Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) (3 page)

And so, while I also sent along my best wishes to Jean’s family (after all, when you’re an ex–Miss America, appropriateness almost always wins the day), I sat and stewed. And I looked at what the pageant had become, and wondered what Jean Bartel would think.

It started as a stunt.

There are plenty of stories of Miss America’s history, many of them colored by opinions and agendas on all sides. But one thing that nearly everyone agrees on is this: if the hoteliers and assorted businessmen of Atlantic City hadn’t wanted to wring one more week out of the bustling tourist season, Miss America probably wouldn’t exist in the first place.

It’s more complicated than that, of course. In America in 1920, when the seeds of women’s rights were being sowed by a growing minority, the definition of femininity was ever-changing. Scarlett O’Hara was clinging to life some
where in the Deep South, and the career woman-slash-supermom was yet to be discovered. In an era where the role of women in the United States morphed at a previously unheard-of speed, the flapper—sexy, brazen, smart, and unafraid to dance on a table while people were watching—was born. With the First World War over, she cast off her Victorian corset, bobbed her hair, and stayed out all night smoking cigarettes and drinking gin at speakeasies. She represented a new type of female freedom, a bold working girl in a consumer-driven society. She glamorized deviant behavior and traumatized those who believed that women should aspire to (a) provide good homes for their families and (b) avoid scandal at all costs. The flapper didn’t hide from scandal; in general, she ran straight into its appealingly dangerous clutches. And by doing so, she laid the groundwork for what was about to happen in Atlantic City. The flapper couldn’t survive just anywhere—even Zelda Fitzgerald had to move to New York to complete her transformation—and as she restlessly searched for a home base that would embrace her progressive identity, she threw off seedlings that would blossom into various paradigms of femininity. The seedling that landed in Atlantic City, which in 1921 was teetering between the traditional and the risqué, grew into the flapper’s prim cousin. They would call her Miss America.

In 1921, a group of businessmen in Atlantic City (then a luxurious summer vacation resort) came up with a gimmick that capitalized on the craze for sexy, independent womanhood. Not for nothing, it also served to extend the summer season by one additional week. They created the Fall Frolic, a festival which included the Atlantic City Bathing Beauty Contest and was scheduled for the weekend after Labor Day. A hundred thousand people showed up to watch eight contestants parade down the Boardwalk in their knee-length bathing costumes, culminating in the crowning of sixteen-year-old Margaret Gorman
from Washington, DC. Her body, according to the
New York Times
, was “a 30-25-32 figure that was close to the flapper era ideal”—although, unlike some of her competitors, she was modest enough to wear her stockings on the beach.

The pageant’s smashing financial success and massive popularity pretty much guaranteed that it would be repeated. But it was not without its detractors—a theme that would be increasingly familiar to Miss America’s leadership in the decades to come. By 1923, when attendance at the pageant swelled to 300,000, the business leaders and newspapers that had sparked its creation were growing uneasy; ironically, they were nervous about Miss America’s effect on Atlantic City’s image. Women’s groups protested against this public display, which they viewed as alternately immoral and exploitative. It was the beginning of a long and fascinating push-and-pull between Miss America and ideals of twentieth-century femininity.

For a time, the protesters won. Even though the pageant eliminated the “professional” (intended for actresses and models) category in 1923 (the same year that Mary Katherine Campbell became the only woman who would ever win the pageant twice, prompting numerous show business offers, including one from Florenz Ziegfield himself), conservative groups began to push back hard. After all, it was not only the era of the liberated young woman, but also the era of Prohibition—an indication that advocates of enforced morality were not going to lose their country to purveyors of beaded fringe. The year 1925 brought what appeared to be substantive allegations (later proven false) that the pageant was fixed to ensure the win of California’s Fay Lanphier, which added fuel to the moralists’ fire. In 1927, Norma Smallwood turned the Miss America title into a career. Today, she is remembered more for leveraging her fame into sponsorships than for the fact that she remains the only Native American woman ever to grab the Miss America crown.

For all of these reasons—protesters, disorganization, and certainly the pall cast by the economic crash that was barreling toward America—the pageant was discontinued. There would be no Miss America in 1928. Or, for that matter, in 1929, 1930, 1931, or 1932.

