Esther Williams’s Latin Lovers

Abstract Early in Bathing Beauty, Esther Williams’s first musical at MGM, Red Skelton’s character wants to serenade his fiancée, played by Williams. She is about to arrive for her daily swim and Skelton, a songwriter, has composed a song for her. Although he can sing, rather than perform “Magic Is the Moonlight” himself, Skelton has asked Columbian baritone Carlos Ramirez to sing it for him in Spanish. The substitution of Ramirez for Skelton is a foreshadowing of how Williams’s cinematic body could blur certain ideological boundaries of the era through her association with Latinness and its visible displacements onscreen. Central to Williams’s star persona was her frequent association with Latinness. Xavier Cugat appeared in four of her musicals, she starred opposite Ricardo Montalbán in three, and Fernando Lamas, whom she eventually married several years after leaving MGM, appeared in Dangerous When Wet, one of her final efforts at that studio. The chapter concentrates on three musicals: Fiesta, On an Island with You, and Neptune’s Daughter. These films, made shortly after the war ended and as the postwar readjustment of conventional and more rigid gender roles began, offers a revealing glimpse not only of how this studio progressively whitened Montalbán’s Latinness but also how his onscreen ethnicity opened up ways of appreciating what made Williams’s star image, so focused on her athletic body, a more provocative portrayal of femininity in the 1940s than one remembers or that most scholarship on the musical acknowledges.