Eleanor Holm
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| Olympic medal record | |||
| 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 Olympic team.
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 such future Hollywood legends as Ginger Rogers and Gloria Stuart. The following year, on 2 September 1933, she married her first husband, bandleader Art Jarrett, a fellow graduate of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, and performed with his band while wearing a white bathing suit with a white cowboy hat and 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.
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 Whelan, an oil-drilling executive.
Eleanor Holm Whelan died of renal disease in Miami, aged 90.
[edit] References
- 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 .
[edit] External links
Olympic champions in women's 100 m backstroke |
|---|
| 1924: Sybil Bauer 1928: Marie Braun 1932: Eleanor Holm 1936: Nida Senff 1948: Karen Harup 1952: Joan Harrison 1956: Judy Grinham 1960: Lynn Burke 1964: Cathy Ferguson 1968: Kaye Hall 1972: Melissa Belote 1976: Ulrike Richter 1980: Rica Reinisch 1984: Theresa Andrews 1988: Kristin Otto 1992: Krisztina Egerszegi 1996: Beth Botsford 2000: Diana Mocanu 2004: Natalie Coughlin |
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