Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) (16 page)

Even under the best of circumstances, assuming 100 percent compliance with a drug regimen, living with HIV/AIDS long term has never been easy. Some of the drugs are so toxic that they’re far from a panacea. Ultimately, they end up simply being a moderate extension of life for many people. Uncle Bob is a perfect example: after several years of treatment, his kidneys just can’t take it anymore. The same medications that promise to save him eventually kill him. In 1999, when I see him alive for the last time, the whites of his eyes are so yellow that they look like they’ve been colored in with a crayon
.

And as awkward a comparison as it may be, the Miss America Organization is still facing significant limitations of its own. Yes, several Miss Americas have been able to achieve major advancements in terms of respect and relevance. But while we can treat the symptoms of what ails the pageant, we can’t cure it, any more than the best doctors in the world can cure the HIV/AIDS epidemic. For a long time,
I believe we can—if only I work hard enough. I want the country to see the institution the way I see it—full of opportunity, full of influence, limitless in its potential
.

It’s such a dangerous thing to fall in love with potential. Doing so—whether it’s a person or an entity—is basically a fast track to getting your heart broken. Until 1995, for example, Chevrolet is a major sponsor of Miss America. And in many frustrating ways, trying to save Miss America proves to be a lot like restoring a ’57 Chevy. You can give it a new paint job, rebuild the engine, replace the cloth top, and on and on and on. But there are so many moving parts to keep track of, and if one isn’t working perfectly, it can drag down the whole enterprise. I will learn this, painfully and repeatedly, later. And then again. And again. Until I finally realize that if Miss America herself is one of the very few pushing the Chevy uphill, she’d better eventually figure out when to get out of the way, before it rolls backwards and crushes her under its wheels
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With or without the silver bullet of a platform issue, it was crazy to think that I could save Miss America. But, oh, how I tried
.

TEN

During the last decade of the twentieth century, the Miss America Organization (as it had officially been rechristened) made major changes. Some were smart, some were shortsighted, and some were just downright desperate. But with each passing year (and as ratings for the annual telecast consistently fell), the pageant was at least making efforts to rebrand itself.

With the new-car smell barely wearing off of his term as CEO, Leonard Horn decided to bring in a new executive producer for the pageant. Starting in 1993, the pageant gradually relegated longtime producer Bill Caligari to preliminary-night duties, while Emmy winner Jeff Margolis took over as both producer and director.

Clearly, one of the goals of Margolis and his team was to shake up the format of the show. For years, if not decades, the pageant had followed essentially the same pattern: introduce the contestants, introduce the host(s), narrow the field to a top ten to compete in swimsuit, talent, and evening gown, and announce the runners-up and the winner. Sure, there were small alterations here and there. Sometimes the winner was called from a field of six (the four runners-up having already been announced and the rest of
the top ten waiting with bated breath); in other years, the ten were first narrowed to a top five. For a few years, the top
two
were plucked out of the final seven (after the weeding-out of the fourth, third, and second runners-up), keeping the field as large as possible for as long as possible before surrendering to the higher-drama visual of the Last Two Standing. But in general, the show had largely remained unchanged for much of its lifetime on television.

Margolis was proactive. During his seven-year stint, he and pageant officials tinkered with numerous elements of the format. Almost immediately, the production numbers became more current. The music that accompanied them was more contemporary, but not awkwardly so, and everyone spent less time lip-syncing along with prerecorded tracks. The contestants themselves—for better or, sometimes, worse—were involved as singers and dancers, sometimes in elaborate outfits (in one number, they wore costumes made largely of inflated balloons).

The early nineties also saw the introduction of new emcees for the show. After surviving an agonizing eleven-minute delay just before the crowning of Miss America 1989—and here, one must really refer to William Goldman’s
Hype and Glory
for the most painfully detailed account of that night’s events—Gary Collins was replaced by popular morning show hosts Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford.

