Читать книгу Looking for Miss America - Margot Mifflin - Страница 11
ОглавлениеBEAUTIFUL FAY LANPHIER WAS SEATED in the lunchroom of Paramount Pictures talking about the five years since she’d been crowned Miss America 1925. She had not become a star. She had married and divorced a millionaire. She had opened and closed a beauty parlor. Now twenty-four, she was working as a stenographer in the very studio that had signed her after the pageant. And she had something extraordinary to say: she was happy.
“Those days when I was ‘Miss America’—they were nice in one way, but I was never happy. Something was always bothering me, causing me to worry,” she told the reporter profiling her for The New Movie Magazine, a popular gossip monthly. In fact, it was everything: her looks, her weight, her talent, her right to be in the spotlight, her fear of letting people down, and her very worth as a public figure. The studio hadn’t wanted her for The American Venus; they had wanted Miss America.
“I wonder if you know what it means to be wanted not for yourself?” she asked. “How it feels to know that people are interested in you not because you are you, but because you are something?” It was a misgiving any celebrity might share, but she sharpened the point and aimed it at the very heart of the pageant. “Perhaps if that something is a real accomplishment on your part you can take pride in it and so feel all right. But I couldn’t.”
Crowned for her non-achievement, Lanphier felt unworthy of the attention. “I did not build myself,” she explained. “I just happened to be like I am.” Or was. She had since quit wearing makeup and had gained almost thirty pounds. “I suppose that a person dying of thirst would overdrink when he first got a tank full of water,” she noted without remorse. “You’ll never catch me getting the same ailments some of the girls who win beauty contests work themselves into. Fifteen pounds overweight is better than ten pounds underweight. So that is that.”
Lanphier’s frank allusion to pageant-inspired eating disorders was unusual in the early twentieth century. The problem became obvious in the fitness-crazed 1980s and ’90s, when Miss Americas proudly described their starvation diets and kamikaze exercise regimens as if they were commendable, not crazy. Later, one honest ex, Kate Shindle (1998), affirmed that the pageant preparation had left her with both an eating disorder and a “massively unhealthy” exercise compulsion.
Thinness had defined the first wave of Miss Americas, who competed in a period when the corset was in decline and disciplining the body through dieting was on the rise. The Victorian paradigm of fleshy beauty had shifted as women became more physically active and fashion became less restrictive. In 1918, the first popular weight loss book, Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories, was published by Lulu Hunt Peters, a formerly fat doctor who offered a scientific method for slimming down: counting calories. She assured aspiring dieters that “fat individuals have always been considered a joke, but you are a joke no longer” and entreated women to ignore husbands who claimed they preferred zaftig women. The book was a bestseller from 1923 to 1927.
Like so many former beauty queens who gain weight, Lanphier was fat-shamed. She’d heard the whispers behind her back at work, but she didn’t care, because with the pounds came relief from the pressure. “The prize,” the reporter concluded, “was not worth the game.” He added that she was still very pretty, and “a great part of that attractiveness was her perfect ease of manner,” which set her apart from the flutteringly self-conscious women—even a few stars—he had spotted lunching on the Paramount lot that day.
The oldest of six children whose father died before the last was born, Lanphier entered her first beauty contest in Oakland, California, in an effort to improve her life as a secretary. She placed second, which didn’t qualify her to compete statewide for Atlantic City, so she raced to San Francisco the next day to try there. But as she stood in the wings waiting to walk out and be judged, she was paralyzed with fear and plagued with self-doubt. She couldn’t budge. The pageant host gave her a shove and told her to smile and keep moving. “Don’t stand still out there. SMILE! Do you hear?”
She smiled and she won, qualifying for Miss America, which she lost in 1924, and to which she returned—thinner—to win in 1925. All that was fun. But then came the fashion shows and sponsorships and a sixteen-week stint demonstrating Underwood typewriters as Miss America and the inkling that she wasn’t really the most beautiful girl in the United States, which was true—no one was. Soon after her New Movie Magazine interview, she married her childhood sweetheart, had two kids, and rarely made news again, except in articles about failed pageant winners.