After a hiatus of a few years, and with the aftereffects of the Great Depression still hanging over most of the country, Director General Armand T. Nichols pushed hard for Atlantic City to revive its biggest publicity event. Copycat pageants were starting to spring up in other seaside towns (particularly troublesome was neighboring Wildwood, New Jersey). By most accounts, however, the 1933 effort was poorly organized and a financial and public-relations disaster. While professional women were allowed to compete for the Bathing Beauty titles (and an RKO screen test was among the prizes to be awarded), pageant organizers made it clear that they were not looking for a showgirl. The major controversy (if one doesn’t count Miss Maine and Miss New Hampshire forgetting their bathing suits, Miss New York State passing out during the judging because of a bad toothache, or Miss Oklahoma dropping out for an emergency appendectomy) was the disqualification of three contestants alleged not to live in the states they were representing. Just before the pageant, officials announced to the assembled media that
four
young women had actually been disqualified: Misses Iowa, Illinois, and Idaho for residency issues, and Miss Arkansas for being married. As if that weren’t enough for one Saturday in September, Miss New York City (who had beaten out ten thousand rivals at Madison Square Garden) quit a few hours before the finals, “saying that the pageant was not on the up and up.” In the end, the crown went to Miss Connecticut, Marion Bergeron, a squeaky-clean fifteen-year-old blues singer who attended convent school—and who returned to her school a year later to be told that the nuns felt she “had had entirely too much undue publicity” to continue her education there.

The year 1933 was also noteworthy for the friction that began to develop between the Miss America organizers and the pageant’s home in Atlantic City. Director General Nichols dangled the idea that he had received offers to stage the festivities in other cities, and that he was disappointed in the lack of support from the Atlantic City Chamber of Commerce. As for Mayor Harry Bacharach, he speculated that when all was said and done, no money had been made by that year’s pageant. It was a tension that would continue for decades to come, as idea men, money men, and legislators fought for the three C’s: control, capital, and credit.

And just like that, Miss America was dead again. There was no Atlantic City pageant in 1934, although Madison Square Garden gave it a shot, selecting a “Queen of American Beauty.”

In 1935, however, the pageant got serious. Certain that Miss America was a cash cow waiting to happen, some new leaders stepped in, accompanied by one very interesting woman. According to the Miss America Organization, “Steel Pier owner Frank P. Gravatt and associate Eddie Corcoran enlisted the help of the Variety Club of Philadelphia to bring back Miss America. Corcoran hired Lenora S. Slaughter from the Chamber of Commerce in St. Petersburg, Florida, for a six-week stint that lasted thirty-two years. Her immediate goal was to build interest within Atlantic City itself. The Boardwalk Parade was brought back with 350,000 people in attendance. The 1920s pageant mascot, ‘King Neptune,’ also made a valiant return. Fifty-two contestants, representing eleven states and forty-one key cities, took part.”

Lenora Slaughter, in particular, was a genteel Southern woman with big-picture ideas and big-city negotiating skills. When Eddie Corcoran died shortly after bringing her on, she grabbed the pageant by its nether regions and didn’t let go for three decades. Miss America historian
Ric Ferentz once referred to her—and one suspects he was not the only individual to do this, nor the user of the most colorful language—as a classic “iron fist in a velvet glove.” During her time with the pageant (her original title was “Executive Secretary,” and despite her married status, she was always referred to as “Miss Slaughter”), she set out to convince skeptics and supporters alike that the pageant had been off the mark from the start.

Throughout her tenure, Slaughter fought a battle that can be summed up pretty simply, one that continues to this day and has never quite been won. Deserved or not, Miss America had already acquired something of a cheesecake image, and a mercenary one at that: young women cashing in on their anatomical blessings to win a prize, gain notoriety, even launch a career. There seem to be no indications that most of those involved in the event—the founding businessmen, the media, or the Hollywood executives who came calling—had much of a problem with that. Interestingly, just as the pageant’s earliest detractors were women concerned with the image of American femininity, so too was the individual who pushed to transform Miss America into something more than the “right” measurements, hairstyle, and marketability potential.

