Looking for Miss America. Margot Mifflin
identifying her as the “Popular Favorite.”
Because the 1923 Miss Brooklyn had turned out to be Mrs. Everett Barnes, the wife of a professional baseball player, a new rule now forbade married women from entering, but Miss Boston had missed the memo and, faced with disqualification, cried in her hotel room with her seven-month-old son while her husband, a lawyer, threatened a lawsuit, and the rule was relaxed.
The need for clearer guidelines was further highlighted when Helmar Liederman, Miss Alaska, a vivacious favorite in white—swimsuit, stockings, and jazzy tam—was exposed as a married New Yorker who had immigrated from Sweden a year earlier and spent all of three days in Juneau. One newspaper reported that she’d “made the long journey from her native town by dog sledding, hiking and automobiling.” Known as the “Arctic Venus,” she and her grifter husband had posed as a brother-sister team at other beauty contests.
Liederman made national headlines by filing a $150,000 lawsuit against the pageant for barring her from it, spelling out the damages in exquisite detail: “My worth in future beauty contests was reduced tremendously thereby. For you can deplore the fact all you wish, but marriage certainly hurts a girl who wishes to appear before the public . . . To the American public there is no romance, no zest, no mystery to the married woman. Her eyes are opened; her case is decided. She is as flat as a blown out tire, as tame as a dish of rice and milk. She is like a story read several times, all discovered and finished.” Which was exactly why married women were forbidden from competing in the first place.
The 1924 parade included thirty bands, a cohort of weary Civil War vets in faded blue uniforms, and floats propelled by great sums of money—but not, evidently, enough for eighteen-year-old Ruth Malcomson, Miss Philadelphia, who balked at the shabby—though mammoth—contraption she was expected to ride, dressed as Betsy Ross, with a court of honor packed with girls costumed as Quakers. She surveyed the fake fireplace and spinning wheel installed on a flatbed truck and broke down in hysterics, crying until a doctor was called to calm her into compliance.
Once aboard, Malcomson was hugely popular both for her looks and as a Philadelphia candidate—second only to Atlantic City nominees in whipping up local enthusiasm. She handily took three preliminary awards, but the Miss America title was harder won. The judges mulled over the five finalists for four hours on a night so hot that four women fainted. Philadelphia’s mayor lost patience and took off for a theater across the boardwalk, asking to be alerted if his girl prevailed. Finally, Campbell, a return competitor and finalist, was asked to step forward and stood quaking at the prospect of a third victory. She was stilled when a thunderous voice announced Philadelphia was the winner, and the band broke into the national anthem. Wearing a knee-length tunic and gladiator sandals, Neptune crowned Malcomson, and Campbell kissed her, whispering, “You have been my choice.”
Malcomson was five feet six, with delicate lips, melancholy blue eyes, and auburn hair, worn natural—a strategic choice, considering the previous year she’d sported a bob and lost. One reporter described her as “a startling combination of athletic prowess and femininity.” She was a sprinter, gymnast, swimmer, and baseball player who, the boys in her neighborhood said, could throw a ball “as straight as a bullet and play any position on the team.” She was sort of interested in a film career but considered herself a “home girl” who loved singing in her church choir and wanted to keep playing ball with her friends, who knew her as Rufus. She’d shrewdly worked the pageant to her own advantage—growing out her hair to win and grandstanding over the hokey float—but her ambition, it seemed, ended with the title.
Frank Deford, who wrote a 1971 history of the pageant, There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America, deemed Malcomson, Campbell, and Gorman early prototypes of one enduring kind of winner, “generally a shy woman, with no sustaining interest in pageants or any other form of publicity; but for this one incidental burst of fame, she is never again in the public eye.” Gorman had gone home to be feted in D.C., then forgotten; Campbell worked in theater for eight months, went to college, then dropped out to care for her father after her mother’s death. Malcomson did a bit of modeling but rejected stage and movie offers; she visited hospitals and church bazaars in Philadelphia during her reign, then married and largely faded into obscurity.
