Eleanor Holm

Eleanor G. Holm (December 6, 1913 – January 31, 2004) was an American competition swimmer and Olympic gold medalist. She is best known for having been suspended from the 1936 Summer Olympics team after she attended a cocktail party on the transatlantic cruise ship taking her to Germany. She went on to have a high-profile celebrity career as a socialite and interior designer, and co-starred in a Hollywood Tarzan movie.

Biography

Born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of a fireman, Holm learned to swim 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 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Holm won 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," she told the New York Times in 1984. In 1932, she was one of 14 girls named as a WAMPAS Baby Star, including Ginger Rogers, Mary Carlisle, and Gloria Stuart. The following year, on September 2, 1933, she 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 night club. She even performed with his band while wearing a white bathing suit and white cowboy hat with high heels, singing "I'm an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande."