Friend Of The Family—Esther Williams

The first time Esther and Ben Gage invited my husband and me to their house, we were really impressed. To visit a movie star in her native habitat was moving a couple of New Yorkers-by-adoption into the lifted pinky set.

As we drove out to Brentwood, we actually sneered at the hapless tourists who were buying maps so they could gawk at movie stars’ homes—from the outside, yet.

We parked our car at a discreet distance from the house, and approached it with no little trepidation. My husband, Jim, who has since become famous in his own right, was aghast—but aghast—at the sight of the small, white frame house.

“This is a movie star’s home?” he gasped. “To me, it looks like Hodge Podge Lodge!”

And he was right. Apparently, they had thrown together everything around the place with their own little mitts. We found out that Ben had even built the pool. Pool? It was an oversize Lily cup. We had expected something that would compare favorably in size to Tahoe.

Not that.it was Ben’s fault, really. They didn’t have as much money as Bing Crosby—then. Besides, they loved doing things for themselves. So Ben did all the carpentry, and worked so hard that the house eventually spilled over into the next lot, which they didn’t own. If Esther wanted to go to the incinerator, she was off limits!

Our crowd at one of the get-togethers Esther loves. There’s Renee and Bill Lundigan, me, Janet Blair, Jim, Esther. Seated: Ben, Lou Hirsch.

But Hodge Podge Lodge was their honeymoon cottage and they loved it. Esther made all the curtains, the slipcovers, the lampshades and the upholstery, and she had enough time left over to knit Ben a few pairs of argyle socks. It was all lovely and informal. In fact, there was a bow on the garbage can.

Well, that was a few years back, when my husband was best known as “Hubert Updyke” on the radio, which led to our meeting with Esther and Ben. We were living in an upholstered telephone booth over Schwab’s drugstore. This, at a time when Jim’s character, “Updyke,” was billed as “the richest man in the world.”

We were transplanted New Yorkers, and we disdained automobiles (let’s face it, we couldn’t afford one). Jim had gone into Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills to get out of the rain and wait for a taxi. He was standing there, trying to look accustomed to such places, when two tall, beautiful people approached him.

No matter how many chairs are available, Esther always play down on the floor. She didn’t like the hat I was trying.

“We watched you do Updyke the other night,” said Esther, while Jim tried to swallow his busy Adam’s apple, “and we want you to know that we think you are the greatest!”

You tell any man he’s great, and you’ve got a friend. So has your spouse. Then and there, we became friends of the Gages, and we’ve never let them go.

You ought to see how things have changed since 1946 when we first laid cynical eyes on Hodge Podge Lodge. Since then, the Gages have pioneered in a place called Mandeville Canyon, a deep gorge, previously the residence of coyotes and rattlesnakes living in little houses of beer cans left by brave picnickers. That’s all changed since Esther and Ben took over. Now it’s a sort of Schubert Alley (a place in New York where you see no one but famous people.) But life in Mandeville Canyon, despite the encroachment of movie millionaires, is still primitive and breath-taking.

Esther and I don’t like spectator sports, so when Jim and Ben go golfing we stay home and cook together.

For instance, Dick Widmark lives there in a house he made over from an old nursery, and on a clear day, you can see him with a small ax, hacking at an encroaching jungle of wild orchids and gardenias. Up the street, you must drive carefully or risk getting hit by Bob Mitchum as he backs out the trailer he keeps in front of his $75,000 hut. The next hazard is a pair of oversize dogs, a boxer and a police dog, who roam the area, looking for people who do not belong there. They belong to Vic Mature, who also makes life dangerous for trespassers by pitching practice golf balls up the canyon. Relatively few people are hardy enough to reach the top by the ancient road that leads to the many-acred estate of June Allyson and Dick Powell.

Esther and Ben have the best, the most authentic Harly American farmhouse we’ve ever seen (and we’ve seen enough to start a new New England.) They don’t have a bed George Washington slept in, but they have everything else. They have a pool so big the tides come and go in it. It’s a far cry from the one in which Esther broke cement every time she took two strokes.

