Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) (6 page)

That first television contract stipulated that about 125 ABC affiliates were to broadcast the show in its “entirety”—to be completely accurate, it should be pointed out that many of those early telecasts actually began before the cameras went live at ten thirty in the evening. Numerous other affiliates joined the in-progress show at eleven, after their regularly scheduled programming but in time for the crowning of the new Miss America.

As Atlantic City held its collective breath, hoping that Convention Hall wouldn’t be vacant while the show aired at home for free, households across the nation tuned in to the broadcast in unbelievable numbers. Twenty-seven million viewers watched Lee Meriwether take her walk down the runway, and the pageant scored a 39 share of the viewing audience. Once again, Atlantic City foreshadowed its future as a gambling town, and another huge roll of the dice paid off big time. The massive success of the show transformed the pageant into a major network television event for the next fifty years.

Infinitely more important than any of the ratings numbers, however, were the two biggest and most lasting results of the 1954 competition—the national and remarkably indelible branding of Miss America’s image, and the concept of turning an ordinary American girl into a household name overnight.

Miss America’s presence on television, once and (arguably) for all, went a long way toward cementing her brand.
While the first thirty-ish years had piqued public interest, and had clearly achieved the original objective of keeping the tourists in Atlantic City for an extra week in September, 1954 was the year the pageant really exploded into a national phenomenon.

In reality, this instant brand identity has proven, over the decades, to be both a blessing and a curse. Those early, grainy images look more like a debutante parade than the actual rough-and-tumble, roll-your-stockings-down infancy of the pageant. Watching the contestants float up and down the endless Convention Hall runway in orderly formations, it’s easy to understand why this soft-focus image continues to stick with the average viewer to this day. No matter what more contemporary updates have been attempted (and attempted, and attempted, and attempted), this vision of idealized 1950s Southern belle femininity has refused to budge.

As for Miss America herself? She, too, remains firmly ensconced in the minds of many as an archetype rather than an individual. Miss America is an ideal, as Bernie Wayne’s famous anthem has proclaimed for decades, but in the hearts and minds of the public, she is a very specific type of ideal. She is classy, charming, charismatic, and humble. She is a lady. She has a decorous and prominent sense of purity—she may not actually be a virgin, but she sure can play one on TV. She is usually politically and personally conservative. She is both approachable and appropriate to place on a pedestal. She is pretty, but blush-of-youth pretty, and she seemingly just woke up that way one day, at around the age of sixteen, without trying too hard (see also: Lee Meriwether, 1955; Mary Ann Mobley, 1959; Judi Ford, 1969; Dorothy Benham, 1977; Shawntel Smith, 1996; Angela Perez Baraquio, 2001; Laura Kaeppaeler, 2012). Very few of those who have captured the national crown have been true bombshell-sexy young women—Yolande Betbeze (1951), Carolyn Sapp (1992), and Jenni
fer Berry (2007) being notable exceptions. In fact, as writer Frank Deford observed in 1971, “Most Miss Americas, when they win, are neither especially beautiful nor sexy. They become more beautiful with age.”

Miss America, on balance, is usually the kind of girl a mother would want her son to marry—or as Betbeze colorfully put it, “the kind of girl who would go into a bar and order orange juice in a loud voice.” If she were a car, she’d be an attractive, sensible coupe, not a pickup truck (despite her enduring heartland appeal) and
certainly not
a fast convertible with a V8 engine. For better or for worse, she is regarded by the greater public—with a fair amount of accuracy—as the ultimate girl-next-door-made-good.

And with the exception of a few specific winners—most of whom attained enduring celebrity status not as a direct result of winning the title but by virtue of the high-profile careers (and/or marriages) they leveraged it into—the institution, the image, the brand consistently remains more famous than the individual. Miss Americas have ranged in height from four feet eleven to six feet; they have possessed every hair and eye color under the rainbow (one fun game is to look back through the old Atlantic City program books at the sheer creativity the contestants employed to describe their features—not to mention their measurements). Contestants, and winners, have represented most of the prominent ethnicities in the United States, with the notable exception that there has never been a Muslim Miss America, and there has never been a winner who was openly gay—although more than one contestant has taken on gay/equal rights as her platform issue and there have been a sprinkling of out lesbian contestants at the local and state levels.

Regardless of these variations, the perceived “look” of a Miss America is remarkably stereotypical and consistent. Deford in particular analyzed the available statistics with his trademark sportswriter’s precision, but in general, my experience is that the public expects Miss America to be
tall (5′7″–5′11″), white—or, at the very least, the possessor of distinctly Caucasian features—blond, long-haired, light-eyed, effortlessly slender, shockingly beautiful, and tricked out in a gown and crown regardless of their appropriateness for any specific event. In truth, very few Miss Americas actually meet even most of these descriptors. The pageant itself has been significantly more diverse for many years, although it didn’t really start becoming a truly inclusive enterprise until about 1990.

A different kind of evolution, however, unquestionably occurred in the months and years immediately following Lee Meriwether’s televised crowning in 1954. For probably the first time in American history, a young woman attained true overnight celebrity. One day she was just another charming, lovely California girl; within hours of her crowning, she was a nationwide household name. She was certainly preceded by plenty of female celebrities—everyone from Abigail Adams to Harriet Tubman to Clara Bow to the consortium of American women who fought to win the vote—but this celebrity status was different. It came without a climb to the top, a publicly understood back-story, or any kind of recognizable body of work. Lee Meriwether wasn’t a star. And then, instantly, by virtue of a crown, a bouquet of flowers, and a long walk down a runway, she was.