But on one subject, she was no wallflower: the following year she refused to return to crown Miss America 1925 because of the influx of professional beauties using the pageant as a career stepping stone. “What chance has an ordinary girl,” she asked, “untrained, to win a contest in which girls who have been trained to make the most of their beauty are competing?” She was especially irked by two New York showgirls, one of whose employers was a pageant judge.
Confirming Malcomson’s allegations, the 1925 contestants were asked to sign a contract promising that if they won, they would appear in a film produced by Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (later Paramount Pictures). Shortly before the contest, Miss Pittsburgh backed out, declaring, “This whole thing reeks of commercialism.” But the others had no objection, least of all the winner, Fay Lanphier, Miss California, who landed a leading role in a comedy-romance called The American Venus. In a case of art imitating life, Lanphier played an aspiring beauty queen.
Though she was toasted by Will Rogers and Rudolph Valentino and appeared in a Laurel and Hardy film, Lanphier’s acting career never lifted off. By 1927 she was running a beauty parlor, and in 1934 she described herself as a housewife. Deford dubbed her a second Miss America prototype: the Hollywood dreamer—whose dreams were almost always dashed. More losers, it seemed, made it in Hollywood in the 1920s than winners: Georgia Hale (Miss Chicago 1922) costarred in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush; Adrienne Dore (Miss Los Angeles 1925, second runner-up to Lanphier) signed a five-year contract with Universal Pictures; Joan Blondell (Miss Dallas 1926) starred in films with James Cagney.
Lanphier, nineteen, was the first winner to represent a state, the first from the West, the first to appear in a feature film, the first whose win was broadcast on live radio, and the first to wear a bob. She was also the first to be crowned with something that looked more like metal than cardboard, as the crown evolved from a headband evoking Lady Liberty to a coronet connoting royalty. A secretary from Oakland, she had lost ten pounds since placing third in 1924 and was yet the heaviest of the bunch, at 130. But her crown was quickly tarnished; later that year, in an extraordinary lapse of judgment as the one veteran pageant judge, Christy unveiled a nude sculpture called “Miss America 1925,” eliciting whispers that she had posed naked for it, which she hadn’t. That fall, tabloid rumors swirled that the pageant was fixed and Famous Players-Lasky had chosen Lanphier as their star before the competition began.
Film contracts were just one element of the creeping commercialism of 1925. Miss Chicago scandalized the crowd by posting an ad for a powder puff on her rolling chair, prompting onlookers to yell, “How much are you getting for that?” Ads for a railroad and a telegraph company also appeared. “It had never been done just that way in previous years,” The New York Times explained, “but there had been rumors that the contestants weren’t all that altruistic.” In fact, they’d never been altruistic at all: they competed to win prizes, careers, recognition, or husbands.
Recognizing that the contest was corroding Atlantic City’s image (already damaged because of open gambling in its pool halls, along with the heroic volume of alcohol it was bootlegging—nearly 40 percent of the entire nation’s supply), Mayor Bader supported terminating it. But instead of giving in to the opposition, the committee tried to bring the pageant to heel. New rules for 1926 said the beauties couldn’t be married, divorced, or widowed; couldn’t be professionals (including stage and screen performers and artists’ models); must be over sixteen and under twenty-five; and couldn’t have competed previously. Seventy-three women entered, fifteen judges were recruited, and still everything went wrong.
When the “Beauty Train” arrived from Philadelphia with its cargo of contestants, the bands played, the crowds cheered, and the welcoming party hoisted the flag, but the rope broke and Old Glory went crashing to the ground. Stormy weather prevented King Neptune (now played by comic actor DeWolf Hopper) from arriving by sea. Returning champion Lanphier suffered “a slight nervous breakdown” after the introductory formalities at City Hall, repeatedly bursting into tears at the luncheon in her honor.