Kellerman, Annette (1886–1975)

Australian-born athlete, swimming star, and actress, both on stage and screen, who played a significant role in the popularization of swimming as a sport, especially for women. Name variations: Kellerman or Kellermann (both spellings are found, but Kellerman was in the information provided to the press at the time of her death and is found in Australian sources); known as "The Diving Venus," "The American Venus," "The Million Dollar Mermaid," and "The Form Divine." Born Annette Marie Sarah Kellerman in Sydney, Australia, on July 6, 1886 (and not in 1887, as is sometimes found); died in Southport, Queensland, Australia, on November 6, 1975; married James R. Sullivan (her manager), in 1912.

Began competing in swimming meets while still a teenager; went to England as an athlete and performer (1904); with her brother as manager, came to U.S. and made first public appearance (1907); made first film, a kind of documentary, as early as 1909, and her last just before the end of the silent era; a champion swimmer, recognized health authority, and exponent of physical culture, was the first woman swimmer to achieve acclaim; is said to have devised the idea of formation swimming as an art, is credited with having introduced the single-piece swimsuit, and did much to facilitate the entry of women into the aquatic sports by gradually making acceptable the kind of minimal swimwear necessary to allow freedom of movement and speed in the water; retired to her native Australia (1935). Awards: Holder of the world record for the two-, five- and ten-minute swimming championships.

Filmography:

Miss Annette Kellerman Fancy Swimming and Diving Displays (both reportage, 1909); Neptune's Daughter (1914); Isle of Love (1916); A Daughter of the Gods (1916); The Honor System (1917); Queen of the Sea (1918); (reportage) The Art of Diving (1920); What Women Love (1920); Venus of the South Seas (1924).

Born on July 6, 1886, in Sydney, Australia, Annette Kellerman is said to have suffered from bowleggedness as a child, supposedly as a result of having been encouraged to walk too early. By age nine, she had been taught to swim as a therapeutic means of overcoming this condition. It now appears from Australian sources that her childhood ailment was actually a case of Poliomyelitis that had left her partially crippled, and that the braces she wore and the swimming lessons she took were designed to correct the results of this disease. On the other hand, there is no truth to the exaggerated stories that occasionally appeared in the press, that she was declared "a hopeless cripple" as a child, that she was forced to wear "an iron brace up to her hips," that the calisthenics required of her were "pure torture," or that at the age of five she was forced to swim by her father even though she was "deathly afraid of the water." Whatever the exact degree of her condition, her legs were normal by the time she was 13, and she was soon swimming first one, then two, then ten miles at a stretch.

As early as the 1880s, Australians were extraordinarily devoted to outdoor sports, especially cricket, hockey, archery, skating, and swimming. Women participated in these activities in almost as great a proportion as the men, a custom attributed to the fact that until 1840, male immigrants to the continent outnumbered women ten to one, so that the entire culture was said to have been thoroughly "masculinized" from an early date. Whatever the case, turning to athletics as a cure for childhood deformity was a natural recourse for Australian parents in those days. By age 15, Annette Kellerman had won her first contest, swimming 100 yards in the New South Wales swimming championships in 1902, an achievement quickly followed by similar triumphs, one after the other.

From her youthful swimming successes in Australia, Annette Kellerman journeyed with her father to England in 1904, where she quickly attracted attention by appearing in the water in a daring, one-piece, cotton bathing suit of her own design, consisting of an ankle-length leotard over which she wore a snug fitting, hip-length tunic. In England, she won a 26-mile race on the Thames and, sponsored by the London newspaper, the Daily Mirror, three times attempted to swim the English Channel before she gave it up after covering three-quarters of the distance in a record-breaking 10½ hours. Already aware of a public image, her words at the time were a fuzzy "I had the strength but not the endurance," but the truth was that while she was a good swimmer, notable for her stamina and endurance, she simply wasn't that good. Nevertheless, the record she set on her last attempt stood for 17 years.