“
‘First thing,’
” she explained in Angela Saulino Osborne’s 1995 book
Miss America: The Dream Lives On
, “
‘I had to get Atlantic City to understand that it couldn’t just be a beauty contest.’
” And did she ever. More than thirty years later, when Slaughter retired, she had almost single-handedly transformed Miss America into an aspirational icon for millions of girls and young women across the nation, a symbol of cultural respectability, an instant celebrity from the moment she was crowned, and the face of a wildly popular organization whose telecast drew as many eyeballs as any other event on television. She accomplished this by taking one deliberate step at a time: a college scholarship for the winner (unheard of when it was first initi
ated), a talent competition, a coterie of sponsors for the program, and a veritable army of volunteers to pull off the event each year. And not just any volunteers—in order to form the first Hostess Committee, for example, Slaughter focused her attention on Atlantic City high society, recruiting each “lady of the house” with potential to be a chaperone of sorts. In effect, she leveraged the credibility of the hostesses themselves to create an aura of sterling reputations for the contestants, and for Miss America herself.

Initially, Slaughter’s success rested precariously on a house of cards. She faced her first challenge almost immediately upon her arrival in 1935. That year’s winner, a high school dropout from Pittsburgh named Henrietta Leaver, found herself in a protracted battle with Frank Vittel, a renowned artist who had used her sittings (in which she consistently claimed that her grandmother was present, and that she had worn a bathing suit) to create a nude sculpture of her. Although she did not lose her Miss America title, she was not invited to crown her successor, since she had married during her year. Two years later, the 1937 winner (seventeen-year-old Bette Cooper) disappeared within hours of her crowning. According to the Miss America archives, “Bette, having second thoughts about her commitment, took off with her Pageant male chaperone, Frank Off, in a motor boat. The two floated around Atlantic City until the boardwalk crowds dispersed. No other contestant was crowned Miss America in her absence, though several participants from that year have made claim to the title throughout the decades. Bette lives a quiet life in Connecticut. A soft-spoken person of polite cordiality, Bette still refuses to talk to reporters, the Pageant staff and others about her involvement.”

Despite these setbacks, however, Slaughter can reasonably be credited with substantial accomplishments during the early years of her tenure; first and foremost, she began running the pageant less like a garden party and more
like a business. Under her administration, Miss America quickly found herself fronting a legitimate nonprofit corporation, complete with a board of directors and an executive board, and with written expectations for contestant conduct both during and outside of the competition—for example, the dictate that no young woman aspiring to or wearing the crown may ever have been married or divorced. The leadership also broadened the reach of the competition by getting Miss America into the newsreels; an estimated 112 million viewers saw Marilyn Meseke become Miss America 1938. The pageant had paid off the last of its debts by 1936, and the prizes awarded to the new Miss America, which previously were mostly of the screen-test-and-trophy variety, became more lucrative. Miss America 1939, Patricia Donnelly, received a $2,000 endorsement deal with a hat company—a far cry from Norma Smallwood’s reported $100,000 in the pageant’s early years, but a sign that the burgeoning institution was beginning to gain traction as a viable option for corporate sponsors. Slaughter’s first effort to fund the scholarship prize, for example, can only be described as herculean in nature. Once it proved successful, however, she had more potential sponsors than she knew how to accommodate.

History has been kind to Lenora Slaughter, who presumably did some serious arm-twisting in order to thrust the pageant toward both legitimacy and financial stability. Hindsight, however, does reveal that she made at least one serious sacrifice at the altar of respectability. At some point in those early years, she reportedly inserted what is now known simply as “rule seven” into the pageant’s contestant contract, affirming that each young woman “must be of good health and of the white race.” According to the excellent 2001 PBS documentary titled simply
Miss America
, “All contestants were required to list, on their formal biological data sheet, how far back they could trace their ancestry. In the pageant’s continual crusade for respecta
bility, ancestral connections to the Revolutionary War or perhaps the Mayflower would have been seen as a plus.” Viewed in historical context, such a practice was consistent with the eugenics movement of the era. The pageant’s 1940 abandonment of the genealogy requirements, too, coincides with the beginning of the end for all but the most hard-core eugenicists—who rapidly lost momentum around the time the world discovered that the quest for a superior race had become Adolf Hitler’s raison d’être, and joined the war to stop him.