The biggest evolution during the 1990s, at least in terms of scoring, was the gradual shortening of the talent competition. A word about talent: although it has almost always been the highest-value competition, the judges are often reminded that the contestants are not expected to be professional-level entertainers. Still, no thinking person should argue that the overall quality of talent hasn’t been spotty in the past two decades. Part of that was due to the simple fact that more women were choosing to go to college to pursue non-artistic careers, and just had fewer hours to practice the piano. But also, the contestant’s charisma and
spokesperson skills (as demonstrated in the private interview) became more and more important in an era when Miss America was chasing both institutional and platform-related credibility. Talent may have been responsible for more
actual
points, but a good interview could scatter de facto points across all of the competitions.

Also, while the platform issue took center stage—requiring a significant time commitment to community service and activism—the opportunities for talented young women to use Miss America as a launching pad for entertainment careers were waning. Miss America herself now spent more time on Capitol Hill than at Carnegie Hall; her prize package included scholarships instead of screen tests. Young women who were seeking to perform at the highest artistic levels undoubtedly began to wonder whether the pageant was a legitimate outlet for introducing themselves to the entertainment industry—or if it was just a lot of trouble for a diminishing amount of screen time and artistic cred. In the 1978 finals, for example, talent was worth one-third of the contestant’s score—the same value as swimsuit and evening gown—and she demonstrated her skills, such as they were, for two minutes and fifty seconds; that year’s Miss Washington went almost a full three minutes. In 1993, the performances were shortened to two minutes, thirty seconds; in 1996, they went to a flat two minutes. The year 1999 was the first in which only the top five contestants performed talent. And by the time Miss America was dropped from network television after the 2004 pageant, the talent competition had been reduced to a “showdown” between the top two; although both women were well-rounded and consistent across the categories, neither gave a particularly stellar performance. Although he had left his CEO duties in 1998, the always-outspoken Horn offered some typically pointed words regarding this turn of events. He essentially blamed the cheese factor on local and state volunteers who had just been around too
long, flatly stating that “the talent got homogenous and boring” and that “by the time (the contestants) reach the national level they no longer look like fresh girls or 21-year-olds. They look like 40-year-old Stepford Wives. If they are going to relate to the women in audience, they have to look and act like their peers.”

The leadership’s basic reasoning behind the Incredible Shrinking Talent Competition was that most of the talents weren’t strong enough to be showcased in an era when attention spans were getting shorter and television remotes would be used liberally across America as soon as a singer hit a bad note. The enormous and sustained success of
American Idol
just a couple of years later seems to disprove this hypothesis; clearly, America was just fine with tuning in to watch terrible singers sing terribly. Perhaps the disparity in ratings can be attributed to the fact that
Idol
clearly delineated between good and bad, or that
Idol
judges weren’t compelled to heap flattery on anyone—even their best singers—after a poor showing. But because Miss America contestants were consistently treated with reverence regardless of their performance quality (and one could argue that their achievements, if not their entertainment abilities, warranted such treatment), the pageant didn’t offer the kind of gleeful schadenfreude that televised talent shows had, did, and would. In other words, no matter what happened with Miss Alaska’s baton twirling, no one was going to sound the gong. And no one was going to tell her afterward that she had been terrible—at least, not to her face. As the years went on, the swimsuits and gowns continued to hold appeal, but viewers were more likely to switch off the talent competition and return only for the crowning moment at the end of the show.