Decency is a question of common sense.

—Annette Kellerman

Having developed an "aquatic act" consisting of swimming and diving, however, Kellerman attempted to present it in public but, at first, she had some difficulty in getting her act across, particularly because the women in the audience were shocked—or feigned shock. Swimming was still a novelty in the early years of the 20th century. Bathing suits for men, and especially for women, were bulky and unsuited for speed, and many women, usually unable to swim at all, simply waded, while attempting to look modest and fetching at one and the same time. All the while, they carefully avoided the sun, which was then thought to be bad for the complexion—a fear justified, of course, by findings after World War II. Young as she was, however, Annette Kellerman already had an entrepreneur's instinct. After appearing at the Bath Club for charity, an event attended by the duke and duchess of Connaught (Louise Margaret of Prussia ), who thereby put their stamp of approval on her art, she found herself able to secure engagements, in particular, one at the London Hippodrome that was followed by a successful tour of the Continent. In 1906, she competed as the only woman in a 12-kilometer (7½ mile) swimming race on the Seine in which she defeated all but two of the men.

In 1907, Kellerman brought her show to the United States in the company of her brother, who managed the act. Their first engagement was at White City Amusement Park in Chicago, where she was required to do 55 shows per week. From there, she went on to Revere Beach in Boston, where her performance was seen by the impresario B.F. Keith, who gave her a contract for an engagement in New York at Keith and Proctor's Fifth Avenue Theater. There, she received top billing, packing the house for seven weeks. In the course of her act, which included both swimming and diving, Kellerman both shocked and delighted audiences with her remarkable one-piece bathing suits, especially designed to provide unhampered movement in the water, and which, in short order, came to be known as "Annette Kellermans." Her engagement at Keith's was followed by vaudeville tours culminating in her arrest the same year at a Boston beach for appearing in public with her unconventional swimsuit. "I was wearing a very modest one-piece suit," she recalled 25 years later, "and didn't remove my robe until I got to the edge of the water. I was in training for long distance swims and I had to have something practical. There were some other women on the beach—how funny they would look today. They wore long skirts, blouses with sleeves and ruffles on the shoulders, and stockings. Of course, they didn't go in the water much, and they couldn't swim. Very few women could in those days." Undoubtedly an unpleasant experience at the time, the arrest was worth a million dollars in free publicity, and Kellerman found herself famous at 21.

Thereafter, Annette Kellerman continued to tour both in the U.S. and abroad, dancing, demonstrating her skills in the water, lecturing on health and exercise, and varying her act with acrobatics and highwire walking. In 1911, she made her Broadway debut with an aquatic act in the musical review Vera Violetta, which starred the French soubrette Gaby Deslys but which also launched the careers of a number of newcomers including Al Jolson, Mae West , and, of course, Kellerman. In time, she became world famous as a health authority, exponent of physical culture, advocate of physical exercise for women, and supporter of universal military training. An astute showwoman, Kellerman knew well the uses of publicity. The "hype" generated by her performances and public statements, as well as by the various lawsuits undertaken by promoters vying for the opportunity to present her on the stage, helped keep her in the public eye. A Harvard professor pronounced her "the most perfectly formed woman in the

world," after which she was much sought after by women, who flocked to hear her lecture on health as well as on her beauty secrets.

Much had been written about exercise as a means of maintaining good health, but it was only in the 1870s that swimming was seen as an important means of providing this, and that the idea arose that women should exercise as well. This notion emerged among medical specialists who were troubled by the fact that women died far too often in childbirth—a supposed "natural" process—but that lower-class women, more use to physical work on the farm, in the home, or in the factory, were less inclined to do so. At first, women's exercises were limited to girls swinging narrow-necked clubs or ladies genteelly tapping croquet balls through a little hoop, but gradually, the positive results of regular exercise became clearer and more widely known. By the end of the century, tennis, bicycle riding, and other more strenuous activities had begun to be included in the regime, especially at women's colleges.