You’ve heard about the homes of movie stars? Well, let me tell you!

This one has a television set in every room, a projection room built in for home movies. It has two nurseries for the children. And yet, it’s a home where an embroidered sampler would not be amiss.

There’s no butler who precedes Esther as she comes into the room, to announce: “Miss Esther Williams, MGM star of Easy To Love and other extravaganzas.” No, Esther and Ben are, despite the million! dollar atmosphere, plain “folks.”

Even when she was working on a picture herself, Esther always found time to help me in my work on the lot.

One time Jim had a golf date with Ben, and he brought along his father, who is a retired businessman from Cleveland. Jim’s dad didn’t care much for Cleveland. Jim’s a golf course, so he readily accepted Esther’s invitation to hang around the pool, while the boys played golf. She entertained him all afternoon, chatting and swimming and diving.

Later, as Jim and his dad were driving home, the elder Backus exclaimed, “Say, that girl who’s married to the tall feller with the cigar—she can really swim. Now, if she’d like to come on back to Cleveland for a spell, we might fix it so she could give an exhibition at the Athletic Club. I’d buy her a dinner and maybe she could do herself some good.”

ESTHER and Ben are constant party-givers and will use any excuse to invite over eight or ten people. Esther will go out and buy a beautiful housecoat, say, and next thing you know, she’s on the phone inviting us over for a costume party: “Everybody come over and wear housecoats and pajamas!”

We dressed up as waiters and waitresses from The Trails for a costume ball.

Then, out of the deep freeze comes a beautiful buffet supper. She’s an excellent cook, specializing in American and Americanized dishes. A typical buffet might be ham and turkey, strawberries Romanoff, a salad (we’ve kidded her by calling it “salad with chlorine roquefort dressing right out of the pool”) and later, coffee and a great pie, homemade a la E. Williams.

You can get waffles all day long at the Gages, but one thing you’ll never get is seafood. They don’t dig it. Once, they found us sitting over a seafood dinner and Esther asked, in awe: “What are you eating? Live bait?”

At a typical party, you may find Janet Blair (whom we all call “Poo”) and her new husband, Nick Mayo, Virginia Bruce and Ali Ipar, Donna Reed and Tony Owen, David and Jane Wayne, Dick and Winnie Wesson, the Backuses (who else?) and Dr. Raymond La Scola, the babies’ pediatrician. At one party in the backyard, the good doctor and Esther roasted individual squabs for each of us. We had wild rice, garlic toast, that salad and Cherries Jubilee.

The men wore blue jeans and the gals, pinafores. Ben showed up in a white suit. Jim took one look at the long man in white and dubbed him “The Good Humor Man.” I noticed his vanilla was dragging. Esther wondered, “Where are your chimes?”

Then we saw some color movies of their trip to Hawaii, and behind-the-scenes film of Esther’s two films, Pagan Love Song and Fiesta.

For one Photographers’ Ball in Hollywood, Esther and Ben had our whole gang dress up as waitresses and waiters from their restaurant, The Trails. There were eight men and eight girls. We used dark make-up from head to toe, and the girls wore pretty, dainty, revealing costumes. We may not have been the most elegant gals there, but we certainly overpowered the rest of Hollywood’s great names by sheer numbers.

Incidentally, Keenan Wynn was in our group. He had worked all day, and then it took him five hours to get his make-up on. He wore white eyebrows and a white mustache over jet black make-up. Jim took a look at him and screamed: “Man, you look like a negative!” A photographer came and snapped our pictures, and then poor Keenan collapsed from sheer fatigue. We dragged him home and off to bed. After five hours of arduous make-up application, he never did get to the party. Esther never runs out of ideas for costume parties. Once, when she appeared to be stumped, Jim laughed her out of it by suggesting she marinate herself and come as a herring.

Parties for sheer fun aren’t Esther’s only hobby. Each year she is hostess for fund-raising affairs for babies blind from birth. All the stars help her, but she is the sparkplug. Moreover, she devotes many hours a week teaching these children to swim, and she donated a pool. Jim does lots of charity work during the year, and when they are needed, Esther and Ben always rally around.

