| I was born in Sidney, New South Wales, Australia, in the year of our Lord 18 - but look at the pictures in this book and figure it out for yourself. My father was a native Australian, and my mother Alsatian French. I am not a sea captain's daughter nor did I come of fisher folk. In fact, my mother was a musician and in the days of my childhood conducted the Australian Musical Conservatory, and while there Nellie Mitchell, the great Melba, took instruction under her. Later mother became one of Paris's greatest pianists. My family had no intention of making a mermaid of me, amateur or professional. But my swimming came about as a means of curing a very distressing condition of my legs, which one doctor said was caused by allowing me to walk too soon; but the other doctor said that I had chalk in my bones, which, as I remember it, seemed a very much more scientific explanation. But while the cause was a matter of argument, there was no doubt about the effect, for I had to wear painful and humiliating steel braces when I walked. One day when I was still a very little girl, my father went to see a third doctor, and came home and informed me that I was to take swimming lessons. To those of you who know me now as the "Diving Venus", "Queen of the Mermaids", "Neptune's Daughter," and what not, this may sound very strange; but the truth was that I was terrified at the thought of swimming. Perhaps my fears were increased by my humiliation because of my dread of exposing my weak and ill-formed legs. But all pleading availed me nothing. Daddy had discussed the matter with the doctor and the doctor was very, very sure that swimming was the only thing that would help me. In Cavill's Baths in Sidney I received my first swimming lessons. My brothers and sister had learned to swim in four or five lessons, but eighteen were required for me. Only a cripple can understand the intense joy that I experienced when little by little I found that my legs were growing stronger and taking on the normal shape and the normal powers with which the legs of other youngsters were endowed. In Australia practically all children are taught to swim, but in my case if my father had not been especially persistent, I am sure I never could have overcome my childish dread and fears. But for his wisdom I might have been hobbling about on crutches to-day, instead of skating, dancing and indulging in twenty-five mile constitutionals, in addition to making my regular livelihood as a moving picture mermaid, or flirting with Toto, the Funny Fish, through the walls of the glass tank at the New York Hippodrome. Of course, I had some other exercises in calisthenics, but it is to swimming that I feel I owe the great debt. At the age of thirteen my legs were practically normal, though for some years afterwards one of them was easily susceptible to strain, and I was compelled to wear tightly laced high shoes until the age of eighteen. In my early childhood swimming I was taught the breast stroke and mastered it thoroughly. Swimming meant for me a healthful and necessary means whereby my limbs could be exercised while free from the horrible steel braces. At the age of fifteen I went to the Farmers Baths in Farm Cove, Sidney, and took up the sport with renewed interest. In six weeks' time I mastered all swimming strokes, including the trudgeon. It was then that I caught the mermaid fever and told my father of my ambition to enter one of the many swimming competitions open to Australian women. My father laughingly opposed my desire to enter the race, as he had not seen me swim since the age of nine, and thought it quite absurd that I should compete with well-known swimmers, one of whom was the champion of Australia. My first contest was a forty-five yard event, in which I swam against Miss Buttel, who was regarded as the fastest girl swimmer in our locality. I came in winner by a couple of yards, very much to my father's astonishment. After that I was always placed at scratch, and lost only one race. My father's incredulity was immediately changed to a most enthusiastic and persevering faith. To him had been due my childhood swimming which kept me from remaining a cripple, and to his revived interest I owe much of my success as a professional swimmer. Father took up my training in a systematic fashion and through thick and thin saw that I stuck to it. The rest of the family were doubtful that anything outside of a little local notoriety could ever come of my swimming. But I was certain that there was no hope for me in music, and equally determined to make my mark in something; hence, with father's more mature will to make smooth the road, I took up swimming with an earnestness that was bound to succeed. It was not long until I won the championship for New South Wales by swimming 100 yards in one minute and eighteen seconds. The same year I won the one mile championship in thirty-two minutes and twenty-nine seconds at that time a world's record, which I later lowered to twenty-eight minutes. I also began to swim for distance and did ten miles in the Yarra River near Melbourne. In those days I took Fred Lane for my ideal swimmer, and I was told that I imitated his trudgeon stroke perfectly. For the single over-arm stroke I took Percy Cavill as a model. I also developed a keenness for diving and made my first public display at the Farmers Baths, where I dived with Vera Buttel, making two plunges from the fifty-foot board. About this time the Sidney Bulletin and the Melbourne Punch became interested in my swimming, and encouraged me to follow it up as a profession. Soon I began to give public exhibitions in the principal Melbourne baths, and by request to give lessons. Then came an offer from the Melbourne Exhibition Aquarium where, in what was then the largest glass tank in the world sixty feet with fish swimming all about me, I gave two shows a day. The next winter I was engaged by Bland Holt for his wonderful production, "The Breaking of the Drought" at the Theatre Royal in Melbourne, where I gave a diving exhibition and sea-side gala. It was a very novel scene, a real stage flooded with real water. It was here I had an awful experience. Through my own foolhardiness I was nearly sucked down the hole through which the water was being emptied from the stage tank. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to catch the end of a beam which was projecting over the side, and screaming hard, managed to attract attention. I made many other Australian records than those mentioned. At one time I swam down the Yarra River for two and a half miles in forty-six minutes. It is a "dead" river and very difficult to swim in. Later I did five miles down the river at an average of twenty-one minutes to the mile. I gave exhibitions throughout Australia, one stop of my itinerary being at Broker's Hill where I swam to entertain the Australian miners while the thermometer stood at 112 degrees in the shade. All in all I was doing very well indeed as a professional swimmer in my native country, but Australia, though big in area, was not big enough in population to satisfy our ambition. In England were more people, more theatres, and more money to be earned by professional swimmers. Indeed, in Australia swimming is so much a sport for every one, and amateur swimming contests and exhibitions so plentiful, that the very abundance of the sport makes it commonplace, and there is less opportunity for the professional swimmer. So father and I decided to go to England. Success in England did not come so easily. We were utter strangers, and theatrical managers at that time were no more interested in a "Diving Venus" than they were in a "Flying Mercury." I secured a few private engagements and swam before the Duke and Duchess of Connaught at the Bath Club; but high society was not going in for mermaids enough that season to keep the wolf in his den. At one time father and I were reduced to such desperate straits that we had to take rooms down at King's Cross at ten shillings each for board and lodging. In order to make the English people take notice, we planned that I should swim down the Thames from Putney Bridge to Blackwall. It was an awful trip. I shall never forget that swim through the flotsam and jetsam of London, dodging tugs and swallowing what seemed like pints of oil from the greasy surface of the river. I arrived at Blackwall after three and a half hours in the water, absolutely starving, and there was nothing to eat. Lunch had been forgotten. The wharf-keeper's "tea" of bread and cheese had just been brought, and he generously gave it to me. Never before had food tasted like those hunks of bread and cheese which I devoured, sitting on the wharf in my bathing costume. But this fearful swim was not without its results. The sporting man of the Daily Mirror looked me up, examined my records and finally told me that if I would attempt to swim the English Channel he would "run me." He agreed to pay me eight pounds a week while I was in training, and father and I were to go down to Dover while the Mirror was to announce every day that I would swim along the shore from one summer resort to another. Success seemed within our grasp, but there was a black week for us. When we reached Dover dad decided to go to the finest house in town. That was just like him. We walked boldly in and demanded demanded, mind you to see some rooms. Very well! We were shown them. Dad asked me in a very dignified manner whether I thought they would suit. "I think so" said I, trying to appear none too eager. "How much?" said dad, turning to the landlady, "Two guineas each per week" And we with only a ha'penny and nothing coming in for seven days! At this point dad did a fine acting stunt. He told the landlady that the Daily Mirror was backing me to swim the Channel and what our plans were. She listened intently, and was so much impressed that when dad thrust his hand into his pocket, observing in a very lordly way, "Perhaps I had better give you a check," she was quite profuse in her refusals to take it. But we didn't dare to ask for any loan, however small. We bought no newspaper for a week, and had to watch our chance to look over somebody's shoulder in order to see what the sporting man was saying about us. In this preparatory training I made many swims along the English coast. I started out by swimming from Dover, four and a half miles, to St. Margaret's Bay; Dover, nine miles, to Deal; Deal, eleven miles, to Ramsgate; Ramsgate, ten miles, to Margate; and so I worked up the distances, making good copy for the Mirror all the while, and finally swam from Dover to Ramsgate, a distance of twenty-four miles. After I had done that I felt that I was more or less ready for the Channel stunt. There were seven of us that made the start for the Channel swim that night. One of these was Burgess, who afterward actually did swim from England to France in twenty-three and one-half hours. He was the only man who ever did it. Wolffe, who was a very fast swimmer, almost did it. On one occasion he got within a quarter of a mile of Calais, and then had to give up. And it only took him eleven hours to go all that distance, which was marvellous. We