Swimming, too, became popular, but the development of the sport was long handicapped by Victorian prudishness. If a respectable woman was not to reveal her ankle (and proper young ladies were taught how to get on and off a streetcar without doing so), how was it possible to appear in a swimsuit unless the garment was as modest as everyday wear. Fortunately, the changing times, the emergence of the "new woman," and the positive benefits attached to swimming wore down the opposition. Annette Kellerman was not only a pioneer in fully active swimming for women, but, as a strikingly beautiful woman with a superb figure, became the world's first "bathing beauty." Billed as "The Diving Venus," "The Form Divine," and, oddly enough since she was an Australian, "The American Venus," she not only did much to publicize and popularize swimming, and to generate a steady reduction in the amount of yardage required for women's bathing suits, but also contributed to a changing taste in feminine beauty. In 1900, the large-framed, well-rounded, even heavy woman, so popular since the 1870s, was still the ideal, but within a decade the trend turned towards a slimmer, more lithe figure, culminating in the tall, wisp-like slenderness of the 1930s and the decades which followed. Careful to nurture her youthful image, Kellerman kept it a secret when she married her manager, James R. Sullivan, in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1912.

As a theatrical attraction, Kellerman probably reached the height of her career when she appeared in The Big Show at the Hippodrome in New York City. The very nature of her act made it difficult for her to find theaters with stages sufficiently large to accommodate a swimming pool so that her appearances tended to be relatively far between—geographically if not in time. The New York Hippodrome, however, was a vast venue, especially suited to spectacles, and in this production, billed as "The Diving Venus, Annette Kellerman (herself)," she appeared in an on-stage water extravaganza together with a company of 200 "water nymphs," concluding her act with a high dive into a massive tank of water. Her last appearance at the Hippodrome—and her first in New York in five years—took place in 1925, when she was 38. Fourteen years later, the Hippodrome was demolished.

Annette Kellerman was especially proud of what she called her "swimologies," actually short films with minimal plots designed to demonstrate her skills as diver and swimmer. The first of these, Fancy Swimming and Diving Displays, were filmed as early as 1909, the underwater scenes being shot by her manager (and future husband) from within a diving bell submerged for the purpose. The last, The Art of Diving, was made in 1920. In between and afterwards, Kellerman appeared in several full-length features, the first of which, entitled Neptune's Daughter, was filmed on location in Jamaica. In this production, filmed before the advent of process or "trick" photography, Kellerman not only set a world record for women by diving off a cliff some 90 feet above the water, but also allowed herself to be hurled from a cliff while bound hand and foot. Her later films included Isle of Love and A Daughter of the Gods (both 1916), The Honor System (1917), Queen of the Sea (1918), What Women Love (1920), and Venus of the South Seas (1924). Reviewing A Daughter of the Gods, directed by Herbert Brenon, a bemused film critic for The New York Times described the opus:

The beautiful figure of Miss Annette Kellermann [sic] and her matchless skill as an amphibienne [sic] are made the most of in "A Daughter of the Gods," an elaborate, spectacular and somewhat monotonous photofable which was unfolded for the first time at the Lyric Theater. On tropic strands, in vine-hung pools, on coral reefs, through dismaying rapids and in the marble harem plunge, the diving Venus disports herself. …

The result is a photoplay carefully cultivated to shock the late Anthony Comstock [a New York guardian of the morals at the turn of the century] and certain to please many others. There are long passages when Kellerman wanders disconsolately through the film all undressed with nowhere to go. Audrey Munson , as exhibited in the short lived "Purity," has nothing on Kellerman. And as it has been observed elsewhere, neither has Kellerman. …

But the submersible star is unrivaled in diving and swimming, and this photoplay, taken amid settings as fantastic and Arabic as are to be found anywhere in the Caribbean, must leap from a hundred-foot tower, plunge into a pool full of crocodiles, be dashed against forbidding rocks, and fall down a waterfall, till the life amid the breaking china and falling pies of the comic studios seems serene by comparison.

