MAKEOVERS OF ‘BEAUTY’
Yes, 100-yr.-old Miss America Pageant has changed, but not as much as the world has
It was a song millions listened to, but few heard. “There she is, Miss America,” the host would sing. “There she is, your ideal.” But which America? Whose ideal?
It’s been a century since the first Miss America was crowned, and the show has evolved. Yet as much as it’s changed, the world has changed even more.
Does Miss America still make sense in modern America?
That’s the question Amy Argetsinger’s “There She Was: The Secret History of Miss America” asks as she examines the institution’s long, troubled life.
The idea of a national beauty pageant dates to the 1850s and promoter P.T. Barnum, “but it was scuttled for the indecency of women flaunting their figures,” Argetsinger reports. Beauty contests remained primarily local affairs, often promoting seasonal events. In New Orleans, during Mardi Gras, men would “tap someone’s debutante daughter to serve as queen of their annual parade.”
Then, in 1921, big business became involved, and Miss America launched as a contest intended to spur business.
Hotel owners in Atlantic City were frustrated the tourist season always seemed to end on Labor Day. So that year, they announced a followup “Fall Frolic,” promising two days of dancing and vaudeville and a beauty pageant.
Nine women from nearby cities participated in the “Inner-City Beauty Contest,” arriving in Atlantic City on a barge dressed as “sea nymphs.” Miss New York, Virginia Lee, was said to be the immediate front-runner. However, she turned out to be married and a professional model. She was also friendly with one of the judges, artist Howard Chandler Christy.
“They came back and said, ‘Oh, Virginia, you won but we can’t give it to you,’” Lee griped more than 70 years later. Even more frustrating, she said, was that the judges told her the original vote had been unanimous. “I won it hands down!” she insisted.
Instead, the Golden Mermaid prize went to Washington, D.C.’s Margaret Gorman. When Gorman returned the following year to defend her title, there was another problem. There was already a new Miss Washington, D.C., in the contest. What title should Gorman have?
Miss America, someone suggested.
That title stuck and soon became the contest’s name. But its image grew dodgy, thanks to contestants who represented places they’d never been or crassly cashed in on their fame afterward. “Many of the girls who come here turn out bad later,” mourned a sponsor.
The businessmen brought in an outside organizer, Lenora Slaughter, to improve the competition’s image. She would serve as its director for 32 years.
Among her eventual reforms? Slaughter added a talent competition and awarded scholarships so it would appear to be more than a beauty contest. She also established a minimum age of 18, which has since dropped to 17. (Gorman was barely 16.)
Slaughter’s rules stipulated that contestants be “of good health and the white race.”
The loathsome segregation lessened over time. In 1941, Miss America welcomed a Native American contestant from Oklahoma. Seven years later, the competition admitted a Latina from Puerto Rico and an Asian from Hawaii. None won.
In 1945, Miss New York, Bess Myerson from the Bronx, became the competition’s first – and, so far, only – Jewish winner. But it was a bitter prize. Some pageant sponsors refused to work with her. When she traveled, “gentiles-only” establishments turned her away.
“I was expected to understand,” Myerson said later. “Expected to remain sweet and dignified and calm. Outwardly that is exactly what I did. Inwardly, I felt a rage that has never left.” She spent her reign giving speeches for the Anti-Defamation League.
There were more changes at the 1971 pageant, which featured the first Black contestant, Iowa’s Cheryl Browne. Browne lost to Miss Texas, Phyllis George, who would become a popular TV broadcaster. But other news was being made outside, where feminists loudly protested the whole spectacle.
It wasn’t the first demonstration, either. Two years before, some 200 women threw “instruments of female torture” — girdles, makeup, and bras — into trash cans. They even crowned their own beauty queen, a sheep.
“You could spend six months leafleting on the corner of St. Marks Place,” organizer Robin Morgan explained. “It was more important to have six seconds on the six o’clock news.”
There was plenty to protest, too. Over the decades, Miss America had not only become an antiquated guide to how a woman should look — big hair, high heels, tight swimsuit — but what she should stand for. Faith. Patriotism. Chastity.
The last was more about image than reality. Still, the fiction was ruthlessly maintained. Officially, Miss America had to be of “good moral character.” She could not have engaged in “acts of moral turpitude.”
Then, in 1984, Vanessa Williams brought reality crashing in.
A musical theater major at Syracuse University, the 20-year-old Westchester County native was the first Black contestant to win. Already a gifted performer with Broadway dreams, she spent her reign touring the country, meeting President Ronald Reagan and thrilling audiences.
Shortly before her official reign was to end, Penthouse magazine announced it had obtained old nude photographs of Williams. Not blurry, stolen Polaroids, but posed, professional, explicit photos, some with another woman.
The photos were “calculated sexual exploitation” and, as such, “intrinsically inconsistent” with the pageant’s values, thundered the organization’s current chief. Williams was forced to resign. It took her years to rebuild her career.
The hypocrisy of a contest with a swimsuit competition decrying “sexual exploitation” would have been a bad joke if it weren’t so infuriating. Insiders knew the Miss America pageant had plenty of issues with “moral turpitude.”
And it wasn’t because of the young women. Older men, like B. Don Magness, were in charge. Magness oversaw many local contests in Texas, and his behavior went well beyond cringeworthy. Today, it’s actionable.
His idea of hello was a kiss on the mouth. His idea of a joke was giving a young woman a T-shirt that read,
“In case of rape, this side up.” He casually referred to contestants as “sluts.”
His language would have been right at home with top management, too. In 2017, HuffPost published three years worth of sexist and derogatory emails exchanged among the organization’s current CEO, head writer and two board members. After protests, all eventually resigned.
The new board’s first chairwoman was Gretchen Carlson, Miss America 1989, and a critic of sexual harassment at Fox News. Some of her immediate changes? Dropping swimsuit and evening gown segments. The competition would be about celebrating “a new generation of female leaders.”
It might have been too little, too late.
In the late ’80s, about 80,000 contestants competed in local pageants; by 2019, fewer than 4,000 did. When the show was initially broadcast in 1955 — Lee Meriwether won — it drew 27 million viewers; by 2019, the audience was down to 4 million. That crown went to Camille Schrier, “who said the things a dying institution wanted to hear and needed to believe,” Argetsinger writes of the woman who studied biochemistry.
The pandemic shuttered last year’s competition.
This year’s show is scheduled for December at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn. A new Miss America will be crowned. Once again, she will be held out as “your ideal.” And, some will ask, Whose ideal?