Reflected in Our Pools

Shimmering with the boundless cool-blue possibilities of Southern California, the swimming pool belongs to us; it is our image, our icon and a ubiquitous reality. Glamour, romance, the sweet life: It’s all there poolside, and this weekend marks the start of the high summer season.

Ever has it been so here, as a delightful exhibit at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library attests. “Hollywood Poolside” includes 43 saucy black-and-white prints of movie stars lolling and clowning in the water or nearby. The swimming pool is the backdrop for fantasy in these photos, originally shot for fan magazines and newspapers between the 1910s and the 1960s and collected by Frans Evenhuis and Robert Landau.

There’s a heavily made-up Carole Lombard in a revealing black swimsuit, wearing high heels, jewelry and a come-hither look directed toward a lucky someone out of the camera’s range. There’s a beefcake shot of a young Ronald Reagan. Charlie Chaplin strikes a coy pose in 1920s-style bathing garb next to his pool. A fully clothed Jack Benny paddles a dinghy across the pool on his Beverly Hills estate.

The swimming pool fantasy life has not been Hollywood’s exclusive domain, of course. Watch the teenagers preening deck-side at any of Los Angeles’ 55 municipal pools, achingly certain that summer romance lies just a few towels away. Or the boys who gleefully cannonball off every diving board; airborne, they are omnipotent, if only for a moment.

Here, in the capital of backyard pools, the luckiest among us can set our own personal stage for more grown-up dreams of the good life. What Levittown did to launch the affordable single-family tract home, Southern California has done for the family pool. Kidney-shaped, rectangular, postage-stamp-sized: The backyard pool is our masterpiece. And now, as last month’s cloud-cover curtain rises, we, with cool drink in hand, inflatable raft beneath, slip into the languid fantasy life of summer in the Southland.