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Zale Parry, the “First Lady of Scuba Diving” who appeared on the Lloyd Bridges-starring TV show Sea Hunt and doubled for Sophia Loren and Carroll Baker on the big screen, has died. She was 93.
Parry died Monday at her home in Tillamook, Oregon, granddaughter Katherine Maloney announced on Facebook.
In 1954, Parry, then 21, set the women’s scuba depth record of 209 feet, a feat that four months later got her on an episode of the NBC game show You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx.
“Well, I admire you, Zale, it must take a lot of courage to go down that deep,” Marx said. “I get panicky when the barber puts my head in the sink for a shampoo.”
In 1955, she made the cover of Sports Illustrated — “Zale Parry, Girl Skin Diver” — and began working in television on the syndicated adventure show Kingdom of the Sea, produced by Jack Douglas. With her blue eyes and blond hair, some thought she resembled Grace Kelly.
In underwater scenes, Parry doubled for Loren in Greece in Boy on a Dolphin (1957); played the wife of Dan Dailey’s character in Underwater Warrior (1958), produced by Ivan Tors and filmed in Hawaii; and stepped in for Baker in The Miracle (1959).
She played several characters, most of them damsels in distress, alongside Bridges as former Navy diver Mike Nelson on the Tors-created Sea Hunt, a popular syndicated show that ran for four seasons from 1958-61.
“The series combined underwater action with one of the earliest environmental and conservation themes,” wrote Bret Gilliam, author of the 1995 book Deep Diving: An Advanced Guide to Physiology, Procedures and Systems. “It gave Bridges his signature role as Mike Nelson, diver detective. And Zale became the sex symbol that everyone wanted to give CPR to.”
One of seven kids, Parry was born in Milwaukee on March 19, 1933, and raised about 30 miles outside of town near Pewaukee Lake. She said her father made a U.S. Olympic team as a track and field athlete.
“I learned to swim when I was very small,” she said. “As one of seven children, it was a case of swim or take the chance of being perpetually dunked by your older brothers and sisters.”
Nicknamed Zale (her first name at birth was Rosalia), she started performing with the Sam Howard Aqua Follies in 1947, touring during summers and Easter breaks from school — “modeling the swimwear, precision swimming and surface diving to big band-era music provided a colossal show,” she noted — and in high school was water ballet president during her senior year.
In 1951, she and her family moved to California, and she landed a job at the Douglas Aircraft Co. in Santa Monica as a stenographer. She also taught Red Cross water safety, helped polio patients with their aquatic exercises and met her future husband, Parry Bivens, who would go on to work in hyperbaric medicine.
In 1953, the couple helped launch Scientific Underwater Research Enterprises, which tested underwater equipment that would be sold to consumers. Two years later, she became the third woman certified as an underwater instructor in Los Angeles County.
Parry said she attempted her record-setting dive in August 1954 “to prepare a technical paper on the subject of nitrogen narcosis since we could not find enough subject matter. We wanted to give a good, true picture of what happens. The event changed my life.
“All it took was three miles off the shores of Avalon, Santa Catalina Island with a slight afternoon chop and a dive to 209 feet to a sandy rippled bottom with a strand of bull kelp and one discarded Schlitz beer can … From there on, the radio, television, newspapers and magazines had agents calling for interviews and fun game shows.”
She often demonstrated her skin diving skills and new equipment on Kingdom of the Sea in a live, three-minute segment that closed each episode. She then took acting classes with Anges Moorehead at Fox for a year, followed by a Theater Arts course at UCLA.
On Sea Hunt, she also assisted with the technical aspects of the program and sometimes acted alongside Ricou Browning — the Gill-Man from Creature From the Black Lagoon — a frequent bad guy on the show.
Parry also worked on Peter Gunn, Wagon Train and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (where she played an amphibian), among other shows, and did lots of commercials before she appeared in the 2006 family film The Legend of Tillamook’s Gold, set near her home.
She also was a co-founder of the International Underwater Film Festival, which took place for 17 years until 1974; served as president of the Underwater Photographic Society; was among the inaugural inductees into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in 2000; and co-wrote the 2001 book Scuba America: The Human History of Sport Diving.
In 2006, the Zale Parry Scholarship was established by the Academy of Underwater Arts & Sciences to support students pursuing careers in undersea exploration, marine conservation, hyperbaric medicine and diving technology.
Donations in her memory can be made to the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, the Monterey Bay Aquarium or the Zale Parry Scholarship.
Parry Bivens, whom she married in 1955, died in 1963. She also was married to Robert Neuman.
Asked once by a prop guy on a movie set why anyone would get involved in diving, she replied: “I’m here because I love what I’m doing. Aquatics is my life. I never get tired. At the end of the day, I’m rested and refreshed from being in and out of the sea, and I really feel bathed and very clean. I’m very curious, and I’m following my bliss. This is a very happy place to be.”
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