Already, the media had launched a lasting practice of shooting down beauty queens, Miss Americas among them. Swimsuit pageants had sprung up all over the country, from copycat regional contests to Miss NRA. A 1924 article titled “Cursed by Their Fatal Gift of Beauty” ran down the “tragic misfortunes” high-profile winners had suffered. A 1931 piece announced, “Tragedy or Obscurity Comes to Beauty Queens; Disaster Follows Scores of Winners; None Has Made Good as Actress.” Miss America winners were dismissed directly in a 1934 article that asked, “What Has Befallen the 6 Beauties Who Won the Title ‘Miss America’?” It took three columns to explain: not much. Except, perhaps, Norma Smallwood, whose marriage to an oil millionaire ended with a fantastically sordid public divorce in which she lost custody of her daughter. Smallwood’s husband alleged that she’d allowed their toddler to drink whiskey, had entertained men while he was away (earning her the media moniker “Mistress America”), and had taken a lover who not only slept in the couple’s bed and hung his clothes in their closet, but also—the ultimate indignity—wore the oilman’s pajamas.
It was this sort of press that had caused the pageant to disband in 1928. The city still hoped to reboot it, since the 1927 event had been a genuine financial success, and an epic $15 million convention center, covering seven acres—big enough to swallow Madison Square Garden in one bite—was slated to open by the end of the decade, promising whole new orders of extravagance. But the Depression delayed it until 1933, when the revamped pageant not only failed to restore order, command respect, make money, attract decent crowds, or even secure the support of the Hotel Men’s Association, but actively plunged it deeper into disrepute, causing Miss America 1933 to be snubbed for decades while pageant officials disavowed the rogue event.
She was Miss Connecticut, fifteen-year-old Marion Bergeron, a platinum blonde with a sheepish smile and an hourglass figure reflecting the fleshier ideal of the Depression era, as the reedy look of the flapper disappeared. Her typical day began at 6:00 a.m. when she milked ten cows. The daughter of a policeman, she’d won her first beauty pageant just weeks earlier after entering on a lark. Few of the thirty Miss America contestants that year were selected through newspaper nominations; most were sponsored by carnivals and amusement parks, attracting a rougher and more desperate range of beauties, some of whom cried openly when they were bested during the elimination judging. Neptune did not sail forth from the sea; rather, the hopefuls debuted at something called the Evening Dinner Party on the arms of uniformed Morris Guards—volunteer militia members who squired the women around the room for the benefit of onlookers. This was the first mistake—no one likes a beauty queen with a man attached.
The Bathers’ Revue moved from the beach indoors, opening with a parade led by twenty women in white swimsuits who rode bicycles ahead of the contestants, one of whom, as she passed the judges for inspection, keeled over and writhed around on the floor in pain from an abscessed tooth. The rolling chair parade also came indoors—the new Convention Hall and its $5,000 pipe organ had to be put to good use, though it broke down ten bars into the “Star-Spangled Banner,” forcing the mailmen’s band to step in. The finalists were trundled in on wicker rolling chairs and pushed around the aisles in what seemed more like bingo night in a retirement community than a beachside beauty contest. The contestants’ ranks were thinning at an alarming rate: one dropped out to get an emergency appendectomy, three were disqualified for lying about their home states, one was outed as married, and one quit before the final judging, claiming the pageant was fixed. At fifteen, Bergeron should have been disqualified, but she hadn’t mentioned her age, and no one asked.
The ten all-new judges included New Yorker illustrator Peter Arno, whose trailblazing one-panel cartoons skewered New York society, reserving special contempt for women, and Life illustrator Russell Patterson, whose leggy sophisticates had defined flapper fashion before it yielded, in the 1930s, to curvier silhouettes. They were joined by the Bronx-born Ziegfeld girl and Broadway actress Gladys Glad, herself the winner of a Daily News beauty contest. Her husband, theater columnist Mark Hellinger, covered the pageant, writing that “a funnier looking set of monkeys I never gazed upon in all my life. There are two or three cute ones among the group, but the rest are all depression Miss Americas.” Seven had arrived exhausted after touring all summer, unpaid, in a vaudeville show called The Pageant Beauties, on the promise of new clothes and job offers in Atlantic City. “They have been conned before they start,” wrote Hellinger, amazed that they’d signed contracts agreeing to work for free.
One day in their hotel lobby, Patterson and Arno were buttonholed by thugs sent by Nucky Johnson, who told them Nucky had chosen Miss New York to win. The men were outraged. “Look, that’s the way we run the contest down here,” one said, patting his chest where a pistol might be holstered.
“Or else?” Arno replied, pushing past them.
“Hey,” Patterson suggested as the two men walked away, “let’s cross them up altogether and pick a girl from out of left field. How about the little blonde from Connecticut?” He meant Bergeron.
