Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) (8 page)

In 1987, Kaye Lani Rae Rafko quickly made it clear that her reign would be dedicated to the unique power and importance of the nursing profession. Courtesy of Kaye Lani Rae Rafko-Wilson
.

Part Two

WOMEN ON TOP

FIVE

I find out pretty quickly that not only am I kind of famous, but also that I’m completely unprepared to be famous
.

The best way I can describe this disorienting experience, in general, is to say that it’s both the best and the worst year of my life. Most Miss Americas—me included—come from relatively sheltered backgrounds, and we sort of wander away from our cozy college campuses as we win our local and state pageants. But there’s no way anyone can prepare you for what it’s actually like when you win the big kahuna. As a result, you do spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how the hell you just became not only a quasi celebrity (which you’ve been super excited about being for quite a long time) but also a grown-up (which you really haven’t seen coming). You are, suddenly and constantly, accountable for—and judged on the basis of—your statements, outfits, hairstyle, opinions, political positions, family religion, body type, and so on for the first time in your life. No more rolling out of bed and going to class in your sweatpants. No more off-color jokes in mixed company. No more being safely tucked away while you figure out who you are and what you value—which, no matter what anyone tells you, you do not already have all figured out by the time you win the crown.
It’s like being pushed out of the nest with a red-hot pitchfork; you’d better learn to fly pretty damn fast or you’re dead
.

Wherever you go, you are never just yourself. You are
Miss America.
And part of the reason people love having Miss America come to town is because, well, they get to say they hung out with Miss America. If they remember your actual name after a few months, count yourself lucky. If they spell and pronounce it correctly, you should give them a big fat kiss, because there’s no telling when that’ll happen again. And if they ever meet another Miss America, at some point in their lives, they will probably tell her, “You’re my second Miss America,” and then wait with bated breath to be politely asked who the first one was, because they’re very, very proud of it. Which, again, is charming—the first fifteen times it happens
.

Well-meaning people, dazzled more by your position than by you as an individual (because most of this stuff gets thought up way before they ever actually meet you) often guess wrong about what you might find fun or amusing. I get into the habit of politely declining the optional “extras”—dinner at someone’s house, a ride in their boat, a special tour—once I realize that no matter what anyone says about giving me a chance to relax, bringing along the Miss America persona is mandatory. It’s way more fun to hang out, work out, and spend a couple hours watching TV than to go to a lovely-sounding brunch on my one day off a month (if I’m lucky) and discover upon arrival that it’s a host, hostess, and thirty of their closest friends. And the jokes—THE JOKES. My favorite joke occurs about two-thirds of the way through my year, when I’m already pretty fried. I like being self-sufficient; I’ve always been about 75 percent tomboy, and it’s weird to me that people suddenly believe that, for some reason, I can’t or shouldn’t do menial things for myself. So I end up basically racing whoever it is—driver, skycap, helpful volunteer—to the baggage carousel, so as to pull
my seventy-plus-pound suitcases off for myself. Stupid, but it seems like a good idea at the time. A small act of defiance against the porcelain princess image, because I’ve never fit that image and am not planning to start
.

So one day, one of the guys from the group greeting us at the airport grabs one of my suitcases and acts like it’s extra heavy. And then kind of laughs and goes, “Is this the one with all the makeup?” And he doesn’t mean a damn bit of harm by it. He’s probably nervous, because he isn’t here to meet me, he’s here to meet Miss America. So he makes a dumb joke, and I immediately get all uppity, like “actually, that’s the one with all my files on AIDS research.” And then he feels terrible. And then I feel terrible, because seriously, no need to be a complete bitch to this harmless guy
.

Except that I don’t think the stereotypes
are
harmless, because I live with them every day. Every time I show up somewhere and someone makes a crack about how surprised they are that I’m not wearing a gown. Yeah, dude. To a grade-school assembly? Seriously? Or the time I’m invited, and then uninvited, to speak at Stanford, because somebody gets the bug that Miss America won’t be able to relate to the students there. And by “bug,” I mean “suggestion from a women’s studies class.” Which I’ve also taken, by the way
, at Northwestern.
I think I can hang, guys
.

