Wet Work

In the opening scene of director Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” the dead body of a hapless screenwriter is seen floating, face down, in the pool of a decaying Hollywood estate. “Poor dope,” remarks the investigating detective, “he always wanted a pool.”

When Wilder directed his classic paean to Hollywood in 1950, “always wanting a pool” was about to become a common suburban refrain. Next to home ownership, pool worship would acquire a peculiar fervor, and within 12 years, these aquatic shrines would proliferate. In 1947, there were 11,000 pools in the United States; 15 years later, there were more than 310,000, of which 113,500, or one-third, were in California. Los Angeles, proud home of sybaritic backyard pleasure, had the highest density of private swimming pools in the world.

Understanding the allure of the pool--at once a hole in the ground filled with water and then so much more--requires not only an understanding of swimming but also architecture. The private pleasure of one is intimately connected with the seductions of the other.

Thomas van Leeuven approaches this task in “The Springboard in the Pond” with appropriate gravity and humor. A Dutch cultural historian, he properly recognized that any study of the pool must begin in Southern California. Fittingly, he set up camp here when he started researching the book:

“Greater Los Angeles proved excellent hunting grounds. Digging through hedges, climbing fences, and dodging guns, dogs, and patrol cars was a welcome change from the stifling quiet of the reading rooms which, it was quite clear from the beginning, never had the intention of collecting texts on swimming pools.”

“The Springboard in the Pond” is the second in a projected four-volume study in which Van Leeuwen plans to explore the relationship between architecture and the elements--air, water, fire and earth. The first volume, “The Skyward Trend of Thought” was published in 1988 and looked at architecture’s penetration of the air, focusing on the skyscraper. Now before delving into the mysteries of earth and fire, he has immersed himself in water, its built containers and its varied connections to the physical and cultural environment.

Van Leeuven asks: “Why do people swim? Do they do so for pleasure or do they swim for survival? Are humans well equipped for swimming, or are they born drowners? If so, what drove them to build swimming pools? How do these pools follow their owners’ intentions, and what, finally, do the owners do with their swimming pools?” He divides mankind into thirds. Forget the id, the ego or the superego; we are, he argues, hydrophilic, hydrophobic or hydro-opportunistic, attitudes which he metaphorically equates with the frog (who lives in the water), the swan (who lives on the water) and the penguin (who lives next to the water).

Like the frog, the hydrophilic dives right in. The hydrophobic, like the swan, uses the pool for parties and floats upon it in rubber inflatables that keep the water at a safe remove, and the hydro-opportunistic, the penguin, is “hydrophilic with strong resisting tendencies.”

“The embrace of water is an erotic one,” writes Van Leeuven, “yet at the same time its cool fingers presage the immediacy of mortality.” The implications are clear: For hydrophilics, diving into and moving through the water produces sensations that combine the ecstacies of sex with kindred expressions of athletic conquest. For others, water, any deeper than one’s shoulders, is a death-trap. In that simple trope, the appeal of Van Leeuven’s study becomes clear: There in the backyard just beyond the family room is not just a pool, but an agent and metaphor of Life and of Death.

After the advanced hydraulic experiments of ancient Rome, the piping of water as necessity and luxury went into a long decline, emerging from the Dark Ages only with the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century as an aid to industrial production and for flushing the toilet of the recently invented water closet. At that time, Van Leeuven insists, “modern culture begins.” Pools for recreational swimming and therapeutic exercise slowly appeared throughout Europe and the American East Coast. He dubs key figures of pool history “Lords of the Swan”--from the 19th century Mad King, Ludwig II of Bavaria, to his slightly younger American contemporary, the publisher William Randolph Hearst. Each man exhibited strong tendencies of the swan and the penguin, Hearst making use of his pools and water follies to induce his guests to take off their clothes and cavort about for his prurient amusement. His fabulous San Simeon had two immense pools, one outside and one indoors. North of San Francisco at his family’s “Bavarian” estate Wyntoon, a swimming pool consumed the entire nave of a reconstructed abbey.

