Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) (2 page)

But in this moment, the moment just before they make the announcement, there’s an awareness that simply washes over me like a tidal wave. Becoming Miss America will change the whole course of my life for a very long time, if not forever. And I believe that when a change of this magnitude is barreling toward you, the universe gives you a heads-up. Suddenly, I’m no longer hoping that they’ll call Miss North Carolina as first runner-up. I’m certain of it
.

The next bit can’t be described as anything but surreal. There’s a voice in my head—my own voice, in a tone I would use to recite a grocery list—calmly walking me through the necessary steps
. Bend your knees so Tara can pin the crown on. Take the scepter. Oh, there’s the stage manager, at the end of the runway, waving her white-gloved hands to catch your attention. Walk toward her. Duh, you’ve been watching this thing all your life, you know about the part with
the runway!
On camera, of course, it doesn’t look anything like this; I just look like a girl who’s really excited that she’s the new Miss America. But living it is an out-of-body experience. And then I’m off, to a press conference and a photo shoot and to speak to the other contestants and their families, to a sponsor party with a mile-long line of strangers congratulating me. Through the Claridge lobby, packed to the rafters with familiar and unfamiliar faces, cheering. Up to my new hotel suite, to visit with family, then pile, fully dressed, into the (empty) hot tub with my school friends, and eventually, sleep for a couple of hours. And then awake again, prancing awkwardly in the ocean for photographers, changing into my interview suit for another press conference, condensing my belongings into a couple of suitcases, then climbing into a stretch limo and speeding up the Garden State Parkway to Manhattan
.

To say that my life has changed drastically is both an understatement and an overstatement. The overstatement part is simple. I sort of just feel like the same old drama-geek me; I just have different stuff to do now. But the understatement—whoa. I have flown first class for the first time ever—right now, in 1997, Miss America never flies coach. I have no problem with this. I hate that discriminatory little curtain they pull between the sections of the plane, but I like the free warm nuts and hot towels enough to get over it
.

I feel like I’ve been on almost every TV show people watch
. Today, Good Morning America, The Tonight Show, Regis and Kathie Lee,
and a brand-new show called
The View.
I have listened as the media and the public—mostly on television and various op-ed pages—analyze nearly everything about my recent win. I have visited designer showrooms, where clothes were practically shoveled at me; I have slept in hotel suites with (can you believe it?) multiple bathrooms. I’ve been invited to sing the National Anthem at Northwestern’s Homecoming game, and for the Bulls’ championship ring ceremony. I have gone on a date with possibly the most
gorgeous guy I’ve ever met, who would never have looked at me twice before Miss America . . . and I have also gotten flowers from my first boyfriend, who once broke up with me by just not really calling anymore. I have launched my platform issue—the public service project every contestant is required to develop—with a speech on the lawn of the Capitol in Washington, DC
.

In the meantime, my mom has gamely moved all of my college-appropriate stuff (everything from holey sweatpants to the tattered running shoes that carried me around campus this past summer) out of my little apartment in Evanston and back home to New Jersey. I won’t be spending more than a handful of nights in any one place between now and next year’s pageant, so there’s really no sense in keeping an apartment at school. In my absence, my quirky engineering grad student roommate will be using the empty living room to practice for her ballroom dancing competitions, because I guess it makes more sense than just getting another couch. I haven’t seen my friends for weeks—and even then, only the ones who were intrepid enough to make the 1,000-mile drive from Chicago to Atlantic City to watch the competition in person. I know that people all over campus have gotten calls from tabloids digging for dirt, and some have been offered money to tell some scandalous secrets about me—the press, it seems, is forever crossing its ink-stained fingers for another Vanessa Williams. One of my friends told off the caller in spectacular fashion; another buried the only photograph with the ability to cause mild controversy. Thank you, Daniel and Kevin
.

