She Walks in Beauty

by Sarah Shankman

  At that, Sam remembered the Shame Girls outside. But it was too late to ask the Inquirer. “Here we go!” the young blonde said.

  The curtain rose on the Miss America dancers, young men in white pants and white pullovers. In their midst strutted a figure in devilish black.

  “Nickie Brasco. He works the casino circuit the rest of the year,” the Inquirer whispered.

  The gentlemen soft-shoed and sang their way through a verse and chorus of “Tonight.” Then a back curtain lifted and there they were in all their glory: the Miss America finalists.

  The fifty of them sported short, tailored dresses in fuchsia, blue, and off-white, no two dresses quite the same. The girls posed and modeled their way through another chorus and verse of “Tonight,” then sang a chorus of “There She Is.” They did a quick turn down the runway and back, singing, smiling, waving all the while.

  “Let’s meet them face-to-face,” Brasco called, the signal for the Parade of States to begin from the two sides of the great stage.

  “I’m Miss Alabama, Ashley Dunbar, a graduate of Auburn University,” announced a big redhead with a booming voice from stage left, then strutted down the runway.

  Miss Alaska, a brunette with quite a bounce, declared from stage right that she was “Tricia Lewis, bringing you greetings from the frozen North. I’m a graduate of the University of Washington and a speech therapist.” She bounced behind Miss Alabama.

  They all had the same walk. The Miss America Suck-and-Tuck Glide, said the Inquirer. They suck in their tummies and tuck their buns under. Swing their arms like wings to alternate with the legs. It covers thunder thighs.

  “You’re looking wonderful,” Sally Griffin shouted to Miss Arkansas as she sucked-and-tucked above them on the runway. It was rather dazzling to be so close. “One of mine,” Sally said to Sam. Miss Arkansas beamed and waved and shot Sally a thumbs-up.

  The Inquirer shouted to Miss Colorado, one of her personal favorites. So when Miss Georgia paraded by, Sam called, “Hey, Rae Ann, looking good.”

  Rae Ann was flying. Her eyes sparkled, and her color was high.

  It was tough not to be excited. The enthusiasm in the hall was wildly contagious. The evening felt exactly like the semifinals of any sporting event—the music, the fans, the lights, the banners, the shouts, the applause, and the players themselves, pumped within an inch of their very lives.

  Sitting right at the edge of the runway, Sam almost could have reached over and touched the girls. And she found herself wanting to, they were so vibrant, so alive. And though they weren’t all beautiful, not what you might think a Miss America ought to look like (whatever that was), when she was prancing down that runway, each girl looked like she held the title to that long, narrow piece of Atlantic City real estate.

  Now here was Miss Louisiana, Lucinda Washington, Lavert’s drop-dead-gorgeous cousin. One of two black contestants, she had the queenly bearing of Jessye Norman—though she’d spot the diva a hundred and fifty pounds.

  There were bouquets of long-stemmed blondes. More brunettes. A few redheads.

  What Sam noticed most was their bodies: how tall they all were—though of course she was looking up—and how thin, with long, shapely legs, not much fanny, and considerable chests. Their heads were different, but the bodies were all by Barbie. This was it: the Role Model. The Golden Mean. Twenty-two years of age, 35-22-34, 5′7″, 117 pounds. No wonder the average American woman was perpetually dieting.

  Following the Parade of States was some banter between the emcees Phyllis George (Miss America 1971, former pro football commentator, wife of a former governor, and a fried chicken entrepreneur) and Gary Collins (NBC game show host and husband of Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America 1959).

  They introduced the reigning Miss America, Lynn Anderson, who was stunning in a low-cut dress of gold and silver. As Lynn paraded and waved to the roaring crowd, Sam, swept away by the moment, actually found herself tearing up.

  Ridiculous! Though she did remember crying along with the winner of every Miss America Pageant of her girlhood.

  Beauty pageants have always been especially popular in the South, and growing up in Atlanta, Sam had loved the Miss America Pageant even more than the Oscars. The second Saturday in September, it was timed just perfectly, right after the opening of school. She and a dozen of her friends had huddled together in their pj’s, draped over one another like so many cats on her bed before the television.

