Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 certainly 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 however 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