Fifty years later, Eleanor Holm could still recall the events of July 23rd, 1936 in vivid detail. She would remember that night for the rest of her life—in part because people never stopped asking her about it. Every four years, in the run-up to the next summer Olympics, the questions about July 23rd and its whirlwind aftermath started up again. “Before the Olympics…they take me out of the trunk and review me,” she joked in the New York Times in 1984. “When it's over, back in the trunk.’’ Most of all, July 23rd was stamped into her memory because that was the night Eleanor Holm got kicked off the American Olympic swimming team for drinking too much champagne.
That July, Holm was a passenger on the S.S. Manhattan, the luxury ocean liner carrying 350 American athletes to the 1936 summer games, which would take place in Adolf Hitler’s Berlin. Holm was then a Brooklyn girl with “a hell of an accent” who had won a gold medal in the 100-meter backstroke at the Los Angeles games in 1932, and she was arriving in Berlin as the favorite in the same race. She was famous for her beauty and charm as much as her speed in the pool; she was not only extremely photogenic, posing for newsreels with her feet dangling in the water as she turned to the camera with a dazzling smile, she was also what the newspapermen called “good copy,” always ready with entertaining banter. A later interviewer said she spoke “in sunbursts and exclamation marks.”
In 1936, Holm was only twenty-two years old, but she possessed a brash kind of confidence, especially compared to her teenage bunkmates on the Manhattan, fellow swimmers who were rooming with her down in third class. She’d trained for her race in between performing with her singer-husband at nightclubs, where she “used to take a mic and get up in front of the band in a white bathing suit and a white cowboy hat and high heels.” In 1932, she was named, alongside Ginger Rogers, one of the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers’ “Baby Stars,” an award given to young actresses whom the association deemed poised for success in the movies. “Baby Star” she might have been, but Holm didn’t see herself as immature. “I had been around,” she said later. “I was no baby.”
Though the story of Holm’s Olympic disgrace has been told and retold hundreds of times, in Holm’s own words and in others’, the most exhaustive account of what happened on July 23rd appears in David Wallechinsky’s The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics. According to Wallechinsky’s book, that night Holm went to a party in first class with some of the newspaper guys she knew, where she drank champagne and played dice. Around 10:30 pm, a female chaperone found Holm “staggering along the deck” in the company of a young man. After she got back to her cabin, Holm “stuck her head out the porthole and began shouting obscenities.” (At some point, by Holm’s own account, she also told off the chaperone for trying to force her to go to bed: “I said to her, ‘Oh, is it really bedtime? Did you make the Olympic team or did I?’”) She then fell into a deep sleep, so deep that she wasn’t roused when the chaperone, team doctor, and the ship’s doctor appeared in the cabin at midnight to examine her.
The team doctor diagnosed the sleeping Holm with “acute alcoholism,” by which he seems to have meant she was passed-out drunk. The American Olympic Committee called an emergency meeting on the ship to decide what to do about Holm, and by the time she woke up early the next morning, she had been permanently suspended from the team. A lifetime ban from amateur competition would follow, effectively ending her competitive swimming career.
This was not Holm’s first run-in with Avery Brundage, the president of the American Olympic Committee at the time and the man who announced the decision to suspend her. “This is no joy ride!” he reportedly said. According to Richard Mandell’s The Nazi Olympics, two years earlier, Brundage had tried to revoke Holm’s amateur status so that she could no longer compete. “I was everything Avery Brundage hated,” Holm said later. “I had a few dollars, and athletes were supposed to be poor. I worked in nightclubs, and athletes shouldn’t do that…I didn't conform to his image of an athlete.” Known as “the high priest of amateurism in sports,” another athlete described Brundage as “tactless and arrogant”; he was a “thick-shouldered, flat-stomached millionaire…with a discus where his heart ought to be.”
That morning, Holm went to Brundage’s room and tried to persuade him to change his mind through a crack in the door. A petition of support for Holm was signed by 220 of her fellow American athletes. A few days later, she released a statement claiming that she wasn’t the only athlete to break the “training rules” or curfew, pointing out that there were more than 100 other offenders, including members of the fencing and field hockey teams. Brundage rebuffed all efforts and pleas to reinstate her.