didn't all start together. The swimmers, with their little hands of friends and backers, and the representatives of the different papers who were "running" them, were more than a mile apart in some cases. I started from Dover, others from St. Margaret's Bay, three miles off, while some started from points farther along the coast. The reason for each having a different point of departure from the others was that each had studied the coast and the tides and had his opinion as to the most advantageous point of departure. You sometimes have to wait for days before you can get a good time to start the right weather and tide. The Channel is most treacherous. The idea is to catch the tide running northerly, avail yourself of this for a certain time, and, though carried northeast, cut in when farther out in the Channel to the return tide, so to speak. You see, your course is not a straight but a zig-zag one. If it were only a matter of swimming twenty-two miles, the distance from Calais to Dover, the task would not be so difficult, even if the sea were a bit choppy. But having to ziz-zag by reason of the tides, the actual swimming distance across the Channel is something more than forty miles. It was about two o'clock in the morning when we assembled on the beaches. Channel swimmers always start in the middle of the night in order to get the hardest three or four hours of the work done while they feel most fit. Then, when their strength and courage begin to wane, daylight comes and gives them new hope and vigour. The first two hours of a long-distance swim are very difficult. It takes one that long to settle down to steady work, to get one's pace, to feel confident that one is doing the regulation twenty-eight strokes to the minute. After the pores of my skin had been rubbed full of porpoise oil and my goggles glued on, I was ready. The men, who started from different points along the coast, wore no clothes, but I was compelled to put on a tiny bathing suit. Small as it was, it chafed me. When I finished, my flesh under the arms was raw and hurt fearfully. We were off. I was accompanied by a steam tug and a row boat, as was each of my rivals. I swam practically between the two, the steam vessel keeping some three hundred feet off, so that I should not be affected by the wash, and the smaller craft about half that distance, always ready to come to my instant aid, should I need it. You start out absolutely alone, so as to have everything authentic. No one is allowed to give you the slightest assistance. If you so much as touch the boat or rest your fingers on the tip of an oar, you are "declared out." Every half hour the big boat slows down and you swim alongside; they pass you a long-snouted chemical cup containing hot soup or chocolate, which you snatch as they let go of it. Or they hand you tiny inch-square sandwiches from the end of a long stick. A manufacturer had supplied me with a good deal of chocolate as an advertisement, and I used it. But I am a "liverish" person, and so I'd been out only four hours when the chocolate and the chop of the water made me very seasick. From then on, for the rest of the swim, I was seasick every half hour. But I stuck it out for six and three-quarter hours. You will wonder that I remained in the water so long, suffering from sea-sickness and the chafing of my bathing suit, and cold and weariness. But dad and I were desperately poor we must have money. And I kept saying to myself, "The longer you stick, the more you get!" For this attempt at swimming the Channel I got thirty pounds, about one hundred and fifty dollars. But if I gained thirty pounds of English gold, I lost seven pounds of good Australian flesh. The other contestants were in the water longer than I was, but not one of them got so far, though they were all men. The winner, so far as endurance was concerned, was a Yorkshireman, who was well-trained and had a good "tummy". And, believe me, a good "tummy" is very essential for that kind of a contest. One must have a good furnace at work, not only to supply one with steam, but to protect oneself against the extreme cold of that North Sea water. On other occasions I have tried to swim the Channel. Once I stayed in the water ten and one-half hours and got three quarters of the way across. My record for a woman still holds. I had the endurance but not the brute strength that must be coupled with it. I think no woman has this combination; that's why I say that none of my sex will ever accomplish that particular stunt. After this, I went in for long-distance swimming entirely. The Auto, the big sporting paper in Paris, was "running" an annual event called "The Swim Through Paris". 7 The course, a little over seven miles, runs practically through the heart of the city. Probably half a million people crowd the banks of the Seine to witness this contest. I entered the race with seventeen men. Each swimmer was accompanied by an attendant in a little boat, who passed him things to eat whenever he wanted them, and looked after him generally. In my boat were dad, a friend, and two oarsmen. As I pushed my way through the dirty water of the Seine, the people would cry to me, "Come on, Mademoiselle, you've only one more kilometer, two more bridges, that's all!" This was one of those kindly prevarications intended to cheer me up. But they shouldn't have done it, for I would make a dash or sprint trying to wind up with a flourish and would get out of my stroke and use up most of my reserve strength. Because the river was full of curves and I couldn't see ahead, they fooled me for a little