Rihanna and her barely-there outfits? Pfoo. Katy Perry and her constant cleavage? Whatever. And Cheryl Cole’s rosy bottom? Not even fighting in the heavyweights. If you want provocative, the blueprint was drawn up a century ago, by an Australian swimmer called Annette Kellerman.
Born in 1886 in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville, Kellerman had such weak legs that until the age of six or seven, she wore steel braces for support. To help her muscles develop, Kellerman’s parents began taking her to the local pool. “Only a cripple can understand the intense joy I experienced,” she later said. “After I learned, I’d go swimming anywhere, anytime.”
It soon became clear that Annette was not only a natural-born swimmer, but also a natural performer. While still a schoolgirl, she gave swimming and diving exhibitions, had a twice-daily mermaid act swimming with fish at the aquarium, and performed breathtaking high dives as part of a hit play of the time, The Breaking of the Drought.
This was an era, though, when Victorian mores still held firm. Sydney council only repealed its law banning daylight bathing – an inflammatory and immodest practice – in 1903, after a campaign by newspaperman-swimmer William Henry Gocher. A year earlier, Gocher had threatened to take to the waters off Manly beach in daylight, and been carted away by the cops before he could even disrobe. Civic leaders might have been happy to sneak in at the back once one of Kellerman’s shows was underway, but in public they were less keen on the idea of a semi-dressed woman appearing in front of large crowds.
It would have been bad enough if Kellerman had worn the acceptable swimming costume of the time. This was a weighty, flesh-covering combination of loose dress and pantaloons that would be familiar to Iranian swimmer Elham Asghari. But Kellerman championed an outrageous new swimming costume – one that actually made it easy for women to swim freely. It had bare arms, bare legs, and an extremely tight fit. It was so shocking that on a 1907 trip to the USA, Kellerman got to follow in the groundbreaking footprints of Gocher: she was taken away after being arrested on a beach in Massachusetts.
By now, Kellerman held many of the world records for female swimmers, and in truth was competing with the men. In 1905, for example, she had come third in a seven-mile race down the river Seine. She became so famous that her swimming career began to morph into a showbiz one. This process was given a shove in 1908, when a Harvard professor announced that Kellerman was “the Perfect Woman”. (When told, she’s said to have quipped, “But only from the neck down.”) He had measured the bodies of thousands of different women, and Kellerman’s was the one closest to that of the Venus de Milo. Always one with a keen eye for publicity, she named her next show The Perfectly Formed Woman.
As you’d expect, demand for a look at the Perfect Woman outstripped possible supply, at least as far as personal appearances went. But this was the golden age of the silent movie, and Kellerman was headed for Hollywood. She made a large number of films; the most controversial was A Daughter of the Gods, in which she appeared fully nude (though judging by the surviving publicity shots, always tastefully draped in her flowing locks). Most of her films had an aquatic theme, and Kellerman often appeared as a mermaid. Only one movie is known to survive complete: Venus of the South Seas.
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Kellerman continued to perform in aquatic shows until the 1940s. By then, she was in her mid-50s and a new female swimming star, Esther Williams, was drawing Hollywood’s eye. (In 1952 she would play Kellerman in the biopic Million Dollar Mermaid.) Kellerman continued to live in California until 1970, when she and her husband moved back to Australia.
Still swimming – and by all accounts still able to do an impressive high-kick – well into her late 80s, Annette Kellerman died in 1975 at the age of 89. She had been a female groundbreaker at a time when women’s roles were limited. She’d been a movie star, a health-and-fitness guru, a motivational speaker, a bestselling author and a dungaree-wearing health-food entrepreneur (Kellerman was a lifelong vegetarian and teetotaller, and owned a health-food store in Long Beach). She herself, though, regarded her greatest achievement as helping to free women from having to wear swimming costumes you couldn’t actually swim in.
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