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When the 1936 Olympics came round, Swimmer Holm was doing pretty well as a night-club singer, with her husband's and other bands. She started her celebrated trip on the S. S. Manhattan on the wrong foot with the U. S. Olympic Committee by trying, unsuccessfully, to pay her own way first class. She spent her time in first class anyway, with newspapermen, taking literally the Committee's instructions to keep the kind of training to which she was accustomed. So the Committee's sober Chairman Avery Brundage threatened to kick her off the team. Her newspaper friends, who had been finding the voyage dull, set the radio crackling. By the time the Manhattan docked and Mr. Brundage had made good his threat, factions in the athletic world were divided in partisan schisms. Eleanor was thoroughly sore and dejected. In her suitcase she had a $1,000-a-week theatre contract contingent on her winning another championship. Then she got off the boat to find herself besieged with theatre offers, among them one from Loew's State promising $3,500 a week.
After this unexpected turning point in her life, Swimmer Holm turned professional, did a Tarzan movie with Olympic Decathlon Champion Glenn Morris (which proved that she might have listened more attentively to Mrs. Dillon), made more money than she had ever seen before. She met Billy Rose at the 1937 Cleveland Aquacade, where her curvesome capers pleased him as well as the customers.
Pretty, convivial and companionable, Eleanor Holm always has a very good time. Between shows at the Aquacade, she plays bridge with other members of the cast for stakes that do not jeopardize her pay check (reputedly $2,000 a week), has knitted eleven sweaters for her friends since the show opened. She thinks that after her marriage she will retire. She thinks that Billy Rose is "the most fascinating man I ever met." He probably is.
Mighty Midget. Billy Rose Exposition Spectacles, Inc., which leases the Marine Amphitheatre from New York State and the Fair Corp., has no one on its payroll quite so spectacular as Billy Rose. His pressagent, Dick Maney, has dubbed him The Mighty Midget, The Mad Mahout, etc! A competitor once remarked that Rose's definition of a "myriad" was 18 girls, but that is only one of his accomplishments since he was born Rosenberg in Manhattan, 40 years ago.
As a student at The Bronx Public School 44, he made the track team by learning to jump the gun without detection. After he won a shorthand championship with a broken finger by ingeniously sticking his pen through a potato, he became a demonstrator for the Gregg shorthand system. His specialty was taking notes with both hands from a phonograph chattering 350 words a minute. This inhuman proficiency took him to Washington, aged 18, as organizer of the stenographic force for Bernard Baruch's War Industries Board, where he had occasion to record the thoughts of such dignitaries as J. P. Morgan and the late Judge Elbert H. Gary.