooking, cleaning the furniture, and sewing. She is known to be an eater of the first order, and thence comes her skill in cooking and in 'inventing' dishes upon dishes. Yet she insists, in season and out of season, that she eats only a little, and does not scruple to say that she shares with her husband the piece of sweet she serves him.

As for her husband, he is Ben Gage; during the war he held the rank of sergeant in the air force, and he married her in December of 1945. Her married life is very happy indeed. Among her sayings: 'I would rather be granted a child a year than an acting part assigned to me.' And how I should love to be granted twins, or triplets, at one stroke!

Before her latest marriage and her work in the cinema, Esther Williams was married to a medical student to whom a firm friendship had bound her since their school days. She was working at the time as a model in a fashion house, and thanks to the grace of her figure she became, overnight, the first model of San Francisco.

Louis B. Mayer, one of the owners of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film company, had heard of her, so he went to visit her, and kept at her until he persuaded her to leave her work and appear on the silver screen. And so it was: she accepted the offer and made her first appearance in the film 'Andy Hardy's Double Life,' together with Mickey Rooney... And she went on appearing in small, secondary parts until she came to play the leading role in 'Bathing Beauty,' filmed in natural colors, with its splendid dance music.