Esther loves to laugh, even at her own expense. Jim once said: “She’s the only hostess I’m afraid of. I saw her hug Ben and break three of his ribs!”

And when Jim called her “the world’s wealthiest barracuda,” her laughter was the loudest.

There’s a running gag about Esther’s housekeeping instincts. She never comes to our house when she doesn’t hang up her coat, roll up her sleeves and start emptying ashtrays, carrying trash to the incinerator and tidying up even where everything has just been tidied. At such times, Jim will say: “Esther, why don’t you go down to the garage and bring up two cases of soft drinks? Oh, and on your way back, don’t forget to mow the lawn!”

She’ll be on her way before she lets out a roar of laughter and cries: “Hey, what am I doing?” Anent the same trait, Jim says, “After Esther started coming to our home, I laid off the gardener!”

She’s always lecturing me on what she calls my “silly, New York extravagances.” She tells me ways to save money and urges me to be thrifty. For instanee, I never have learned to drive a car, so I spend a fortune on cabs when Jim isn’t around to chauffeur me. Once, exasperated with me, she said, “Henny is the only person in the world who takes cabs to a drive-in!”

Esther is a great floor sitter, and an articulate gesticulator, waving her arms, jumping up, striding and plopping down again during the narration of an anecdote. She also takes off her glasses when she swings into action. While she is “backstroking” a story, she has broken a pair of glasses a day.

But neither that, nor anything else, ever makes her lose her temper. She’s generally as sunny as a wheatfield in the noonday sun. When she’s really annoyed, she may cluck her tongue and say: “Oh, honestly!” She prides herself (and who wouldn’t?) on her self-control.

She loves to play tricks, but we’ve never known a practical joke by Esther to hurt anyone. When Jim first became the judge on the I Married Joan TV show, the shooting schedule was rugged. In one episode, I played Jim’s secretary while Joan Davis played his wife.

When Esther heard this arrangement, she quipped: “Why don’t you announce yourself as Jim’s Other Wife from now on?”

During that tough schedule, we usually got home after midnight pretty tired. One night, we shuffled into our enlarged cracker box (really, it’s lovely) and found it shipshape. Candlelight softened our dining room. The table was set, and the aroma of good cooking emanated from the kitchen.

Ben and Esther had stopped by, found us not at home, broken into our house, cleaned it, cooked the meal and set the table for our arrival. Now that’s a trick we’d like to have played on us every day. If she had the time, don’t think Esther wouldn’t do it.

When Jim and I returned from summer stock in August, Esther had taken a photo still of a scene from Julius Caesar in which I played the Citizeness, had it blown up to mural size and papered one wall of my studio with it.

Summer stock, too, was Esther’s idea.

At the end of last season, Jim broke his toe in a nosedive into our sunken living room. He broke more than that; he broke both our hearts. Jim was to have taken advantage of the summer hiatus of I Married Joan, to appear opposite Judy Holliday in A Name For Herself. The accident killed that golden opportunity and about three other good roles.

We were mooning over our fate in Esther’s house, and it was getting late. The later it got, the more morose Jim got. Esther wouldn’t let us feel low, but at the same time, this could have been an allnight crying session.

“All right, Buster,” said Esther to Jim, “what are you playing now? The Man Who Came To Dinner?” Without a second’s hesitation, she continued: “And say, that’s a great idea!”

It was. The wheelchair role of Sheridan Whiteside was tailored for Jim, and I went along to co-star as Maggie Cutler in the Rabbit Run Theatre’s production of the great George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play. We broke all records, but we’d have just been sitting and squawking if it hadn’t been for Esther.

Esther is very un-movie star with her friends. It’s heartwarming. We’ve never seen Esther “pull her rank” on anybody. Once in a while, she puts on her schoolteacher face, especially when she sees youngsters out very late, hunting autographs. She admonishes them for not being home in bed. Even then, she’s more solicitous than stern.

