I gave my eardrums to MGM. And it's true: I really did.

Barely a teenager, Elizabeth Taylor was already more beautiful and voluptuous than Miss America. When she arrived at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for our magazine shoot, I was bowled over. I couldn't believe she was only fourteen. She filled out a swimsuit better than I did. We did the pictures, including one shot of me teaching her to float. With that superstructure of hers, she floated just fine. What she couldn't do was sink.

I never walked the streets of New York hoping to be a musical comedy star. For one thing, they would have thought I was too tall, because l was five feet eight and a half, and they were all little bitty things running around in the studio at that time.

Howard Hughes himself was a regular at the restaurant, and in a way it became his headquarters, too. Howard had recently relocated to Las Vegas, so when he wanted to do business in Los Angeles, he went into the back of our restaurant to use the telephone.

I always felt that if I made a movie, it would be one movie; I didn't see how they could make 26 swimming movies.

No one had ever done a swimming movie before so we just made it up as we went along. I ad-libbed all my own underwater movements.

I always took it for granted that there would be life after Hollywood.