while. At last, when I thought I'd reached the last bridge and they called out, "Only two kilometers more!" I was so disappointed that I began to cry. I was worried, too, for I was to receive forty pounds for the race if I finished and, as usual, we needed the money! Just then Burgess came along. He had started handicapped, half an hour behind me, but had caught up. He saw that I'd been crying and asked me what was up. When I told him how they'd been fooling me, he was very sympathetic. "Come on," he urged, and swam alongside me, pacing me, and by his chivalry running the risk of losing the race himself, for the racers behind were coming on apace. At the last hundred yards we made a dash for it, and touched the goal together a tie! There were eighteen starters, but only four of us finished. It was the most thrilling race I was ever in! After my Seine swim, I sought new worlds to conquer, or, at least, new worlds sought me, for Baroness Isa Cescu, the best known Viennese swimmer, challenged me for a race in the Danube from Tuln to Vienna, a distance of thirty-six kilometers, about twenty-two miles. The Danube is very treacherous. Its waters are icy cold and it runs so fast that there are dangerous eddies everywhere. Half the game in swimming that course is knowing your ground. Well, we started, swimming far apart. I had not gone far before I found myself sucked into a shallow whirlpool. The water was only about six inches deep and was whirling with great force and speed over a bed of sharp pebbles. Before I could work my way out, my legs were one mass of cuts and bruises. I won the race easily, by about three-quarters of an hour. After a few more contests, I gave up long-distance swimming and went back to the London Hippodrome for the winter. The following spring dad and I came to America. We soon found that there was no long-distance swimming to be done, and as we were still very poor I determined to capitalise the various water-stunts, particularly high diving, which I had learned in Australia. That is how I came to be known in America more as a water-feat artist than as a long-distance swimmer. We went to Chicago, made straight for the White City Park, and managed to get possession of a very small enclosure on the principal thoroughfare right across the way from the Igorrotes and next door to the snake man! Our little place had a high false front, but no roof. In it was a tank fourteen feet long, containing water five and one-half feet deep, and surrounded by seats like a circus. We charged an admission of ten cents and gave fifty-five performances a week, some five or six on week days and from twelve to eighteen on Saturdays and Sundays. At each performance I gave three examples of the most approved styles of swimming, did some fantastic stunts, porpoise swimming and the like and sixteen dives, backward, forward and sidewise. At last I was making good money steadily. When the season closed in Chicago, I went to Boston and was doing similar stunts when Mr. Keith saw me and offered me three hundred dollars a week for two shows a day in vaudeville. As it meant only fourteen shows a week, I decided to take it. So contracts were signed. My diving act, the first of the kind to be done on the stage, was such a novelty and drew such crowds that when I reached New York, after a few weeks on the road, a rival manager offered me fifteen hundred dollars a week to work for him in the summer alone. He had no objection to my working for Keith in the winter. But Keith wouldn't have it. Then I decided to break with Keith for the other man and work during the summer and lie idle in the winter. Keith was furious, and the famous lawsuit followed in which Mr. Taft, brother to the former President, was counsel for Keith. The courts decided that the summer arrangement was inequitable. Then Keith offered me a twelve hundred and fifty dollar a week contract, and I played for two years without a day's vacation. The suit cost Keith twenty-five thousand dollars; but the manager of every house at which I played was compelled to pay an additional hundred dollars, over and above what Keith was paying me for the act, the extra hundred going toward paying the costs of the lawsuit. I remained in vaudeville two and one-half years, when I realised that my vogue was taking a decided slump, that the diving Venus proposition was rapidly becoming passé. I was being copied all over the country. And then, when they tried to cut my salary two hundred and fifty dollars a week, I realised that the end was close at hand. For a long time I'd had an idea that I couldn't develop in any way except through motion pictures. So I practically peddled myself among the various moving picture studios. But none of the directors seemed to want me. Then I asked Captain Leslie Peacock, a successful scenario writer, to write a scenario about fairies and mermaids for me. A few days later, President Laemmle of the Universal sent for me. Captain Peacock had talked to him about my scheme. While Laemmle seemed dubious about my project, he was willing to discuss it with me. The outcome of our interview was that Captain Peacock wrote "Neptune's Daughter." And let me say that, although they made a million dollars out of it, nobody in that concern had any faith in the picture until it was put on at the Globe Theatre in New York, and they realised what the public thought of it. They begrudged every bit of the thirty-five thousand dollars that went into it. We went to Bermuda to make the picture, as that island offered every natural facility that was required. It was while engaged on this