Back when Old News was researching the death of Buffalo Bill Cody, I ran across this odd national item near the bottom of Page 5 in the Jan. 22, 1917, Arkansas Gazette:
Miss Kellerman Will Have to Wear Clothes
New York, Jan. 21 -- The nude in motion picture art has come under the ban of the National Board of Review. All producing companies that are members of the national association have agreed, it was said, not to permit the production in their studios of photoplays using such a figure. Action was taken after "widespread disapproval" of such pictures was disclosed by an investigation covering the entire country.
Danger of overproduction of sex problem plays also has been recognized by the Board of Review. The producers' branch of the association has voted, therefore, "that any attempt on the part of any unscrupulous manufacturer to use the motion picture for indecent or immoral purposes must be dealt with summarily and every support offered to the law-enforcing authorities in the suppression of such pictures."
That's it. No mention of a Miss Kellerman. I figured she was some notorious cookie or the Gazette's tittering headline writer wouldn't have mentioned her over a story that didn't.
Fast forward to last week. I'm reading the March 13, 1917, Gazette preparatory to writing these words, and this next word. And this. Also all these other ones:
The three-hour silent movie A Daughter of the Gods was showing at the Kempner Theater in Little Rock. Admission ranged from 25 to 75 cents for the matinee and 25 cents to $1 for night shows.
The movie ad praises "the picture beautiful" and its "wonderful music score by complete symphony orchestra." Also, it depicts a lean beauty on her toes in ballet slippers. Back arched (oh, my) and (bare!) arms lifted overhead, she seems about to execute a swan dive.
Her hair's oddly wrapped by a scarf, but her flesh-tone (!) body suit (!) looks comfortable enough for lap swimming -- and highly unusual for 1917, when ladies still "bathed" in shifts, bloomers, tights and shoes. The fringed shawl wrapping her fanny would have created drag, though.
And there was the name: Annette Kellerman.
Just a little Googling assured me that, yes, Kellerman (1887-1975) was at the turn of the 20th century a public figure, a star as big as Harry Houdini. A champion athlete born in Australia, she invented the one-piece swimsuit ("maillot pantaloons") and was arrested for wearing it on a beach in Boston.
The synchronized swimming, underwater ballet and lung capacity she developed for her Diving Venus glass-tank vaudeville productions -- employing as many as 200 mermaids -- made possible her own movie ventures as well as film careers for later swimmers like Esther Williams.
Not by accident, Williams portrayed Kellerman in the Oscar-nominated 1952 film Million Dollar Mermaid.
But both actresses did suffer serious accidents while doing diving stunts. In real life, Kellerman was never as badly hurt as Williams was while playing her for Million Dollar Mermaid. Shooting had to be delayed six months after Williams broke her neck during a badly costumed dive.
Mermaid took large liberties with Kellerman's story, giving her childhood polio rather than rickets and leaving the brave heroine hospitalized and unlikely to walk again.
The real Kellerman lived to a ripe old age in Australia, where her name graces a prestigious aquatic center. Besides her stage and movie career, she wrote a best-seller on health and beauty in 1918 that urged women to abandon corsets, which she described as "fiendish things injurious both to body and health."
And she made a living with product endorsements. She was the first woman to attempt to swim the English Channel while drinking Cadbury's cocoa. Watch an Aussie TV feature on her at bit.ly/2m27C54.
But I digress.
Kempner Theatre was a respectable venue in churchy Little Rock, and so Kellerman couldn't have been all that scandalous.
Today the site is a parking lot, but in 1917, the fancy suites and auditorium of David Kempner's elegant, three-story opera house at 516 S. Louisiana St. hosted lectures, plays, galas, funerals and photoplays. One of several important downtown businesses established by the sons of a dynamic German immigrant, the theater was remodeled in the 1920s to show movies and renamed the "Arkansas Theater." It closed in 1977 and was demolished in 1995.
A Daughter of the Gods was a prestige film, the first U.S. movie with a production budget larger than $1 million. Kellerman's nude scenes were justified as appropriate for the character she portrayed -- an innocently nekkid water goddess. In November 1916, the Gazette reprinted a celebrity interview with Kellerman by the New York Evening World's crackerjack interviewer Nixola Greeley-Smith (whom we have met before, see the Old News column of Oct. 31).
Tongue firmly in cheek, Greeley-Smith asks Kellerman about risking her neck, and her toes, during its nine-month shoot in Jamaica.
"Besides fooling the crocodiles by coming out of their pool alive," Greeley-Smith explains, "the original Diving Venus had to dive from a tower 103 feet high into a swirling torrent, swim through waves 85 feet high to a reef, and while the waves dashed her upon the rocks, cut the ropes which bound her hands behind her on their sharp edges, go over a waterfall and through a whirlpool and finally just by way of changing the subject be burned at the stake -- a real stake surrounded by real flames, upon which stage hands played discreet fire extinguishers."
Kellerman says, "I had read that iodine was used in the war and put in open wounds, so I tried it. Don't try it, I advise you, no matter what happens to you. And the poor mermaids who appear with me in the mermaid scene were just as black and blue as I. Really, I think we must have spent hundreds of dollars for iodine and arnica."
Greeley-Smith then asks, "not altogether without malice," how much they'd spent on Kellerman's costumes, "because in some of her appearances as 'The Daughter of the Gods' Miss Kellerman is disclosed in her right mind and the wrong hair -- that is, all she wears is the consciousness of rectitude and a long wig."
Blue eyes wide, Miss Kellerman assures the reporter, "Oh, quite a long one. ... And it seems all right to do that sort of thing for a picture with fairies and witches in it, such as 'The Daughter of the Gods,' but I wouldn't do it in vaudeville or on the regular stage for worlds.
"But a picture is quite a different thing, don't you think so?"
Do we? One hundred years of movie history seem to suggest that indeed we do.
Next week: Rumor Said "Kaiser Dead" -- Rumor Lied
ActiveStyle on 03/13/2017