Getting Real

by Gretchen Carlson

  They made assumptions about me being a bimbo or a “beauty queen,” totally ignoring who I actually was. It hurt, but I kept thinking I could change a few minds once people saw me, heard me play, and listened to me speak. That was my goal.

  Some of the fans who came out to see me were disappointed for other reasons. They didn’t think I looked like Miss America was supposed to look. People think you should appear just as if you walked off the runway that moment. Many times I’d be sitting at a table signing autographs, and I’d hear the conversation down the line. “Can you believe it? That’s Miss America?” They must have thought I didn’t have ears to hear them. Then they’d come up to the table and I’d give them my best smile: “Oh, hi, Sylvia. It’s so great to see you. Sure I’ll take a picture with you—here we go . . . cheese!” I got used to the comments and the harsh evaluations. It seemed that everyone’s sister and girlfriend was better-looking than Miss America!

  One thing I heard a lot was, “Where’s your crown?” I didn’t always wear it, especially if I was going to play my violin. I was worried that my spirited playing would knock the crown right off my head. I loved wearing the crown when I was signing autographs or visiting schools and hospitals, but I didn’t like to wear it when I spoke at business events because I wanted people to focus on my words and not be distracted. I got some flak for that. In later years, the pageant guidelines would state that Miss America didn’t need to wear the crown unless it was specifically stipulated. In fact, many of the official photographs of Miss America since my time have showed her holding the crown, not wearing it. I’ve always said that the Miss America pageant emulates where women are in society and has evolved with them. It’s a work in progress, not just a historical artifact.

  Many years later, I was doing a Mother’s Day presentation for young women and mothers at a church in Texas, and the coordinator said, “Of course you’ll bring your crown, right?”

  I said, “Yeah, if I can find it.”

  She was shocked. “If you can find it? You don’t know where your Miss America crown is?”

  I had to confess that I wasn’t sure. “Maybe in my mom’s basement.”

  I looked at her face and realized that I was giving her great pain, so I quickly said, “Don’t worry, I’ll bring it.”

  Then I called my mom, a little bit panicked. “I’ve moved around so much, Mom, please tell me you have the crown!” She found it and saved the day.

  Often at corporate events I was introduced with my vital statistics—even though I was about to give a serious speech about professional success. On one occasion, the man who spoke before me was a very accomplished executive, and his introduction was a tribute to his incredible credentials. When they got to me, the male emcee said, “And now we’re honored to hear from this year’s Miss America. She’s a five-foot-three, 108-pound gal with green eyes hailing from the state of Minnesota.” No mention of my name, no mention of my background, no mention of anything pertinent except my vitals.

  When I got up, I said, “As you can see, there are unfortunately those who do not yet understand that being Miss America embodies more than just vital statistics.” I so wished he’d introduced me as a classical violinist. I so wished he’d said I was an honor student at Stanford. I so wished he’d said Miss America was the largest scholarship pageant for women in the world. I was trying to stand up for myself, Miss America, and all women, but sometimes my words sounded more frustrated than eloquent. At the end of my year, I proposed adding GPA to the scoring in some small way because so many of the contestants excelled academically. In my mind it could be a way to stop the critics’ constant analysis that Miss America was only a beauty pageant while drawing more attention to the scholarship aspect of the program. I figured we should celebrate the brains behind the beauty.

  Whenever I could I challenged the stereotype, but it was an uphill battle. When I was invited to perform at ceremonies in Washington, D.C., honoring Nobel Prize winners, a past winner caused an uproar, saying Miss America had no place on the stage with these esteemed men and women. Fortunately, the current winners discounted his words and welcomed me warmly.

  Everywhere I went I reinforced the message, over and over and over again, that Miss America was a role model, a young woman with brains and talent and professional aspirations. Not just a pretty face. Not just a body. I was chipping away at that stereotype, as so many others before me had.

