Eleanor Holm

Eleanor Grace Theresa Holm (December 6, 1912 – January 31, 2004) was an American competition swimmer and Olympic gold medalist. An Olympian in 1928 and 1932, Holm was expelled from the 1936 Summer Olympics team by Avery Brundage under controversial circumstances. Holm went on to have a high-profile career as a socialite and interior designer and co-starred in a Hollywood Tarzan movie, Tarzan's Revenge.

Holm was born in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of seven children of Charlotte (née Long) and Franklin Holm, a fireman and cousin to professional basketball player Bobby Holm. She graduated from Erasmus Hall High School.

Holm learned to swim while very young. Winning her first national swimming title at age 13, Holm was selected to compete in the 1928 Summer Olympics, where she finished fifth in her specialty, the 100-meter backstroke. Holm was also talented in several other strokes, winning several American titles in the 300-yard medley event.

At the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Holm won the gold medal in 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," Holm told the New York Times in 1984.

In 1932, Holm was one of the fifteen girls named as WAMPAS Baby Stars, including Ginger Rogers, Mary Carlisle, and Gloria Stuart. One of her first assignments at Warner Bros. was to join a trainload of actors and Busby Berkeley chorus girls on a barnstorming trip across the country in early 1933 to publicize the movie musical 42nd Street and to show support for the newly elected president Franklin D. Roosevelt at his first inauguration in Washington, DC.

The following year, on September 2, 1933, Holm 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 nightclub. Holm even performed with his band while wearing a white bathing suit, white cowboy hat, and high heels, singing "I'm an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande)".^{[citation needed]} "I'm an Old Cowhand", words and music by Johnny Mercer, was written for the 1936 movie Rhythm on the Range.

Holm competed as Eleanor Holm Jarrett and qualified for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. After a drinking party aboard the SS Manhattan on the way to the Olympics, the team doctor found Holm in a state approaching a coma. According to David Wallechinsky in The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics, the Olympic team doctor's diagnosis was "[a]cute alcoholism". Various charges were made against her, which Holm did not deny. U.S. Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage promptly expelled her from the Olympic team. Holm admitted to having had a few glasses of Champagne but subsequently maintained that her dismissal arose from a personal grudge held by Brundage.

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. So she went to 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.