Frank O’Neill, charming Australian swimmer

When Frank O’Neill gave Greta Garbo her first swimming lessons, the actress could only manage a “painfully slow” breaststroke. “She was keen to learn, but never got beyond a dozen yards’ slow overarm. I could never persuade her to put her face into the water,” he recalled, adding that, perhaps appropriately, the star of Hollywood’s golden era of silent films “trained in almost complete silence”. She was also so shy that she never sunbathed “and always put on a robe over her one-piece black costume as soon as she left the water”.
William Somerset Maugham, on the other hand, “was a friendly, happy old fellow, who could swim sidestroke but could never master overarm because he couldn’t learn the proper breathing technique”. Although the author was getting on in years “he was mad keen to learn to dive and so adventurous that I used to worry that he would hurt himself … he would try anything once, even if it killed him”.
O’Neill had been a champion swimmer, winning two silver medals at the 1950 Empire Games in Auckland, New Zealand, and captaining the Australian swimming team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, though on that occasion he did not reach the finals in his events. The following year he broke the world record for the 400m medley at the North Sydney Olympic pool with a time of five minutes and 43 seconds.
By then he was teaching Garbo, Maugham and other celebrities including Ginger Rogers at La Fiorentina, the impressive villa on the French Riviera owned by his wealthy mother-in-law Enid, Countess of Kenmare. Known as “the Stucco Venus”, she was a wealthy Australian beauty from the Lindeman’s wine family and viciously referred to by Maugham, her bridge partner, as Lady Killmore on account of having outlived four husbands, the last of whom was the Earl of Kenmare, an Irish peer.
They had met in October 1949, when Kenmare was sailing to Australia on the SS Orcades to visit family in Hunter Valley . She was accompanied by her daughter, Pat Cavendish, who had recently broken off her engagement to the poet Richard Murphy (obituary, March 10, 2018), whose father had succeeded the Duke of Windsor as governor of the Bahamas. O’Neill was on the same ship and in her memoir, A Lion in the Bedroom (2004), Cavendish described how she lay sunbathing as he emerged from the ship’s pool: “He stood at the top of the steps, water dripping from him … a magnificent figure with a very developed chest and slim hips, and the most indecent bathing suit of very thin material in navy blue that clung like a second skin.”
O’Neill had already noticed Cavendish and made a bet with his travelling companions that he could persuade her to have dinner with him that evening. “He was full of charm and very easy to talk to. So of course, I had dinner with him and we danced all evening,” she wrote.
Their engagement was announced in February 1950, causing a stir in Australia with newspaper headlines such as: “Swimmer to marry English heiress.” Meanwhile, at that month’s Empire Games he came second in the 110-yards freestyle and the 4 x 220-yards freestyle relay, the latter in a race that did not start until almost midnight when most of the 5,000-strong crowd had gone home. He also picked up a gold medal with the water polo team. Afterwards they set off for England via a safari in Kenya, where Cavendish’s brother Caryll lived, before travelling to La Fiorentina. They were married at the British consulate in Nice in a small and business-like ceremony because she was “always terrified of commitment”.
O’Neill had a relaxed attitude to fidelity, something his wife at first accepted, adopting her parents’ motto: “Never be afraid, never be ill, and if you are, never talk about it, and above all never be jealous.” Even before their engagement was formally announced, a fellow swimmer had said she would sleep with him if he became the first Australian to complete the 110-yards freestyle in under one minute. “He did and they did,” Cavendish recorded. “He said to me that the effort nearly killed him, but all he could think about was the reward.”
On the French Riviera she once drove with her niece to the Hotel La Réserve de Beaulieu to pick up her husband, who as usual had swum across the bay. “When we got there, he was sitting at a table by the pool with a glamorous girl in a bikini practically sitting in his lap … Instead of announcing me as his wife, he called me Pat Cavendish”. After leaving them to it, “I did not see Frank again for at least three days.” One morning back in Australia she returned home with the groceries “when a very dishevelled, half-dressed female leant over the banister and, obviously thinking I was the maid, said, ‘Do go away and stop making so much noise, we haven’t finished yet.’”