Gladys Glad was already smitten with someone else, Miss Ohio; they’d even posed together for photos, and it seemed most of the judges preferred other contestants to Bergeron. But once it emerged that Nucky had bullied other judges as well, they all teamed up to fight corruption, agreeing to vote for Bergeron. Patterson claimed that many of the early Miss Americas were Nucky’s picks; a City Hall employee had even told him Bergeron was the first honestly chosen winner he’d ever seen, which, if true, would make an illegally entered, underage Miss America the only legitimately crowned one thus far.
But the audience had been rooting for Miss Ohio, a nineteen-year-old nanny who’d flouted protocol by appearing at one of the official events in a white evening gown instead of the pageant-approved sportswear, endearing her to fans. The rowdy crowd hissed when Bergeron’s victory was announced, and angry shouts rang out from the box seats reserved for city officials, presumably in Nucky’s pocket as well. (According to Nelson Johnson’s book Boardwalk Empire, by the mid-1920s, every Atlantic City employee top to bottom was beholden to Nucky.) Bergeron was backstage with no idea she’d won until she was told to pull a dress on over her swimsuit, slapped with a Miss America sash, and hustled out to take the crown, flanked by two runners-up who looked on with unhappy smiles. As the flashbulbs popped, said Bergeron, “I felt like I’d been hit with a stun gun.”
Afterward, Hellinger interviewed Bergeron backstage as other reporters vied for her attention. “She is a nice kid, natural and unaffected,” he wrote. “She probably doesn’t know that this mantle she has inherited has never brought more than momentary happiness to any girl in the past.” He asked about her ambitions; she told him she wanted to be a singer. In fact, she’d been singing blues on a local radio station since she was twelve.
“Be careful, honey,” he told her. “You’re in a tough racket now. Be wise in everything you do.”
“Don’t worry about me, Mr. Hellinger,” Bergeron said with a dismissive wave. “I know what you mean. You’re thinking of what has happened to other beauty winners. But don’t worry about me. I’m—I’m different.”
Bergeron won a lavish array of mostly age-inappropriate gifts: a Ford she was too young to drive, a diamond-studded watch, a trip to Bermuda, a piece of property on the Jersey Shore, and a fur coat. A screen-test offer vaporized when her age was revealed, but it was all good: unlike Lanphier, she got exactly what she wanted as Miss America. She began performing live when she turned sixteen, signed a record deal at seventeen, and was soon sailing through a career crooning with bandleaders Rudy Vallee, Guy Lombardo, and Gene Krupa.
Hellinger was entirely wrong about Bergeron. “If I hadn’t been Miss America,” she later told a reporter, “I would never have had a contract with CBS.” And she liked carrying the title (“You’re just a little bit special all the time,” she said), even if her crown was stolen from her hotel room that night and her Catholic school kicked her out when she returned home, but especially after the organization finally rallied—in 1965—to reclaim their Depression queen, the most talented and successful in Miss America’s short history.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, THE PAGEANT TOOK a powder in 1934. But the concept was pirated elsewhere, first in Madison Square Garden’s “Queen of American Beauty” competition that year, then again in early 1935, when the San Diego Exposition staged a beauty contest in Balboa Park next to two midget attractions, naming a professional nudist, Florence Cubitt, “Miss America of the Midway.” (When journalist Joseph Mitchell interviewed Cubitt a year later in a New York hotel room, she greeted him in her standard publicity attire: naked but for a blue G-string.) Nearby Wildwood, New Jersey, had even poached the title while it was dormant in 1932, throwing an “American Beauty Contest” and crowning the winner Miss America.
This wouldn’t do; the brand had to be reclaimed. An Atlantic City publicist who still saw profit in the pageant persuaded his boss to strike a deal with the Variety Club of Philadelphia, a local chapter of a national charitable organization, to recast it in 1935 as the Showman’s Variety Jubilee, drawing candidates through other Club sponsors nationally. This third rebirth involved a mastermind of a midwife: twenty-nine-year-old Lenora Slaughter, the only female beauty pageant director in the country. Slaughter had overseen the successful Festival of States Parade in St. Petersburg, Florida, an early spring event created to entice snowbirds to remain south a bit longer.
