LITMIR.BIZ

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Bess Myerson routinely stopped traffic and turned heads on the streets of the Bronx, where she grew up. But beauty wasn’t important to Myerson’s Russian Jewish parents and their three daughters, who lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the Sholem Aleichem housing co-op. “Nobody [there] cared about looks,” a childhood family friend told The New York Times. “They cared about books and brains.”

      The co-op was a workers’ housing project built in the 1920s to preserve secular Yiddish culture, named for the author of the stories that inspired Fiddler on the Roof. Snuggled between Jerome Park Reservoir and Van Cortlandt Park, it served as a haven for Jewish families who left the crowded Lower East Side for the greener pastures of the Bronx at the dawn of its urban growth. Its fifteen Tudor-style buildings contained a nursery school, an auditorium, three art studios, and two schools—one for communists, another for socialists, leaving members of the resident anarchist group to make their choice. Landscaped with gardens that snaked between the buildings, its inner courtyards nurtured a communitarian spirit, though skipping across the rooftops was sometimes the quickest route to a friend’s place.

      “It seemed to me that almost every child in the building took piano or violin,” Myerson said in Susan Dworkin’s Miss America, 1945: Bess Myerson and the Year that Changed Our Lives. “The place resounded with music. There was an unwritten rule that you could not practice after 9 o’clock at night because the tenants—truckers, butchers, garment workers, blue collar people—rose early and needed their sleep.”

      Because Myerson’s demanding mother wanted her girls to be music teachers, she made them practice for hours every day and drummed into them that they should be prepared to make their own living, just in case. Myerson, who played both flute and piano, paid for her music degree from Hunter College by giving piano lessons. She graduated with honors in 1945. Though she wanted to attend graduate school to train to become a conductor, she couldn’t afford it. But her older sister Sylvia had a plan. When Myerson was in college, a photographer friend had taken modeling photos of her; she’d slathered on the makeup and hammed it up in pinup poses, imitating Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. In the summer of 1945, while she was working as a music counselor at a New England summer camp, she learned that Sylvia and their friend had used the photos to enter her in a beauty contest. She’d been picked from 1,200 applicants to compete for the Miss New York title at the Ritz Theater. Bess was reluctant to go, but Sylvia persuaded her, arguing that a victory could win her money to buy a piano or start a music school.

      “I remember walking onto the stage,” Myerson told Dworkin, “looking around at the other girls, feeling like I was out of another mold. They were very blond and cover-girlish . . . I was tall and dark and had no hips . . . I thought surely one of them would be chosen.” She was also intensely uncomfortable appearing in a bathing suit. But she felt more confident once she changed into a gown to perform Grieg on piano and Gershwin on flute. She made the final fifteen.

      When she returned for the finals on Wednesday, August 15, the city was teeming with euphoric New Yorkers. The previous day, half a million people in Times Square had looked up to see the news rolling across the ticker: OFFICIAL—TRUMAN ANNOUNCES JAPANESE SURRENDER. For the next two days, millions of people flooded into midtown Manhattan to cheer and cry under showers of streamers and confetti. “Buildings ablaze with parties,” Myerson wrote in her diary. “Finals tomorrow.”

      The next afternoon, following rehearsals for the evening finals, she met Lenora Slaughter, who, Zelig-like, managed to attend regional contests across the country when she wasn’t jousting with her board, smooth-talking Atlantic City businessmen, masterminding the fall pageant, or managing the latest winner. She struck Myerson as “a bright woman who knew exactly what she wanted” but who “scared most of us because she was so self-assured and flamboyant.” Slaughter, impressed with Myerson’s statuesque beauty and fine musical talent, invited her to chat.

      Sitting in the empty third row of the theater, they talked about the history of the pageant, the scholarship, and Myerson’s dreams of graduate school. Myerson was just the type of cultured, sensibly ambitious candidate Slaughter wanted to see at Miss America. But there was a problem: the name. “Bess Myerson is just not a very attractive name for a career in show business,” she told her, though that wasn’t exactly Myerson’s stated ambition, nor was it consonant with Slaughter’s new vision for the pageant.

      “What would you suggest?” Myerson asked.

      “‘Betty,’ or whatever, ‘Merrick’ or something,” Slaughter ventured.

      Myerson knew this was about more than a stage name. In the first of many tussles she would have with Slaughter, she put her foot down. She recalled her father, a house painter who had survived a pogrom as a child in Russia, telling her to remember who she was—meaning a Jew—and refused. “I cannot change my name,” she said. “I live in a building with two hundred and fifty Jewish families . . . If I should win, I want everybody to know that I’m the daughter of Louie and Bella Myerson.”

      Slaughter later said she was merely concerned that Myerson’s chances would be hurt when she encountered anti-Semitism in Atlantic City. “I figured that if I could get her name changed it would help her because she didn’t look Jewish or anything like that,” she told the writer Jennifer Preston. She claimed the Quakers who ran the pageant didn’t like Jews, and that there weren’t many hotels for Jews there. In fact, there were (along with about a dozen synagogues), though they were largely segregated, built in response to discriminatory “Gentiles Only” hotel policies, as was the Jewish country club.

      When Slaughter pressed the point, Myerson dug in. She was already losing her sense of who she was. “I was in a masquerade, marching across stages in bathing suits,” she told Dworkin. “Whatever was left of myself in this game, I had to keep, I sensed that.”

      Myerson’s sheltered life changed irrevocably that week. The day after she was crowned Miss New York, her diary read, “Had champagne! Met Spanish playboys. Chauffeur drove us home at 6 a.m.!” She had just turned twenty-one. Her photo appeared in the city papers, showing her seated, legs extended, on a deeply unglamorous tar beach rooftop, tanned from summer camp and wearing a white two-piece swimsuit with lacing down the hips. Her parents weren’t happy about it—until she told them winning Miss America could mean graduate school and a baby grand piano. But her sudden celebrity had a downside: a steady stream of obscene letters and phone calls that continued even after she was crowned Miss America. She was mortified when her father discovered a used condom hanging from the apartment doorknob.

      Myerson found herself being whisked around to lunches, cocktail parties, radio interviews, and photo shoots. When she met mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, founder of her alma mater, the High School of Music & Art, he wanted to know why a LaGuardia graduate would stoop to such a thing. “He asked me if the Miss America Pageant was merely another fanny-shaking contest where I’d have to compete with a lot of empty headed females who show their legs,” her diary read. “Made me promise to stick to my music and write and tell him what school I was going to attend.” LaGuardia, who killed New York City burlesque by shutting down all six Minsky’s theaters in 1937, may be the only elected official in the pageant’s history who was immune to the glamour of a beauty queen.

      Despite lingering prejudices against it (and, in big cities, general indifference to it), the pageant was poised to enter a new era. The scholarship was in place. With the war over, Slaughter hoped to make her baby “the first major national event of the peacetime era.” Nucky Johnson had finally retired as mobster-in-chief after spending four years in prison, which, combined with the wartime military presence in Atlantic City, had tamped down racketeering and softened the city’s public image. Many soldiers who’d spent time there liked it so much they wanted to return with their families. In 1944, a popular film called Atlantic City was released. Set in 1915, it centered on a fictionalized Miss America pageant as it dramatized the making of the ritzy resort town, luxuriating in flashy nightclub sequences with performances by Louis Armstrong and Dorothy Dandridge.

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