Queen Bess Read online

  Hollywood and Broadway press agents thought her decision to turn down the screen test was nothing more than a marvelous publicity stunt. But Bess knew her limitations and realized she had no dramatic abilities. She also believed that her parents would be furious if she had agreed to the screen test. “Hollywood to them meant bad girls, bad times, and I guess I never had the courage then to just go out and do it on my own. My father felt anything one did with his hands was respectable. My mother thought anything that one did with the hands and the mind was respectable,” Bess said years later.

  Bella was so concerned that the beauty pageant might have sullied her daughter’s reputation that she set the record straight right away in the New York Post: “She’s pretty and she’s a nice girl and so she won. She’s not one of those runaround girls, which is why we’re proud of her.”

  Louis, who had been described in the newspapers as a “well-to-do interior decorator,” said he thought the results were “very nice” but added that he may not have chosen Bess if he had been the judge: “I wouldn’t say she’s bad-looking, but maybe, if I was the judge, I would have chosen one of the other girls.”

  The Myersons’ friends, family, and neighbors at the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses were elated that someone from the complex had become Miss America, but underlying the congratulations was resentment among some neighbors, who wondered what Bessie Myerson had over their “Rosie.”

  “Some people were saying that,” said Judy Sanderoff, who lived upstairs from the Myersons. “But we were so proud of her. She was one of our own.”

  “It became sort of a victory for the Jews,” said Mildred Schwartzman, another neighbor. “It was more important that she was Jewish than that she was from the house.”

  The people of the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses greeted her return with a bouquet of red roses. There was music and dancing in the cafeteria. “When I came back as Miss America, I felt like a lady,” Bess said. “I had the world waiting outside. I went up to my apartment, and I wanted to share that with them because we had shared so much pain.

  “Do you know what that would have meant to me if I had been Betty Merrick and I had disowned them? This was the only place I was nourished throughout my entire life. I have been nourished by my own Jewishness. That never leaves me.”

  Her friend Ruth Singer said the 1945 Miss America pageant was probably the first and last pageant the people of the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses ever followed. “A girl walking down a runway with bare legs was not an attraction, but she was one of ours.”

  Before departing on a four-week vaudeville tour, Bess spent a few days in New York, beginning her new life as a glamorous celebrity. She stayed at the Ambassador Hotel and dined at the Pierre. She once again visited Mayor La Guardia. She went to a beauty parlor for the first time in her life, and she bought her first pair of high-heeled shoes, black satin pumps. She answered more questions from reporters and posed for more photographs.

  “Men?” she said in response to a question posed during a press conference at the Ambassador Hotel shortly after she returned to New York. “Well, naturally, they must be tall since I’m so tall. About six-two, generally intelligent, kind of attractive, in a muscular way. And I’d like him to like music.”

  “Any boyfriends?”

  “Sure, I have lots of boyfriends.”

  “Someone special?”

  “We—ll,” she said, smiling a secretive smile.

  The truth was she had no one special at all.

  Stacks of letters with proposals were, however, arriving at her family’s home in the Bronx, and mothers were trying to interest her in their sons. A woman who had read about her in the Bronx Home News thought she would make an ideal daughter-in-law and urged her to meet her son, a dentist, who was also interested in music.

  Bess was not intrigued. “Well, if the man can’t ask me himself, then I don’t want him,” she told reporters.

  The vaudeville tour, billed as the American Beauty Review, began at the Adams Theater in Newark, New Jersey, a week after the pageant. Bess’s pronouncements that she was too serious about her music for a Hollywood screen test did not stop her from appearing on a live bill with “featured acrobatics, ventriloquial antics, the Marimba Co-Eds, and a vocalist singing a medley of romantic melodies.” Lenora had signed up Miss America and the top five finalists with the William Morris Agency, which booked them into theaters in New York, Newark, Hartford, and Detroit. The tour paid $1,000 a week. Bess was glad to be finally earning some money. She expected the title to bring her not only fame but fortune as well.

  Bess had never seen a vaudeville show before she arrived in Newark, and she did not like what she found. The theater was old. The dressing rooms were dirty and the audience unruly. “I came out in a high-necked gown and played ‘The Ritual Fire Dance’ and ‘Malagueña’ on the piano and flute. I could hear the boys in front complaining and muttering, ‘Where’s the bathing suit?’ So in the finale I came out in a white bathing suit, and the boys would cheer. Toward the end of the tour I realized that they didn’t want to hear my music, so I just came out in a bathing suit. Finally I was losing weight and not filling out the bathing suit, so I quit.”

  While the other finalists were accompanied by their parents on the vaudeville tour, Bess traveled alone. She was lonely and depressed. And she found it demoralizing that she had to play the piano and flute in between animal acts and second-rate comedians. In Detroit her friend Marjorie Wallis, who was living in Ohio, visited with her and was surprised to find her so blue. Bess told her that she wanted to go home. This is not how she had envisioned her Miss America reign. When the William Morris Agency offered to extend the American Beauty Review’s tour, Bess refused to go on. She told Lenora she wanted out. Lenora agreed.

  “In my heart I knew it wasn’t the right thing,” Lenora said about the vaudeville tour forty-three years later. “It was a colossal failure. In those days they had these acts running between the shows. She would come out and play the piano. And some of them made her come out in that damn bathing suit. And that I hated.”

  Virginia Freeland Berry, Miss Florida, remembers a different story. “We were told that Bess thought she could do better on her own and she wanted out. We kind of resented that.”

  Bess was ready to make money. On a postcard she sent to Lenora from Detroit on October 2, Bess wrote, “anxious to hear word from you about any recent developments on anything that’s come up.” She had bought her father a yellow station wagon with part of her earnings from the vaudeville tour, and now she expected pageant officials to line up endorsements and to schedule additional appearances. She assumed there would be dozens of corporations seeking her out to promote their products in the time of plenty right after the war. She dreamed that she would move her parents out of their apartment and into a building with an elevator. “During the Miss America pageant,” Bess said years later, “we contestants listened to endless tales of sponsors who discussed glamorous plans for the new Miss America, a fashion show, for example, on Catalina Island, because Catalina Swimsuits was a sponsor.”

  But few offers to promote products came her way that fall of 1945, and she was stunned when she discovered that she could not depend on Lenora to seek out advertising and promotional campaigns. Unlike today, the Miss America pageant did not provide winners with a chaperon or with much help in managing their reign. Lenora was already busy putting together next year’s pageant, and she did not have the time or the staff to help Bess find work. Lenora was expecting the William Morris Agency to arrange whatever bookings and endorsements that might come up.

  Within a month after she was crowned, however, Bess found herself caught in a messy dispute between the William Morris Agency and her brother-in-law over the management of her career. Harry Kalscheim of the William Morris Agency assumed he would be her agent since he had a contract with the pageant. Sylvia’s husband, William Grace, insisted that he was her manager and announced she would not appear on any radio progra
m that paid less than $500.

  When Kalscheim came up with radio appearances that did not meet the $500 rate, Grace rejected them. Lenora intervened. She sent Bess a letter suggesting that she ask her brother-in-law to step aside and allow the professionals at the William Morris Agency to manage her career. “I warned her to get herself an outsider, someone who was trained to be a manager,” Lenora said.

  Bess decided to stay with her brother-in-law, but eventually she turned to the director of the Vermont camp where she had been a music counselor. He signed her up with another agent. Still, the lucrative endorsements that Bess had expected did not materialize.

  “I had my hands full trying to help her make some money,” Lenora said. “Had she been a little sophomore, she would have gone back to college. But Bess was a college graduate, an ambitious kid. She had worked awfully hard, and she wanted to make money. She wanted to show her family that it would pay, and besides, Bess liked money. Who doesn’t?”

  That fall Bess visited wounded veterans in hospitals, attended bond rallies, and toured the White House, where she met Mrs. Truman. She was invited to appear at the Rose Bowl and Cotton Bowl parades. She modeled for a magazine layout for one of the pageant sponsors and posed in a shampoo advertisement for another. She also appeared at the National Canners’ Association convention as a hostess. But she did not always collect a fee since the pageant sponsors had already contributed to her $5,000 scholarship.

  Years later Bess would complain bitterly that she had earned less money than other Miss America queens because she was Jewish. She would blame anti-Semitism for the difficulties she faced in getting endorsements. “I wasn’t invited to attend as many events as I should have been,” she said. “In some instances I thought they really wanted a blond, not a brunette. I had to really cover. I had to really protect myself from the truth then.”

  Lenora insists that Bess had as many opportunities as past winners: “I don’t know why she says they didn’t use her. I think Bess is mistaken there.”

  Until Lenora Slaughter began providing some management and chaperons for the Miss America winners in the late 1940s, Bess and almost all of the other titleholders faced difficulty earning money during their reigns. Without the pageant’s help, Bess made mistakes, inadvertently angering two of the pageant’s five sponsors, first by appearing in a drugstore advertisement touting a competitor’s shampoo and then by posing for a magazine layout in a bathing suit that was not a Catalina.

  While Bess did encounter anti-Semitism at the pageant and during her reign, it is hard to tell what impact anti-Semitism had on her ability to cash in on sponsors and endorsements. She earned from sponsors and endorsements as much money as, if not more than, the two women who had been crowned Miss America in 1943. and 1944. In the first month of Bess’s reign she earned at least $4,000 from her vaudeville tour, in addition to her $5,000 scholarship. During her reign in 1943, former Miss America Jean Bartel made 469 appearances and earned a total of $3,000. Venus Ramey, Miss America 1944, collected $8,500, but not from endorsing products. She chose to go directly into vaudeville, performing the tango and the rumba. She was able to cash in on her celebrity for only a few months, however, prompting her to write a little poem that ended with “But it’s nice to be a Miss America, it makes life très gay/Now if I could only find a way to eat three times a day.”

  By late December Bess must have been thinking along the same lines when she was collecting mainly expenses for her travel. She did realize, however, that travel was a great teacher.

  Growing up in the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses, Bess had never encountered anti-Semitism. She had never been told she could not enter someplace because she was a Jew. Then, in Florida, she saw the signs outside of hotels that read “No Jews.”

  “Sometimes they said it subtly, and sometimes they said it quite obviously,” she recalled. “‘No Jews. No Dogs.’ I don’t know what they called the blacks then. It was overt.”

  Not as overt was the conversation she overheard at a country club she had been invited to by one of the sponsors. She cannot remember where the country club was located, perhaps outside of Wilmington, Delaware, or Baltimore, Maryland.

  “It was a lovely place,” said Bess, remembering the beautiful landscaped gardens, the impressive architecture. “My memory on certain things is very clear. I can almost smell the fireplace. This lovely black woman came in, and she used these bellows to stoke up the fires. I got dressed.

  “I was all dressed and standing tall and walking down the stairs, and I overheard this conversation.”

  “Well, you didn’t tell us she was Jewish,” said a member of the restricted club.

  Bess froze on the stairs. Then she heard that voice explain, “This is a restricted country club. We do not have Jews, and we do not have Negroes.”

  “I think I was arrested in motion,” Bess said. “I turned around and went up that stairway. I took off the gown. I just let it drop off my body. I took off the crown. I put it on top of the gown. I went over to where my own clothes were, and I got dressed silently.

  “It was as though I had to get through these next few minutes, and I couldn’t think about what it was that I had heard. I wanted to just get into my clothes, and I wanted to go home. Being Jewish was always a very important part of my life, and suddenly it didn’t suit them.”

  Hurt and stunned, she went directly to the train station that night and waited for a train bound for New York to take her back home to the Bronx, where she felt safe and secure. She can still remember standing on the platform sobbing uncontrollably. “I couldn’t stop crying because I wanted to go home. I wanted to feel safe and protected.”

  7

  “You Can’t Be Beautiful and Hate”

  On the train back to New York Bess began to think that maybe her need to return to her protective, insulated community in the Bronx was wrong. She felt that as a public person, in a position of power, she could be a positive influence. Maybe, she thought, she should be doing something with her reign other than getting keys to cities, riding in parades, and sitting in department store windows. “And I realized that this title was mine, forever, that I didn’t really lose it at the end of the year. I just didn’t want to be remembered as a beautiful but dumb broad.” She wondered what she could do to help end racism and anti-Semitism.

  At the end of 1945 the horror of the Holocaust was just beginning to make its way into the consciousness of the American people. Six million Jews had died in Nazi death camps. “We can’t live through a Holocaust and know we were not part of that,” Bess said to herself. “We can’t dismiss it as something that didn’t happen to us.”

  Disappointed that she was unable to earn a lot of money and deeply hurt by her experience at the exclusive country club, she welcomed an opportunity to meet with members of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, who proposed another way for her to spend her time. Harold Flender, a young writer who was dating her sister Helen, introduced her to his cousin-in-law Arnold Forster, who was counsel to the ADL. He thought Bess could be an effective speaker for the ADL’s ambitious new campaign against racism and anti-Semitism.

  “I had no idea who she was,” said Arnold Forster years later, remembering the day Flender brought Bess to his office. “I did not know why he brought her in, and I made a big blooper. He said to me, ‘She is ready to work for us.’ And I said, ‘Who is she? Should we be interested?’ He said, ‘Arnold, she is Miss America.’

  “From there on in, she worked for us. She was a good name to use. She had personality. She was pretty and had achieved a kind of renown. We set her up to speak before high school audiences across the country. She did an excellent job.”

  The ADL, founded in 1913 to battle anti-Semitism, created an organization called Youth Builders Inc. to provide high schools and civic groups across the country with people to speak out against bigotry, anti-Semitism, and racism. Discrimination against Jews was rampant in post-World War II America, Forster recalled, “discrimin
ation that no longer exists in any meaningful way in the United States today, which is to say it was difficult for Jewish applicants to get into colleges or graduate schools. It was impossible for them to get into jobs in big business, the utilities, and the banks. Insurance companies were virtually closed to them, except for sales jobs. It was rampant discrimination, to say it in one sentence, in housing, employment, education, and in the social areas, where it still exists.”

  With thousands of soldiers returning from war, competing for jobs, racial tensions were high, Forster said. The Ku Klux Klan, which now counts hundreds of people among its members, counted thousands then.

  Bess embraced her new assignment with enthusiasm. She finally had a role that would allow her to display some substance with her style. “If I’m supposed to be representative of the American girl, I want to make constructive use of that fact,” she explained to a reporter at the time.

  In February 1946 Bess began her speaking tour in Chicago and Milwaukee, visiting schools and community groups. The title of her speech was “You Can’t Be Beautiful and Hate.”

  “I talked to them about tolerance,” Bess remembered. “I told them to be kind to people different from themselves, to strangers who might speak with foreign accents, reminded them that it would be impossible to hate and be beautiful.” She also told groups about her experience in Atlantic City.

  “I said, ‘There were girls from big towns and little towns. Nobody asked if your parents spoke with an accent. Nobody called you, “Hey, Jewish girl. Hey, Catholic girl.” Not there, and we competed and won on our merit.’”

  In those first few months of 1946 Bess felt she was finally bringing her family honor. Not only was she now being taken seriously on the lecture circuit; she was also practicing the piano again for her Carnegie Hall debut.

  On May 31, 1946, she appeared at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic. The concert opened with Fantasia on Themes by George Gershwin. Wearing an evening gown and flat shoes, Bess played “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” based on a theme from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. For an encore she played Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu. There was loud applause, and a young girl approached her and handed her a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses.