by Wally Lamb
Speaking of fashion, is it mere coincidence that in 1959 at the pinnacle of Miss R’s popularity, the Mattel toy company introduced Barbie, its mute fashion doll with the perfect figure, the demure sidelong stare, and the dozens of chic outfits, beneath which was the absence of a vagina? Did Miss Rheingold beget Barbie? That first year, the doll was available as a blonde or a brunette (buyer’s choice; you voted with cash). Like Rheingold beer itself, Barbie even had a Teutonic lineage. A voluptuous, narrow-waisted German doll named Bild Lilli was designer Ruth Handler’s template for her bestselling Barbie—and, perhaps as well, for Miss R, whom Esther Cohen wryly notes was “Philip Liebmann’s shiksa fantasy.”
Of the twenty-five Miss Rheingold titleholders, sixteen were brunettes, six were blondes, and three were redheads. They had perky first names like Pat, Kathy, Nancy, and Margie, and Anglo-Saxon surnames like Austin, Banks, Woodruff, Bain—not a Finkelstein or Faragosa or Flores in the bunch. Rheingold’s monthly ads in the New Yorker, Gourmet, Playbill, and the New York Times depicted them as active women who hunted, skied, golfed, bowled, square-danced, and gardened. Year after year, they were established as animal lovers who cuddled with puppies, kittens, baby chicks, miniature ponies. Miss Rheingold of 1953 even played with a pair of bear cubs, and in one memorable 1947 ad, Miss Rheingold goes for a Coney Island roller coaster ride with her Scottish terrier. Occasionally, a Miss Rheingold ad would give a nod to current events. Miss R of 1943 posed as Rosie the Riveter. During the presidential campaign between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, Miss R of 1960 led a marching band flanked diplomatically by a baby elephant on one side, a donkey on the other. When the New York Mets came into existence, Miss R of 1962 posed with the team’s curmudgeonly manager, Casey Stengel. (Liebmann Breweries was a major Mets sponsor.) More typically, however, Rheingold’s “super saleswoman” was depicted at the center of fun: poolside parties, picnics at the beach, backyard barbecues, hay rides. They were cowgirls one month, hostesses in couture the next. In the ads and on the billboards, they never smoked, never frowned, never looked lustfully at the innocuous male models who occasionally showed up in the ads. Indeed, Miss R was so fashionably prim that she never chugged or even took polite sips of the beer she perennially served and proclaimed was hers.
Oh, and one more thing: Miss Rheingold was always white.
If the perfect storm of democracy, consumerism, and sophisticated sex appeal had created the Miss Rheingold phenomenon in the early 1940s, a perfect storm of a different kind unraveled it in the mid-1960s, namely the rising tide of racial unrest, the gathering winds of feminism, the growing market share of national brands, and the sudden crack of rifle fire in Dallas.
By 1963, the civil rights movement had reached a fever pitch and put Liebmann Breweries in a difficult position. For many years, Rheingold had been appeasing its customers of color—a large and important market—with print ads that featured celebrities like Louis Armstrong, Dorothy Dandridge, Carmen Miranda, and Jackie Robinson. Significantly, Rheingold also stepped up as a regional sponsor of The Nat King Cole Show, television’s first variety show to feature a black entertainer as host, when no national sponsor could be convinced to underwrite the program. (Said Cole, “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.”) But African-Americans and Latinos took note that none of their own had ever made it to the finals of the Miss Rheingold contest. (The closest to ethnic diversity the contest had come was finalist Audrey Garcia, a Hawaiian native who competed the year Hawaii was to become the fiftieth state.) Rheingold executives feared a fierce backlash from white consumers—its dominant customer base—if it accommodated its minority customers with a black or Hispanic candidate. The adage “No publicity is bad publicity” had not yet been embraced by Madison Avenue. Miss Rheingold was about fun, after all, not controversy.
As the admen responsible for the Rheingold account wrestled with racial politics, feminist Betty Friedan published her watershed book about women’s roles, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan’s treatise pulled no punches. “The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive,” she argued. At this, the dawn of feminism’s second wave, Miss Rheingold began to be regarded by some as a quaint, semi-insulting, or even dangerous stereotype—one that endorsed the male chauvinist value of beauty over brains, objectification of “the fairer sex” over a woman’s true worth. Contestants were, after all, women. Why were they referred to as the Rheingold girls?
Meanwhile, as the nation’s newspapers ran front-page stories of the latest race riots, and editorials about the empowerment of women, the financial pages reported that national brands like Anheuser-Busch had begun to eat away like termites at the sustainability of regional brews like Rheingold. A decade earlier, the Liebmann company had tried and failed to make a foray into the California beer market. But if the Northeast was loyal to the “extra dry” lager, the rest of the nation made it clear that they preferred Schlitz, “the beer that made Milwaukee famous”; Miller, “the champagne of bottled beer”; Schaefer, “the one beer to have when you’re having more than one”; and Budweiser, the beer that “said it all.” Rheingold’s aging plants were facing costly overhauls and its labor force had begun demanding more concessions and threatening to strike. And then those shots rained down on Dealey Plaza, a president was mortally wounded, and his charming and photogenic first lady was covered in his blood.