  “Yeeeeeeew! Ugly! Too fat! Look at those thighs!” they’d screamed. Or, “Wow! But get up in front of all those people, play the piano, answer questions, I’d diiiiiiie!”

  They’d stayed awake until midnight—and past. However long it took, they were there when Bert Parks announced the first runner-up, and it dawned on the other one, the girl whose name wasn’t called, that she was IT!

  There she is. They’d sung along as she paraded down the runway, each and every one of them fighting a big lump in her throat, squeezing her eyes tight trying to imagine what she must feel like. To be the fairest in the land, smack-dab in the middle of a fairy tale. An ordinary girl from an ordinary family in an ordinary town—now crowned like Cinderella. And it was permanent. You always would be Miss America. Always and forever. No matter what.

  But then Sam had grown up and gone on to Real Life, and the pageant hadn’t. The girls on TV, if she happened to flip past them on that September evening, were exactly like these girls before her now. Looking older than their peers because of the makeup and silly hair, they were plastic Barbies mouthing platitudes. Real women had thrown away their pushup bras along with the old second-class ways of thinking.

  Yet here she was, and there they were, and she was the one with tears in her eyes.

  Go figure. She surreptitiously blew her nose. But the Inquirer never missed a trick.

  “Getting to you already, I see.” She rubbed her hands together. “I can’t wait to collect.”

  “The day I become a pageant junkie, I’ll not only give you the hundred, I’ll buy myself one of those spangled gowns,” said Sam, pointing at Lynn Anderson’s rear as she made her way offstage.

  “Bugle beads,” said Sally Griffin. “You’ve got to get the terminology right.”

  Where did they find those dresses anyway?

  “In pageant stores, when they’re beginners. Further along, most girls get them custom made from designers like Stephen Yearick, Jeannie Carpenter, or Randy Dimitt. Jeannie and Randy both have stores in Russellville, Arkansas. Girls fly in from all over the country for fittings. And then some go to designers like Bob Mackie, who designs for Cher.”

  Pageant stores? Sam hadn’t gotten past that.

  “Sure,” said Sally. “They have everything, the beaded gowns, the acrylic rhinestone pumps. Come over to the trade show in the Trump Regency, you’ll see everything—but wait, I want to hear Susan Davidson.” Trade show? Did she say trade show?

  A Miss America first runner-up from several years past sang “With a Song in My Heart” in the spot where a commercial would be on Saturday night.

  Then the panel of preliminary judges, who sat in a V between stage right and the runway, was introduced. Mimi Bregman was in red sequins. Eloise Lemon had chosen blue metallic. The men wore handsome evening clothes. Julian Peacock’s ruffled shirt and cloth-of-gold vest stood out in the field of black and white.

  Cindy Lou Jacklin took her bow in apricot chiffon and sunglasses. “Is she afraid she’ll be blinded by the spangles, I mean bugle beads?” Sam wondered aloud.

  “It’s her shiner she thinks she’s hiding,” said the Inquirer.

  Shiner?

  “Yeah, wait a minute. I want to see how they handle this. You notice someone’s missing?”

  Sam took a closer look. Why, of course, that slimebag Kurt Roberts was nowhere in sight. But there’d been no mention of his absence. “Where is he? What happened to him?”

  USA Today on the other side of the Inquirer couldn’t keep out of it. “What I heard is that he rang up Barbar
a Stein very late this afternoon and said something had come up in New York and he had to go home.”

  That was preposterous. If you’d agreed to be a judge for the Miss America Pageant, for Pete’s sake, you’d clear your calendar months in advance.

  “That’s the skinny,” said the Inquirer. “Of course, Barb was fit to be tied, but I guess they just decided to go ahead with the six. What’re they going to do, bring in somebody else for these three nights, after they’ve already done the interviews?”

  “His mother died? His girlfriend threatened suicide? What could have happened?” Sam asked.

  “Taking this business awfully serious already,” warned the Inquirer.

  “I just think a deal’s a deal. You tell somebody you’re going to do something—”

  “That’s exactly what I teach the girls,” said Sally. “You agree to make an appearance, then you darned well better show up on time with every hair in place, your shoes shined and color-coordinated to your outfit, nails polished, yourself fed, fragrant, bathed, fresh-breathed, with your clothes clean, good-looking, pressed, and accessorized.”