Holm was heartbroken, and in her distress, she turned to her sportswriter friends from the ship. They managed to secure a gig for her as a correspondent for the International News Service, which came with press credentials. Her dispatches from the press gallery were all ghost-written, but no matter. Holm could stay in Berlin instead of being sent home on the next boat back to America. At the opening ceremonies, dressed in a pink dress and a picture hat and watching from the sidelines, she sobbed when she saw the American team enter the arena.
The silliness of Holm’s offense—she was a mouthy twenty-two-year-old who drank too much at a party— makes it hard to understand, in retrospect, how her behavior and subsequent dismissal became such a polarizing scandal, one that dominated international headlines for weeks. One columnist wrote that Holm’s suspension “caused more chatter than the revolution in Spain.”
This despite everything else there was to write about at the ’36 games: the righteous calls for a boycott of what was essentially a globally-sanctioned Nazi propaganda pageant; Jesse Owens’ legendary triumphs on the track; the charge that Avery Brundage and coach Dean Cromwell had conspired to remove the only two Jewish runners on the team, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, from their relay event at the last minute so as not to displease Hitler. In his memoir, Glickman labeled Brundage and Cromwell “American Nazis.”
From coast to coast, the American press weighed in on the case of Eleanor Holm. The Los Angeles Times “commended Avery Brundage and his associates for their action” because it was Eleanor’s “duty to the American public to conduct herself as a lady. It was her duty as an American woman to avoid any scandal which would reflect on the flower of American womanhood,” a duty she had clearly failed to uphold. Heywood Broun used the incident as an occasion to attack Brundage’s leadership. “One of the reasons I’m for Eleanor Holm is that I don’t like Adolf Hitler or Avery Brundage,” he wrote. And anyway, “champagne is a good thing on a boat because it settles your stomach.” In the Miami News, Jack Bell wrote that Holm was “nothing more than a very pretty girl with ability to backstroke a bit better than the rest of us on this earth” who “should have kept her mouth shut.”
Meanwhile, in the Negro Star, published in Wichita, Kansas, a different argument in Brundage’s favor appeared: “It is highly probable that had Jesse Owens or some other widely touted Negro stars been guilty of [Holm’s] misconduct, many white sportswriters…would have pointed to this as proof of the fact that colored just don't belong and that the race is childishly unreliable. Instead most of them have broken their typewriters rushing to her defense.” Eleanor Holm “was warned and told to watch her step, but continued to guzzle cocktails and champagne in open defiance. She merely got what she deserved.”
One of the brattiest quotes attributed to the tipsy Holm embodied the Star’s allegation, a cry that she was “free, white, and twenty-two” and could therefore do as she pleased. Holm’s foolishness extended to her post-suspension cavorting in Berlin, where she met with Hitler himself and partied with Hermann Göring, who gave her a silver swastika. (When she was married to the Jewish showman and producer Billy Rose, she had it remade with a Star of David set in the middle in diamonds). “I had such fun,” she said. “You know, athletes don't think much about the politics of it all.” In addition to her ignorance about “the politics of it all,” Holm at twenty-two harbored another delusion, one that fueled her public disobedience: an apparent conviction that she could ever hope to be treated like the men on the Olympic team.
In an August 1936 article titled “Separation of Sexes in 1940 Games Forecast,” Holm was blamed for a burgeoning movement within the International Olympic Committee to separate women’s sports from the games completely. “These games are for world champions, not sex appeal,” said Lawson Robertson, one of the American track coaches. “The world’s record established by Helen Stephens, the best woman sprinter, is at least 18 years back of Owens. It makes women in comparison look like children. They are not in the same class with men.” Because of the war, the 1940 games never happened, but doubts about women’s fitness for Olympic competition persisted.
