Eleanor Holm

Eleanor Holm on the cover of TIME Magazine, 1939

Olympic medal record
Competitor for the United States
Women's swimming
Gold	1932 Los Angeles	100 m backstroke

Eleanor G. Holm (December 6, 1913 – January 31, 2004) was an American swimmer. An Olympic champion, she is best known for having been suspended from the 1936 Summer Olympics team, after she had attended a cocktail party on the transatlantic cruise ship taking her to Germany. She went on to have a high-profile celebrity career as actress and singer, socialite and interior designer that included co-starring as Jane in a Hollywood Tarzan movie.

Born the daughter of a fireman in Brooklyn, New York, Holm learned swimming while very young. Winning her first national swimming title at age 13, she was selected to compete in the 1928 Summer Olympics, where she finished fifth in her specialty, the 100-meter backstroke. She was talented in several other strokes as well, winning several American titles in the 300-yard medley event.

At the 1932 Games in Los Angeles, California, Holm won her favorite event, with defending champion Marie Braun having to forfeit the final due to an insect bite. "I was hardly dry at those Olympics when I was whisked from one studio to another—Warner Brothers, MGM, Paramount—to take screen tests," she told the New York Times in 1984. Also in 1932, she was one of fourteen girls named as a WAMPAS Baby Star alongside Ginger Rogers and Gloria Stuart. The following year, on 2 September 1933, she married her first husband, Art Jarrett, a fellow graduate of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, the singer and bandleader at the Cocoanut Grove night-club, after a whirlwind five-month romance. She even performed with his band while wearing a white bathing suit and white cowboy hat with high heels, singing "I'm an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande."

Competing as Eleanor Holm Jarrett, she was selected for the 1936 Olympics. Unfortunately, after a drinking party aboard the ship transporting the team, Holm was found, according to the team doctor, in a state approaching a coma. According to David Wallechinsky, The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics, the Olympic team doctor reported that she was suffering from acute alcoholism, but Holm denied it.

Team leader Avery Brundage promptly suspended her from the Olympic team. Holm, admitting to having had a few drinks, subsequently maintained that her suspension arose from a personal grudge held by Brundage.

"This chaperone came up to me and told me it was time to go to bed. God, it was about 9 o'clock, and who wanted to go down in that basement to sleep anyway? So I said to her: `Oh, is it really bedtime? Did you make the Olympic team or did I?' I had had a few glasses of Champagne. So she went to Brundage and complained that I was setting a bad example for the team, and they got together and told me the next morning that I was fired. I was heartbroken."

Holm's Olympic teammates petitioned unsuccessfully to overturn the suspension. The top favorite for the 100-meter backstroke event, Holm watched from the stands as the title went to Dutch swimmer Nida Senff. Decades later Holm confided in fellow Olympian Dave Sime that Brundage's grudge stemmed from an incident in which he propositioned her sexually and she turned him down.

Though she would appear in at least four films as herself, Holm appeared in only one Hollywood feature film, starring opposite fellow Olympian Glenn Morris in the 1938 film Tarzan's Revenge.

In 1939, a year after Jarrett divorced her, claiming that his wife's suspension from the 1936 Olympics and her affair with another man had caused him embarrassment, she married her lover, impresario Billy Rose. At the 1939 New York World's Fair she did 39 shows a week at Rose's "Aquacade", co-featured with Tarzan swimmer Johnny Weissmuller and, later, Buster Crabbe. In 1954, she divorced Rose-- receiving $30,000 a year in alimony and a lump sum of $200,000, to be paid in 10 yearly installments, according to the New York Times -- and several months later married Thomas Whalen, an oil-drilling executive.

Eleanor Holm Whelan died of renal disease in Miami, aged 90.

References

• Maraniss, David (2008). Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World. New York, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 1416534075.

Sources

• New York Times obituary, February 2, 2004
• William O. Johnson, All That Glitters Is Not Gold
• Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty, Tales of Gold

External links

• Eleanor Holm at Find a Grave
• Eleanor Holm at the Internet Movie Database
• [1] New York Times obituary, February 2, 2004