Who is Annette Kellerman and why is she saying those horrible things about me?

I've got several movies on my DVR that are coming up on TCM. Two of them are in conjunction with prime-time programming, and I figured it would be better to do posts on those on the following two days. So my next post is on a movie that TCM isn't showing for a good three days yet: Million Dollar Mermaid, Nov. 6 at 2:15 PM.

After a brief title card sequence about the old Hippodrome in New York, the action switched to Australia in the 1890s. Frederick Kellerman (Walter Pidgeon) is a widowed musician who runs a conservatory in the Sydney area and lives with his young daughter Annette (Donna Corcoran playing her as a juvenile). Annette suffered a polio-like disease as a child that weakened her legs; since then she's taken to swimming as a form of physical therapy. Fast forward several years and Annette is all grown up (played by Esther Williams) and winning swimming competitions. Unfortunately, she only wins trophies because the sport is completely amateur.

The Kellermans could use the money as the conservatory can no longer support them. Dad gets a job in London, and Annette follows him. On board, they meet James Sullivan (Victor Mature), who is promoting some sort of act involving a kangaroo, which would have been really exotic in the first decade of the 20th century. James is taken with Annette, and this being a movie based on a real person, James and Annette married and would remain married until his death 60 years later, although his death was 20 years after the movie. At this point of the movie, James wants to manage Annette's career, having her dress up as a mermaid and doing aquatic acts, somthing of which Dad decidedly does not approve.

The Kellermans get to London and find that the man who had offered Dad a job has died in the meantime, so his conservatory is now closed. This gives Jimmy the idea to promote Annette in a marathon swim in the Thames. It doesn't exactly make a whole lot of money, although at this point the point is to get Annette's name in the news, which the stunt does in spades. Eventually, everybody goes over to America to try to make it big there. As you can guess from the opening, Kellerman will eventually perform at the Hippodrome, but not the first time she approaches the manager. She's going to have to go through more struggle to make it to the top. Part of that includes promoting a new line of swimwear, which is a scandalous for the early 1910s one-piece relatively tight-fitting ladies' swimming gown, a lot like the one-piece outfits of today. 110 years ago, it would get her arrested (in the movie and in the real-life Kellerman's claims; from what I've read there's no surviving record of the arrest).

Annette does of course get to be the star attraction at the Hippodrome, and this gives MGM a chance to stage some of those spectacular aquacades that were the point of an Esther Williams movie. Kellerman would try her luck in Hollywood as well.

Million Dollar Mermaid is a Hollywood biopic, so often playing fast and loose with the facts, but this time the story generally does fairly well dramatically. Victor Mature is a bit handicapped in that the script often asks him to be a bit of a cad, but then the movie was a vehicle for Williams and her swimming numbers, not Mature. In that regard, the swimming numbers are worth the price of admission.