Queen Bess Read online

  With World War II now finally over, the military was bringing the boys back home. For almost four thousand men that September their first stop was Atlantic City’s Thomas N. England General Hospital. There had been a strong military presence in Atlantic City since the U.S. Army took over the town in 1941, turning the city’s hotels and convention centers into barracks and stations to train thousands of soldiers. Almost all of those soldiers still in town would crowd into the old Warner Theater to watch the Miss America pageant that week.

  When Bess and the other thirty-nine contestants arrived in Atlantic City, they first went to the Miss America pageant’s headquarters at the Seaside Hotel for registration and their hotel assignment. They were instructed not to smoke, drink, or speak with men (including their fathers) during pageant week, or they would face disqualification.

  On the registration forms that were distributed to the press Bess claimed to be 5’10”, an inch shorter than her actual height. Her other measurements, mentioned in almost every news story: weight, 136 pounds; 35½-inch bust; 25-inch waist; 35-inch hips; 20-inch thighs; 14½-inch calves; even ankle, neck, upper arm, and wrist measurements were given. She wore a size thirty-six bathing suit, a size fourteen dress, and size nine shoes.

  Bess and Sylvia watched the other contestants as they registered at the Seaside Hotel. “We got there, and here are these lovely girls, beautiful girls, shapely girls with their mothers,” Bess told a reporter years later. “And I looked at those girls, and I said to Sylvia, ‘I’m never going to make the final ten.’ I was taller than anybody. I was skinny. I felt awkward, but I had felt that way most of my life, and I hadn’t evolved to the point where I accepted my own attractiveness.”

  It also seemed to Bess that all the other girls were dressed in stylish clothes. Other than her Samuel Kass evening gowns, she had brought only the royal blue and chartreuse outfits made by John Pape’s seamstress. As they checked into their room at the Brighton Hotel, Bess told Sylvia she didn’t think she had brought enough clothes.

  Sylvia told her not to worry. When they got upstairs and into their hotel room, she spread the outfits on the bed and showed Bess all of the possible combinations. “First you have the all-blue outfit,” she said to Bess, dancing around the room as she held up the blue skirt and blue blouse, trying to get Bess to smile.

  “Then you have the all-lime outfit. Then you can wear the blue top with the lime skirt and the lime top with the blue skirt.”

  “She made eight outfits,” said Bess.

  No one who watched Bess move around Atlantic City that week would have guessed that she felt so insecure. In fact, one of the other contestants said she believed from the beginning that Bess would take the crown.

  “From the minute we got there, we were in awe of this big, tall, beautiful gal,” remembered Miss Florida, Virginia Freeland Berry. “We knew that she was going to be Miss America from the time we arrived because she didn’t look like the rest of us. She was so tall. She was really tanned. Her hair was black. She had beautiful hair. And she was just so confident. If she was nervous, she didn’t show it.”

  Berry and some of the other contestants suspected that Bess was Lenora Slaughter’s favorite and that pageant officials were guiding her to victory. Lenora adamantly denied ever choosing one girl over another during a contest.

  “She was one of the girls that I admired tremendously,” Lenora said. “But I trained myself never to have any feeling about one girl. If I had, it would have been the kiss of death.”

  Lenora remembered, though, that Bess did emerge as a potential winner early in the contest. “She was what they used to call ‘a definite threat.’ She wasn’t a little southern beauty, you know. She stood out. She had a mouth of the most beautiful teeth you’ve ever seen. She had that dark tan and that gorgeous head of curly brown hair. She was just a beautiful girl. And then, of course, she was very talented, and we didn’t have too many talented girls. It took years to get the talented girls they have on the stage today.”

  Bess got a chance to display her talent at the Warner Theater on Wednesday, September 5, which was the first day of official judging. The forty contestants were organized into three groups for preliminary competitions in talent, bathing suit, and evening gown. Thirteen finalists would be chosen from the preliminaries to compete for the Miss America title Saturday night.

  At 8:00 P.M. Wednesday Bess and the other contestants arrived backstage at the Warner Theater on the Boardwalk for the pageant’s opening night. Bess had practiced the piano and flute earlier that day at a rehearsal for those competing in the talent division that night.

  More than thirty-five hundred people were jammed into the Warner Theater, including hundreds of servicemen who set the tone for the audience with their cheers and whistles. As the curtain rose, the U.S. Coast Guard Band, in dress whites, struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a spotlight shone on a huge American flag draped against a black silk drop.

  Gerald R. Trimble, owner of the Claridge Hotel, introduced the judges, and Venus Ramey, Miss America 1944, was presented to the crowd.

  The talent competition opened with Miss Iowa performing a tap dance, followed by Miss Connecticut, who sang “I’m in the Mood for Love,” and Miss Illinois, who belted out “The Sheik of Araby.”

  When Bess walked onstage, she looked confident and regal in her white dress. She first played George Gershwin’s “Summertime” on the flute with the orchestra and then took a seat at the piano and performed once again her three-minute arrangement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. She nearly brought down the house.

  The ten judges, sitting in the first few rows, had difficulty deciding between Bess and Frances Dorn, Miss Birmingham, who won wild applause for a fast-paced tap routine. The judges finally announced a tie for first place. As a winner of a preliminary competition, Bess now had a chance of becoming a finalist Saturday night.

  The next night Bess wore her new white Samuel Kass gown with long sleeves in the evening gown competition. While the judges revealed their scores in the talent and bathing suit competitions, they traditionally kept the winner of the evening gown competition secret to add to the suspense on Saturday night.

  There was now only the bathing suit preliminary contest Friday night before the finals on Saturday. Winning the bathing suit contest would ensure her a place among the finalists. Surrounded by so many other beautiful young women, Bess felt unsure about herself, although she recalls being “filled with a flaming competitive spirit.” She knew she had to keep going and try to win “no matter how insecure I felt,” she later told a reporter. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Move through the event. Stand tall.’ I wasn’t confident. But my mother had taught me the process of doing my best.”

  The importance of the bathing suit preliminary competition Friday night made it only more difficult for Bess when she learned on Thursday that the size twelve white bathing suit that looked great with her dark tan was too small. Lenora thought it rode too high in the back. She sent over a size fourteen for Bess to wear instead. Only it was not white. It was lime green and hung on her tall, thin frame like a potato sack. Bess was devastated.

  “I looked like a frog,” Bess remembered. “I had this suntan, a little darker than lime green. The fourteen was impossible. It was just silk jersey, had no built-in supports, anything like that, and I looked like a telephone pole draped in lime green.”

  Once again Sylvia saved the day. She thought of the perfect way to stretch out the size twelve white suit. She put it on over her own bulky frame. “She slept in it all night,” Bess said. “She was at least two or three sizes larger than me.”

  On Friday morning Bess put on the white suit and joined the other contestants at the Thomas N. England General Hospital to entertain the wounded veterans. The suit was still too tight, but it looked great with her tan. She got the most whistles and the loudest cheers. It was not a surprise when they voted Bess the likely winner of the Miss America title.

  Bess returned to the
hotel early that afternoon and complained to Sylvia that the white suit was still too small to wear in the preliminary competition that night. Sylvia removed the buttons on the straps, loosening them enough for Bess to pull down the bottom of the suit even more. Then Sylvia sewed the straps shut. Bess was now sewn into her white suit. She had to wear an evening gown for the opening of the show, so she slipped her gown over the suit and headed to the theater.

  As she joined the other contestants onstage at the Warner Theater, no one suspected Bess was wearing her bathing suit under her evening gown. When her name was called later that night for the bathing suit competition, she tried not to cough, sneeze, or laugh as she strode past the judges. “I heard this shriek in the audience. It was Sylvia,” she said.

  Bess won first place, making her the only winner of two preliminary competitions, talent and bathing suit. It was now clear she would be among the thirteen finalists. Some of the newspaper reporters were already picking Bess as the favorite to win.

  But Bess saw signs that did not indicate a sure victory. She felt some people were uncomfortable selecting a Jew. She became certain when one of the pageant’s photographers warned her, “They’re going to take it away from you.”

  “I said, ‘They can’t take it away from me,’” Bess recalled. “‘You can take it away from me because I am too tall or because my eyes are not light blue. But you cannot take it away from me because I’m Jewish.’ And there was something in me; something that happened to me. It was like I was backed up against the wall and somebody was saying to me, ‘You are going to go just that far and no further, unless you play the game our way.’ I thought, ‘If I keep in that stationary position, nothing is going to happen to me.’”

  It was only a few hours until the finals. Bess tried to put out of her mind the photographer’s grim warning and her troubling thoughts that some people associated with the pageant did not want her to win. She would learn years later that her suspicions were correct. Someone was plotting to rob Bess of the title, to make sure Miss New York City—a Jew—did not become Miss America that night.

  The mysterious phone call came Saturday night to one of the judges, Harry Conover, as he was getting ready to leave his hotel room and join the other judges at the Warner Theater for the Miss America pageant finals.

  “The caller did not identify himself,” said Candy Jones, a former Miss Atlantic City and top New York model who later married Conover. “He said, ‘We do not want a Jewish Miss America. And if you do vote for her, you will never be invited back again.’”

  Jones, who had been invited to return to the pageant by Lenora Slaughter, said Conover slammed down the phone in disgust.

  Conover wasn’t the only judge who got a mysterious phone call that night. “It was well known that this nasty situation existed,” said Jones, now a talk show host for New York’s WMCA-AM radio, referring to the level of anti-Semitism at that time in Atlantic City.

  Jones could not imagine another contestant taking the crown away from Bess Myerson that night. “Her talent was spectacular. She had the best smile. She had a good figure. She looked very refined but very wholesome. There had been so many cutie-poos, Bess should not have had any problem.”

  Conover had been marking high scores for Bess in the preliminary competitions all week, even though he had rejected her as a potential model a year before because she didn’t look All-American enough for his agency.

  What prevented anyone from stealing the crown from Bess that night was the elaborate scoring system used during the pageant’s preliminary competitions. Even if judges had yielded to pressure, it would have been virtually impossible to ignore the fact that Bess was the only double winner in the preliminaries.

  Bess did not know about the phone calls until years later, but she said that at the time she felt “there were people there who were not rooting for me, who were going to deprive me of something because I was of the Jewish faith. I think there was a lot of anti-Semitism then. Nobody said anything directly to me, but I was a difficult product for them, as it turned out.”

  That night at the Warner Theater, without any knowledge of the mysterious phone calls, Bess joined the other contestants backstage with the same hopes and dreams: to walk down the runway at midnight with a scepter, robe, and crown.

  The Warner Theater was packed. Bess’s younger sister, Helen, came down from the Bronx and sat in the audience with Sylvia. Their parents remained at home and did not even listen to the pageant broadcast live on radio.

  Nearly ninety reporters, magazine writers, and photographers filled the press section. Camera crews from five newsreels and the American Broadcasting Company had their lights, cameras, and equipment set up along the front of the stage. For the first time in its history the pageant was to be carried on five hundred television stations around the country.

  The curtain rose at 8:00 P.M. with the U.S. Coast Guard Band playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a spotlight once again illuminating the American flag. Then a gold-and-silver curtain parted, giving the audience its first glimpse of the forty contestants in their evening gowns.

  Bob Russell, the master of ceremonies, then stepped to the microphone and to a hushed house announced the names of the thirteen finalists. As expected, Bess was among them.

  As she stood onstage next to another finalist, Arlene Anderson, Miss Minnesota, Bess could not imagine herself as the winner. “She seemed to me to have complete beauty requirements,” Bess said years later about Anderson, who was pretty and petite. “Looking down at her, I felt tall and thin and miserable. I wanted to go home.”

  Shortly before midnight, as the judges were ready to tally their scores, the thirteen finalists stood on a platform in their bathing suits behind Russell, who was trying to keep the audience’s interest with a few jokes and songs. Finally a judge handed him a card.

  The orchestra gave a drum roll.

  “And the fourth runner-up is Arlene Anderson, Miss Minnesota,” Russell announced.

  Bess was numb. She had been sure that Arlene’s looks would win.

  “The third runner-up is Virginia Freeland, Miss Florida.”

  But she was such a pretty blond! And the judges had loved her performance in the talent competition.

  “The second runner-up, Frances Dorn, Miss Birmingham.”

  Bess took a deep breath. Frances Dorn had been her toughest competition in the talent division.

  “The first runner-up is Phyllis Mathis of San Diego.”

  “And Bess Myerson is Miss America.”

  The audience cheered and applauded wildly. Flashbulbs flickered throughout the theater as photographers captured the first shots of Miss America 1945, smiling her dazzling smile as she stepped down from a platform to the front of the stage to take Bob Russell’s hand. She looked serene and composed as Miss America 1944, Venus Ramey, put an ermine robe around her shoulders and the glittering crown on her shiny, dark, wavy hair.

  Still smiling, Bess strolled down the runway carrying a scepter in one hand and a bouquet of American Beauty red roses in the other. She paused at the end of the runway and waved her scepter to the cheering crowd before turning back toward the stage. Past winners had often wept, overcome by emotion, but Bess never shed a tear.

  6

  Pride and Prejudice

  Lenora Slaughter was beaming as she took her new queen by the arm and led her through the crowd of well-wishers to the Coronation Ball at the Claridge Hotel. Lenora had what she wanted, a beauty with brains, a Miss America who could change the image of the Miss America pageant and would attract more money for the scholarship fund.

  Bess danced until the early morning hours, returning to her hotel room at 6:00 A.M. Later that morning she was awakened by a telephone call from Earl Wilson, the columnist from the New York Post, who had a few questions for New York City’s first Miss America.

  “Haven’t you got pretty long gams?” Wilson asked.

  “Yes. They call me Long John,” Bess quipped.

  “
What’s your favorite cocktail?”

  “Milk.”

  “Do you ever neck?”

  “Neck? A little sometimes. Just from the neck up.”

  “Ever say damn or hell?”

  “No. I say gee whiz.”

  “Are you a sweater girl?”

  “Oh sure, I wore them all through college, but I don’t wear them tight. I wear them long and sloppy.”

  “Do you care for Sinatra?”

  “I can take him or leave him.”

  “Are you beautiful?”

  “I thought a lot of the kids here were more beautiful. I’m just kind of attractive, a little different-looking. I’m not underestimating myself. I’m just being frank.”

  “Do you wear a girdle?”

  “No.”

  “A brassiere?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pads?”

  “Me? No, sir.”

  “Tell me, did anything funny happen at the contest?”

  “Yes,” Bess replied. “I won it.”

  Wilson ended his column by describing Bess as “one of the smartest dolls I have ever talked to.”

  At her first press conference early that afternoon on the lawn of the Brighton Hotel, Bess met with more than seventy reporters and photographers, representing newspapers and magazines from around the country. She responded to dozens of inane questions ranging from her views on the end of the war to what color nail polish she preferred (dark red). She startled reporters when she said that she intended to decline the Hollywood screen test that went along with her scepter and crown. She proclaimed the only reason she had entered the pageant was to obtain the scholarship so that she could pursue a master’s degree in music.

  A Miss America who did not want to become a glamorous movie star? A beauty queen who wanted to go to Juilliard? The newspapers dubbed Bess “a very serious type” and America’s “first beauty with brains.”