I’m on pace to travel 20,000 miles every month, crisscrossing the nation in an almost random pattern to speak to students, lobby legislators, raise money for nonprofits, and generally spread the message that AIDS is bad, we know how to stay safe from it, and given the infection stats both domestically and abroad, we’d better hustle
.

The downside of this particular life moment is something
I haven’t anticipated: the likelihood that those I meet, those who observe me from afar—and, most troubling, those I already know—will feel compelled to decide who I am on the basis of a few facts and the trivia they access on the rapidly evolving Internet. One minute I’m a gawky, show-tune-loving, dean’s list student at a top university. I have treated Miss America like I would any other goal; in the face of impossible odds, I am ferociously competitive and laser-focused. Of course I get my act together and go to Atlantic City planning to win. Then someone puts a crown on my head, and all bets were off
.

Suddenly, people make wild assumptions based on very little information. Suddenly, I will never again just be Kate Shindle; I will always carry the mantle—and, as it turns out, the baggage that comes with it—of Miss America’s complicated history. And brains versus looks. And, you know, most of the nation’s ideas about womanhood and femininity and stuff. A few weeks from now, on my short Christmas break, there will be a well-intentioned but somewhat awkward reception at my South Jersey elementary school, where neighbors, family friends, teachers, and anyone else who happens to be nearby will line up for autographs and photos with me. Even some of those people will start to see me as an institution rather than a person they’ve known since kindergarten or earlier. But later that week, I’ll watch Northwestern play in the Citrus Bowl (in which we get schooled by Tennessee) and sit slack-jawed as I see, for the first time, what Peyton Manning can do with a football. And in Knoxville in a few months, I’ll drop hints to the limo driver—and anyone else who will listen—until I get to sit in Phil Fulmer’s office and talk to Manning about school, and football, and his little brother at Ole Miss. So it’s a bit hypocritical to complain about one aspect of this new identity while simultaneously learning how to leverage it
.

I have been called courageous, a trailblazer, the first socially relevant Miss America ever, fat, thin, beautiful, hand
some, ugly, talented, untalented, inspiring, infuriating, deserving, undeserving. The media have parked for days outside my parents’ house, rung the doorbell and phone relentlessly, gone through the trash cans. At some point in the near future, Howard Stern will apparently call me a whore, although I will only hear about it secondhand. When you make AIDS your cause, people project all kinds of things onto you. In reality, I am the furthest thing from a whore, to a degree that’s almost embarrassing. But I don’t want that to get out, because I’m pretty sure the high school students I’m going to face this year will listen more attentively to my safer-sex message if I don’t run all over the country disclosing that I am, in fact, about as pure as the driven snow. It’s a conundrum: travel the country telling people to use condoms, while I myself have never had cause to make some of the choices I advocate
.

Even in the late 1990s, after Miss America has been pronounced dead, extinct, irrelevant more times than anyone can probably count, I am newsworthy. Children climb over each other at assemblies to touch me. Or the crown. I can’t always tell which
.

I’ve read that Princess Diana—who at this point in history has been dead about six weeks—had trouble reconciling who she was as a human with the royal image she had to live up to. I’m starting to get it
.

Kate Shindle, Miss America 1998. Kate Shindle, Miss America 1998
.

TWO

In March of 2011, about six weeks after the Miss America Organization (MAO) celebrated its ninetieth anniversary, eighty-seven-year-old Jean Bartel, Miss America 1943, died.

Former Miss Americas are a unique breed. They are achievers, certainly; even the least type A’s among the group are generally pretty driven women. They are competitive—and not just because most have spent years pushing themselves into the position of Miss America, but because after that tremendous accomplishment comes and goes, many find that there is no off switch for their considerable ambition. And so any gathering of former Miss Americas rapidly and invariably turns into its own contest. Who among these women is the most beautiful, most intelligent, most accomplished, most altruistic,
most ideal
of the “ideal” that Bert Parks used to sing about? It’s a never-ending race with no official winner.

