Swimming
Before the Olympics were open to women swimmers, Australian Annette Kellerman was pushing the boundaries of propriety – with a determination that would make her a star. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
Annette Kellerman: Australia’s one-piece wonder
Before radio, film and the Great Depression sickened the popularity of its entertainments, New York City’s Hippodrome was celebrated – often by itself – as the global mecca for “SPECTACLE, MUSICAL EXTRAVAGANZA, DRAMA, CIRCUS and… ZOOLOGICAL DEMONSTRATIONS”. Those excited capitals are theirs.
Opening in Midtown in 1905, the owners of “the world’s largest theatre” promised “A Glorious New Era in Amusement History and Framed for the Tastes and Pleasures of the Whole People”, and they were true to their word. Until its demolition in 1939, that democratically expansive frame included magicians and comedians; boxers and wrestlers. The Hippodrome hosted vaudeville, plays, circuses, operas and dance.
On the façade of this grand building, some of the world’s biggest names were lit up on the world’s largest electric marquee – made from thousands of light bulbs. The great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova performed there; in 1918, it was where Harry Houdini performed his most famous illusion when he made an elephant vanish. For a decade after its opening, the clown Marceline Orbés – who had inspired Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, only to shoot himself, poor and obscure, in a hotel room in 1927 – held residency here.
In 1917, the year before Houdini’s great trick, it was the Australian Annette Kellerman whose name appeared in lights. Billed as the “Australian mermaid” and “Diving Venus”, she sold out shows.
Annette Kellerman was born in Sydney in 1886, the daughter of two musicians. From the age of two, Kellerman suffered from rickets or mild polio – she never publicly named the illness – and wore heavy leg braces until the age of seven. Whatever the diagnosis, the prognosis would never have included a life of famous athleticism.
With her parents’ support, Kellerman began distinguishing herself as a swimmer in her early to mid teens. Swimming had been an appropriate exercise given her condition, but it became a life-altering passion. Before her fame as a film and vaudeville star, she was an evangelist for her sport. In 1906, at the age of 20, she published her first book in Britain: Swimming for Health, Exercise and Pleasure.
This already made Kellerman a noble oddity. As an Olympic event, swimming wouldn’t be open to women for another six years – and, only five years after the death of Queen Victoria, few women were championing athleticism in an age of gendered sequestration.
Having dominated both short and long-distance swimming in Australia, Kellerman sought recognition in Britain. She quickly found it. With her father as manager, she staged endurance swims of the Thames and then, with the sponsorship of The Daily Mirror, made three attempts in 1905 to swim the English Channel. She failed on each occasion, but her attempts – all of which came close – excited public interest.
That was the year New York City’s Hippodrome opened, and the American market – for what, exactly, was still being figured out – attracted the restless Kellerman. She was not only a gifted endurance swimmer; Kellerman could dive beautifully and, by combining her early ballet training, became an early performer of what we might call aquatic vaudeville.
In the early 20th century, Kellerman began performing in the swimming tanks and from the diving boards of American amusement parks and travelling carnivals. She was a “mermaid”, her bosses were local impresarios and her colleagues vagabond “freaks”.
In the folklore of Annette Kellerman, perhaps the most significant story is of her 1907 arrest at Revere Beach, eight kilometres north of Boston, and her appearance before a local judge the next day on the charge of public indecency. Kellerman had joined a local amusement park and, to promote her show, she later said, went down to the beach to perform a long swim to publicly testify to her unusual abilities.
By Kellerman’s telling – her unpublished memoir is one example but most often cited is a 1953 interview given to Boston Sunday Globe – her appearance on the beach in a skin-tight one-piece suit, exposing her arms and much of her legs, inspired disgust, moral hysteria and the summoning of a nearby policeman to arrest her.
It’s a delicious story, made more so by Kellerman’s recounting of her appearance before the judge when, with great dignity and clarity of thought, she persuaded His Honour to acquit her on the grounds of common sense. She was an athlete and it was at best impractical to impose upon professional female swimmers the heavy garbs of modesty.
As the story goes, Kellerman found clemency not only with common sense and her plain appeal to equality, but also with a clever compromise: that she would wear the same bathing suit but render it less scandalous by wearing tights beneath it. Thus, in this one moment, Kellerman had both defied hysterical prudishness and invented a swimming costume for women.