job that the director and myself met with an accident which came near to putting an end to our motion picture ambitions. We were doing an under-water fight scene in a large tank, the front of which was three-quarter inch glass plate. We had asked for an inch and a half plate as the smallest thickness that could safely resist the pressure of the water, but were refused on the ground that such a thing would be too expensive. While we were doing the fight, suddenly the front wall of the tank burst with a report like a cannon. My only thought as this happened was to keep my feet and go with the great rush of water through the hole in the glass, which was surrounded with great, jagged points. The out-rush carried me twenty feet beyond the tank, where I lay, bruised and bleeding, with a great piece of flesh cut from my right foot. But the director, not having had my water experience, lost his head and was drawn through the hole sidewise and stranded among a lot of broken glass. He looked as if some one had chopped him all over with a hatchet. One wound alone, running from his armpit to his wrist, required forty-six stitches. We were both sent to the hospital, where I lay with a wounded foot for six weeks and the director remained for five weeks. When I had finished my work at Bermuda, I wrote down the list of water-stunts I had done in "Neptune's Daughter" and determined to surpass them in my next piece. This I did in "A Daughter of the Gods." The principal features of value in the new picture are my water-stunts I invented some new ones and the kiddies. We employed about eight hundred children, nearly sixty per cent, of whom were under six years of age. But to sit in the audience and watch yourself on the screen is a poor substitute to any one who has been on the other side of the footlights. So the stage fascination got me again, and I signed up for the big mermaid spectacle at the New York Hippodrome. The old days of my crippled childhood seem unbelievably distant as I write this. My early physical misfortune has turned out to be the greatest blessing that could have come to me. Without it I should have missed the grim struggle upward and the reward that waited at the end of it all. I first loved the ocean when I was a child because it made me curious. I wondered whether it really went down and down, if it would hold me up. I wanted to know what made it blue and to feel the white on a wave. My father told me that all animals swam except the monkey and the pig. And I didn't want to stay on their level. The pig, he said, always cut its throat in the water. That interested me greatly and I begged for the chance to throw one in the briny deep; but he firmly refused. And so I have never been sure about the tale. Some day I am going to buy a pig and try it. I have been asked ten thousand times why I like to swim and I have given a different answer every time. You see the water always teaches me a new story. It is three times as large as the land and too big to be disturbed. Therefore it has not been crossed out by man and goes on and on, the most elemental thing in all the world. And why do I believe in swimming? To put it briefly, swimming is a pleasure and a benefit, a clean, cool, beautiful cheap thing we all from cats to kings can enjoy. The man who has not given himself completely to the sun and wind and cold sting of the waves will never know all meanings of life. Swimming is more deeply woven into the fabric of man than any other form of motion. Athletics have scarcely begun to have a history; scientists tell us that walking is comparatively modern, but man swam before he was a man and he will swim till there is no more sea. The way in which literature does not appreciate swimming surprises me. Poets have pushed the subject far away from them, even those who loved it. Lord Byron, who swam the Hellespont, barely mentions the fact. I only wish I could turn all this into poetry but I can only tell in a faulty way what a glorious human experience it is. No where else in life can one find an experience bringing that wonderful sense of laziness and cares all blown away at the same time rousing all forces of resistance. New confidence and power are born within you for haven't you just overcome the depths of the sea? But it works the other way, too. I have turned to the ocean when remembering only me and after I left the shore behind, I seemed to shrink and shrink till I was nothing but a flecky bubble and feared that the bubble would burst. And so I advise swimming as good to encourage the modesty of the soul. There is nothing more democratic than swimming. Bathing is a society event but swimming out beyond the surf line is just plain social. Every one is happy and young and funny. No one argues. No one scolds. There is no time and no place where one may so companionably play the fool and not be called one. I learn much from people in the way they meet the unknown of life, and water is a great test. If they come to it bravely they've gone far along the best way. I am sure no adventurer nor discoverer ever lived who could not swim. Swimming cultivates imagination; the man with the most is he who can swim his solitary course night or day and forget a black earth full of people that push. This love of the unknown is the greatest of all the joys which swimming has for me. Though my swimming has earned me a goodly fortune I am still looking for my chest of gold in a cool dripping sea cave though a professional mermaid for the movies I still wait to see my first real one sitting on a damp grey rock combing her long green hair. |
