Before she was everyone’s worst midnight-swim nightmare, she was just a kid named Susan Jane Myers, born in Miami in 1946, or maybe Washington, D.C., depending which lazy file clerk you believe. Either way, she landed in Florida and that’s what mattered. By ten she was living in West Palm Beach, cutting through the Atlantic like it owed her money, doing mile after mile in the ocean and the local pools until the water felt more like home than anything built on land. High school gave her two things: a cheerleader’s smile and a state freestyle title. Forest Hill High, class of ’64. While other kids were worrying about prom, she was beating people to the wall and learning the one lesson that actually sticks in this world: if you want to stay above the surface, you’d better be able to kick. She tried nursing school for a year, because that’s the respectable route, the one with white shoes and forms in triplicate. But you can’t chain somebody like that to fluorescent lights and corridors; she wanted sky and water and risk. So she walked. Florida, being Florida, had a solution: mermaids. Weeki Wachee Springs, that roadside fever dream where women smile underwater in fishtails for families who’ve already burned through the alligator farms and roadside citrus stands. She became one of them, a living postcard, breathing from hidden air hoses and selling the fantasy that you can live under the surface and still look pretty. Hours in cold spring water, holding poses while tourists gawked—people called it a show; her body knew it was a job.
But water wasn’t her only dance partner. She fell in with Ivan Tors Studios, the animal outfit that cranked out Flipper and other “wholesome” shows where dolphins grin on cue and everything smells like fish and wet fur. She worked with Gentle Ben the bear, Judy the chimp, Clarence the cross-eyed lion—names that sound cute until you’re close enough to feel the weight in their muscles and the possibility that today they might decide they’ve had enough of show business. On tour she stood onstage with them like it was nothing, just another day at the office.
When that gig dried up, she followed the animals west, to Africa USA, an animal theme park in California. There she was, early twenties, riding on the back of Zamba, a 300-pound water-skiing lion, like that was a normal line item on a résumé. Somebody got the bright idea: “Let’s put the girl and the lion in a magazine.” So they did a topless pictorial—“The Lady and the Lion”—for Penthouse in ’73. Later she posed nude again for Mayfair. Call it exploitation or call it rent; either way, she understood the bargain. Cameras point at you, money comes out, dignity negotiable.
Stunts came next, because of course they did. If you’ll ride a lion on water, you’ll do just about anything. She started turning up on film as human debris: a dead prostitute floating down the river in The Blue Knight, a body in a falling elevator in The Towering Inferno. You watch those scenes and don’t see her face, but she was there, taking the hits so the audience could feel a little jolt and then move on with their popcorn. That’s the trade: you get bruised, they get entertained, your name scrolls by too fast to read.
In 1974 she was doing extra work when the casting call came in like a bad joke: must be a strong ocean swimmer, must be willing to work nude. Hollywood, summed up in one sentence. She sent in a nude photo—practical, not coy—and it landed on Steven Spielberg’s desk. She pitched herself with blunt logic: use me, you can shoot the stunt up close; use an actress, she’ll have to hide her face. No nonsense, no mystique—just a professional who knew her strengths and wasn’t shy about the commerce of it all. She got the job.
Three days in the water for that opening scene of Jaws. The bonfire, the guy chasing her down the beach, the clothes coming off, the midnight dive. What people remember is the terror: her body whipped back and forth in the dark, dragged by something they can’t see. What they don’t see is the hardware—metal plates on her cut-off jeans, ropes stretching back to shore, ten guys yanking one way, ten the other, turning her into a human ragdoll in the surf. No stunt double to hide behind. Just her, flippers, and a whole lot of trust that the sea wouldn’t finish what the movie only pretended to start. Spielberg later called it one of the most dangerous stunts he ever directed.
Her screams? Those came later in a studio. He sat her in a chair, poured water down her throat, and had her choke and scream into the mic until the sound matched the violence on screen. Richard Dreyfuss saw the dailies and told her she’d scared the hell out of him. She’d done her job too well. The shot opens the film, and from then on the whole world was afraid of what might be moving under the surface. Meanwhile, the woman who sold that fear went back to work.
The business gave her a few more bites. She showed up in Day of the Animals, one of those “nature’s had enough of us” movies that followed in Jaws’ bloody wake. In Spielberg’s overstuffed war comedy 1941, she got to parody herself—skinny-dipping again, only this time she’s hoisted out of the water on the periscope of a Japanese sub instead of dragged under by a shark. The best joke in a messy movie, people said. She even swam a water ballet with Miss Piggy in The Great Muppet Caper, proof that you can go from horror icon to Muppet partner in the same odd little career.
Life off-camera changed shapes too. She married young, to a ranch foreman named Henry Backlinie in ’66; the surname stuck even when the marriage didn’t. Later, in 1996, she married Harvey Swindall. Somewhere along the way she had a daughter and, like a lot of workers chewed up by show business, eventually drifted into a quieter, less glamorous job—a computer accountant. It sounds dull until you remember she’d spent her youth being jerked around by ropes in cold water and standing next to unpredictable animals for a living. Boredom can be its own kind of paradise.
Still, the sea never quite let her go. She became a regular at Jaws conventions and “JawsFest” gatherings, signing photos, hearing the same stories from fans who watched her die a thousand times on VHS and Blu-ray. She scuba-dived off Australia and swam with real sharks, the creatures that got stuck with humanity’s projected nightmares because of a movie she helped make iconic. No harnesses, no metal plates, no guys on the beach yanking ropes—just her and the animals in their own world, on their own terms.
On May 11, 2024, she died of a heart attack at home in Ventura, California, age seventy-seven. No spotlight, no swelling soundtrack, no camera pushing in as the water closes overhead. Just the way it usually ends: quietly, far from the screens where a younger version of you is still screaming. Obituaries called her “the first victim in Jaws,” like that was her whole story, the way people shrink a life down to one good anecdote. But she was more than a single frame of terror. She was a swimmer, a mermaid, an animal trainer, a stuntwoman, a nude model, a working woman who understood how to turn danger into a paycheck.
Watch that opening scene again—the quiet splash, the playful laughter, and then the sudden violence ripping through the water. The fear on her face feels too real to be faked, and maybe that’s the point. She knew what it meant to wrestle with things bigger than you are: the ocean, wild animals, Hollywood, rent, time. The shark was rubber and machinery. She was flesh and nerve and willpower. The monster sank back into the studio tank when they were done with it. She had to keep swimming.