All that aside, there were indeed substantive and positive changes in the show during the 1990s. The reintroduction of the top-five segment gradually brought the platform issue into much sharper focus. Over the course of the de
cade, the awkward memorized personal statements (usually delivered at a microphone during the evening gown competition) disappeared entirely. Instead, the five finalists were asked to sit down with a host—Philbin, Nancy Glass,
The View
’s Meredith Vieira—and answer questions in a roundtable format. This moment, along with home videos and “up close and personal” features on each hopeful, allowed the viewing audience to connect with more real, relatable Miss America contestants. The glimpse of conversation also provided insight into each contestant’s individual judges’ interview. As the first of all the competitions, the private interview has a significant impact on the outcome. But because it is only seen by the judging panel, it can make for a head-scratching moment at the end of the evening . . . especially if one or two of the women seem to be miles ahead in the onstage competition, yet don’t end up with the crown. The refrain that “it must have been her interview” has been both grumbled and shouted joyfully all over pageant venues for years following the announcement of the new Miss Whatever. Finally, the new Woman of Achievement Award, given by Miss America to a distinguished female, was noted during the telecast. Usually, it was a pre-taped segment with the recipient. First Ladies Hillary Clinton (1995) and Barbara Bush (1997) and movie star Sharon Stone (1998) were among the recipients, chosen on the basis of their humanitarian efforts—sometimes in the field of Miss America’s platform, sometimes for their broader philanthropic work.

Developments like these certainly highlighted the evolution of the pageant. But the largest challenge—and one that has never quite been met—was synchronizing the telecast with the day-to-day duties of the winner herself. Miss America’s “year of service” (a phrase that unilaterally replaced the outdated “reign”) changed significantly in the 1990s. While the organization continued to use the same statistic (actually calculated by Miss Amer
ica 1990, Debbye Turner, during some downtime with her traveling companion): at least 20,000 miles a month in domestic and (occasionally) international travel, the focus of those trips shifted. The new Miss America was quickly and strategically aligned with nonprofit and corporate entities that shared her stated mission. Often, these groups would seek her out, recruiting her to travel to their fundraisers, lobbying efforts, and educational initiatives. As a result, about 80 to 90 percent of her year was spent doing real boots-on-the-ground advocacy and education, with the remaining time dedicated to sponsor appearances, autograph sessions, and selected performances. In the 1990s, Miss America evolved from a figurehead to an activist, turning the spotlight away from herself and onto an issue she felt was critical. In terms of mainstream legitimacy, it was arguably the pageant’s most important initiative since the introduction of scholarships. The platform issue was strongly emphasized in Miss America’s marketing materials. In the national program book, for example, it slid neatly into the spot where the contestants’ eye color and measurements had once been printed.

But was it sexy television? For a while, it was different enough to take center stage. The top five competition focused almost exclusively on platform. Although it was initially met with skepticism or derision—critics snarked about hearing “beauty queens” play concertos and wax poetic about literacy—there was, as the decade progressed, evidence that Miss America’s efforts were indeed penetrating the public consciousness. Even author Sarah Banet-Weiser recognized the shifting identity that Miss America was trying to carve out for herself. Though she remained skeptical of the throwback “nurturing” element of many of the platform issues, she asserted that “the politics of the Miss America pageant dovetail with early, first-wave liberal feminism in the United States. [Miss America] consistently and forcefully establishes herself as an icon of
respectability, someone much more than a mere beauty queen.”

There were certainly obstacles on the way to this new identity. Carolyn Sapp (1992) competed with a platform of education, but quickly found her year sidetracked when her past came back to haunt her. Shortly after her crowning, the media uncovered that she had been involved in a physically abusive relationship with an NFL player; Sapp soon became a de facto spokesperson for domestic violence organizations. Leanza Cornett (1993) was widely praised for her HIV/AIDS platform, especially since the disease directly affected such a large segment of the pageant’s volunteer network. However, her devotion to her advocacy led her to violate one of the most sacrosanct traditions among Miss America’s most faithful fans: she decided that she would not wear the crown when making appearances, claiming that it undercut her credibility as an activist. Her actions would eventually point up a major philosophical split between old- and new-school pageant fans. The former group openly threatened to boo her on the Convention Hall stage the year she crowned her successor, and opined that her first runner-up would probably be more than happy to show up in Atlantic City for those few final days and wear whatever headpiece she was asked to. The latter group recognized the cognitive dissonance that Cornett was pointing out (“How do you talk about practicing safe sex when you’ve got this thing on top of your head?” she asks), but were still far outnumbered by the traditionalists.