World: Eleanor's Show

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Billy Rose likes to call the spectacle that is making him another million "Eleanor's show." It is an ambitious amphibian affair that has plenty of the three things Showman Rose says he most admires: Sex, Sentiment, and Curiosity. An enlargement of the Aquacade Rose put on at Cleveland's Great Lakes Exposition in 1937 (he said then "I'll use Lake Erie for a stage and Canada for a backdrop"), it is not an old-fashioned water show but a slick, streamlined revue put on with professional pace. Before a huge outdoor auditorium that resembles a big-league baseball grandstand, stretches a swimming pool 300 feet long, with a stage behind. In the water Johnny Weissmuller and many of a cast of 350 (500 for advertising purposes) swim and perform water ballets that are poetry and water slapstick that is poetry too. On the stage perform Frances Williams and Morton Downey, endless choruses of girls and boys and four superbly shiftless Aquabuilders, who at each show construct a privy. Olympic champions dive; a fat man falls off a diving board; Channel Swimmer Gertrude Ederle, dumpy and deaf, still raises a nostalgic cheer from the crowd. The Aquacade has also Eleanor Holm.

Water Girl. Billy Rose appeared before the Aquacade audience only once (on the chilly opening night in a topcoat to calm a restless audience), but he and Backstroker Eleanor Holm (nominally only one of the Aquacade's four headline attractions) are the show's real stars. They are its personalities and give it most of its marquee strength. The fact that Billy Rose is going to marry Eleanor Holm as soon as his divorce decree from Actress Fanny Brice becomes final in October does not do their publicity any harm.

Eleanor Holm, born in Brooklyn on Dec. 6, 1913, the daughter of a captain in the New York Fire Department, had luck early in life. Because Olympia Pool, summer meeting place of the Women's Swimming Association of New York, happened to be near her parents' summer cottage, she had expert swimming instruction as soon as she had made her start on water wings. Her unequalled backstroke was developed by a coach who found her backstroke the weakest in her free-style repertory and set her to practicing it exclusively. It was her best stroke when she won her first important championship—national 300-yard medley —in 1927.

By the time Eleanor Holm had won her first Olympic championship, in 1932 (she placed fifth in 1928), she was beginning to attract attention on land. That year Warner Bros, put her under contract at $500 a week, although she declined to surrender her amateur status by swimming before the camera. She spent her year surveying Hollywood's high life, met Husband Jarrett, and was groomed for a movie career. Her coach was Josephine Dillon, Clark Gable's first wife. Whenever Eleanor tired of grimacing into a mirror or exercising her voice, she could always end the lesson by asking Mrs. Dillon about Mr. Gable. When her option came up at the end of a year, Warner's somewhat surprisingly renewed it for $750 a week. But by that time Eleanor knew she had more chance of fame as swimmer than actress. When the studio came to the same conclusion and tried to make her swim, she got them to buy up her contract and let her go.

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