Eleanor Holm: Swimming

 American Star of the Women’s International Sports Hall of Fame

Many will forever remember her as the “Champagne Girl,” the swimming prodigy out of Brooklyn, New York, who had a taste for the good life. Aboard the German-bound SS Manhattan en route to the 1936 Olympics, the “Champagne Girl,” after a young night’s worth of drinking in the ship’s first-class section, was found staggering along the ship’s deck by the U.S. Olympic team chaperone. Upon being returned to her room in the ship’s third-class section reserved for athletes—an indignity to her—she stuck her head out of a window screaming obscenities to no one in particular. Her roommates pulled her in and by midnight she was soundly asleep. 

 

The ship and U.S. Olympic team doctors entered her room and found her to be “in a deep slumber which approached a state of coma” and diagnosed her with “acute alcoholism.” The members of the American Olympic Committee (AOC) held a meeting to discuss what sanctions to take against her. The next morning, she was informed by the team manager that she had been removed from the team.

 

“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,” she said. “So she went to [AOC President Avery 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.”¹

 

That’s how the “Champagne Girl” was born. Eleanor Holm was the kind of athlete-celebrity that would have been at the front and center of today’s paparazzi. She not only would have been unapologetic about the attention, but would have openly embraced it. Yet for all her celebrity and controversy, she was one of the greatest swimmers of her generation. Holm made her Olympic debut at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics as a 14-year-old and finished fifth in her specialty, the 100-meter backstroke. In 1932 at the Los Angeles Olympic Games, she set a world record during the qualifying heats with a time of 1:18.2 and won the gold by nearly two seconds with a time of 1:19.4. In between Olympics, Holm married singer and orchestra leader Art Jarrett. Marrying Jarrett exposed her to a different lifestyle now that she was hanging out with a Hollywood crowd and performing in many of her husband’s nightclub shows. At times she would appear in a white bathing suit and white cowboy hat while strutting in high heels singing “I’m an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande.”

 

Even so, she stayed in shape and continued to train for the 1936 Olympics in Germany, hoping to defend her gold medal. She had not lost a race in seven years and had become the first American woman to be chosen to swim for three Olympic teams. But Brundage took the opportunity away from her, despite having 200 American athletes sign a petition to reinstate her. Holm would forever remain angry at the AOC president for denying her the opportunity at repeat gold medals. By all accounts, she was not the only Olympian drinking on the boat and she felt that Brundage held a grudge against her.

 

“I was everything that Avery Brundage hated,” Holm said in Tales of Gold, by Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty. “I had a few dollars, and athletes were supposed to be poor. I worked in nightclubs, and athletes shouldn’t do that. But he rained on my parade for only a very short time. He did make me famous. I would have been just another female backstroke swimmer without Brundage.”²

 

Upon arriving in Germany and without a meet to swim in, Holm became a correspondent for the Olympics, contributing ghostwritten articles for the International News Service. She also attended many of the receptions hosted by Hitler and the Nazi Party, many of them amazed that she had been kicked off the team for drinking. Herman Goering, a leader of the Nazi Party, gave Holm a silver-plated swastika off his uniform. Americans followed Holms’s saga with great interest and intrigue and welcomed her as a celebrity upon her return from Germany. When Holm married second husband Billy Rose, who was Jewish, she made a gold copy of the swastika and placed a Star of David in the middle set with diamonds in it.

 

Looking back, Holm said, “I did all right after I won in 1932, but 1936 made me a star—it made me a glamour girl! Just another gold medal would never have done that!”³

 

In 1938, she would star in her lone major motion picture in the 20th Century Fox Movie Tarzan’s Revenge, starring alongside Glenn Morris, the gold medal-winning decathlete of the 1936 Olympics. She also performed in 39 shows a week co-starring with fellow swimming greats Johnny Weismuller and Buster Crabbe at Rose’s Aquacade in the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40.

 

Holm entered the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1965, becoming known as the Hall’s “Great Dame.”

 

“Life owes me nothing—I’ve had a ball!” Holm said to author William O. Johnson.

Indeed, she had a ball. In 1999, she appeared at a White House screening of HBO’s Dare to Compete: The Struggle of Women in Sports, and casually stepped to the side of former President Bill Clinton and gave him an easy compliment on his looks. Clinton, somewhat startled, could only ask “What?” to which Holm again complimented him on his looks. Clinton laughed and said that Holm, ever the show woman, had just made his day.

 

Holm passed away in 2004 at her home in Miami at the age of 91. In a 1984 interview with Dave Andersen of the New York Times, the “Champagne Girl” said she no longer swam but played some tennis, and she no longer drank champagne either, having replaced that with a bit of dry white wine.

 

Notes

1 William O. Johnson, All That Glitters Is Not Gold (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972), p.188.

2 Richard Goldstein, “Eleanor Holm Whalen, 30’s Swimming Champion, Dies,” New York Times. February 2, 2004.

3 Goldstein, “Eleanor Holm Whalen.”

This excerpt was written by Horacio Ruiz.