Eleanor Grace Theresa Holm (December 6, 1912

Holm learned to swim while very young, winning her first national swimming title at age 13. Holm was selected to compete in the 1928 Summer Olympics, where she finished fifth in her specialty, the 100-meter backstroke. Holm was also talented in several other strokes, winning several American titles in the 300-yard medley event.

At the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Holm won the gold medal in her favorite event, though defending champion Marie Braun had 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," Holm told the New York Times in 1984.

In 1932, Holm was one of the fifteen girls named as WAMPAS Baby Stars, including Ginger Rogers, Mary Carlisle, and Gloria Stuart. One of her first assignments at Warner Bros. was to join a trainload of actors and Busby Berkeley chorus girls on a barnstorming trip across the country in early 1933 to publicize the movie musical 42nd Street and to show support for the newly elected president Franklin D. Roosevelt at his first inauguration in Washington, DC.

The following year, on September 2, 1933, Holm married her first husband, Art Jarrett, a fellow graduate of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, after a whirlwind five-month romance. He was a singer and bandleader at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub. Holm even performed with his band while wearing a white bathing suit, white cowboy hat, and high heels, singing "I'm an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande)". "I'm an Old Cowhand", words and music by Johnny Mercer, was written for the 1936 movie Rhythm on the Range.

Holm competed as Eleanor Holm Jarrett and qualified for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. After a drinking party aboard the on the way to the Olympics, the team doctor found Holm in a state approaching a coma. According to David Wallechinsky in The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics, the Olympic team doctor's diagnosis was "[a]cute alcoholism". a year after Jarrett divorced her, claiming that his wife's expulsion from the 1936 Olympics and her affair with another man had caused him embarrassment, Holm married her lover, impresario Billy Rose, who had divorced first wife Fanny Brice. At the 1939 New York World's Fair, Holm did 39 shows a week at Rose's "Aquacade", co-featured with Tarzan swimmer Johnny Weissmuller and, later, Buster Crabbe. In 1954, Holm divorced Rose – receiving $30,000 per month (equivalent to $ today) in alimony and a lump sum of $200,000 ($ today) to be paid in 10 yearly installments, according to The New York Times. This sensational divorce trial was called "the war of the Roses" and is the subject of a chapter in Louis Nizer's book My Life in Court. Several months later, Holm married Thomas Joseph Whalen, an oil-drilling executive. They remained married until his death in 1986. All of the unions were childless.

In 1966, Holm was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame. She was buried at Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.

Holm is portrayed by the synchronized swimmer Heidi O'Rourke, who bore a close resemblance to her, in the 1975 film Funny Lady.

A protagonist based on Eleanor Holm, with the fictionalized name Eleanor Emerson, appears in the 2012 novel Flight from Berlin by David John, published by HarperCollins.

See also

  • List of members of the International Swimming Hall of Fame
  • List of Olympic medalists in swimming (women)

References

Bibliography

  • William O. Johnson, All That Glitters Is Not Gold
  • Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty, Tales of Gold