And yet, for all this internal jockeying for position, it is also a group of women who are generally affectionate—toward one another and toward the program that has provided them with a lasting identity. By and large, they are capital-L Ladies. Most are either Southern or have taken on
a Southern-type identity of what it means to be feminine—a product, no doubt, of the fact that Miss America has always been more deeply in demand in the Bible Belt than anywhere else, and a girl’s got to learn how to walk softly and keep the big stick hidden.

Some are saccharine, some a little dippy, some snarky. Like clockwork, there is one from each decade who seems never to have taken the crown off—she’s either leveraged it into an extremely successful career or she’s still trying to white-knuckle her fifteen minutes. In general, though, they’re pretty kind. The Miss Americas are a sorority of sorts; it is not at all rare for them to begin a group e-mail message with “My dearest sisters” and conclude it with a prayer or a request for prayers. Although some of these women barely know one another, they share a steely bond forged by the Miss America experience, an experience that requires a young woman to take on a mantle that grows both more storied and more burdensome with each passing year. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, indeed; it doesn’t help that the crown itself seems to get exponentially weightier with the passage of time. Most of the young women who strive to become Miss America see it as the public sees it: as a dream, a wish fulfillment that guarantees one will be respected, praised, and lifted up as an example of all that is right about young American women. Little do they know what they’re actually getting into if they win. Decades of stereotypes, expectations, scandal, myths, media scrutiny, public skepticism, and questionable leadership choices have made actually
being
Miss America nearly impossible. That kind of shared crucible makes for some serious camaraderie.

And so, when the news broke that Jean Bartel was gone, the Miss Americas flooded each other’s in-boxes with sympathy and prayers and shared reminiscences of the woman they had known. They expressed sadness and shock; having just seen her in Las Vegas, no one could believe that she
had passed so quickly. Mostly, they said things like “she will be missed” and “such a precious gem” and “a legend, a beauty, an example.”

I had a different reaction. I had met Jean; I liked her very much. But mostly, the death of Jean Bartel kind of made me cranky.

I never planned to be a black sheep Miss America. I’m still not exactly sure how it happened. I do know that in a sea of genteel, Southernish women, I’m the one who grew up in New Jersey and went to school in Chicago. I do know that I have a very difficult time holding my tongue when something is unfair or when people are being treated badly. I can clearly see the difference between taking the high road and being a doormat. And I have watched Miss America slowly and painfully fall apart in a way that would have had longtime director Lenora Slaughter rolling over in her grave.

Jean’s death hit home for me because, in most of the ways that matter, she was the first one to make Miss America mean something. There are a couple of different versions of the story (a common theme in this mostly oral history), but the most widely accepted is the version where Jean—then the current Miss America—brought Slaughter a crazy idea that she and her sorority sisters had dreamed up: in addition to the screen test and fur coat and whatever else Miss America received as prizes, she should also get a college scholarship.

Today, the Miss America Organization frequently claims to be the largest provider of scholarships for women in the world. Each year, it makes available about $45 million in cash and in-kind scholarships to young women ages 17 to 24. All because Jean Bartel chatted over tea with some women her own age and almost single-handedly transformed the pageant. She saw beyond the borderline-smarmy boardwalk parade featuring “amateur” and “professional” women, bathing suits and tape measures, and
handed the leadership the keys to the legitimacy kingdom. It is a testament to her significance that both the
Huffington Post
and
Jezebel
, two unlikely sources of praise for pageants, lauded her following her death. She was a transformational Miss America.

And that’s really the reason I was mad. It struck me that her death brought things full circle, at what was the end of a very long era. An era in which the young women beneath the crown were able to push the pageant to do things that would lift up their successors. An era in which the pageant brass knew enough to steal a good idea when they heard one. An era in which no one would’ve said the pageant was perfect—its idiosyncrasies are the very things that make it endearing—but in which it crept closer and closer to the edge of cultural relevance. And when it got right up to the precipice, instead of jumping, it took fifteen steps backward.