Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) (4 page)

Considering Slaughter’s Deep South roots and the politics of the time, the systematic exclusion of minority women is not all that shocking. Viewed through a twenty-first-century lens, however, it seems remarkable that a woman with such progressive vision also saw fit to formalize blatant discrimination.

Despite this blemish, however, it’s difficult to argue about most of Slaughter’s initiatives and their long-term effects. By 1944—barely twenty years after the pageant’s chaotic inception—the vision of a steely, big-picture woman and a thoughtful Miss America had effectively cleaned up its image. In hindsight, it’s easy to point to this moment as Miss America’s first significant philosophical shift, the beginning of an evolution from a mere flesh parade to an entity that would provide real opportunities for young women. The cultural criticism seemed to have waned. Miss America was on solid ground.

Or so everyone thought. In 1945, Slaughter had no idea that she was about to run headlong into a brick wall—and the wall’s name was Bess Myerson.

Bess Myerson probably knew she was special. In terms of sheer elegance, talent, poise, and beauty, she was the kind of girl who would stand out in any crowd. She cer
tainly stood out among the competition for Miss America 1945; before the finals, the media had all but declared her the winner already, with one newspaper bluntly proclaiming that “the new Miss America will either be Miss New York City, Bess Myerson . . . or somebody else.”

But this year’s Miss America wasn’t going to encounter the smooth sailing that Lenora Slaughter must have been hoping for. Just four months after the world went crazy celebrating V-E Day, with the staggering extent of Hitler’s atrocities still waiting to be discovered in Germany and Poland and Austria and Russia and on and on and on, the pageant found itself with the first—and, to date, still the only—Jewish Miss America. And Bess Myerson wasn’t just any Jewish girl; she was an outspoken New Yorker who grew up in the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses in the Bronx.

In retrospect, this seems like the perfect storm for that historical moment. Myerson has rarely given interviews in recent years, but when she does, like in the 2001 PBS documentary
Miss America
, they carry the uncommon weightiness of an individual who understands exactly her place in the cultural landscape: “The first night I compete with a group of girls on talent, I won. Headline says, ‘Jewish Girl in Atlantic City Wins Talent in Miss America Pageant.’ Now we’ve just learned all the details of six million Jews being killed, slaughtered, burned, tortured. And naturally it attracts attention, and the juxtaposition of the two things was so improbable. There were people that would come to the hotel where I was staying with my sister, and they would introduce themselves to me and say I’m Jewish, and it’s just wonderful that you’re in this contest. But how about when people came up to you with numbers on their arms, which they did as well, and said, you see this? You have to win. You have to show the world that we are not ugly. That we shouldn’t be disposed of and so on how
ever they worded it. I have to tell you that I felt this tremendous responsibility. I owed it to those women to give them a present, a gift.”

Anyone, including Lenora Slaughter, could tell that Myerson had star quality. But she also had an identity and a stubborn streak, which resulted in at least one clash with the pageant boss. Having grown up immersed in a community of Jewish families, Jewish classmates, and Jewish friends, Myerson admits to being startled by the blatant anti-Semitism she quickly encountered during her brief tenure in the pageant world. A 1995 interview with the
Chicago Jewish News
asserts that several judges were warned by an anonymous caller “not to choose the Jew.” Myerson herself recalls that Slaughter advised her to take the name Beth Merrick. She declined, of course, and now recognizes it as “the most important decision I ever made. It told me who I was, that I was first and foremost a Jew.”

So the pageant had a problem. But instead of taking her usual approach—facing challenges head-on and attempting to transform them into substantive assets—Slaughter did what just about every subsequent Miss America executive has also done. She tried to sidestep the issue. It was a rare moment for her, one that found her back on her heels instead of proactively taking charge of the situation. By all accounts, she just didn’t get Bess Myerson’s back.

Although there may not have been any outward indicators that Lenora Slaughter was fumbling with how to handle the situation, the message apparently came through loud and clear to the pageant’s sponsors. Myerson reportedly received far fewer invitations than her predecessors for public appearances from sponsors like Ford and Catalina. “Those companies didn’t want a Jew representing them,” she has said. Even during her appearances at veterans’ hospitals, where a large portion of her audience had fought against the extermination of the Jewish race, she remembers encountering anti-Semitism.

