Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) (23 page)

Finally, there was still the matter of whether the current board of directors would ever be able to rise to the challenge of actually leading the organization, of guiding its executive rather than being guided by him. While the board had issued few public statements during the preceding weeks, the ones that made it into print weren’t all that encouraging. On February 15, the day of Katie Harman’s coerced press conference, the board still apparently didn’t see what the big fuss was all about. Board member David Sparenberg took a direct, irrelevant, and rather cheap swipe at Rob Beck, saying that “unlike his predecessor, Bob is not autocratic,” and went on to state that he and his colleagues were “very satisfied” with the job he was doing.

If nothing else, Miss America’s troubles during this era were consistent. For Bauer, the substantial challenges began in July 2002 when the new Miss North Carolina, Rebekah Revels, abruptly resigned shortly after being crowned. The situation would culminate in a public relations nightmare that prompted the
Chicago Tribune
to label the organization “hypocritical and cowardly,” after the press got wind that Revels had been forced out. “Revels was pressured to resign the crown because a guy she now claims abused her as a teenager crawled out from underneath his rock in late July and fired off an e-mail to Miss America Organization officials. The gist of it read, ‘Ask her about the two nude photos.’
” Revels recounted a situation in which her former flame sneaked a couple of photos while she was getting dressed. But state officials allegedly convinced her that the existence of the photos violated the contract’s vague morals clause. The
Tribune
story continued:

Although [national pageant] officials apparently never saw the photos in question and never spoke directly with Revels, they sent word that she had no shot at Miss America’s crown.

Given that she would effectively be knocking her home state out of contention for the title if she participated, Revels decided to take one for the team and resign.

George Bauer, interim president of the organization, issued the following disingenuous statement on July 26:

“Although the Miss America Organization regrets the circumstances surrounding Rebekah Revels’ previous relationship with her former fiance and is concerned for her well-being, it was she who voluntarily chose to resign her position as Miss North Carolina 2002.”

Apparently, though, Revels’s decision wasn’t really all that voluntary. Writing at the time for
Salon
, Jake Tapper
recounted that she soon decided to bring a lawsuit against the pageant, claiming that she had been forced out—and that she should still get to compete in Atlantic City in September. A Raleigh judge reinstated her. When both Revels and her first runner-up, Misty Clymer (who had been appointed when Revels stepped down) showed up for the national pageant, there were two Miss North Carolinas in Atlantic City. Revels must have felt unwelcome, but she surged ahead with her effort to participate, even signing the giant map that each contestant autographs on arrival day. Revels’s inscription on the Tar Heel State? “The Forget Me Not Campaign.” The circus continued for several days; Tapper characterized their eventual joint Boardwalk press conference as “Begin-and-Sadat style.”

Revels lost the battle shortly before the start of preliminary competition, when District Court Judge James Fox declined to force the Miss America Organization to recognize Revels as a contestant. Almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth, the pageant essentially kicked Revels to the curb in favor of Misty Clymer.

Clymer made the top ten. Revels was invited to stay as a VIP guest and watch the competition. She did, however, continue to pursue litigation back home. Although Judge Fox declined to extend Revels’s injunction to keep the pageant from happening without her, he did not rule on several other issues. Revels contended that although she had not participated in the Miss America Pageant, she had still been reinstated in North Carolina. Ultimately, her lawsuit against Miss America dragged on until 2007, when “the state Court of Appeals rejected her claims that she was illegally barred from taking part in the 2002 national pageant.” However, as a result of the litigation, the Miss North Carolina Pageant recognizes neither Revels nor Clymer. No doubt reflecting the desire of many to forget the whole mess, it simply skips the year 2002 in the parade of former titleholders on its website.