For two interrelated reasons--the climate and Hollywood--Southern California became the “swimming pool capital of the world.” Cinematic images of actors and actresses indulging in aquatic sport, quickly linked the notions of sex and water, and when the pool became a part of the set, it was clearly a pretext for filming nude or semi-nude bodies. “Eros,” Van Leeuven claims, “could be shown in an athletic and hygienic context, providing legal as well as tasteful entertainment for the voyeur as a family man.”

Though its legacy was diluted by production codes and family values, “Bird of Paradise” in 1932 became the cinematic model for swimming pool eroticism. Joel McCrea is, Van Leeuven suggests, the “‘proverbial unwary American,” while Delores Del Rio “personifies the irresistible, wildly erotic Pacific priestess. Her mission is of Rousseauesque sincerity--to establish an imaginative connection between the degenerate West and the pure, unspoiled world of the savage.” On the exotic island of Lani, teacher Del Rio and pupil McCrea “find the perfect place: a pond fed by a small waterfall. ‘This will be home,’ they cry in bilingual unison. A house is easily built of bamboo and palm leaves to create the ideal home: bedroom, porch, and swimming pool.” “Bird of Paradise,” he avers, is the “ultimate hydrophilic narrative.” Even when McCrea and Del Rio are not splashing about in the water, “fluids are produced to keep their bodies constantly wet.” Upon first arriving in their island paradise, Del Rio opens a coconut and trickles the milky liquid over herself and her lover.

A kindred but less self-conscious version of jungle pool romancing occurs in the serialized frolics of Tarzan and Jane. It was no small coincidence that the best Tarzans--Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weissmuller--were both champion swimmers. By contrast, the strenuous Esther Williams epics seem pale and sanitized: “Instead of nudity and free-flowing tresses, we see a bathing costume and--fascinating detail--a bathing cap. Although not precisely a novelty, as a suggestion of paradise it fails completely, for the bathing cap is the condom of aquatic freedom.”

Yet even in Los Angeles, there have always been those who could not afford a pool of their own and were forced to rely on public facilities. It is therefore regrettable that Van Leeuven’s stimulating book focuses only on the private sector because people of lesser means could at least afford to go to the movies where, with their upscale compatriots, they also watched Joel, Delores, Tarzan, Jane and Esther. Were none of their fantasies transferred to public pools? Moreover, as opposed to the book’s rich analysis of social and cultural symbolism, there is a regrettable paucity of basic architectural analysis of the connection between the design of pools and the larger landscapes and buildings they ornament. Why have there been no swimming pool equivalents to such celebrated works as Fallingwater--Frank Lloyd Wright’s dramatic siting of a modernist house over a rural waterfall?

Other problems occur in matters of detail and emphasis. There is, for example, a disquieting reference to pool-using tennis stars William Tilden and Billie Jean King as “notoriously homosexual.” One finds no reference to Jane and Tarzan or Joel and Delores as being “notoriously heterosexual.” Finally, with its frequently dull half-tone photographs, the physical book fails to convey the sumptuousness of its subject.

After chronicling the history of the pool from the Romantics to Hollywood, Van Leeuven closes his epic with a sobering look at pool culture today. “Humans dug holes in the ground, filled them with water, fitted ladders, and installed springboards,” he writes, giving us the whole trajectory in one swift sentence. But this freedom and pleasure has begun to dissipate: “Then they added disinfectants and coloring agents but eventually apprehensive of what they had wrought, came to shun the family pool, influenced by environmental superstition, fear of litigation, and, perhaps most of all boredom. First they banned the springboard, then they banned their children, and finally they banned themselves.”

Gone is Mad Ludwig, William Hearst, Joel McCrea and Delores Del Rio. The pool, Van Leeuven writes, has become filled in, turned into a rock garden, paved over for a tennis court or turned into a carp pool.

“The Springboard in the Pond” is a bracing intellectual plunge. A searching exploration of manners, morals and darker truths in cultural and architectural history, it is, both insightfully serious and wildly funny.