Slimmer than most sylphs is Austria's fragile Fraulein Lisl Goldarbeiter, recently crowned "Miss Universe" by Galveston,
Tex., judges (TIME, June 24). Hard-boiled correspondents had to grope for adjectives to describe her famed "air of ethereal purity."
Rumanians are an earthy people. Last week, as lovely Lisl Goldarbeiter stepped off the Vienna Express at Bucharest, she was met by an ogglesome throng of youths whose reaction soon became riotously negative. "Give us someone our weight!" roared voices from the crowd. "A bent pin for the Austrian Jewess! Give us Magda Dimitrescu —Magda is our weight!"
Magda Dimitrescu was also at the sta tion. She is not really a buxom girl, but beside ethereal "Miss Universe" her dimples looked their deepest, her curves and bulges fulsome. In the Galveston pulchri tude tourney as "Miss Rumania" she was not even runner up. Magda had come, hired by a Rumanian roulette syndicate, to welcome her successful rival and shepherd her to smart Sinaia Casino, where she was to be featured as "guest beauty" for a month.
Uglier grew the crowd. "We want no underfed beauty queens here!" cried a roughster. "Let's make her eat some pork!" As the rowdies rushed, even saucy Magda Dimitrescu became frightened, seized Lisl Goldarbeiter by the wrist, dragged her through a baggage room and out by a back alley to sanctuary in the Bucharest Rumanian Orthodox Cathedral.
Thwarted, furious, the now frankly anti-Semite crowd rushed howling to demand that the Cathedral authorities refuse to harbor a Jewess. In the riot a traffic policeman was knocked down, trampled, bloodied. Finally with 300 police rescuers holding back the mob, sobbing, hysterical "Miss Universe" was sped in a limousine with blinds down, to a place of refuge undisclosed.