With the benefit of history and information that Lenora Slaughter did not have, it’s easy to look back and call her behavior in the Bess Myerson episode cowardly at best, bigoted at worst. But consider this: nearly seven decades later, there are still Fifth Avenue apartment buildings that New York real estate agents are quietly advised not to show to their Jewish buyers, because their purchase will never be approved by the building’s board of directors. The story of Jewish culture in America in any era is a complex one, and certainly beyond the scope of this particular project. But this episode was an early and obvious example of two of the pageant’s most consistent and self-destructive patterns: first, defaulting to a reactive position (rather than crafting a clear and firm identity and sticking with it), and second, sacrificing the young women it claims to celebrate in the name of the pageant’s survival.

Fortunately, Myerson herself had the fortitude that the pageant lacked, and demonstrated the type of big-picture vision that allows significant human beings to hurdle over insignificant ones. After all, women had fought for the vote, flown airplanes, run the country while “the boys” were fighting for Europe’s freedom. Women had already internalized that they had options besides dutifully staying home with the kids. The boldest among them, like Alice Paul, like Amelia Earhart, like Bess Myerson, followed through by leveraging their power into action.

Instead of sitting alone and frustrated in her hotel room, wishing she could have her picture taken with hope chests and helpful household appliances, Bess Myerson joined forces with the thirty-year-old Anti-Defamation League. Instead of spending time in department stores, as many of her predecessors had done, this Miss America launched a speaking tour. She determined that she would “make her reign one that would matter.” When the ADL suggested she use her position to speak to students and community groups, she jumped at the chance. She toured 15 cities. Pag
eant officials were not pleased, Myerson recalled. ‘They accused me of making communist speeches sponsored by Jewish manufacturers.’
”

Bess Myerson used her unique celebrity to push the pageant—uphill and pretty much against its will—toward a type of meaning it hadn’t yet experienced and probably didn’t deserve. Like Jean Bartel before her, she left a legacy when she handed over her crown. By the end of 1945, Miss America could both go to college and say something important to the world, from the perspective of a young woman whose voice would not otherwise be heard. Although Slaughter had tested the idea of framing Miss America as a serious, intelligent, independent young woman, it had been understood that things were done on her terms. Rather than let Slaughter’s lack of faith in her potential dictate her narrative, Myerson was the first to take control of her own destiny. Ironically, it was this exact defiance of the pageant leadership that allowed her to make manifest the qualities that Miss America endeavored to embody.

Even today, Myerson continues to be considered an anomaly—significantly lauded, somewhat troubled, but a woman who evolved Miss America’s image to one that was more complex, interesting, and relevant. But regardless of this progress, it was still going to be a tricky proposition to convince the country that the girl in the swimsuit and high heels wasn’t just a pinup.

That was where Yolande Betbeze came in.

There is significant debate about the actual facts of Yolande Betbeze’s story, although there’s not much debate that she was the next to significantly propel the pageant forward. Betbeze, a twenty-one-year-old convent-educated native of Mobile, Alabama, has inaccurately gone down in pageant lore as the Miss America who refused to
be crowned in a swimsuit. Among other challenges, this would have been a rather impractical rebellion for a not-yet Miss America. Even though pageant officials were frequently known to tell the winner in advance so that she might maintain her composure for the cameras, Betbeze would have had to digest that news, run backstage, yank off her industrial-strength bathing suit, and get herself into something more to her liking. Those who have actually encountered Yolande Betbeze in person might be inclined to take a position like “Well, if anyone could do it, it would probably be Yolande,” and they would be right. In reality, though, the pageant had done away with this tradition a couple of years earlier.

By 1948, Slaughter and company had significantly cleaned up the pageant’s image. In 1947, Barbara Jo Walker was the last Miss America to be crowned in a swimsuit, and that year’s crop of contestants would be the last to show their midriffs for quite a while, as the pageant outlawed two-piece swimsuits altogether for the ensuing fifty years.

