At Oxford I learned to drink my tea with sugar and cream—and to eat. It was like heaven for me because we were eating all the time. Tea with crumpets in the morning, tea with sandwiches in the afternoon. And that was in addition to lunch. The pub food was heavily fried, and I tried valiantly to find healthy things to eat. But I wasn’t very successful. Of course I gained weight.
Then one day late in the quarter my mother called me. “You have to come home for the summer,” she said. “I’ve found the perfect pageant for you.”
“What are you talking about?” I grumbled. “I’m registered for the Georgetown program.”
“Hear me out,” she insisted. “I’m reading about the new director of the Miss America pageant. His name is Leonard Horn. He says they’re changing the direction this year, putting more focus on excellence and less focus on the beauty element, because this is, after all, a scholarship pageant. Here, let me read it to you: ‘Miss America is a relevant, socially responsible achiever whose message to women all over the world is that in American society a woman can do or be anything she wants.’ Leonard Horn says he wants Ivy League contestants, people who have honed their talents for their whole lives.”
She paused, and then said firmly into the phone, “That’s you, Gretchen.”
Mom and I had talked about the Miss America pageant before—she was convinced I could nail the talent portion, which was a big part of the score. But so much else was going on in my life, and the idea had faded to the background. Now, listening to Mom, I felt the familiar tingle of the competitive drive. If I did the pageant, it would be the most challenging goal I had ever pursued, because even though I had achieved great things in my youth, the Miss America pageant was outside my comfort zone. It would mean starting as an underdog and stretching myself in new ways.
“Because of Leonard Horn, this is the year where the focus on talent and academic achievement will be the greatest,” Mom said. “I think this is your year.”
And so I decided to seize the day.
Chapter 4
Becoming Miss America
When most people think of the Miss America pageant, they envision a night of pomp and glitter on a big stage in Atlantic City, where in a dazzling finale one young woman is crowned. In reality, Miss America is a long journey that begins in hundreds of small towns across the country, with ordinary girls just like me. It’s not an event, but a competitive process, similar to qualifying for the Olympics, where winning at various levels advances you to the next.
The first step is winning the pageant from a local community to become eligible for the state pageant. Some states require that you live in the community; others allow anyone from across the state to enter open pageants. There weren’t a lot of open pageants in my area, but I found one in Cottage Grove, a suburb of Saint Paul, and I entered that one. Winning would qualify me for the Miss Minnesota pageant, and winning Miss Minnesota would qualify me for the Miss America pageant.
I came home from London in June 1987, and the Miss Cottage Grove contest was in August. I had little time to prepare, and I needed to do a lot of work.
I immediately found a coach in Kathleen Munson, who ran the Pageant Shop in the Twin Cities. Kathleen was very tall, with short red hair and an infectious personality, cheering me with her southern twang. She was originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the pageant was in her blood. Kathleen cautioned me that I was in for a long haul—a victory that might be years in the making. In the South, she said, they put girls on a “four-year plan” to be contestants. “You shouldn’t expect to win the pageant the first year you try it,” she cautioned. I didn’t argue the point, but I wasn’t intending to make this a multiyear project. I was in it because I wanted to win it—that year.
Kathleen had an office set up in the basement of her house, where she put me through my paces, introducing me to a foreign world. Until then I had never given a single moment’s thought to the way I walked. Now I felt as if I were learning an elaborate dance. “The walk,” as I called it, was one of my biggest fears. I had always been a tomboy, not a model. Kathleen made me practice in high heels, and I’d totter along the twenty-foot runway she’d set up, feeling enormously clumsy.
Kathleen showed me pictures of pageant winners she had groomed, and they all seemed to have perfect dresses, perfect bodies, and flawless hair and makeup. It was the first time in my life I was awed by something girly. I had never played “princess” as a child. The glamour side of the pageant was totally foreign to me. At the same time, the talent side was somewhat foreign to Kathleen, and when she heard me play the violin she was a bit taken aback. I think it made her look at me with new respect.
Working with Kathleen was more than just a lesson in the mechanics of a pageant. It was also about the psychology of a pageant. She always said that you can’t teach charisma or authenticity, and the key was to let your personality shine through. She stressed that personality was the main attribute of a winner.
I believed that. One of the big complaints about Miss America pageants in the 1980s was that everyone felt so canned—overcoached and overdressed. That wasn’t my style, and normally that might have been a disadvantage. But that year I thought it was my strength.
Kathleen’s sessions were like a crash course in pageantry and its strategies. I realized that many of my competitors would have much more experience than I, especially if they’d been on the so-called four-year plan. That turned out to be the case. A lot of the contestants had been in the system for a while. The states had different rules for how many times a person could compete, but it wasn’t unusual for people to try again if they didn’t win the state title the first time. But for me the goal was to compete, succeed, and then go on with my studies and my life.