Shortly thereafter, Bauer encountered another big headache: some serious difficulties with “his” first Miss America, Erika Harold (2003). Harold had competed several times before winning the Miss Illinois title. Her ultraconservative views had proven to be a bit too extreme for some judges; one year, she had failed to make the top ten after her answer to a question about same-sex adoption in her private interview: under pressure, Harold reportedly stated that she would choose to place a child in an abusive heterosexual home rather than with a loving gay couple. Unfortunately for her, one of her judges had recently adopted a child with his longtime partner. Another told friends that because of that single answer, he had dropped her interview score from a 10 to 2. Although judges are trained not to score contestants directly on their personal or political values, they are instructed to evaluate the young woman’s ability to state her opinions in a diplomatic and appropriate manner. Like everyone, pageant contestants say plenty of things that they think better of later. But if a winner publicly flubbed an answer as badly as Harold did privately, the fallout would be disastrous. If a young woman can’t find a way to mitigate her more polarizing views, she identifies herself as a potential loose cannon and pretty much disqualifies herself from getting the job.

Harold then took a year off from competing, grew up a bit, and came back like gangbusters. She won the Miss Illinois title with a combination of intelligence, tenacity, and academic credentials; she was a stellar student and had been accepted to what were then “the country’s five leading law schools,” ultimately deciding on Harvard.

A relevant detail: 2002 was the first year that the Miss Illinois Pageant had adopted a statewide platform issue that would replace the contestant’s own platform issue. Realistically, it’s difficult for a state organization to start from scratch every year. With the anti-bullying program that was created that year, each new winner would build
upon the work of the previous titleholders, and allow the state organization to foster lasting relationships with non-profits, legislators, and sponsors. But although Harold—like all of the contestants—signed the contract stipulating this along with the other particulars of the job, she apparently wasn’t thrilled about it. Her own platform issue, advocating for abstinence-only sex education programs, was a longtime passion of hers. She had served as a youth advocate since age eighteen; in fact, “by the time she won Miss Illinois . . . Erika had addressed 14,000 youth in Illinois schools about making proper sexual decisions.” This work had ushered her into social and political circles with prominent figures like NFL Hall of Famer Mike Singletary and especially longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who could potentially be future assets to her stated plans to run for public office.

Despite some reported grumbling, Harold did indeed go to Atlantic City with anti-bullying initiatives as her platform. As it turned out, she had been aggressively targeted by other students during her early years; her personal story included compelling details about her time growing up. “She was called a whore, she said. Her home was vandalized by bullies. Fellow ninth-graders even pooled money to buy a gun and kill her.” Bolstered again by her potential to be a game-changing Miss America—in part because a Miss America who had already been accepted to Harvard Law would undoubtedly generate a great deal of media attention—Harold swept to victory. At the time, awards for private interview and evening gown were given alongside the traditional preliminary swimsuit and talent prizes; Harold took both the private and onstage interview competitions, which presumably balanced out her unique, non-pageant brand of physical beauty.

But once she had the crown, things shifted a bit. First of all, she arrived in Atlantic City ready to start her job immediately, with national and international organizations
standing by to put her right to work on their behalf. Although she did attend the “summit” she had pre-organized for her post-crowning week, the Miss America leadership was reportedly not eager for the new winner to continue those relationships. Understandably a bit paranoid about the influence of the state directors, George Bauer dismissed Harold’s contacts and initiatives as “state stuff.” To put it mildly, the national office—which has somehow repeatedly failed to learn the value of returning phone calls, even in the best of times—did not follow through on the opportunities that Harold brought along with her. It is the perfect example of a moment when power squabbles triumph over opportunity and common sense, and result in a huge step backward for the platform issue and its value. Sure, the platform had remained dominant for a couple of years after Leonard Horn’s departure. Both Nicole Johnson (1999) and Heather French (2000) had spent their Miss America years primarily working on platform initiatives (although French had to kick and scream a bit after being advised by MAO staff that she should change her platform because there supposedly wasn’t any money to be made advocating for military veterans). But Baraquio’s year (2001) was a scramble for sponsorship, with less of a focus on her platform issue, character education. And Harman (2002), whose advocacy dealt with caring for terminally ill breast cancer patients, saw her work overshadowed first by 9/11—to which she quickly and enthusiastically adapted—and then by the behind-the-scenes Miss America circus. By 2003, the pageant needed an articulate, passionate, ready-made winner who could kick-start the platform issue again. The Miss America Organization desperately needed to remind the public that the pageant still had substantive value and that, at its best, it could be a training ground for the next generation of female leaders. And miracle of miracles, the MAO execs got exactly what they needed . . . but to
say that they didn’t take advantage of that opportunity is a gigantic understatement.