  The three reporters stared at one another, and finally USA Today giggled, “I guess Kurt Roberts didn’t do any of that.”

  *

  No, Kurt didn’t. He definitely wasn’t fed, bathed, or fresh-breathed, though he was becoming a little fragrant. Or perhaps ripe would be more accurate.

  His clothes were a mess. There was blood on his peach-colored T-shirt, and even the best cleaners would play hell trying to get the stains out of his creamy Armani suit. Roberts was no Jay Gatsby at this juncture, though Gatsby, if Kurt had been the kind of guy who read, would have been one of his heroes. He’d have loved Gatsby’s style—his tailoring, his great house on Long Island, his heavy saloon of a car—for style was Roberts’s whole life. He wouldn’t have appreciated Gatsby’s adoration of Daisy Buchanan, however. Women? Women were playthings. They were like Kleenex. You were finished with one, you threw her away.

  But speaking of disposable, look at Roberts now.

  *

  “What about Cindy Lou’s shiner?” asked Sam.

  “Well.” The Inquirer leaned closer. “I just happened to worm my way into a table beside the judges at dinner in Monopoly’s steakhouse. Somebody popped her one good, all right.” She nodded with the certainty of a reporter who had her facts straight. But in this case, she might know the what of it, but she didn’t know the who, when, why, where.

  “Interesting, huh?” She cocked an eyebrow. “One judge splits, the other’s sporting dark glasses. Especially since they seemed to be, shall we say, cozy?”

  So others had noticed, too. But of course they would. That’s why the press was here, to sniff out, in the great tradition of pageant coverage, every little trace of scandal and innuendo.

  But what Sam had witnessed—and as far as she knew, no one else from the press corps had—was Kurt Roberts’s attack on the young boy at poolside and his subsequent departure from the scene arm in arm with the lovely Cindy Lou. He seemed to have called Barbara Stein with his apologies soon after.

  So what did that mean? Anything, nothing? Were the two events related?

  But there was no time to ponder such intrigue, for Gary and Phyllis were explaining the judging.

  The girls were divided into three groups: Alpha, Mu, and Sigma. Tonight Alpha did talent, Mu did evening gown, Sigma did swimsuit. Then they rotated events each of the other two nights until they’d been judged in all three categories. Sam punched the information into her laptop. This beauty business was foreign territory with its own lingo, and she wanted to get it straight.

  *

  “The girls will be judged on physical fitness in swimsuit, on talent, and on onstage presence in evening gown.”

  Interesting word choices. But then, if you listened to the official pageant line, here were the priorities:

  Talent

  Intelligence

  Olympic ability (whatever that was)

  Energy

  Communication

  Poise

  Attractiveness

  Pretty is as pretty does, and beauty was dead last, or so they said.

  “The swimsuit and evening gown are going to go very quickly,” warned the Inquirer. “If you want to score, use whole numbers. Ten’s the top.”

  When Price Waterhouse did the tabulations, talent counted forty percent. The interview conducted earlier in the week was 30. Evening gown and swimsuit were each 15.

  Sam didn’t get it. “Swimsuit’s only fifteen? Then why do swimsuit winners take the crown so often?”

  “She’s been doing her homework,” sighed Sally.

  “But don’t they?”

  “Yes,” said the Inquirer. “Nine of the last twelve Miss A’s were preliminary swimsuit winners.”

  “So?”

  “I guess you’d prefer they didn’t do swimsuits?” Sally didn’t try to hide her irritation. The controversy over the swimsuit competition was an old wound, reopened every year.

  “Hey,” said Sam, both hands up. “I’d probably prefer they didn’t do Miss America, if you want to know the truth.”

  “It wouldn’t be the pageant without the cynicism of the press. You all are as much a part of the tradition as the damned swimsuits you’re so high and mighty about.”

  “Now, wait just a minute—” But Sam didn’t finish as the curtain rose on a stage set that replicated the Boardwalk outside. While strains of “Summertime” filled the air, fifty girls in gold lamé beach togs thrown over their white swimsuits perambulated down in roller chairs, played volleyball, built sand castles in the pseudo-sand.

  Then they did some more dancing, singing, and posing with the Miss America dancers.

  What did Sam think? She thought they looked terrific. They looked like showgirls, even if they couldn’t dance. And she couldn’t help it; she wished she looked just like that.

  But see? That’s what this kind of crap did to you. Beauty pageants and girlie magazines, starlets, they made you think that’s what women really looked like. And how many women felt rotten about themselves because they didn’t? Even women who came close would call themselves old hags the moment their breasts began to migrate south.

  She said as much to Sally, who replied, “Barbara Stein has been campaigning for years to try to drop the swimsuit category—and you know what? If they did, people out there in TV land would scream their heads off. Watching beautiful girls parade in swimsuits and then bitching about it is as much a part of the American way of life as—”

  “—the cynicism of the press,” said Sam.

  “That’s right.” Sally laughed.

  The emcees held forth about the judges’ looking for fitness, grace, an all-over statement of health. The American woman worked out and was in better shape than anytime in history.

  What it sounded like was an apologia for a T&A show.

  However, up on the stage, no matter what anyone thought, the girls of the Sigma group were ready to strut their stuff. One by one, and much more quickly than Sam had imagined, each girl—wearing only her white swimsuit, her taupe pumps, and a big smile—made the trek down to center stage, where she paused, turned to show her full backside, stopped for a count of five before the judges, and hit the runway.

  There, close up, they looked great. Again Sam thought of athletes pumped up for the big game. Because, she’d have to give it to them, for whatever reason, these girls had worked hard and sacrificed God knows what to arrive here at their peak. Their bodies were toned drum-tight, their skin flawless, their ample bosoms high, their waists tiny, their buns bounce-free, their racehorse legs went on and on. They were nigh unto perfect. They were all 10s, by God, and proud of it.

  Or so Sam thought.

  *

  Had Kurt Roberts been there, he would have told Sam she knew nothing about womanflesh, not the way a pro like himself did.

  That’s what a big-time fashion photographer did for a living, coax beauty from girls
who came in on the Greyhound from Paducah with their heads full of silly notions of what modeling was all about.

  They didn’t know it was hard work. They didn’t know they needed more than a little turned-up nose, nice boobs, and a face that made the “beauty” section of their high-school yearbook.

  They didn’t know that if they were extraordinarily lucky, what they had for a face was a blank canvas. A face you could make into a thousand different women. A face that if you laid your portfolio open, the client would say, “That’s her? And that’s her, too?” She had a face you wouldn’t look at twice walking down the street. A blank canvas, as he said, for the genius of someone like himself who, along with a good stylist, could coax her, and coke her, and kiss her, and baby her into making love to that camera.

  That’s what it was all about. Doing that camera with your face. Doing those judges, giving it to them, oompah-pah, oompah-pah, ooh ooh ooh.

  That’s what the famous fashion photographer Kurt Roberts would have said to Sam about beauty, if he could have, if he’d been there.

  *

  “Oh, God,” said Sally. “Look at that makeup.”

  Sam stared at the leggy brunette on the ramp. Her face looked fine to Sam. Overdone, of course. But they were all painted for the stage.

  “No, on her legs. See that?” Sally pointed. “She tried to sculpt them, to make them look thinner by using a darker shade of makeup down the outer and inner sides of her legs and a lighter shade in one straight line down the middle. But you can see it. That’s a no-no.” She gave the girl a three.

  “And look at Miss Arkansas’s tan line,” said USA Today. “They should tan in the altogether to avoid that.” Another three.

  Leg makeup, Sam wrote. Tan lines.

  “Oh, my God. Check out those pads,” said the Inquirer.

  Where?

  “Right there.” Sally pointed. “Miss Colorado. You can see her bust pads through that white swimsuit. With white you have to be so careful. That’s why the girls hate it. But you do what the pageant tells you. Another three. Next.”

  It was okay to wear falsies?

  “Oh, Sam!” cried the Inquirer. “Honey, what century do you live in? They use the latest in silicon mastectomy pads. Eighty bucks apiece.”