Esther Williams: Rockin' the Cary Grant Thing

That's my word for today: "Rockin'" - I'm rockin' "rockin'" if you will.....



From the NY Times:

Miss Williams tried therapy, but says she gave up when two successive psychiatrists sat gaga before a movie star. In 1959, her career at a seeming end and her second marriage over, she did try LSD under the direction of Cary Grant's psychiatrist, and had a hallucinatory experience in which she envisioned herself in the body of her older brother Stanton, a child movie actor who had died years earlier as a teen-ager, and whose mantle she realized she had assumed. She begins her book with an account of the trip.

''That was like solving a mystery,'' she says quietly now. ''I realized that my mother and father had not filled in the blanks'' in their lives. She continued: ''And the reason was that it was because it was such a shock to live without that wonderful boy. So I became that boy. Cary told me LSD was like instant psychiatry, and I was sorry the kids got ahold of it and made it a recreational drug, but I think it needed to be clinical for a long time, tested and tested.''

Miss Williams herself was repeatedly tested. She arrived at MGM self-conscious enough about her abilities to demand a clause in her contract stipulating that she could not be forced to appear in a movie for at least nine months.

Seems to me her performances were priming her. Hmmm....