Another woman begged her to divorce O’Neill so that she might marry him, while at a party at the family home her mother came up to her and said: “Pat, you must do something about your husband. I have just come up the walk from the pool and Frank is in the bushes making love with some female and it is highly embarrassing.”
Francis Thomas O’Neill was born in the Manly suburb of Sydney in 1926, the son of Tom O’Neill, a First World War veteran who ran the Manly Baths, and his wife Etta, who ran the poolside kiosk. He had two sisters: Meg, a swimming instructor, and Peggy, who also swam competitively. The family lived in a flat over the pool and from an early age he was marked out as a champion, not allowed to do anything at home other than train and swim.
As a boy he was good at tennis, table tennis and rugby, but had to give these up to concentrate on swimming. He did, however, box under the eagle eye of his father, practising with a punchbag to develop his shoulder and arm muscles. He also swam five miles daily, had an hour’s massage each day, played water polo and took part in water ballet, appearing some years later in a swimming extravaganza with Esther Williams, the swimming film star (obituary, June 8, 2013).
His mother arranged for him to serve an apprenticeship as a dental mechanic. However, his heart was firmly set on swimming and in 1948 he used his dental earnings to make his way to London, hoping in vain that once there he might be invited to join the Australian team at the Olympic Games. He spent the next year travelling and swimming throughout Europe, winning the South of France sprint championship for America in September 1948, before his fateful voyage home.
Some months after his marriage, O’Neill returned to Australia to train for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics and continue with his extramarital dalliances. Eventually Cavendish, who found Australia suffocating, fell for another man and asked for a divorce. Being Catholic, O’Neill refused. Her mother hired a female detective to prove his adultery, but she too fell in love with him and refused to provide the necessary evidence. Eventually the divorce was secured, although in O’Neill’s telling the £20,000 settlement promised by his wife’s mother failed to materialise.
Turning professional, O’Neill coached at the Manly Baths, gave televised lessons in a pool equipped with underwater lighting and looked after Percy, a pet penguin that lived in the pool at his home and would waddle into the kitchen for fish. By 1958 he had created his own swimwear brand and opened Frank O’Neill’s Olympic Swimming School in Pymble, New South Wales. Over the next decade he developed home swimming pools, the curves of which won awards for design excellence; they later proved popular with skateboarders, although only when emptied of water.
Out of the blue one day in the late 1960s came a letter from his former mother-in-law saying that his former wife, whom he had not seen for 17 years, was unhappy. Her second marriage, to Count Aymon de Roussy de Sales, an artist and poet, had ended badly, as had an affair with Stan Lawrence-Brown, a noted big-game hunter in East Africa. O’Neill dropped everything and flew to Kenya, only to find that de Sales had arrived with the same idea. She chose O’Neill and in 1969 they were remarried in a Nairobi register office.
Eventually they settled at Broadlands, her mother’s stud farm in South Africa, surrounded by a spectacular array of animals including macaws and a chimpanzee that Cavendish had raised from a baby. O’Neill continued to spend most of his time in Sydney, sending horses for his wife to breed and race in South Africa and never entirely forsaking his philandering ways. He rekindled an earlier relationship with Jan Garrett, a theatrical agent who had first set eyes on him when he was a young swimming teacher. “I actually used to go down to Manly Baths when I was young and I saw Frank from the distance and I thought, I’m going to go out with him one day,” Garrett, who survives him, told the Manly Observer.
In 2000 O’Neill took part in the torch relay for the Olympic Games in Sydney, running his leg through Goulburn. He continued to swim, winning the over-80s relay at his local pool. After Cavendish’s death in 2019 it transpired that she had written him out of her will, instead leaving her reputed $100 million estate to Kalu, her pet monkey.
Frank O’Neill, Australian swimmer, was born on September 30, 1926. He died on July 10, 2024, aged 97