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

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 tobe 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 becomea 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