Brundage was “suspicious” of female athletes; he had public fights with Babe Didrikson and Barbara Ann Scott, and at one point demanded at an IOC meeting that all female Olympic athletes undergo a physical examination to prove they weren’t “really men.” “You know, the ancient Greeks kept women out of their athletic games,” he said to a LIFE Magazine reporter in 1948. “They wouldn’t even let them on the sidelines. I’m not so sure but they were right.” Brundage would go on to become the president of the IOC from 1952 to 1972, two decades that were marked by accusations of racism and antisemitism.
Not too long after she first made the national papers as a fourteen-year-old at her first Olympics in Amsterdam in 1928, Holm’s athletic achievements became the second most important thing about her. Her hair and teeth and figure were the first thing. “Eleanor Holm has beautiful legs,” went a Los Angeles Times piece about the 1932 games. “When Eleanor sits in the sun, with water dripping from her legs they look like something carved from ivory.” At sixteen, in 1930, she turned down an offer to join the famous Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. At eighteen, now a gold medalist, she told the Los Angeles Times that she was glad she’d done so: “I like this better; I can wear more clothes than I could with the Follies.” The reporter noted that after confiding this, the teenager “drew downward a trifle the silken one-piece racing suit that glistened on her.”
As she got older, the attention paid to Holm’s looks by male sportswriters only intensified; rare was the story about her that did not comment on her appearance. One of the men who ghostwrote for Holm in Berlin in 1936, Paul Gallico, published an article in 1937 in Cosmopolitan entitled “Mermaids and Muscle Molls.” This was a survey of women’s sports that took as its chief purpose the task of determining the relative attractiveness of runners, tennis players, wrestlers, swimmers, and divers. The phrase “those legs!” appears twice. “If there is anything more dreadful than the fatigue-distorted face of a girl runner at the finish line, I have never seen it,” Gallico wrote. Of course, a photograph and lengthy description of Holm were included in the spread; swimmers and divers were, after all, “the beauty chorus of women in sport,” and Holm was the reigning “water queen” of that chorus. Gallico’s tone is light, amused, slightly mocking. “It is a pity that, with all the effort, the publicity and the acclaim,” he concluded, “actually none of the girls can be taken seriously at their games.”
Lost in the glare of the glamour and drama of Holm’s later life, which was partly made possible by the fame she gained from her Berlin feud with Avery Brundage, was one inescapable fact: she was an incredibly talented athlete. The book Women in Sports called her “the finest American swimmer of her time.” She won her first national championship in the 100-meter individual medley at the age of thirteen, placed fifth at the Olympics at fourteen, and went on to win a total of 20 national championships in backstroke and individual medley. In the months leading up to the 1936 Olympics, she broke her own world records in the 100-meter and 200-meter backstroke. “The suspicion grew in my mind that Miss Holm never dared swim as fast as she could,” Heywood Broun wrote in 1936. “She played with that backstroke record as a cat plays with a mouse.”
Holm was enamored with the water from a young age. When she saw the ocean for the first time, as a child on the beach on Long Island, she didn’t let the fact that she did not yet know how to swim stop her from wading so far out that only her cap was visible from the shore and a lifeguard had to go in after her. She used to watch, “goggle-eyed,” as swimmers and divers competed at a local pool, and she loved Helen Meany, an Olympic diver. “I was going to be a diver because of her,” she recalled. “Then, when I saw the judges holding up their scorecards, I decided that if you touch first there’s no question who’s the winner.” That early desire to win wasn’t dimmed by her ‘32 gold medal or her nightclub career. In the afternoons, before performances, she’d steal away to nearby pools to train. She quit a film contract when they asked her to swim in a movie rather than lose her amateur status. “I wanted to win desperately,” she said, of the race in Berlin. “Almost more than I did in 1932.”
Before her first Olympics, long before the champagne and cigarettes and tabloid headlines, a piece ran in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that was mostly focused on her firefighter father’s anxieties about his irrepressible, ambitious, “saucy as you make ‘em,” tomboy daughter, then still a kid. The piece captured something essential about Holm that the buckets of ink spilled trying to capture her on paper later never quite did. “She was born with the heart of a water sprite, and she’s never happy unless she’s reckless,” it read. “Either indoor or outdoors, in stagnant pool or buffeting ocean, she loves passionately to swim.” ■