I’ve learned that the stereotypes, even this many years later, are an automatic companion to being a Miss America. And really, most people don’t intend to be rude. I mean, sure, there are some jackasses who intentionally want to make you feel powerless, and some who legitimately believe that they can make jokes over your head without you figuring it out, because they don’t expect you to be very bright (hello, stereotype . . . sit down and make yourself at home!). But for a much greater percentage of the people you meet, it’s a more simple give-and-take. Like, “you were handed this great position, based partially on your performance in a swimsuit
competition—so you must understand that America will naturally assume you’re a bimbo, right?”

Well, no, actually not right. Here’s how it actually happens: I work my balls off to become what I believe a young woman should aspire to be. I develop my talent, my brain, my physical fitness, my ability to speak intelligently in public on just about any topic you can throw at me; I focus on my adeptness at becoming, overnight, the public face of a multimillion-dollar corporation. I’ve given speeches to people in the upper echelons of education, world health, non-profit work, the media, the entertainment industry, and the legislature of our country—and not only have they listened, but they’ve given me awards for the things that I say and stand for. I’ve gotten a standing ovation at the World AIDS Conference just for talking passionately about HIV education, and another from a skeptical DC insider crowd when I read my needle-exchange-related open letter to President Clinton during my two minutes at the podium
.

I have come here, to your town, not just because you invited me and paid for my flight, but also to tell your students and your news anchors and anyone else who will listen all about this thing called AIDS, which will kill them if given the chance. I’ve researched and touched this epidemic in ways you will never bother to do, not only to help you, not only to build a fortress of credibility that gets me through this very moment almost every day, but because I believe that individuals who are placed in positions of substantial influence have an obligation to do something more than talk about their effing outfits for 365 days. I say all this not to brag, but to express to you in the most solemn fashion I can muster that if I have done all this before the age at which I can legally buy alcohol, your decision to pass judgment on my character—cloaked in humor as you may think it is—is completely out of bounds
.

But, of course, I will never actually say this. Because that would be rude. And you don’t become Miss America without
internalizing at least some of the rules of the road. For example, that Miss America is—duh—not rude
.

In the end, I don’t blame those people very much at all. I actually place the responsibility squarely where I think it belongs—on the Miss America Organization’s continued failure to re-brand its own product responsibly and consistently. Why, for example, does anyone still believe that Miss America is some kind of arm candy, ten years into the pageant’s singular focus on the platform issue? Why haven’t they crafted more effective messaging, or, at the very least, hired someone with that ability? I don’t need to be “FAMOUS, famous”; I’m way more comfortable giving HIV talks at high school assemblies than working a red carpet at a movie premiere. I hold court at summits and conferences far more effectively than I do—still, to this day, in fact—at a nightclub or a photo shoot. And I also find it hard to argue that this kind of work isn’t just a better use of everyone’s time. But you know what they say about a tree falling in the forest, if no one’s around to hear it
.

No wonder Bess Myerson went off the deep end
.

SIX

Once television changed Miss America (and Miss America, in a relative sense, changed television), the pageant had few options but to try to move forward. Certainly, there was a new level of interest from both the public and the advertisers; for the first time, Miss America herself became as famous as the institution she represented.