The story is shared in several academic papers I read of Kellerman, and in a 2005 biography. It also features prominently in the 1952 biopic of her life, Million Dollar Mermaid. The film’s star, Esther Williams, wrote in her 1999 memoir: “While preparing for a long swim, Kellerman was arrested on a beach one day near Boston and charged with indecent exposure … After a highly publicised trial, Kellerman was acquitted.”
Strangely, though, for a “highly publicised trial” I could find no evidence of it in newspaper archives – including The Boston Globe’s. Suspicious, I started working backwards from the sources cited in academic papers and the 2005 biography: sure enough, most cited her 1953 interview and not independent or contemporaneous sources.
Earlier this year, Australian journalist and author Grantlee Kieza published the biography Annette Kellerman, Australian Mermaid. I read it, wondering if the archives had yielded more for him, but instead the book confirmed my suspicions. “Annette knew how to work an audience and she knew the value of a good story,” Kieza writes. “She made as much mileage as she could from her provocative image and knew that newspaper reports in the Australian press about ‘positively indecent photos of the Australian nymph’ would not hurt ticket sales when she returned to her home country … Annette could also stretch the truth when necessary.”
I might note that it is, otherwise, an admiring biography – admiring, even, of the brazen exaggeration of the Revere Beach incident. To be a female athlete and performer in the very early 20th century, and one who reveals her flesh as well as her ambition, marks Kellerman as commendably unusual.
As committed as she was to promoting herself, her shows and her bathing suit – often with the carnie’s talent for embellishment – her impatience with Victorian morality was sincere. She wrote many articles on swimming and health for popular magazines. In one, headlined “Prudery as an Obstacle to Swimming”, she condemned the “evil-minded prudery” that compelled “the handicap” of absurdly burdensome clothing.
Kellerman’s became an extraordinary career. Beginning as a distinguished Australian swimmer, she would draw crowds at regional carnivals in the United States before selling out New York’s Hippodrome with choreographed performances and the climax of a swan dive into the theatre’s great tank. She was an early star of silent film and performed her own stunts. In A Daughter of the Gods (1916) she entered the water with crocodiles. In the same film, she became one of the first major stars to appear naked on screen. Her nudity was artfully disguised by crossed legs and long hair but nonetheless provoked American censors into banning such displays from motion pictures the following year.
In Neptune’s Daughter (1914), she was thrown from a cliff into the water below. While making the same movie, the tank she was swimming in split from the pressure – spilling her out with several octopus, a baby shark and plenty of jagged glass. She was badly cut.
Unfortunately, these films no longer exist – that is, the actual film no longer exists. Instead, the public burnishing or revival of Kellerman’s life was made by the much later and highly romanticised Million Dollar Mermaid.
A peculiar mixture of invention, queasy sentimentality and casual racism, the film also boasts what remain astonishing set pieces. Its scenes of aquatic ballet and acrobatics, choreographed by the famed Busby Berkeley, are stunning – there are swan dives into tight, concentric circles of swimmers; trapezes emerge from clouds of bright red and yellow smoke, from which our performers dive into the tank below.
The star, Esther Williams, was a gifted swimmer and pin-up beauty who parlayed her athletic gifts into “aquatic movie spectaculars” and stardom during the 1940s and ’50s. She would almost die performing one of the film’s stunts: a dive from a raised platform of 15 metres, which she did while wearing a metal crown. Hitting the water headfirst with the unforgiving weight buckled her neck and broke three of its vertebrae. Filming was delayed for six months.
In her memoir, Williams wrote of meeting Kellerman. It happened only once, and it was on the set of the film about her life. Kellerman, Williams said, commended the authenticity of the Hippodrome set. But when Williams asked how Kellerman felt about the portrayal, there was an awkward pause. She’d have preferred it, Kellerman eventually said, if she’d been played by an Australian.
Annette Kellerman moved back to Australia a few years before her death in 1975 in an aged-care home on the Gold Coast. She was 89. She had survived by three years her husband, James Sullivan – the man she’d married about 60 years earlier and who had served as her manager, press agent and collaborator in the making of her legend.
It was not true, as was said early in her career, that Kellerman learnt to swim among sharks in the Great Barrier Reef. But that was where her ashes were scattered at the end of her strange and remarkable career.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 27, 2025 as "Making a splash".
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