Mom and I mapped out a strategy for how I might win. In general, my theory of competing was to do it through observation, not participation. I was going to watch how others did it and learn by studying them. Part of the plan was literally intel. I went to the Miss Minnesota pageant, and Mom, Dad, and I planned to attend the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City to gather information. Unfortunately, I got sick and couldn’t go to Atlantic City, but my parents went anyway and brought back their valuable observations, which went right into our strategy.
My first serious task was getting in shape. I was not confident about my body. I’d just spent a semester in London, and it seems that all we did was eat. But I had less than two months before the Miss Cottage Grove pageant, so it was a matter of trying to make the most of what I had. My mom and I went shopping for a dress, and we picked a white gown off the rack. Even though it was inexpensive, Mom knew how to work magic on a dress so that it looked great.
Fortunately, the Miss Cottage Grove competition was relatively low-key. It was held in the local high school, and most of the contestants were there to have fun and maybe earn a little money for college. The winner received $1,000 in scholarship money, $500 for clothing and training, and discount coupons for local businesses. There was a homespun quality to it, and the people running it were all volunteers from the Jaycees. For me the hardest part—and this would continue to be true—was the dance number. I was not a dancer. They always put me in the back row. Our opening number was a dance to Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America.” All I can say about my performance is that I didn’t fall down.
What I remember most was how nice and supportive everyone was. After I won Miss Cottage Grove, the organizers continued to support me as if they saw themselves as surrogate parents. Some of them continued to befriend and guide me throughout the pageant process, and I found that incredibly touching. They really cared about me. I was their girl.
After the Miss Cottage Grove contest, Mom and I visited Canton, Ohio, to check out a gown shop called Suzie Lee. That’s where we bought the green-and-black talent gown that would take me all the way through Miss America. It cost $250. While we were there, we attended the Miss Canton pageant, which was much
larger than Miss Cottage Grove. We were serious about collecting information wherever we could.
In October I returned to Stanford, but any thought that I might be able to juggle college and pageant preparation was quickly dashed. I realized that if I was going to continue to pursue Miss America I would have to put my studies on hold until after the pageant.
In December I went to the dean to tell her I was “stopping out”—meaning taking a leave from my studies. I wasn’t planning to explain why, but when she asked I sheepishly replied, “To try and become Miss America.”
“That’s absolutely the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” she said bluntly. I think she wondered incorrectly why someone who had made it into Stanford with incredibly good grades would want to become Miss America. I didn’t bother trying to explain that Miss America was mostly about talent, scholarship, and presence—that I’d been a concert violinist in childhood and talent was half the points. I just walked away and started packing my stuff.
I told very few people about my reasons for leaving, and later, when I became Miss America, many of my professors and fellow students told the media how shocked they were. They’d had no idea. I’d just disappeared.
I didn’t even tell my sorority sisters. Part of the reason was that I didn’t want to set myself up in case I failed. Another part was that I just didn’t want to contend with the doubters. I knew what the pageant meant to me, but I was well aware of what many other people thought, and I didn’t want to deal with explaining away the old stereotypes.
The pageant became my full-time job. I had only nine months to prepare. Most of that preparation would go into competing for the title of Miss Minnesota in June. If I won, it would be less than two months until the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. So my preparation for Miss Minnesota was really my main preparation for Miss America.
The first thing I had to do was get in shape, which meant losing fifteen to twenty pounds. I immediately started working out with Mike Tracy, a local trainer who was used to getting women in shape for pageants. He worked at the club that my family belonged to, but I was nervous about starting with him, so I did aerobics on my own for a couple of weeks so I wouldn’t look like a complete schlub when he met me. When we finally got together, Mike put me on a strict diet—twelve hundred calories a day and practically no fat. I had to write down everything I ate and bring him my diet journal so he could sign it. I was always hungry. Like most people, I knew how to lose weight; it was doing it that was hard.
Working out with Mike was extremely challenging. He had me running, lifting weights, rowing—a full range of physical activities. He was like a drill sergeant. He never let up on me. And I took it because I was motivated. Mike always told people I took the most pain of anyone he’d ever trained.
The hardest part was running. I was still haunted by my teenage anxiety when I had to run in the President’s Fitness Challenge, but I also found it boring and grueling. For the pageant preparation I knew I had to do it, so I just got into a mentality of mind over matter and forced myself. I used Miss DeLay’s old trick of visualization, imagining positive images as I ran. I realized I was pushing myself to do something I had never done before, and my competitive drive kicked in. When I eventually got up to six miles, I could hardly believe it, but by then it was second nature.
My schedule was fierce—three or four hours a day practicing the violin, two hours of pageant coaching, two hours of working out. And in between I was studying—yes, studying. I wanted to be knowledgeable about current events and to develop a point of view about what was going on in society so I could do well in the interviews and answer questions intelligently.
It was ironic that I was back in the lonely groove of competing. All my friends were away at school, and I wouldn’t have had time for them anyway. The only person around was Kurt. He was a rock. He worked out with me, and I bought a racing bike so we could race together. We were both getting into world-class shape. But my mom had put me on a strict curfew—ten o’clock. It seemed silly for a twenty-one-year-old to have a curfew, but she was determined that my focus would be solely on the competition, and she was right.