As more Americans acquired TVs, more Americans tuned in to the pageant each September. In 1958, the telecast had moved from ABC to CBS and was expanded by thirty minutes. An astonishing audience of sixty million watched the crowning of Miss America 1959, which worked out to two-thirds of the possible audience. By 1970, the audience grew to an estimated eighty million households, though the nationwide popularity of Miss America viewing parties at the time could actually translate into a figure closer to one hundred million. Regardless, the 1970 Miss America Pageant topped its own record of frequently being the most-watched show of the year by becoming the fifth most-watched show in all of television history. As Frank Deford noted, “Year in and year out there are only
two things in all of the United States that have evidenced the sustained popularity to compete with
Miss America
. One is the Academy Awards; the other is Bob Hope. Were Bob Hope to crown Miss America at halftime of the Super Bowl, the nation would crunch to a complete halt, since the figures prove conclusively that every man, woman, and child in the United States of America would be watching television at that moment.”

The Miss America telecast in those early years was such a smashing success that it became appointment television for families across the country. It was wholesome enough to be the one program per year that little girls were allowed to stay up late for, but also—even if it was not actually the least bit risqué—provided enough eye candy for the man of the house to shrug his shoulders and watch from his recliner.

For several years, it seemed to be enough for a contestant to simply show up, win the crown, and ride the resulting momentum until she relinquished the title to the next winner. Miss America was Miss America was Miss America. She became famous because the pageant told us she was the most deserving; she remained a draw in communities across the country because she was famous. It was a brilliantly simple equation, to the point that it was an essentially straight line to the subsequent deterioration of Miss America’s identity. Her celebrity was not carefully plotted in the conference rooms of high-ranking executives. It was, more or less, an accident of sudden and widespread exposure. This, presumably, was awesome at the time. But lacking a strategy to move ahead—or any recognition of how rapidly America would evolve over the coming decades—the pageant was inevitably going to get stuck. Stuck with a self-created fame that—lacking a more significant message than “She’s the one!”—would eventually become less and less interesting to the public.

It was this very success that would eventually paralyze the pageant, a phenomenon that continues even now. Decades later, facing ratings challenges that simply would not be conquered, Miss America would swing wildly back and forth between trying to copy the trends of the moment and trying to recapture the innocence of the pageant’s younger days. To do that, of course, was and is a fool’s errand; it’s impossible to replicate the pageants of those early years. Among Miss America’s biggest leadership issues (in the absence of a nation-sized time machine) is the apparent crisis over whether to turn the clock back or forward. Sadly, since the leadership can’t ever quite seem to decide which path will be more effective (and don’t seem to have the patience to actually sit down, craft a new corporate identity, and give it a few years to develop), the telecast tends to jerk erratically back and forth. Classic Miss America. Glamorous Miss America. Hip Miss America. Innocent Miss America. Bombshell Miss America. Perhaps that’s a product of the ground the American female identity has covered since 1955; while the aforementioned Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, and Katharine Hepburn (for starters) successfully negotiated bombshell innocence, hipness, and old-school classic glamour, most women define themselves within a narrower identity. Once the pageant’s television infancy set up Miss America as someone who could be all things to all people, it was inevitable that the world would reach a moment when this became difficult to sustain. As Americans recognized that they had more and more choices, the goal of satisfying everyone (or even a significant percentage of everyone) became increasingly impossible. Incidentally, never have the pageant’s identity problems been more significant than in the age of the Internet, which has of course coincided with the biggest and perhaps most irreparable crash in Miss America’s image and marketability.

But in those early days, well, they didn’t need to sweat the details.

In 1955, the year after the telecast first aired, the pageant also brought on someone who eventually became more famous than the winner herself: a jack-of-all-trades emcee named Bert Parks. Parks was an established entertainer in his own right, having enjoyed significant success on television. But this gig was to become his most recognizable role. For starters, he was a terrific showman and improviser. He effectively became the wingman to Miss America each year, guiding her toward her crown and then sending her out to greet the world. He possessed a rare gift for effectively holding together a three-hour show year after year. As many have pointed out, he was its star for all but the last five minutes, but he managed to direct the spotlight toward the contestants with delicacy, attention, humor, and grace. And he was, for decades, the pageant’s most enduring constant, with the ability to put the contestants at ease and provide opportunities for their real personalities to permeate the perfect facades.