Four years later, The Times reviewed a later Kellerman film, Queen of the Sea, in less glowing terms:

At the Academy of Music the new Annette Kellerman film, "Queen of the Sea" was shown for the first time in New York yesterday afternoon. It is not so impressive as Miss Kellerman's previous picture, "Daughter of the Gods," mainly because that film largely exhausted Miss Kellerman's film possibilities, and the present picture can do little more than duplicate the tricks of the other.

Annette Kellerman, lively and enthusiastic, retained her figure and firmness of muscle tone until well into middle age. When she appeared swimming in public, as she often did, onlookers were astonished that this was the same woman they had thrilled to in their youth. A well-educated woman, she spoke French and German fluently and, when lecturing in countries like Denmark, Sweden, or the Netherlands, had her lectures translated into the local languages and learned their pronunciation and accent sufficiently well to present them herself. Although she earned a good living with her performances, dancing, lectures, and demonstrations of swimming and diving, she was not above augmenting her income through endorsements and, in 1917, was seen in advertisements for Black Jack gum. She also worked in the rehabilitation of crippled children through aquatic exercise and undertook to give physical therapy to those willing to pay for it. The silent film actress, Blanche Sweet , was said to have been under her care for a year. Kellerman's own health was excellent, and in her later years her heart, arteries, and blood pressure remained normal, remarkably so for a woman of her advancing years. Apart from her exploits on stage, on screen, and in the swimming pool, Kellerman was also a successful author, her books include such titles as How to Swim (1919), Physical Beauty: How to Keep It (1919), and Fairy Tales of the South Seas (1926).

Annette Kellerman valued her privacy, maintaining her permanent home in Australia, where she lived quietly with her husband, described as "a small, methodical man." Together, they purchased a small atoll in the Barrier Reef off the northeast coast of Australia known as Pindarus Island, where they spent their weekends whenever they were in Sydney. However, because she was deeply committed to physical fitness, Kellerman was a good interview, ever open to a medium for propagating her views. Speaking in 1932, she was quoted as saying:

Bathing suits are now more sensible than ever before. I am all for abbreviated bathing suits; the more abbreviated the better. Decency is a question of common sense. Complete nudism, no. … The trouble with women today is that so many of them are trying to get too thin. A woman should find out what her normal weight should be. An exaggeration to thinness causes all sorts of nervous complaints and the process is devastating to the health.

Annette Kellerman died on November 6, 1975, at age 87. At the time, she was living as a widow with her sister in Southport, in the Gold Coast resort area of Queensland, Australia. In the last decades of her life, she made it her business to keep out of the public eye and tended to be forgotten. She wrote no autobiography, nor were any books written about her, even in her native land. Her name rarely appears in books on swimming as a sport, and she has generally been overlooked. Although she was the first woman swimmer ever to achieve fame, in summing up her life's work, she always claimed that her greatest achievement was the role she played in liberating women from uncomfortable and impractical bathing wear and thus freeing them for exercise in the water.

In 1952, Million Dollar Mermaid, a fictionalized screen biography of Kellerman, was filmed with Esther Williams in the title role, a logical choice since Williams was the only other female swimming champion to take to the screen and, in this way, not only followed up on what Kellerman had achieved, but may be considered to have been the Annette Kellerman of the talking pictures.

sources:

"Million Dollar Mermaid Dies," in The New York Times. November 6, 1975.

"Kellerman, Annette Marie Sarah," in The Australian Encyclopaedia. 3rd rev. ed. New York, 1979.

The Free Library of Philadelphia, Theater Collection.

suggested reading:

"Annette Kellerman, First 'New Woman' of the Modern Age," in Chicago Sunday Tribune. April 28, 1938.

"Annette Kellerman," in People (Australia). May 23, 1951.

Robert Hewsen , Professor of History, Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey