Queen Bess Read online

  Bess harbored no illusions about her invitation to play at Carnegie Hall. “Of course I never would have had the chance to play at Carnegie if I hadn’t been Miss America,” she told the Associated Press in an interview four years later. “But the reviews were very nice, and they didn’t say anything about bathing suits.”

  While the reviews were favorable in the next day’s newspapers, Bess apparently did not perform well enough to satisfy her mother, who was in the audience that night.

  “My teacher, Mrs. LaFollette, and my mother were backstage at the end of the concert,” Bess recalled, “and Mrs. LaFollette went up to her and said, ‘Mrs. Myerson, Bessie was wonderful.’ And my mother looked up at her and said, ‘I don’t know why. She never practices.’”

  Bess remembered thinking then how she had practiced the piano all of her life to please her mother: “And I thought, ‘I’ll never win.’”

  With the Carnegie Hall performance Lenora Slaughter finally released the scholarship money that was being held for Bess until she was properly enrolled in school. But Bess did not enroll at Juilliard, the Curtis Institute, or anywhere else to obtain the master’s degree she had talked about during and right after the pageant. Instead she bought a black baby grand Steinway and drew on the rest of the money to pay for piano lessons and later for courses in music, elocution, and television at Columbia University.

  As her reign approached its end, Bess began to realize that the crown was losing its luster. “It seems incredible that all the doors won’t stay open indefinitely, but toward the end of the year you begin to realize that the title is losing its magic touch,” she said at the time. “Soon there’s talk of the Miss America to come—next year’s hot property.”

  When Bess returned to Atlantic City in September 1946 to crown her successor, Lenora had made sure that the new “hot property” would not encounter the same conflicts and difficulties Bess had experienced with sponsors and managers during her reign.

  The new Miss America would be required to sign a contract giving pageant officials the exclusive right to serve as her agent. The sponsors spelled out exactly what they expected of the winner. A budget was set up to provide Lenora with an assistant and to provide the new Miss America with a chaperon.

  Bess was hoping to earn some real money now that she was no longer required to make personal appearances for contest sponsors and the mayors of small towns. She made an appointment with modeling mogul Harry Conover about becoming one of his clients. Candy Jones remembered that Conover would not give her a job.

  “She was not taken on, mainly because the look then was a more birdlike face,” Jones said. “She had a perfect face for television, nice big strong features, but of course television wasn’t around then. She was also a little bit taller than the average model. The average height then was five feet, eight inches.”

  What Bess was really yearning for was a man. She was a Cinderella at midnight about to slip back into the anonymous crowd without her prince. On her final walk down the runway that September of 1946 Bess could think only of marriage and of a handsome young soldier she had met a few months before.

  8

  A Practical Prince

  Allan Wayne was twenty-seven years old, a tall, good-looking man with an athletic build, dark wavy hair, deep-set brown eyes, and a disarming smile. He was well mannered and knew how to turn on the charm. He must have cut an impressive figure in 1946, walking around Atlantic City in his captain’s uniform in those months after the war.

  He had spent three years as an artillery captain in the Pacific and had been back for only a few weeks when he first saw Bess Myerson sitting at a table in the Mayfair Lounge of the Claridge Hotel in Atlantic City. She was in an evening gown, having dinner with Lenora Slaughter and H. H. Wheeler, a supermarket owner and sponsor of the pageant’s college scholarship who had hired Bess to attend a convention that week and sign autographs at his exhibit space.

  Allan had heard about the Jewish girl from New York winning the Miss America title while he was overseas. As he studied her from across the room, he debated with his friend, another young officer, about whether they should introduce themselves. Finally they decided a polite approach might be the most successful. They sent over a note with a waiter to her chaperons, asking permission to meet her.

  “They were both nice-looking young officers,” Lenora recalls. “They just saw this beautiful girl, and the word was around—everyone knew who she was. They wrote me a little note and asked if they might come over and meet Miss America. And of course I didn’t feel that I had the right to give them permission to, but I approved of it, so I gave the note to Mr. Wheeler, and he said, ‘Of course.’ Mr. Wheeler asked them to join our table, which was perfectly proper and right in every way.

  “The two young officers danced with Bess. Every bit of it was just as nice as could be. A girl couldn’t meet a boy any nicer than Allan. He was very handsome and very nice.”

  As Bess and Allan glided over the dance floor, he told her that he was in Atlantic City for a few days with his father, who was attending a convention for toy distributors and manufacturers. He asked to see her again when they both returned home to New York City.

  Bess said later she knew that evening that she wanted to marry Allan Wayne. Unlike other young men she had met during her reign, he didn’t seem intimidated by her title. She felt comfortable with him.

  Allan was enthralled with Bess. After they parted that evening, he had a white orchid and a note delivered to her hotel room, asking to meet her the next evening. “Then we started to go out with each other, and neither of us went out with anyone else,” Bess said. Their romance blossomed into a steady courtship. It was sometimes difficult for them to see each other, though, because Bess was spending so much time traveling on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League and Allan, who was now working with his father in the toy business, was spending a lot of time on the road.

  That summer of 1946 Bess took Allan home with her to meet her family in the Bronx. The Myersons approved of Allan, who was Jewish and whose family name originally had been Weinshenker. He was the first man Bess had brought home whom her mother liked.

  Allan seemed to have just about everything Bess was looking for in a potential husband. He had been an officer in the war. He was now working in his father’s business. He was from a seemingly prosperous Jewish family from West End Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which Bess would call years later the “golden ghetto.”

  His mother, Cathryn, was a beautiful redhead who wore sophisticated clothes and smoked one cigarette after another. Some of her cousins in Baltimore recalled that she had won a beauty contest in Maryland before she moved to New York. His father, Gus, was a friendly and generous man who made a lot of money in the toy business and liked to spend it. To Bess, who had grown up in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, the Waynes represented upward mobility.

  At the end of her reign Bess did not want to return to her family’s cramped apartment in the Bronx, not after a year of roses and orchids, fur coats and first-class hotels. But leaving home to take an apartment on her own or with another young woman would have been unthinkable. “No woman left to get her own apartment and live on her own,” Bess said years later. “If you left, it was to get married. And if you weren’t getting married, you stayed there. And some of the girls who never got married never left home, ever.”

  She considered marriage her only option. Eight years after she was crowned she would tell a reporter that it was important for a beauty contest winner to find solid ground after a whirlwind tour: “The best thing that can happen to a beauty contest winner is to be engaged. Then, when the fanfare dies down, she can get married. It is a good excuse for not having a glamorous career.”

  At the time Bess could not have imagined parlaying her experience in public speaking into a career. “We were never taught as women or as girls that we could make it on our own,” she said in an interview many years later. “You had to get married, and the man you m
arried would take care of you. You’d never have to worry again, which never happens. That is a fairy tale. And that was an enormous problem because I think what I had built within myself was a history of dependency and being dependent on a man.

  “I was the last of a flock,” she said. “Imagine twenty-two, and I thought if I didn’t marry this man, nobody would ever ask me.”

  It was Bess who actually proposed to Allan Wayne. When asked months later by a newspaper reporter how he had proposed to Bess, Allan didn’t answer at first. Then he and Bess giggled.

  “You mean, who proposed,” said Allan, described in the newspaper P.M. as looking “like the man who smokes a pipe in those full-color ads.”

  “Sure,” Bess said. “He was roped in.”

  “The first time you asked me…,” Allan began.

  “… was when I told you to stop seeing that blond I didn’t like,” Bess said, finishing his sentence.

  “… And I asked you whether your intentions were honorable,” he said. “She said, ‘Strictly.’”

  “Provided he would reciprocate,” Bess added quickly.

  “I said I’d try,” replied Allan. “One thing led to another, and then I said, ‘I do.’”

  “But even before I proposed to him he brought me this very beautiful doll, dressed in a bridal costume,” Bess said. “I never would have proposed …”

  “… unless she knew that I’d say yes,” Allan said.

  “I just thought I’d help him out.”

  A month after the end of her reign as Miss America Bess and Allan eloped. They were married in a civil ceremony on October 19, 1946, in White Plains, north of New York City in Westchester County. The couple spent a few days in the Catskill Mountains at Grossinger’s, a popular resort among Jewish families, and then drove around New England. Because of the housing shortage in New York after the war, they didn’t have an apartment. Allan jokingly said that he would pitch a tent for them in Central Park. When they returned from their honeymoon, they moved into his parents’ apartment on West End Avenue. Cathryn and Gus gave up their bedroom for the newlyweds.

  Despite the elopement, Gus and Cathryn Wayne wanted to give Bess and Allan a formal wedding in a swanky midtown Manhattan hotel. On December 29 the stunning young couple was married in a Jewish religious ceremony followed by an elegant reception for 150 guests at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. “They were both so good-looking together that they looked like they stepped out of a movie,” recalled Bess’s cousin, Bebe Barkan.

  “It was fabulous. High-class,” recalled Allan’s cousin, Gilda Kramer, whose husband, Sam, remembered that Allan’s father gave Bess her first mink coat. “They were very, very good in-laws. She couldn’t have had a better life.”

  Though Gus and Cathryn were kind and generous, it must have been difficult for the young couple to live with his parents during their first year of marriage, particularly since Allan was often away on business trips.

  A longtime friend of the Wayne family remembers Bess disappearing into her bedroom whenever guests arrived: “She would always leave the living room. She was very cold. She was standoffish.”

  Bess kept herself busy in the first year of her marriage, using the pageant’s scholarship money to pay for her lessons and courses at Columbia University. She had given up her dream of becoming a professional musician or conductor, but she still studied the piano and gave piano lessons. She also continued to deliver speeches against racism and anti-Semitism on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

  Seven months after she was married Bess was pregnant. She gave birth to her only child, Barbara Carol, on New Year’s Eve in 1947. Barbara would later change her name to Barra. She would become one of the few anchors in Bess Myerson’s personal life.

  The Wayne apartment was not large enough for both Allan’s parents and the young family. Finally Bess and Allan found their own apartment in a less fashionable neighborhood on the northern tip of Manhattan. “We used to go up to Dyckman with bags and bags of groceries,” remembers a family friend. “Gus would go into her bedroom and put a few fifty-dollar bills in her purse. He would make sure they were taken care of.”

  Money was tight in those early post-World War II years. To earn extra money Allan opened a small store on Broadway during the Christmas season and sold stuffed animals. He also tried to boost his income by selling old records. With these extra earnings they were able to move to a better neighborhood, taking a small apartment at 155 East 93rd Street in Upper Yorkville.

  As a young mother, Bess accepted a few modeling assignments and jobs working as a commentator for fashion shows. But she spent most of her time at home, giving piano lessons. Her marriage to Allan Wayne seemed strong, yet Bess felt somewhat discontented. Like most young women in 1945, she had wanted to get married, but now that she was someone’s wife she felt that something was missing from her life. The words of one of her piano students struck her one day: “Isn’t it strange, Miss Myerson, you were Miss America and all that, and this is all you’re doing?”

  Suddenly, teaching piano seemed like scrubbing the floor to Bess. “And I thought, that’s right. This shouldn’t be all I’m doing. So I heard my mother’s voice again, even though she wasn’t there, saying, ‘So? What are you going to do next? What are you going to be good at?’”

  9

  The Lady in Mink

  Bess had been interested in pursuing a career in television ever since she had spent some of her Miss America scholarship money on courses in the new medium at Columbia University. In the late 1940s she made a few appearances on local programs, playing the piano on “The Jacques Fray Music Room” and appearing as a guest on variety and audience-participation shows.

  Television programming was sputtering into life now that World War II was over. TV’s “Golden Age” had arrived, bringing with it lots of opportunities for performers. The networks were constantly looking for talent in New York, where most shows were broadcast live from old theaters on the West Side of Manhattan. The television industry did not shift production to California until the late 1950s, when film and tape were introduced and network executives discovered they could save money by producing shows in Hollywood studios rather than trucking equipment from theater to theater in Manhattan.

  With her daughter approaching her third birthday, Bess began working regularly in September 1950 as the emcee of a musical quiz show on WPIX-TV, Channel 11, in New York. For posing the brain twisters and handing out the prizes, Bess earned $25 a week. “It was a tremendous training ground for me,” she said ten years later. “I never had anything to do with the theatrical world. I never had the stage as my goal. But in those days I helped in the production and the writing of the show, which taught me a lot.”

  The quiz show led to other opportunities, and soon Bess was also working as the hostess of a weekly interview show for housewives. Bess sometimes invited old friends on the show as guests. Lenora Slaughter remembers making an appearance to chat about the Miss America pageant. Candy Jones was invited to talk about her life as New York’s top model, and Virginia Freeland Berry, Miss Florida, who had become a successful model, recalls appearing on the show to share beauty tips.

  Opting to work outside the home in those post-World War II years was a bold decision for Bess. While working women had been lauded for their efforts during the war, at its end they were expected to return to the home and resume their roles as housewives and mothers. The antifeminist rhetoric of the time assailed women who worked, accusing them of destroying their families.

  Allan was supportive of Bess’s blossoming television career—with the proviso that her role as wife and mother remain her top priority. “She takes only those jobs she thinks she can do without interfering with the family,” Allan said at the time. In the beginning he helped manage her career, acting almost as an agent, handling the books and scheduling her television appearances and speaking engagements.

  Still delivering her “You Can’t Be Beautiful and Hate” speech for the A
nti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in the metropolitan New York area, Bess kept a busy schedule. In 1951 she was also committed to raising money at dinners for bonds for the state of Israel. A masterful speaker, she would raise more than $1 million for Israel over the next thirty years.

  It was at a fund-raising dinner on behalf of Israel that her poise and charisma at the podium impressed Walt Framer, a television producer. He thought she would be ideal to host his new giveaway show, “The Big Payoff.”

  Giveaway and quiz shows were popular with the new television audience in the 1950s. The shows were also inexpensive to produce. Manufacturers would swap millions of dollars in appliances, cars, clothes, airplane tickets, and cameras for the opportunity to reach a nationwide audience.

  “The Big Payoff,” first broadcast on December 31, 1951, became one of the most successful giveaway shows on television. “We felt that there ought to be something in television or radio that would glorify the American woman,” Framer said years later. “The concept of ‘The Big Payoff’ at that time was that any man from the age of six to ninety-six could get up and tell the world about the woman behind the curtain and why she deserved the ‘big payoff.’ They could be wives, sweethearts, girlfriends, aunts, mothers, secretaries.”

  But before a man could tell the television audience about his wonderful wife, he would have to answer three questions correctly. At that point he could collect $600 in merchandise and become eligible for the fourth question and the opportunity to win the big payoff: a mink coat modeled by Bess and a trip to anywhere in the world. By the end of the program’s first two years Framer had given away more than $2 million in prizes.