The 40s: The Story of a Decade (37 page)

OCTOBER 22, 1949 (ON THE MISS AMERICA PAGEANT)

T
here are thirteen million women in the United States between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. All of them were eligible to compete for the title of Miss America in the annual contest staged in Atlantic City last month if they were high-school graduates, were not and had never been married, and were not Negroes. Ten thousand of them participated in preliminary contests held in all but three of the forty-eight states. Then, one cool September day, a Miss from each of these states, together with a Miss New York City, a Miss Greater Philadelphia, a Miss Chicago, a Miss District of Columbia, a Miss Canada, a Miss Puerto Rico, and a Miss Hawaii, arrived in Atlantic City to display her beauty, poise, grace, physique, personality, and talent. The primary, and most obvious, stake in the contest was a twenty-five-thousand-dollar scholarship fund—a five-thousand-dollar scholarship for the winner and lesser ones for fourteen runners-up—which had been established by the makers of Nash automobiles, Catalina swim suits, and a cotton fabric known as Everglaze. The winner would also get a new four-door Nash sedan, a dozen Catalina swim suits, and a wardrobe of sixty Everglaze garments. The contest was called the Miss America Pageant. The fifty-two competitors went into it seeking, beyond the prizes, great decisions. Exactly what was decided, they are still trying to find out.

Miss New York State was a twenty-two-year-old registered nurse named Wanda Nalepa, who lives in the Bronx. She has honey-blond hair, green eyes, and a light complexion, and is five feet three. Some
other statistics gathered by Miss America Pageant officials are: weight, 108; bust, 34; waist, 23; thigh, 19; hips, 34; calf, 12¼; ankle, 7½; shoe size, 5; dress size, 10. She was asked in an official questionnaire why she had entered the Atlantic City contest. She answered that her friends had urged her to. The day before the contest was to start, I telephoned Miss Nalepa at her home to ask when she was leaving for Atlantic City. She said that she was driving down the next morning and invited me to go along.

Miss Nalepa lives in a second-floor walkup apartment in a building near 164th Street on Sherman Avenue, a couple of blocks from the Grand Concourse. At eight the following morning, I was greeted at the door of the Nalepa flat by a thin young man in his late twenties wearing rimless glasses. “Come right in, Miss,” he said. “I’m Teddy, Wanda’s brother. Wanda’s getting dressed.” He led me into a small, dim living room, and I sat down in a chair next to a table. On the table were two trophies—a silver loving cup saying “Miss Sullivan County 1949” and a plastic statuette saying “Miss New York State 1949”—and a two-panel picture folder showing, on one side, Miss Nalepa in a bathing suit and, on the other, Miss Nalepa in a nurse’s uniform. Teddy sat on the edge of a couch and stared self-consciously at a crucifix and a holy picture on the wall across the room. I asked him if he was going to Atlantic City. He said that he was a tool-and-die maker and had to work. “Bob—that’s Wanda’s boy friend—he’s driving you down,” he said. “Bob can get more time off. He’s assistant manager for a finance company.”

One by one, the family wandered into the room—Mr. Nalepa, a short, tired-looking man who resembles Teddy and who works in a factory making rattan furniture; Mrs. Nalepa, a small, shy woman with gray hair; and Wanda’s younger sister, Helen, a high-school senior. Each of them nodded to me or said hello, but nobody said anything much after that. Then a pair of French doors opened and Wanda came in and said hello to me. Everybody studied her. She wore an eggshell straw sailor hat set back on her head, a navy-blue dotted-swiss dress, blue stockings, and high-heeled navy-blue pumps. For jewelry, she wore only a sturdy wristwatch with a leather strap and her nursing-school graduation ring.

“I hope this looks all right,” Miss Nalepa said in a thin, uncertain voice. “I didn’t know what to wear.”

“Looks all right,” her father said.

The doorbell rang. Teddy said that it must be Bob. It was Bob—a tall, gaunt man of about thirty with a worried face. He nodded to everybody,
picked up Miss Nalepa’s luggage and threw several evening gowns over one arm, said that we ought to get going, and started downstairs.

“Well, goodbye,” said Miss Nalepa.

“Don’t forget to stand up straight,” her sister said.

“What about breakfast?” her mother asked mildly.

“I don’t feel like eating,” Miss Nalepa said.

“Good luck, Wanda,” said Teddy.

“Well, goodbye,” Miss Nalepa said again, looking at her father.

“All right, all right, goodbye,” her father said.

Miss Nalepa was about to walk out the door when her mother stepped up timidly and gave her a peck on the cheek. As we were going downstairs together, Miss Nalepa clutched at my wrist. Her hand was cold. “That’s the second time I ever remember my mother kissed me,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “The first time was when I graduated from high school. I looked around to see if anybody was watching us, I was so embarrassed.”

We found Bob and a pudgy, bald-headed man named Frank stowing the bags in the luggage compartment of a 1948 Pontiac sedan. I learned that Frank, a friend of Bob’s, was going along, too. Women neighbors in housecoats were leaning out of windows to watch the departure. Frank told Miss Nalepa that a photograph of her taken from the rear had come out fine. “Wanda has a perfect back,” he said to me. “I’m getting this picture printed in the
National Chiropractic Journal.
I’m a chiropractor.”

I got in front, with Bob and Miss Nalepa. Frank got in back. On our way downtown, Miss Nalepa told me that we were to stop at Grand Central to pick up her chaperone, a Miss Neville. Miss Neville represented WKBW, the radio station in Buffalo that, with the blessings of the Miss America Pageant people but without any official blessings from Albany, had sponsored the New York State contest. A couple of weeks before competing in that one, which was held at the Crystal Beach Amusement Park, near Buffalo, Miss Nalepa had won the title of Miss Sullivan County in a contest held in the town of Monticello, thus qualifying for the state contest, and a week or so before that she had won the title of Miss White Roe Inn, the inn being situated outside the town of Livingston Manor, in Sullivan County. She had gone to the inn for a short vacation at the insistence of a friend who thought she could win the beauty contest there. Miss Nalepa had heard of such contests and of others held at local theatres but hadn’t ever entered one before. “I never
had the nerve,” she told me. “I always knew I was pretty, but it always made me feel uncomfortable. When I was six, I remember a little boy in the first grade who used to watch me. I was terrified. I used to run home from school every day. At parties, when I was older, the boys paid a lot of attention to me, and I didn’t like it. I wanted the other girls to get attention, too.” Miss Nalepa went to a vocational high school, to study dressmaking; worked in a five-and-ten-cent store for a while after graduation; considered taking singing lessons but dropped the idea after her two sisters told her she had no singing ability; and went to the Rhodes School, in New York City, for a pre-nursing course and then to Mount Sinai Hospital, where she got her R.N. degree in 1948. She didn’t like to go out on dates with the hospital doctors. “Doctors are too forward,” she said.

· · ·

At Grand Central, Miss Neville, a pleasant, gray-haired lady, who said she had not been in Atlantic City for twenty years and was very enthusiastic about going there now, got in the back seat with Frank, and they began talking about chiropractic. As we headed for the Holland Tunnel, the three of us in the front seat discussed the contest. “Don’t expect much and you won’t be disappointed,” Miss Nalepa said, clutching Bob’s arm. She thought it would be nice to have some scholarship money and said that if she won any, she might use it to learn to play some musical instrument. No money had come with the Miss White Roe Inn title. She had received seventy-five dollars from the Sullivan County Resort Association for becoming Miss Sullivan County, and a picture of her in a bathing suit had appeared in the New York
Daily News
captioned “Having Wandaful Time.” When she was named Miss New York State, she was given three evening gowns and two pieces of luggage. She earned ten dollars a day nursing, but she hadn’t worked for more than a month—not since she started entering beauty contests—and she had had to borrow three hundred dollars from members of her family for clothes, cosmetics, jewelry, a quick, $67.50 course in modelling, and other things designed to enhance beauty, poise, and personality. She was worried about being only five feet three. The Miss Americas of the preceding six years had all been five feet seven or more. The contestants would be judged on four counts: appearance in a bathing suit, appearance in an evening gown, personality, and talent. Miss Nalepa was wondering
about her talent. Her act, as she planned it, was going to consist of getting up in her nurse’s uniform and making a little speech about her nursing experience.

“I don’t know what else I can do to show I’ve got talent,” she said. “All I know how to do is give a good back rub.”

“Listen, what you need right now is a good meal,” Bob said.

Miss Nalepa said she wasn’t hungry.

“You’ve got to eat,” Bob said. “You’re too skinny.”

“You’ve got to eat,” Frank repeated. “You’re too skinny.”

We stopped for breakfast at a roadside restaurant. Miss Nalepa had only half a cheeseburger and a few sips of tea.

· · ·

In Atlantic City, Miss Nalepa and her chaperone headed for the hotel they had been assigned to, the Marlborough-Blenheim, where they were to share a double room. I said I was going to check in at the Claridge, across the street, and Bob offered to take my bag over. As the two of us walked over, he said that he and Frank were going to hang around for a short while and then go back to New York. “She’s not going to win,” he said. “I told her she’s not going to win. That nursing isn’t the right kind of talent. They’ll want singing or dancing or something like that.”

In the lobby there were large photographs of Miss America of 1948, and of the current Miss Arizona, Miss Florida, Miss Chicago, and Miss District of Columbia, all of whom, I learned from my bellhop, had been assigned to that hotel. “Big crowd comes down every year to see the crowning of Miss America,” he said. “This is America’s Bagdad-by-the-Sea. The only place on the ocean where you’ll find a big crowd relaxing at recreations in the fall.”

On my bureau was a small paper cutout doll labelled “Miss America, Be Be Shopp, in her official gown of Everglaze moire for the Miss America Pageant, September 6–11, 1949.”

“You seen Be Be yet?” an elevator boy with round shoulders and watery eyes asked me as I was going back down. “Be Be’s staying with us. Be Be looks real good. Better than last year. You seen Miss Florida yet?” I shook my head. “She’s something!” he said.

I went out to the boardwalk, where booths for the sale of tickets to the Pageant had been set up in a line running down the middle, between two rows of Bingo Temples, billboard pictures of horses diving into the ocean from the Steel Pier, and places named Jewelry Riot, Ptomaine
Tavern, and the Grecian Temple. The roller chairs were rolling in and out among the ticket booths. “Get your ticket now to see the beauties at the parade!” a middle-aged lady called to me from one of them. “Bleacher seats are twenty-five cents cheaper than last year!”

The contestants were registering for the Pageant at the Traymore, so I went over there. A couple of dozen policemen were standing outside the registration room. I asked one of them if Miss New York State had arrived. “Not yet, sister,” he said. “Stick around. I got my eye on all of them.”

A white-haired gentleman wearing a green-and-purple checked jacket asked him how the registration was going.

“You want to see the beauties, buy a ticket to the Pageant,” the policeman said.

“They got any tall ones?” asked the gentleman.

“Yeah, they got some tall ones,” the policeman said. “Utah is five, ten. She comes from Bountiful—Bountiful, Utah.”

“Hope it won’t rain for the parade tomorrow,” said the gentleman.

“It don’t look too promising,” observed the policeman.

Miss Nalepa and her chaperone turned up, and I went inside with them. The contestants were standing in an uneven line, looking unhappily at each other, before a table presided over by a middle-aged woman with a Southern accent. She was Miss Lenora Slaughter, the executive director of the Pageant. The atmosphere was hushed and edgy, but Miss Slaughter was extravagantly cheerful as she handed out badges and ribbons to the contestants. When Miss Nalepa’s turn came to register, Miss Slaughter gave her a vigorous hug, called her darling, handed her a ribbon reading “New York State,” and told her to wear it on her bathing suit, from the right shoulder to the left hip. I introduced myself to Miss Slaughter, and she shook my hand fervently. “You’ll want to follow our working schedule,” she said, giving me a booklet. “All the girls are going upstairs now to be fitted with their Catalina bathing suits, and then they get their pictures taken, and tonight we’re having a nice meeting with all the girls, to tell them what’s what. The Queen—Miss America of 1948; we call Miss America the Queen—will be there. You’re welcome to come.… Miss California!” she cried. I moved on and Miss California took my place. Miss New York State clutched at my arm again and nodded toward Miss California, who had a large, square face, long blond hair, and large blue eyes. (Height, 5’6¼; weight, 124; bust, 36; waist, 24¼; thigh, 20; hips, 36; shoe size, 6½-AA; dress size, 12; age, 19. Reason for
entering the contest: “To gain poise and develop my personality.”) Miss New York State stood still, staring at her. “Come on, Wanda,” said her chaperone. “We’ve got to get you that bathing suit.”

The bathing suits were being handed out and fitted in a two-room suite upstairs. The contestants put on their suits in one room while the chaperones waited in the other. The fitting room was very quiet; the other was filled with noisy, nervous chatter.

Miss Alabama’s chaperone was saying, “I’m grooming one now. She’ll be ready in two years. She’s sure to be Miss America of 1951.”