In 1950, the pageant announced that it would begin postdating the winner’s title; since most of the post–Labor Day winner’s reign (as it was then called) fell in the next calendar year, the Miss America crowned in 1950 would officially be Miss America 1951. With Yolande Betbeze, as it happened, the pageant got itself enough Miss America to handle for two calendar years. And then some.

In reality, Betbeze didn’t have to worry about being crowned in a swimsuit. But she certainly had some opinions about what else she would do in one. Shortly after her crowning, she bluntly put to rest any notion that she would swim with the tide when it came to the annual Catalina promotional tour, or any other event where she was expected to take off most of her clothes. Emphasizing that she had entered the pageant for the scholarships, not to become
a pinup, Betbeze flatly declared that “she would be seen in a swimsuit only when she intended to swim and not for ‘cheesecake’ poses.”

“Betbeze wore the fabled crown uneasily,” according to a January 2006 story in
Smithsonian Magazine
, which giddily recounts her donation (to their National Museum of Natural History) of everything from her crown and scepter to fan letters and telegrams from Lenora Slaughter. “In 1969, she recalled to the
Washington Post
that she had been too much of a nonconformist to do the bidding of the pageant’s sponsors. ‘There was nothing but trouble from the minute that crown touched my head,’ she said.” Nevertheless, she is widely recognized as a lasting influence on the evolution of Miss America, especially since her actions “caused Catalina Swimwear to withdraw its sponsorship of the Miss America pageant and to create the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, both of which focused heavily on physical beauty and crowned their winners in swimsuits.”

Betbeze went on to become an outspoken activist for women’s rights and civil rights. Like Bess Myerson before her (and in a gesture that must certainly have added to Lenora Slaughter’s rapidly accumulating gray hairs), she did not feel it necessary to wait until the end of her reign to begin her activism; instead, she launched “verbal attacks against the objectification of women in pageants while she wore the Miss America crown.” With the simple acquisition of one coveted tiara, the convent-school girl from Mobile became a crusader.

The elimination of the swimsuit from prominence is easy to overstate, though it remains—even today—the most hotly debated element of the Miss America program. Betbeze’s indirect spawning of the Miss USA/Miss Universe Pageants (and the cottage industry of similar competitions that would spring up in coming years) would have a greater long-term impact on Miss America than what she chose to wear during her reign. The Miss Universe Orga
nization—which also comprises Miss USA and Miss Teen USA—is currently co-owned by Donald Trump and NBC, and is Miss America’s most direct competition. Aside from foisting upon an unwitting public Trump’s criteria for female beauty (he once opined that it’s impossible to tell if a woman is attractive unless she’s wearing a swimsuit . . . or less), the establishment of Miss USA and Miss Universe has complicated Miss America’s journey. Sure, there is general public confusion about the differences between the programs, which is difficult to correct. But the Miss USA/Universe staff has a simple goal—find the hottest girl in the room and put a crown on her head—and they market that goal very effectively. Miss America has a more complex message, especially today, and it is sold poorly.

Yolande Betbeze wanted to emphasize talent, intellect, class, and social awareness ahead of her (remarkable) physical beauty. What she actually ended up doing was contributing significantly to a much larger debate about the traits we value and prioritize in the American woman, one that to this day Miss America’s messengers have only fleetingly been able to influence. Miss America’s identity has always been riddled with contradictions and anomalies. By pushing the pageant to be more progressive and substantive than its caretakers aspired for it to be, women like Bartel, Myerson, Betbeze, and even Slaughter introduced a much more demanding mission for the institution they were shaping.

In the proper historical context, though, both Myerson’s and Betbeze’s actions seem less rebellious than they do reflective of what was happening among women in America. Between the First World War and the end of the Second, society’s norms regarding the feminine ideal had substantially shifted. Two consecutive generations of young men had left their sisters, mothers, and wives behind to fight on foreign soil, and the Great Depression had almost all Americans scrambling to exploit every resource and survival
skill. Beyond that, women started to figure out that in the midst of life-and-death moments, traditional social norms about femininity could be more easily broken down. The flapper is an obvious outcome of this type of dissolution; so, too, is Prohibition and the influence of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.