Once she got solicitous and schoolteacherish about Jim. It was Jim’s first day at Metro, where he was making a picture.

Jim was still at the make-up table at eight in the morning, when Esther bounced onto the set and buttonholed the director.

“Now, I want you to let me know how Jim is doing. It’s his first day and I want everything to go right. If there’s anything he doesn’t do right, let me know. If there’s anything—” and so on. Jim slipped off the years and felt like a kid on his first day at school.

If Esther is a devoted friend, she is a more devoted wife. and mother. You must have read reams about her in this respect. We can only add, “Amen.” To us, Esther is a Brahms lullaby played by Stan Kenton.

Esther’s children round out the happiest, best-adjusted woman we know. She loves every minute of every day. She loves acting, swimming, her husband, her children, her home life, her social life, doing things with her hands, knitting, sewing, cooking, reading—but most of all, she loves to laugh.

She gets a big boot out of Jim’s characterization of “Mr. McGoo” which won two Academy Award nominations for cartoons for Jim. The nearsighted old dodger peers into a washing machine (GE, says Jim), looks at the thrashing water and says: “Oh, that Esther Williams, what a sleek tuna—puts on a fine show.” Esther throws back her head and roars.

And we’ve laughed over “girly” stuff. We discovered that the Gages and the Backuses own the same silver pattern, the same glassware, the same china. Since then, we pool our stuff whenever either tosses a big party. It takes us hours after a party to sort the “B” monograms from the “G”. Last Christmas, we received three dozen demitasse cups from Esther and Ben. Jim says it’s only because Esther could then borrow them for a big wingding.

Esther is very generous. Every time a new swimsuit comes on the market, she gets one for me. I now have the best swimming wardrobe in the country. For a girl who can’t swim a stroke, that’s pretty good. (Says Jim: “In fact, I think she sinks.”)

When I worked at Metro in Caesar, Esther was on location and she turned over her sumptuous dressing room to me. She’d arrive at five, go into the dressing room and leave notes of instruction (how to behave on the lot, how to turn on the shower, etc.) all over the place. It was an eyeopener each day, to arrive at seven, to find that Esther had been in, and had gone to location two hours before I arrived.

She is always tipping me to rare bargains, for which she has an uncanny nose, has Esther. Her home is filled with good buys in rare antiques, pressed glass and other articles. She does her own marketing when she can, buys her own clothes and every second best-selling book. I buy the other best-sellers, so we can swap. It’s a good thing, for neither of us ever gives anything back.

She’s the only athlete I know who doesn’t particularly care for spectator sports. So, when the men are off golfing, Esther and I are home knitting, chattering or cooking.

Efficiency is another trait of Esther’s. She and Ben love to travel, and canbe ready to go anywhere in five minutes.

It seems that everything they own zips up and has a handle. She has every conceivable traveling gadget including a lightweight picnic basket, so they can eat on the run. We were at their home once when she received a phone call to fill in at a benefit for someone who just couldn’t make it. Within minutes, it seemed, they were on the plane for San Francisco.

Esther can take spoofing; her sense of humor about herself is legend. Yet, she can give as well as take. She doesn’t wisecrack at the expense of others. She’s too kind to capitalize on another’s misfortunes for the sake of a yock. But she can ad lib an unforgettable line.

Once, she was called to do a benefit at which every show business personality was present. There were Berle, Benny, Thomas, Kaye and many another comedy “great” preceding her on the bill. Stars, who just came on to take a bow and flit, were making the audience hostile when there were so many good “entertainers” waiting. It was a tough spot for Esther. She walked out to face the waiting audience. It was awfully quiet out.

“Now,” she said, calmly, “if you’ll just flood the joint, I’ll go into my act!”

She waltzed off to a thunderous ovation.

That’s our Esther Williams, the greatest gal in town. And we love her. Why shouldn’t we? We’re ahead three “G”-monogrammed forks, two glasses, a bestseller . . . and our ashtrays are the cleanest in Hollywood!

THE END

—BY HENNY BACKUS

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE DECEMBER 1953