Presumably frustrated by the lack of action, Harold turned her attention to her abstinence initiative. She was smart enough to use the media to ignite her pet project. During an event at the National Press Club, writer George Archibald of the conservative
Washington Times
asked about her abstinence work. What happened next made national news for several days, as Harold asserted that she was “being muzzled.”

When Miss America staff reminded her that she was contractually obligated to stick with her stated platform, instructing her to set aside the abstinence issue, Harold spun it like a seasoned pro. Her most-reported quote, “I will not be bullied,” positioned MAO as a schoolyard aggressor and her as the innocent victim. Conservative groups across the country rallied behind her, as did plenty of legislators; “38 members of Congress immediately sent Harold a letter encouraging her to ‘stand up for your beliefs and promote the healthy message of abstinence until marriage.’
”

George Bauer was trapped. He’d used the standard MAO tactics—guilt, isolation, passive aggression, and, finally, a line drawn in the sand—and he’d been outfoxed by a twenty-two-year-old. She had been kept in check as Miss Illinois, and was ultimately required to abide by her contract. But she had cracked the code by the time she became Miss America. Not only that, but she retained a lawyer, presumably to keep from being pushed around by MAO’s many unwritten credos regarding deference and obedience; none of these little customs are included in the actual signed employment contract, but they are reinforced by everything from “helpful hints” to outright pressure. She couldn’t slip out of her contractual obligations entirely, but she could stick to the letter of the law while maximizing the bright light she shone on things she wanted the me
dia to notice. It didn’t serve her to let the focus settle on the fact that she had pulled a bait and switch on her employers, the organizations that had supported her, and of course her Miss America judges—at least one of whom, who championed her during and after the pageant, has privately stated that she would not have won if she had brought an abstinence platform to the national competition. (On the record, a judge did later speak about Harold’s private interview: “
‘I never asked her about abstinence because it was never mentioned on her very, very wordy fact sheet,’ says Jim Jones, a longtime AIDS activist. ‘She went out of her way to hide any information about abstinence.’
”)

It’s one thing to be a local titleholder and talk about the reasoning behind your own life choices. It’s entirely another thing to throw the full weight of an eighty-year-old institution behind a young woman who endorses an educational approach that has been proven (and re-proven, and re-proven) to be utterly ineffective. But by sowing the seeds of partisan frustration, Harold was also able to maneuver around that inconvenient detail. She essentially pointed to the other side of the aisle—Miss Americas who had been permitted to advocate for comprehensive sex education and other types of controversial HIV/AIDS prevention. In reality, Harold, too, would have been allowed to take pretty much any position on issues that were directly relevant to the platform she had officially brought to the competition. But she expertly turned a contractual dispute into a scenario in which her freedom of speech was in jeopardy and her conservative values persecuted. And she quickly figured out how to frame the issue so that it seemed to fit right in with her anti-bullying initiative. She even crafted a message about the relationship between teen sexual activity and youth violence, identifying abstinence as a cure for both.

Having been so thoroughly outsmarted, Bauer had no choice but to back down. Within two days, he did. Har
old would get to integrate her abstinence message into her anti-bullying initiative.

Ultimately, the Erika Harold episode was neatly and presciently summed up well before it happened, in Tapper’s
Salon
piece: “After being browbeat by feminists and media elites for years, the pageant created a method of scoring that paved the way for a winner who isn’t necessarily the average frat boy’s choice for a roll in the hay, but who may very well end up his boss. And that woman is Erika Harold.”