Today, overnight fame is commonplace, although it often begins with scandal. A woman selected to marry a “millionaire” on live television also becomes a household name; so, too, can a nubile, ambitious girl who gets “blindsided” by the emergence of a sex tape (typically—and fortunately—this kind of fame is mercifully fleeting). But the Miss America Pageant did something that very few have ever succeeded in accomplishing: it lifted a young lady out
of complete obscurity without any kind of advance notice. Plenty of game-show and talent-show winners become famous these days, though usually over weeks of competition during which the field is gradually narrowed. Millions celebrate the newly minted stars of each Olympic Games, but plenty of those people watch the trials, qualifying rounds, and semifinals (and of course, there is a de facto, widely held and reinforced, and altogether correct, belief that Olympic medalists, Super Bowl champions, Academy Award winners, and the like do not just show up one day and win the biggest available prize). The country’s fascination with celebrity did not begin with Miss America, to be sure, but she was a major factor in its evolution. One could even persuasively argue that the Miss America Pageant, in the mostly accidental way it did pretty much everything else, was the very earliest incarnation of the now ubiquitous reality television trend. You’re not famous—and then, suddenly, you are.

It also didn’t hurt that Lee Meriwether’s 1954 victory by the Boardwalk launched a substantial acting career, and thereby secured her position as one of the top two or three Miss Americas who has achieved ongoing fame and recognized career success. (Meriwether, in fact, continues to perform consistently as she approaches the age of eighty.) She not only managed to acquire overnight fame, but she quickly and cannily used it as a platform to become a highly visible television and film presence. Most Miss Americas have not been able to leverage the title as successfully (although certainly not for lack of trying). It took the perfect storm of a young woman with talent, looks, charm, and a brain, a contest that earned her lightning-fast public admiration and respect, and a relatively new and hugely revolutionary type of technology to deliver her to the eager masses. Decades later, Vanessa Williams would gain far greater fame both because of and (more specifically) in
spite of her Miss America win. But in those early years, the Miss Americas simply rode the instant-celebrity wave as far as it, and they, could go.

The rise of the Miss America Pageant as a television event in some ways presaged the coming cultural divide over femininity in America. Already audiences were becoming fascinated by distinctly different types of women. Traditional femininity and beauty certainly still had their place in the pantheon, represented by stars like Grace Kelly. But there were plenty of female actors who embraced more-complex definitions of womanhood. Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich had all become wildly successful while deconstructing traditional norms of femininity. Natalie Wood’s tortured-youth persona resonated with a generation. Even cinema darlings like Elizabeth Taylor (particularly in
Suddenly Last Summer
and
A Place in the Sun
) gravitated toward a darker, more conflicted identity. Finally, the rise of stars like Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, and the countless knockoffs who follow even now, carved out a place for women who unabashedly traded on their sex appeal. All of these elements were present in the most interesting Miss Americas, even if they were often buried under layers of white tulle.

Part of Miss America’s peculiar brand of fame also represented an escape—a very public, respectable one, to be sure, but an escape nonetheless—from the average American life. Thousands upon thousands of women had embraced the “Rosie the Riveter” identity in the 1940s, only to be relegated to the kitchen again when the boys came home. Suddenly, the daily tasks that had seemed satisfying and appropriate for generations were a little less exciting—and this realization coincided with a technological moment that clearly offered some fascinating alternatives. The allure of instant fame was not new. But as embodied by Miss America, just a pretty hometown girl who suddenly seemed to have infinite opportunity ahead of her, fame ap
peared far less mysterious and much more attainable. It was, in many ways, the final moment of ascent to the tipping point. Within a few short years, women would openly rebel against the mores that kept them in the kitchen; in the last-gasp-of-innocence fifties, they could at least cheer from their living rooms as the girl next door floated down a long, glossy runway of possibility.

In hindsight, it’s both fascinating and frustrating to look at the pre-television Miss Americas with the knowledge of what was to come. For example, as significant as Bess Myerson’s year was—and as consistently as she stayed in the public eye for decades—it’s hard not to speculate about how the power of national television could have compounded her impact. What if the coronation of the first Jewish Miss America had gone out to 27 million viewers simply because she’d been born ten years later? What would it have meant for the Miss America Pageant to choose her after Hitler’s incomprehensible atrocities had been fully uncovered? But, on the flip side, would she then have been embraced by the sponsors who tossed her aside in 1945? Might her acceptance by those sponsors have meant she would have been unavailable to do the more important work to which she dedicated herself during her time as Miss America? Maybe stardom wasn’t what Myerson needed. Maybe she needed to be marginalized, in order to fight back on behalf of her devastated community. Maybe her impact would have been reduced by a decade’s delay.

In 1921, Miss America was born. In 1954, she quickly became a nationally recognized commodity. How the pageant brass dealt with that enormous success—and how, to this day, they continue to try to harness and direct the potential of Miss America’s identity—would illuminate both the definition of American femininity and the opportunities and limitations of overnight fame.

It begins: in 1921, Margaret Gorman of Washington, DC (third from right), was named the first Miss America. The Vicki Gold Levi Collection
.