  Although I met many famous people as Miss America, I have to say that the most memorable experiences were the everyday encounters—such as the time I was visiting a veterans’ hospital and a young man told me, “We’ve both served America in slightly different ways.” That was humbling, and tears came to my eyes when he said it. But I also felt it was true in a deeper sense—that I was an ambassador serving America.

  My favorite times were spent with young people. I loved talking to the kids and encouraging them to fulfill their dreams. I knew I could be a role model for them. I saw this early on in Buffalo, New York, when I noticed three short girls standing in line for autographs. When I noticed that they had tears in their eyes, I went over to them. “Why are you so sad?” I asked. “We aren’t sad,” they told me. “We’re crying because you’ve given us hope!” It was true. There was a surge of shorter contestants at the local and state competitions after I won. There were also more violinists. In fact, Rebecca Yeh, Miss Minnesota 2013, who was the fourth runner-up in the Miss America pageant that year, was an accomplished violinist.

  One day a little third-grade girl raised her hand and asked, “Why are you so pretty?” The question caught me by surprise, but I went on to talk about the rewards of discovering who you are on the inside, no matter how you looked on the outside.

  I also loved meeting young girls who had that spark of pride and confidence I recognized from my own childhood. One day in Dallas a little girl approached me and said, “Hi, Miss America. My name is Heather Carlson.”

  “Oh, we have the same name,” I said with a smile. “Are you by any chance Swedish?”

  “No, ma’am,” she said fervently. “I’m Texan!”

  • • •

  When David Letterman asked me if Miss America could accept a dinner invitation with a man, I told him I didn’t think so. I wasn’t really sure. It turned out that there was no rule against Miss America dating—if she could find the time. It had to be arranged on my off days.

  The last thing I expected in my jam-packed schedule was that I would meet someone I’d be interested in dating, but that’s what happened. Stranger still, Bill turned out to be one of the celebrity judges in the competition. I didn’t remember him from that night, but some months later I was asked to speak at a corporate event for his company. We sat next to each other at lunch, and he was very charming. I spoke before he did—thirty minutes onstage with no notes to a roomful of executives. When he got up to speak, he said, “Well, that’s a pretty hard act to follow. I have notes.” I wrote in my diary, going back on the flight, “I like this guy.”

  We began to see each other occasionally. Bill was forty-five, and at least in my mother’s eyes he was too old for me. But my life experience had made me much older than my years. I appreciated being with someone who was mature and successful and whose view of the world was already fully evolved. His connections were nice too. When he invited me to accompany him to George H. W. Bush’s inauguration, I was thrilled when the pageant told me I could go.

  My friends didn’t approve of my dating a man so much older than me, and my mother was beside herself. When I performed with the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies at the Ordway in Saint Paul, Bill flew up to see me play, and we went out to dinner at the Saint Paul Hotel with my family. My mother barely spoke for the entire meal. Bill was nearly her age! She was furious.

  During the month that Mom was my companion, I went to see Bill on one of my days off, and there was quite a dustup. She complained to my dad, and he called m
e, quite upset. “How could you do this to your mother?” he demanded. “You know she doesn’t want you to be with him.” Yes, I knew, but I realized that it was my life and my choice. She was afraid I would throw away my future life dreams to settle down with someone who had already seen many of his dreams achieved. My mother’s opinion meant the world to me, but like every young woman, I needed to establish my independence.

  Once when I was in a hotel in Ohio, Bill flew into town to see me. Ellie had her radar out. Somehow she got wind of the plan and she said to me, “Don’t you dare think about sneaking out of your room to go see him after hours.” I immediately began strategizing how to get out of the room without her knowing. I stuffed a pillow under the connecting door, hoping she wouldn’t hear the phone ring when Bill called from the lobby. This was before cell phones and texting, so there was no way to cover up the sound of a ringing phone. When he called, I whispered that I’d be right down and started sneaking out the door, as quietly as I could. Ellie’s voice broke the silence. “Gretchen, I know what you’re doing.” Rats. I had to call him and tell him I couldn’t see him. We ended up talking on the phone for hours.

  For me, dating Bill made perfect sense. I may have been twenty-two chronologically, but since an early age I’d always been forced to be much more mature than my age, and now the ante was upped further. As Miss America, I wasn’t hanging out with twenty-two-year-olds. I was constantly in the company of business and organizational executives. The settings were very worldly, and they required maturity. Those older people, including Bill, seemed to get me in ways that my peers could not, and I was comfortable in their company. It was like being back in the music world, where my experiences were more “adult” than those of my peers. For me it was a great release to feel understood.

  My friends didn’t understand. After I graduated from Stanford, Bill took me and my two closest friends from school to Le Bernardin, a very expensive restaurant in New York City. When he pulled out his reading glasses to read the menu, my friends looked at me with wide eyes, as if to say, “This guy is old!”

  The age difference never bothered me. We were just at different places in our lives. I needed to launch my career, and I knew I couldn’t just start out in TV in a big city like Chicago, where he lived. I expected to have to move around from city to city, paying my dues. Bill could offer me the world, but I wanted to make my own success in my own way.

  • • •

  It was a week before the pageant to crown Miss America 1990, and my picture was on the cover of TV Guide. I thought that was nice—until I read the headline: “A Beauty of a Mistake: Miss America—Was Last Year’s Voting Suspect?” My heart sank. What a lousy note to go out on, but realistically, if the cover had said, “Miss America—A Job Well Done,” it wouldn’t have sold as many issues. The article, written by Lisa DePaulo, raised the possibility that my win was unfair because the celebrity judges hadn’t scored the interview as part of the final points. The worst thing about the article was that it wasn’t true.

  The interview weighed heavily in getting to the top ten, and each of the top ten came into the finals with a composite score. The celebrity panel of judges also got to see the top ten interviews on tape, so it was definitely a factor. You wouldn’t know it to read DePaulo’s article, which seemed to be based largely on an interview with an anonymous preliminary judge who was disgruntled by the outcome. This judge said my interview was just so-so, not stunning like, say, Miss Colorado’s. Based on this evaluation, DePaulo wrote, “Among the top ten in the interview, she was at the bottom of the list. She was very smart. She was very academically skilled but there were many women who did better. Who had the best score in the interview? Miss Colorado. To make matters worse, Carlson barely had the crown on her head when she was already dubbed the smart Miss America.” Later it would occur to me that this perspective sounded an awful lot like the view William Goldman expressed in his book. At the time, I felt embarrassed by this “controversy.”

  I set it aside, determined to enjoy my final week as Miss America. I was doing a lot of media, including guest hosting for the syndicated lifestyle show PM Magazine in Atlantic City with the male host. They were looking for a female cohost and they offered me the job. It seemed to be a great professional opportunity. After a year doing media, I was already seriously considering broadcast journalism as a career. But I wanted to be a news journalist, and in those days there was a big delineation between news and entertainment. You couldn’t cross that abyss, no matter what.

  Coming off the Miss America experience and all the things I had been through, I thought that no one would take me seriously if I went the entertainment route, because they’d just say, “She got that job because she was Miss America, not because she worked hard for it.”

  I told them I was returning to my studies at Stanford, and they sweetened the pot, offering to send me to Stanford during the summer hiatus if I worked for them during the year. I still turned them down. I was a planner, and I had the next year all worked out: three months of continued speaking engagements, two quarters at Stanford to finish my degree, and then I’d be ready to start my career. In the long run, it turned out to be the right decision, because PM Magazine folded in 1991. More important, I advanced my career through hard work, not PR, just as I had always done.

  When I wasn’t doing the show, I was playing the role of the retiring Miss America at the pageant. My wardrobe was set, thanks to a trip to South Carolina to be fitted by Stephen Yearick for some new gowns. One day I spoke at a luncheon for the contestants, and I could feel the raw nerves in the room. I tried to ease the tension by telling the story of the twelve-minute delay and how I spotted the judges poring over the pictures and shaking their heads no when they got to mine. I used the story to tell them never to give up on their hopes and dreams, even when they seemed impossible. I also told them that sometimes we learn the greatest lessons about success through the experience of failure—something I had experienced on many occasions in my life. I spoke to them once again, right before the televised pageant, offering them good luck. That’s about as close as I got to the contestants. There was no chatting and chumminess because I couldn’t show any favoritism.

  My happiest moment at the pageant wasn’t when I did my farewell walk down the runway. It was when I played my violin for the evening gown portion of the pageant. I wore a black beaded gown with a sweetheart neckline and cap sleeves of black fur (which I later purchased and still have), and played Whitney Houston’s song “One Moment in Time.” I played with all the passion and feeling in my heart, the words of the song resonating in my mind. It had indeed been a year of “racing with destiny.”

  The 1990 Miss America, Miss Missouri, Debbye Lynn Turner, was the third African American to win the title. We have remained friends after all these years, as we both worked at CBS News, just two offices away from each other. What are the chances?

  After I pinned the crown on Debbye’s head, I stepped to the back of the stage. All eyes were on Debbye. I was the past. I recalled a story told by Dorothy Benham, the 1977 Miss America, who was also from Minnesota. She described packing up her things and walking out without fanfare, only to have a little boy spot her and cry out, “Hey, there goes the old one.” The story made me laugh, because that was exactly how it felt. I took off the makeup and stashed the crown, and now I was just another young woman out in the world. It’s almost dizzying how fast the fame goes away—like a stage that turns dark at the end of a performance.

  At the same time, I was conscious of striking while the iron was hot—using my platform and contacts to get in the door. That’s what I meant when at the end of my Miss America farewell speech onstage I’d said, “This isn’t goodbye. This is hello to new beginnings.” During my whole year as Miss America and afterward I was calling agents, looking for advice and opportunities. When I was in New York or in Los Angeles doing different appearances, if I had time on my schedule, I tried to meet with executi
ves. Although I recognize that I had a great advantage in being Miss America, it was still difficult for me to marshal the courage to set up those meetings. For that reason, considering how much nerve it took to pick up the phone, I always tell young people that if they want to get their foot in the door, they should make those calls. You never know what will come of it, and even if you’re just starting out, you might encounter interest where you didn’t expect it.

  I also called people I had met as Miss America—like Deborah Norville, who was so generous with her time. When you’re just starting out, you think people like Deborah are too important to talk to you, but I say go for it. You’d be surprised. I think about it today—how much it means to a young person to have a successful person reach out and lend a hand or offer advice. But you have to realize that those people aren’t going to come looking for you. You have to take the first step. To this day I have an open door policy. I seek out interns and young women and try to help them. Women mentors were important to me, and I want to do that for others. I’m thrilled when I am able to give someone an early boost in her career. When my intern at Fox & Friends got a TV job in Nebraska and wrote to thank me for fighting for her and being a great influence on her, I felt an enormous sense of happiness for her.

  Before Miss America, it had been my plan to go to law school after college. That was still in the background—and my LSAT scores were good for five years. But after a year in the spotlight, in front of the public every day, I realized that’s where I wanted to be. Broadcast journalism seemed a perfect fit for my personality—fast-paced, driven, never boring, with daily opportunities to shine. I guess you could say that I was led in that direction not just because of my experiences as Miss America, but also because of all those years playing the violin and developing presence on the stage. When I was playing, I was always conscious that people had come to hear me because they wanted to get something out of the experience. The same was true of broadcasting. You had to bring something special to the screen—whether it was breaking news, the emotional connection of a tragedy, or the shared exhilaration of a happy event. I imagined being able to pull news viewers into the moment—to give them something to feel and to think about. I knew I could eventually be good at it. I also knew it would be hard, and I was willing to start at the bottom.