Esther Williams Swims Again at Film Festival

Esther Williams Day turned out to be an Esther Williams kind of day--water, water everywhere.

“It looked for a while as if I’d have to swim here from Los Angeles,” said the erstwhile queen of chlorine to a sea of subjects awaiting her at the Palm Springs International Film Festival Thursday. “That was some rain.”

The week’s weather had doused some of the festivities meant to honor MGM’s onetime swimming star. The Unsyncables swim team was supposed to perform an aquacade of synchronized swimming, but it was washed out in Riverside. A print of the Esther Williams classic “Jupiter’s Darling” was supposed to be screened outdoors on Palm Canyon Drive, but it had succumbed to a flooded Los Angeles storeroom.

And then there was the limo. Or no limo, as the case may be.

Forty minutes after Palm Springs Mayor Lloyd Maryanov was scheduled to present the star with a proclamation declaring Esther Williams Day, scores of fans who’d come from as far away as Massachusetts were still awaiting her grand entrance.

“If it gets any grander, we’re all going to dinner,” sniffed Toni Holt Kramer, who was covering the festival with Ruta Lee for their cable TV show, “Talk of the Town.” The pair had arrived under the evening’s clear and mild skies awash in crystal fox, mink and raccoon tails. “We look like snow queens, don’t we?” Lee chirped. “I’m pretending I’m Sonja Henie.”

Eventually, the festival’s hospitality coordinator Ron Willison arrived to whisk Williams from the Marquis Hotel to the temporary stage on Palm Canyon Drive.

A block and a half away.

“She’s been very gracious about it, but I’d have been pissed,” Willison said later.

So it went at the sixth annual Palm Springs Film Festival, where hope--and “classic” film stars, in festival parlance--spring eternal. Try asking Esther Williams exactly how classic she is (reference books give her year of birth variously as 1921 to 1924).

“A woman who tells her age can’t be trusted,” she whispered on the way to a post-proclamation party. “She’ll tell everything. In the water, you’re ageless and weightless.”

In Palm Springs too, Hollywood’s Arcadian after-life, where fame and a more prosaic form of commerce meet. Here merchants want to be film stars--Celebrity Bookstore, On Stage Salon--and film stars want to be merchants.

Williams herself put her name to a swimsuit line six years ago showcasing glamour, athletic prowess and, most of all, “containment.” After making her last movie in 1961, the diva of the waters and 26 films invested in a restaurant and swimming pools instead of a grueling TV career, the final resting place for some other Hollywood stars.

“There was something about MGM that spoiled you,” she said, radiant in a black suit with a gold-studded collar. “You were wrapped in cotton batting. They knew how to take care of stars.”

So apparently did the 10-day festival, which ends Sunday, despite a few planning puddles. And while the fledgling festival has always tipped its hat to such Palm Springs heroes as Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Stewart, this year it featured more events and seminars--both classic and current--including three days honoring the older folk who put the Palm Springs into Palm Springs. Honorees at a black-tie gala Friday included George Sidney, Tony Curtis and the late Henry Mancini.

“I think the audience still really loves to see the old classic film stars,” said festival executive director Craig Prater. “At the same time they want to see up-and-coming producers and directors. It’s a nice balance and adds to a well-rounded film festival.”

Organizers crowed over the 25% increase in box office over last year as well as the estimated 75,000 filmgoers attending more than 100 feature films, more than half foreign-language. But all was not sunny at the festival, where organizers privately expressed dismay with some of the overtaxed volunteers. In a scene reminiscent of “Day of the Locust,” overeager volunteers kept scads of filmgoers standing in the rain before a Buddy Rogers/Mary Pickford screening Tuesday until the damp crowd banged on theater doors and American Movie Classics officials had to come to the rescue.

The incident literally kicked off Classic Film Star Day, co-sponsored by American Movie Classics and Time Warner Cable. Rogers was feted nearly 70 years after his performance in “Wings,” the first film to win a best picture Oscar.

And if it’s true that as one ripens, one becomes more oneself, then the 90-year-old Rogers must have started out in fine form. In what seemed to be classic film star style, he arrived fashionably late to an afternoon screening of his 1927 silent, “My Best Girl,” the rich-boy-marries-shopgirl weeper in which he met his first wife, Mary Pickford, who died in 1979. As Rogers teetered down the theater aisle on a silver-tipped cane, he yelped: “Old movie stars never die. They just lose their parts.”

Later, after presenting Rogers with the first Classic Film Star Award at a gala event attended by Howard Keel and Ginger Rogers, Anne Jeffreys (“Topper”) applauded efforts to give curtain calls to Palm Springs’ finest. “Honor them while they’re here,” she said.

It wasn’t just a week to toast forgotten stars, but also ones so beyond the pale of fame no one knew they were there in the first place. At a seminar alluringly titled “Hollywood’s Secret Singing Stars,” three divas who were all voice and no name reclaimed credit for bravura performances chalked up to stars like Joan Crawford and Cyd Charisse.

While compact discs have been recently released naming the real singing names, Hollywood’s illusion-making machine was not always so generous. Indeed, when Annette Warren, who subbed for Ava Gardner in “Show Boat,” was greeted 40 years ago in the London press as “the voice of Ava Gardner,” she was soon threatened by the lawyer of Ava Gardner.

“We were sworn to secrecy,” said Betty Wand, who pinch-sang for Leslie Caron in “Gigi.” “Now we’re into an era of truth--or exposes. Connie Chung, where are you?”