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No question that the contestants must parade as objects--not sex objects, exactly, since the bathing gear they are made to wear is about as revealing as a cassock, but surely as objects--for ogling, for censure, for pity. Lee Meriwether, Miss America 1955, recalls her agony in a one piece: "I was dying a thousand deaths. I've never had people stare at me like that, and with binoculars! I'll be thrilled if they can get rid of it." Says this year's Miss Montana, Amanda Granrude: "We shouldn't have women in a veiled strip show." Even Leonard Horn, who runs the Miss America Organization, says, "I personally cannot rationalize it." Eager to italicize the scholarship program that gives more than $24 million a year to contestants, Horn sees the swimsuit segment as a tacky relic of Miss America's childhood.
Seventy-five years is an eon in pop culture. In 1921 movies were silent, radio was an infant, television a dream, alcohol consumption a crime. There were few awards in fields of frivol: Oscars, Tonys, Grammys didn't exist. But some people in Atlantic City thought they should give a prize and a title to a pretty girl. The town was the East Coast's premier seaside resort, so she probably ought to wear a bathing suit. And hoping to extend the summer season, the pageant's creators scheduled it for after Labor Day.
Early on, the thing had a sweet, slapdash air. In 1933 Marian Bergeron, Miss Connecticut, was summoned offstage and a producer said, "My God, she's it!" She was handed a strapless white satin gown and told to take off her bathing suit and change--right there in the wings. Bergeron, now 77 but a decorous 15 at the time, refused: "So two chaperones built a little screen around me, and I put on the gown. Six boys and two girls put a gorgeous robe over my shoulder--it had a train half the size of our living room--and the band played Stars and Stripes Forever." When the flash cameras started popping like metallic champagne corks, "I felt like I'd been hit with a stun gun."
Bergeron may have been a Bambi in the headlights, but today's Heathers-in-waiting are primed for the media glare. As the 50 alighted from a chartered plane last Monday for the start of their Atlantic City siege, they filed into the airport lounge, taking the room one high-heeled step after another. Posing outside en masse, they lined up like Rockettes. Their collective smile could give an onlooker severe retinal damage.
Yet for all the perkiness and primping, the look is small-town, polyester. This is Sears, not Saks. The women would be prettier with smarter clothes and hipper hairdos. A few display true glamour and grace, but in general this is a triumph of starch over sizzle. The earnestness with which the women sell themselves would make them comfy at a Mary Kay Cosmetics convention. They radiate not fantastic beauty but fanatical effort. For some, striving to be universally liked can trigger the scent of desperation. Horn says, "They are interviewing for a job--the job of Miss America," and the pressure shows. It doesn't help that they are chaperoned and shadowed by so-called State Traveling Companions and two hostesses to a contestant. They are prisoners of the fame they seek.