I was exercising so hard I could have eaten a farm. But of course I was on a strict diet. I’d get up in the morning and eat half a bowl of cereal and half a banana, and by ten I was ravenous. So I ate another half a banana. Visions of home cooking danced in my head. But I never wavered. It was all part of the discipline, the price I would pay to win. It was a necessity.
And then there was the violin. It had been years since I’d played seriously, and I hunkered down to prepare for the performances of my life. I was a bit rusty, but that didn’t affect my confidence. I believed in myself. I knew that my talent, even at 75 percent, was still top-notch and couldn’t be touched in the first few phases of a competition. I even chose a piece for the Miss Minnesota pageant that I had never played before—the Carmen Fantasy on themes from the passionate opera. I had six months to perfect it. Once I started practicing, I was instantly back in my old mode. I discovered that the competitive spirit never goes away. Returning to music taught me something, not just about playing the violin, but about having that fire, that desire to achieve. It’s what I’d been missing in my life, and it felt right to be back into it. Along with putting aside the violin in college, I had also put aside my drive, thinking it was time for a rest. But I saw that I needed it, I was born with it. You can teach people skills to hone their craft, but unless they have the fire in their belly, the skills don’t matter. I never again let my passion slide. The insatiable desire—the appetite—to always get better still drives me today.
In April, Mom and I started to deal with important decisions like wardrobe, and we stepped it up a notch, making visits to the people who were tops in the pageant field.
Our first trip was to Fort Worth to meet with Ann Bogart, who was the swimsuit designer for pageants. That meeting was memorable for how many pegs I got knocked down. Ann and her husband were Russian immigrants. Ann was small, but she had a very daunting manner. I think her attitude was that the best contestants were southern girls because they had the right style. The fact that I was from Minnesota was not a point in my favor when it came to the Miss America pageant. She thought midwestern girls were too “natural,” and she didn’t mind saying so. She studied my body, frowning.
“Have you ever done pageants before, honey?”
“Not really. I’ve never been in the Miss America system.”
“You’ll never win,” she declared.
“Well, I’m giving it my best shot,” I said weakly.
“What’s your talent?”
“Violin.”
She snorted. “Violin’s never won. You’re going to have to fiddle.”
I almost laughed. I had been playing classical music my whole life, and that’s a whole different craft than fiddling.
Finally she got down to brass tacks. “What kind of swimsuit do you want?”
“Rose-colored,” I said naively.
“Rose!” she screeched in disbelief. “Oh, no, no, no. Only white wins.”
So why’d she ask?
Ann and her husband, Louis, lived in a rambler, which was totally devoted to swimsuits. At the back of their kitchen was a huge area cluttered with sewing machines and fabric swatches. We looked through the swatches and settled on a coral pink. Not white. I wondered if she thought I was a hopeless case. I ended up having her make the coral suit for the Miss America pageant, but I bought a white suit off the rack to compete for Miss Minnesota.
Ann had a secret material for her swimsuit creations. It hugged your body in all the right places to enhance your bustline and slenderize your waistline. I appreciated the help. In those days we were limited to a simple one-piece. Today contestants can wear two-piece suits. Thank God I didn’t have to wear a two-piece!
Had I been a less secure person, I would have walked out
of Ann’s home a shambles. But I’d learned my lessons about failure and perseverance, and I didn’t dwell on her criticisms. Months later at the Miss America pageant she happened to be sitting in front of my parents. After I finished my violin solo, she turned around and said apologetically, “Maybe that fiddling idea wasn’t such a good one after all.”
Next stop was Austin, where I met with Chuck Weisbeck, who was known as the “coach of the Queen” and, alternatively, “the Butcher.” His studio was famous for whipping pageant contestants into shape. As he once put it, with a devilish Texas drawl, “All I have to do is torture these girls and make ’em look good.” Weisbeck was seventy, and he’d been training people for twice as long as I’d been alive. He was tall, with a craggy, aging face and a head of curly gray hair. He wore a shimmery sweat suit that squeaked when he moved. His wife, Artie, also about seventy, had a big bouffant hairdo and a ton of makeup. She didn’t look like she actually did all the exercises, but she was a trained coach.
Chuck was quite a character. His studio was lined with portraits of pageant contestants in swimsuits, women he’d trained, including many winners. He was completely unrelenting in what he called the three P’s of working out: “Puff, pant, and perspire.” And he didn’t care a whit about embarrassing me. I thought I was in pretty good shape by that point, but he grabbed my thigh and said, “This has got to go!” He stared at my butt and cried, “Absolutely not!” He declared that my body had to be rehabbed to achieve the right “cut,” and he taught me his system of “plyometrics,” a challenging circuit program using no equipment, designed to increase both speed and power in an explosive way. He ordered me to return home and work out every day in my basement.
While I was doing plyometrics in my basement, and still running every day, my dad would come home for lunch and hear me down there. One day he asked my mom, “Is she going to die down there from working out too hard?” He wasn’t kidding.
Getting Real Page 8