Slaughter was hired away on a temporary assignment with the blessing of her boss at the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce, who told her she should “go up there and show those Yankees how to do a real job with a pageant.” So she did, and the following January, back in Florida, after her bid to become the Festival of States Parade chair was rejected, she quit, then headed to New Jersey for good. Slaughter spent the next thirty-one years in New Jersey, engineering the Miss America pageant, for the most part, as it survives today. She added a talent section, formal entry requirements, a coronation ceremony with evening gowns instead of bathing suits, a Miss Congeniality prize, and—most significantly—the scholarship program that endures as the pageant’s greatest point of pride. “I didn’t like having nothing but swimsuits,” she said. “I had to get Atlantic City to understand that it couldn’t just be a beauty contest.”
Forceful, efficient, controlling, outspoken, censorious, sometimes terrifying, and often affectionate with her “girls,” Slaughter was a tangle of contradictions. She pushed the women to make money while grooming them for matrimony (in 1970, she was still telling them “the most important thing in your lives will be your marriage”); she was socially conservative but kept her surname professionally after her own wedding in 1948; she was a Southern Baptist laboring to save the very leg show the Southern Baptist Convention, along with other religious groups, had condemned in the 1920s. Perhaps the one biographical fact that meshed with her mission was that, for lack of money, she had never finished college.
“She was extremely articulate and persuasive, and very determined,” said lifelong board member Adrian Phillips. “She had an innate sense of diplomacy. But there was another side to Lenora. She could be really rough and tough if the situation called for it.” Her polarities were perfectly calibrated: she could rumble with the big boys of Atlantic City, and if any women’s clubbers were still exercised about seeing a bathing beauty pageant in their town, a proper Southern lady had come to reform it.
She began with the recruiting process. Slaughter learned that the pageant director, a huckster named George Tyson, was tapping women from amusement parks and fairs and making state contestants loiter in swimsuits outside the contest venues like prostitutes. “It was awful,” she said. “I wanted to throw out all the cheap promotions. I said I believe I can get civic organizations to run the [feeder] pageants and we can get a better class of girl.” That class explicitly excluded women of color. Sometime in the 1940s, after Slaughter had become executive director, the notorious Rule Seven surfaced, stating that contestants must be “in good health and of the white race.” It stood until the 1950s.
In Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race, Maxine Leeds Craig traces black beauty pageants back to the 1890s, explaining that they served as “non-confrontational ways of expressing racial pride.” There was no sustained push to integrate white contests, she says, until after World War II, with a watershed moment in 1948 when a black Brooklyn College student named Thelma Porter was named Miss Subways and her smiling face appeared on 9,000 subway posters throughout New York City. After that, black women competed in formerly white contests in the North, and sometimes even in the Deep South and Midwest. But neither that, nor the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, nor the gale-force wind of the Black Power movement of the 1960s could move the Miss America pageant to integrate—until 1970.
Slaughter’s racism targeted black women directly. In 1948, when the South Dakota Black Hills Indian Council pressed the issue by writing her to question the whites-only rule, she responded that they were welcome to compete, explaining, “We have eliminated the Negro from this contest due to the fact that it is absolutely impossible to judge fairly the beauty of the Negro race in comparison with the white race.” Her claim that this was a matter of categorical fairness was a perfect inversion of the truth. Miss America’s ideal was hierarchical, built on classifications of class and race that put black women at the bottom, drawing on centuries of prejudice that presumed they were ungroomed, unfashionable, socially unrefined, hypersexual, and, with declining segregation, a threat to white supremacy. Unlike newly arrived European immigrants or fully subordinated Native Americans, they were, in Slaughter’s eyes, uniquely unassimilable. In fact, the pageant’s first full Native American contestant, Mifaunwy Shunatona, an Otoe-Pawnee-Wyandot of Oklahoma, had broken the race barrier in 1941, before Rule Seven was added. (A year earlier, Ada Woods, a part Choctaw Oklahoman, had placed sixth.) Asians and Latinas were accepted before the rule was retired—in 1948, Chinese American Yun Tau Chee, Miss Hawaii, competed, as did Miss Puerto Rico Irma Nydia Vázquez, upgrading Puerto Rico from “official guest” to contestant.
The 1935 pageant, now part of the Showman’s Variety Jubilee’s weeklong festival of sports, circus, fashion, and entertainment events, featured one of Slaughter’s first adjustments: talent was now an option, though, thankfully, it wasn’t judged. Slaughter believed a winner shouldn’t just be pretty but admitted that “at least half of the girls would get out there on the Steel Pier and sing or dance or do something—badly.” It would take a few years to perfect the format (three women sang the same song in 1938) and attract and reward more decorous contestants. Through the late 1930s, she used a whack-a-mole approach to controlling the obstreperous beauties, laying down new rules for each new infraction. And there were plenty: a new naked sculpture model; a pissed-off contestant, disqualified for wearing mascara, who held a press conference dubbing herself “The People’s Choice” Miss America and set off on her own tour using the title; and the one who—literally—got away: Bette Cooper, the 1937 Miss America who wasn’t.
A private high school junior from Hackettstown, New Jersey, Cooper had won an amusement park pageant that led her to Miss America. Though her parents were reluctant to let her compete in Atlantic City, they decided it would make a good vacation. Cooper didn’t expect to win; more to the point, she didn’t want to. She caught a cold and was sick all week in Atlantic City, her father said, from dieting and drinking only orange juice, and she was disappointed to discover that Miss America fans were “a couple of ticket-takers on a roller coaster, a barker or two, and a few hot dog vendors.” One of the contestants was a stripper. That summer, Atlantic City was making national headlines because of a crackdown on prostitution.
There was one bright spot: Cooper’s twenty-one-year-old pageant-appointed chauffeur was all class. The handsome, urbane son of a hotelman with his own cabin cruiser, Louis Off provided comfort as Cooper’s anxiety about getting mixed up in the pageant mounted. They fell in love. The night she was crowned, she called him at 2:00 a.m. from her hotel room, desperate to get out of it. Off rushed over to find her—and her parents—crying. With their approval, he smuggled her out through a side door and the two sped away in his boat, leaving baffled pageant officials looking for her the next morning on Steel Pier, where she was expected for a photo shoot. By then Off had taken her home, where the blinds were drawn and the phone was unplugged. The most surreal pageant photo in Miss America history shows Cooper’s runners-up posing gamely next to an empty throne draped with an ermine robe, the crown on its seat. It raced around front pages across the country.
Everyone had a position on Cooper’s reason for quitting. Her father told reporters that not all that glitters is gold, referencing the Persian lamb coat she’d been promised, which turned out to be an offer to buy the coat at a discount. Plus, he said, “She’s so young and we feel it’s not proper to shove a kid into vaudeville.”
Slaughter, spinning it just right, suggested love had made her girl bolt. In 1981, Off said he’d told her the day before she was crowned, “You realize, Bette, that if you become Miss America, I’m not going to be your Mister America. I’m not going to follow you around on your coattails.”
Cooper cheerily told the press she just wanted to finish high school and wasn’t ready for vaudeville, though she still considered herself Miss America and even directed a reporter to call her “queen.” She said she was happy to have been chosen but didn’t think it was sensible “to sacrifice my home life, my education, and all my girlfriends for it.”
After much deliberation about whether to crown her runner-up, the pageant board let her keep the title. She modeled a bit and even made some appearances as Miss America, including with her successors, Marilyn Meseke and Patricia Donnelly, at the 1939 World’s Fair. But she declined offers to join the Miss America alumnae “sorority” reunion at subsequent pageants, then renounced her affiliation altogether. She went to college, worked in public relations, and married, after which, until her death in 2017, she refused to discuss “the incident,” meaning the pageant, ever again. When a journalist called to request an interview in 2000, she said, “There is no Miss America here.”
The Cooper mutiny left Slaughter at an entrepreneurial impasse. She was just the kind of polished contestant the pageant wanted. (Off described her as “a very dignified person,” who “couldn’t stand cheapness. Even that little bit of leg that the pageant demanded at the time was not for her.”) Slaughter needed to attract this kind of refinement, crown it, and keep it leashed. The solution: more rules. She set the minimum age at eighteen. Female chaperones were assigned to shadow contestants nonstop, day and night, to keep them out of trouble and protect them from exploitative “talent agents” who might try to rope them into shady deals. Even the chaperones had a chaperone: their manager was a well-known Quaker socialite married to the mayor, whom Slaughter described as “the Quakerest of the Quakers.” (“Why, one time I went to see her,” she said, “I was so scared I took off all my nail polish and lipstick.”)
Then the rules got weirder. 1937: Contestants were banned from bars and nightclubs and couldn’t be seen talking to any men all week—even their fathers (because how else to shield them from menacing men short of asking the dads to wear name tags?). 1938: Contestants had to be single, childless, and never married. Chastity became a lasting mandate for this perennial “Miss”; even today, she must be childless and unmarried. The restrictions simultaneously tamped down the erotic implications of women vamping in swimwear and sustained the impression that they were sexually available. It was as American as apple pie: cranking up interest in female sexuality while punishing women who acted on it.
Once the talent section was boosted to one third of the total score in 1938, the live show got better and the women’s careers flew higher. That year, in a stroke of media savvy, Slaughter persuaded fashion features director Vyvyan Donner, one of the few successful female Hollywood directors, to do a short film highlighting the swimsuits, the parade, and the crowning of Marilyn Meseke, Miss Ohio. It ran on Movietone, a news service shown in theaters before feature films, reaching millions of people and pushing Miss America into the national consciousness. Donner would return as a judge in the 1940s.
By 1940, the pageant stood on solid financial footing, rebuilt with the support of civic groups and local businesses, refueled by endorsement deals, registered as a nonprofit corporation with a large board and bylaws, and officially named the Miss America pageant. Most of the contestants now represented states, as opposed to sometimes obscure regions. (Cooper had competed as Miss Bertrand Island, prompting her predecessor to ask, as she crowned her, where it was.) “We are past the time,” Atlantic City mayor Charles D. White had declared—no doubt praying this was true—“when beauty parades are in the nature of floor shows. This is a cultural event seeking a high type of beauty.”
In 1941, after butting heads with the board over a harebrained plan to stage the pageant on ice, Tyson stepped down and Slaughter was named executive director. Thus, the real queen ascended, carefully coiffed and manicured, to steer the pageant out of the dire straits of the Depression toward a bright future of decorum and substance. A week later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Atlantic City resort culture was utterly transformed during World War II. Nearly fifty resort hotels were converted to barracks and hospitals. The town was hit hard by labor shortages and rationing. Soldiers simulated attacks up and down the shoreline and snipers trained on rooftops, unnerving pedestrians below. In The Last Good Time: Skinny D’Amato, the Notorious 500 Club, and the Rise and Fall of Atlantic City, journalist Jonathan Van Meter describes what “The World’s Playground” looked like by spring of 1942: “Because of its location between Delaware Bay and the New York Harbor, New Jersey had more commercial ships targeted by German U-boats off its coast than any other state along the shore. The beaches were awash in tarlike slicks of oil, and pieces of sunken ships began to wash up on the shore. The coast guard patrolled the boardwalk, and armed, mounted troops with dogs covered the beaches, on the lookout for spies attempting to come ashore from the U-boats.” For the entire month of March, when Nazi submarines were feared to be prowling offshore, the city went dark: streetlights were snuffed, and the riot of electric signs on the boardwalk were unplugged.
But though the war strained the pageant’s finances, it strengthened its patriotic underpinnings. After talk of suspending the event until peacetime, Slaughter persuaded city officials that it was “emblematic of the spirit of America” and should continue, even if that meant moving to the Warner Theater from 1942 to 1945, while Convention Hall, repurposed as “Camp Boardwalk,” served the Army Air Forces.
The war presented not just a new way for the pageant to channel its patriotic aspirations, but also a fresh reason for showcasing American beauty. As women entered factories and shipyards to fill servicemen’s jobs—supplying 57 percent of the workforce by war’s end—new assurances about American femininity were marshaled to allay fears about their unladylike new roles. The beauty industry expressed this through advertising; Miss America reified it through pageantry.
“This conundrum of glamour and grime, of Miss America and Rosie the Riveter, defines the America of 1941–45,” writes the scholar Mary Anne Schofield. She cites a 1943 lipstick ad in Ladies’ Home Journal as its crystallization: “For the first time in history,” it read, “woman-power is a factor in war . . . It’s a reflection of the free democratic way of life that you have succeeded in keeping your femininity—even though you are doing a man’s work! . . . No lipstick—ours or anyone else’s—will win the war. But it symbolizes one of the reasons why we are fighting . . . the precious right of women to be feminine and lovely—under any circumstances.”
While Miss America was busy embodying the feminine and the lovely, she was also evolving into a boots-on-the-ground war worker, traveling with the United Service Organization (USO), which delivered entertainment to servicemen, and visiting hospitals and Red Cross canteens. In 1943, when the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall and the Traymore became Thomas M. England General Hospital, the largest amputee hospital in the world, contestants visited troops there. The soap manufacturer Lever Brothers Co. offered the pageant $5,000 and 1943 winner Jean Bartel $2,500 if she would go on a national tour with Slaughter selling war bonds to finance military operations. The War Finance Department approved it, and Bartel sold $2.5 million in bonds. One headline chirped, “Miss America Arrives to Smash Hearts, Banks” above an article listing Bartel’s measurements from bust, waist, hips, and thigh to calf, ankle, neck, and arms. But 80 percent of her sales were made to women, cultivating a hefty new fan base.
Bartel was a terrifically popular, successful, and hardworking (though poorly paid) winner—the first to star in a Broadway musical, and one who helped dispel women’s misgivings about beauty queens. “The fact that I approached them as their contemporary helped,” she told Frank Deford. She’s routinely misidentified as the first college student to win the title (that was Smallwood), but she was the first coed, and she faced the unhappy task of coping with relentless public surprise at the discovery that beautiful women could indeed be intelligent.
Bartel’s successor, Venus Ramey, doubled her record, selling $5 million in bonds in 1944 and receiving a citation from the Treasury Department. She also inadvertently made Miss America a pinup. When a GI based in Foggia, Italy, wrote her asking for a signed photo, she complied; it was scaled up and painted on the nosecone of a B-17 that flew sixty-eight missions by men who named Ramey “the girl we’d most like to bail out with over a deserted Pacific isle.”
Ramey, who became the first Miss America to run for office when she campaigned as a Democrat in the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1951, was no Miss America booster. She felt the pageant abandoned her after her win, when she was exploited by one of the dreaded talent agents Slaughter had hoped to deter through chaperones; he took Ramey to New York and deflected all her phone calls, including one from the prestigious William Morris Agency when it called to offer her a contract. She was still holding a grudge at seventy-nine, when she said, “They try to keep us hidden from the public when they get old and wrinkled like me.” But she also wrote an unpublished article attesting to the power of the Miss America image during the war: “It wasn’t Venus Ramey that excited those boys, it was Miss America: a symbol of home . . . a reminder of decency, goodness, mercy, freedom, sanity from the world where they were, gone mad.”
Slaughter reflected on the pageant’s achievements in her 1944 Board Report, saying that “if the war had not interfered, I am confident that we would have one of the smoothest running civic events in America.” Two major challenges remained. The first was finding better regional hosts and sponsors. Despite having contacted every Chamber of Commerce in the country (Slaughter was that thorough), the committee had been forced to approach skating rinks and hotel ballrooms. She spelled out nine reasons her pitches to better venues had been rejected. Most related to the war: a manpower shortage, low interest because of wartime activities, and a dearth of “girls” because they had enlisted, were doing defense work, or had become war brides—wedded hastily before a serviceman’s deployment or during his furlough. Changing mass media also weakened PR interest; movie theaters were so packed they didn’t need outside promotions, and newspaper advertising was shifting to radio, thereby reducing available airtime for pageant ads.
Then there was reason number six: “Do not approve of beauty pageants.” Slaughter had a solution for that. The Jaycees (Junior Chamber of Commerce) were a socially and politically conservative national young men’s leadership training organization. They could convince local families that the pageant was an upstanding civic exercise and sponsor it locally. “What better,” Slaughter told Deford, “than to have the ideal men of America run a pageant for the ideal women?” She’d already worked with a few of them to attract Miss North Carolina and Miss Texas, with positive results. The women had arrived “properly wardrobed,” had “good talent,” and sent thank-you notes afterward. Their mothers were agreeable and supported the contest. The Jaycees were based in rural and suburban areas that would become—as postwar migration pulled middle-class families out of major cities—pageant country.
The second challenge, Slaughter explained in her report, was “Better Disposition of Miss America.” By that she meant rewarding the winners well enough to make the title both desirable and respectable. It was too late to stop Ramey, who would call the pageant an “entrée into oblivion” and work a number called “So What” into her post-reign nightclub junkets (being Miss America had made her life “très gai,” she sang. “Now if I could only find a way to eat three times a day”). But she could offer others more.
Slaughter had taken the pulse of the nation while touring with Bartel, polling people informally about their views of Miss America, and she had thoughts. “There is no need to elaborate on the favorable reactions,” she wrote. Her focus was the holdouts she wanted to convert, whose response (which she quoted in language that prefigured Ramey’s novelty song by a year) amounted to “Miss America—So What?” They wanted to know what happened after Miss America won, whether she contributed anything worthwhile to society, and if she enjoyed sustained success.
Likewise, reluctant contestants asked, “Why should I want to be Miss America?” “Is the title one I can proudly claim throughout my life?” “Can the title Miss America help me attain my ambitions?” “What kind of girl seeks the title Miss America?”
Slaughter was confident that most of her recent queens would vouch for the pageant as “the most educational experience of their lives” and had letters to prove it. But (she felt so strongly about this she broke into all caps) “WE HAVE GOT TO PROVE OUR INTENTIONS TO THE DOUBTING PUBLIC WITH FACTS.” A $5,000 scholarship for the winners, she wrote, was the way to do it.
“In five years, think what a reputation a Miss America pageant could build in the schools in this country? Girls would no longer look upon the pageant as a beauty contest, but would respect the title for its genuine value to them and its rating in the nation.” She even allowed, presciently, that the educational mandate might eclipse the beauty piece of the pageant altogether. With a scholarship, she predicted, “The Miss America title will offer a constructive inducement to all types of girls.” (Well, all except black girls.)
The question of who brainstormed the idea of scholarships has never been resolved—whether Slaughter, Bartel, or a student they met on tour at the University of Minnesota who told them that “no college girl would enter a contest that afforded as few opportunities as the Atlantic City Pageant.” Regardless of its provenance, the idea resonated deeply with Slaughter. “I wanted to go to college more than anything in the world, but I didn’t have the money,” she said. “Now I wanted my girls to have a scholarship, something constructive. I knew the shine of a girl’s hair wasn’t going to make her a success in life, and I knew good and well that the prizes Miss America had been getting were a joke . . . a fur coat that couldn’t have been worth more than two hundred dollars, the Hollywood contract that they got for fifty dollars a week—why, they couldn’t even live on that in California.”
She also knew that not all winners wanted a Hollywood career in the first place; scholarships would open other options. She believed the pageant could produce doctors and lawyers, which seemed laughable at the time, but which, in time, it did.
Her proposal was well timed. During the life of the pageant thus far, women’s college enrollment had declined steadily since a then-historic peak in 1920, when they represented 47 percent of students. In the 1930s, a cultural backlash against the feminist gains of the progressive era and the sexual freedom of the Jazz Age nudged women back toward marriage and motherhood and away from college. Hastened by the Depression, enrollment numbers fell to 40 percent in the 1940s, then continued downward, first as women dropped out to take defense jobs, and postwar, when many swapped their studies for domesticity once their veteran husbands rejoined the workforce.
Government-sponsored newsreels promoted domesticity as their duty. A 1942 Ladies’ Home Journal article titled “What is Your Dream Girl Like?” included a “blueprint” based on a survey of military men that said, “A college education isn’t necessary, and most young men would prefer not to have their wives work after marriage.” The 1944 federal GI Bill also bit into their numbers: its scholarships overwhelmingly served white men at the expense of women (who represented less than 3 percent of veterans) and black men (who were largely denied their benefits). Slaughter may have set her sights on an opportunity she personally wished she’d had, but it was also one of national importance.
Because many of Slaughter’s board members preferred to cultivate movie stars, the scholarship was only grudgingly approved, and to her astonishment, she alone was expected to raise the $5,000 to fund it. She merely flinched, then sat down and hand-wrote letters to 230 companies who sold products a beauty queen might endorse, landing $1,000 contracts with Bancroft & Sons, a textile manufacturer; Fitch Shampoo Company; Harvel Watches; and Catalina Swim Suits, which had been designing swimwear since 1912, inspired initially by Annette Kellerman. With giants Jantzen and Cole, Catalina had been dictating affordable beach fashion for decades. Now its suits would become Miss America’s crowning uniform.
Weeks before the 1945 pageant, however, a fifth sponsor had yet to materialize. Desperate, Slaughter put up her own money. Then, a week before the pageant, she got a call from Sandy Valley Grocery Company, a wholesaler in the South whose owner had a knack for publicity, a taste for philanthropy—and, until that year, AWOL Miss America Bette Cooper on its payroll as marketing director. They wanted in.
With funding secured, Slaughter recruited the executive director of the Association of American Colleges and Universities to head the scholarship program and spread the word to colleges. And so, in 1945, the pageant began its evolution from leg show to Honors Club. The inaugural scholarship was awarded to the first—and, to this day, the only—Jewish Miss America. Bess Myerson was one of the most gorgeous, talented, ambitious, uncompromising, and socially significant winners ever. She was also, in the end, the most bewilderingly disappointing.