Celeste Yarnall, the last of the traditionally elected Miss Rheingolds, recalls, “The day I was notified that I had garnered twenty million votes and won it all was the day before John F. Kennedy was shot. This happy new nineteen-year-old Miss Rheingold went from joy to sorrow in twenty-four little hours as I was a kid fresh from that Camelot ‘fantasyland’ and Jackie Kennedy was my idol. I had the dark hair cut in the flip, the white gloves and the pearls. My heart was broken when I flew into New York to pose for the photos that would announce my having won.” The rest of the country had had their hearts broken as well, of course, and a nation’s grieving, added to the racial controversy, Liebmann Breweries’ falling profits, and the new thinking about a woman’s place in the world, drove a stake into the heart of the Miss Rheingold contest. Sharon Vaughn, Miss Rheingold of 1965, was appointed rather than elected, just as the original titleholder, Jinx Falkenburg, had been. Gone now were the lavish magazine and billboard ads, the eye-catching store displays, the TV and radio commercials. Vaughn, a decidedly downsized Miss R, made public appearances at events like the Polish fair and the firemen’s muster and gradually just faded away—as did the venerable and storied Liebmann Breweries. The company was sold to PepsiCo and limped along for a decade or so until the first day of February 1974, when the Brooklyn plant’s remaining 1,500 workers were handed their pink slips. A hundred thousand gallons of Rheingold were dumped into the East River and the factory doors were closed and locked for good.
Well, so much for the beer. But what became of those twenty-five victorious beauties? A number of Miss Rs became the arm candy, and then the wives, of wealthy men, among them famous actors, athletes, and executives. Opting off the modeling merry-go-round, these women raised children and enjoyed well-heeled private lives and, perhaps from time to time, could now indulge in dessert. But many Rheingold “girls” became successful career women: television producers, political activists, professional photographers, and company heads. Celeste Yarnall earned a PhD in nutrition and authored books on holistic health care for cats and dogs while maintaining an acting career on TV (Star Trek, Bonanza) and in films (Elvis Presley’s Live a Little, Love a Little, Roger Corman’s The Velvet Vampire). Among those contestants who sought to parlay their Rheingold girl cachet into big-screen film careers, the losers fared better than the winners. Rheingold runners-up Hope Lange, Diane Baker, and Tippi Hedren went on to successful acting careers. Grace Kelly, the biggest movie star of the bunch, had failed to even qualify as one of the six finalists. Too thin, the Rheingold judges concluded. Monaco’s Prince Rainier thought otherwise. He made Kelly his Cinderella bride in a telev
ised spectacle broadcast around the globe. Ironically, the couple’s 1956 nuptials were covered on American television by none other than Jinx Falkenburg, now a small-screen “personality.”
The Miss Rheingold contest is long gone, of course—a nearly forgotten footnote from Madison Avenue’s checkered and colorful past. Miss R is buried in advertising’s graveyard along with those glossy-haired Breck shampoo girls and subterranean New York’s Miss Subways. Still, vestiges of Miss Rheingold’s influence survive, as do many of the actual titleholders. Nancy Drake, who won that first public election way back in 1942, is the oldest surviving Miss R. A well-heeled widow now in her nineties (who declined to be interviewed for this article), she splits her time between Palm Beach and Watch Hill, a tony Rhode Island enclave, where her neighbor is Taylor Swift, the Barbie doll–like pop superstar. (With her wholesome image, adorable smile, and red carpet fashion sense, who wouldn’t have voted for Swift if her face had appeared on a ballot box during that earlier era?) Barbie herself is still going strong; sales of Mattel’s statuesque fashion doll are as robust as ever.
Here are two curious footnotes to the Miss Rheingold story.
First, Kevin McCrary, a “son of privilege” whose mother was Miss Rheingold numero uno, Jinx Falkenburg, was the subject of a 2011 episode of A&E TV’s series Hoarders. McCrary later faced eviction from the rent-stabilized walk-up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where, for thirty years, he had resided among his various and sundry “collections.”
Second, zombie-like, as if from a crypt in advertising’s aforementioned graveyard, Miss R rose again at the dawn of the twenty-first century, alas briefly and unsuccessfully. In 2003, the Rheingold brand reemerged, marketed now as an “authentic” local craft beer for New York City’s young hipsters. The company brought back a “six-pack” of Miss Rheingold contenders for beer drinkers of a decidedly different era. The contestants now were sexy bartenders with snug-fitting “wife beater” T-shirts and skimpy jean cutoffs, augmented breasts, come-hither looks, and pierced belly buttons. Voting was online now, or in the bars where the women poured, shook, and stirred alcohol for their ogling clientele. In this new incarnation, a tongue-in-cheek talent component was added. Kate Duyn danced on the bar to become Miss Rheingold of 2003. On the oversized, in-your-face billboards erected on buildings in SoHo and the East Village, this bad-ass twenty-first-century Miss R glared over her shoulder at passersby as she sat naked in a tub full of Rheingold, the bathroom floor littered with dozens of empties. Dani Marco succeeded Duyn as Miss Rheingold of 2004, having flamenco-danced her way to victory over her competitors: sleeve-tattooed Erin; fanny-jiggling Raquel; Carmel, who demonstrated the takedown of a male customer in the talent competition; raunchy Kim, whose talent was pouring Rheingold over her T-shirt front and tongue-kissing another woman; and six-foot-plus opera singer Shequida. Interestingly, Shequida was the first Rheingold girl who was, biologically speaking, a Rheingold boy—a female impersonator who, at the conclusion of her aria, snatched off her long blond wig to reveal his close-cropped Afro. At long last, the Miss Rheingold contest had an African-American contestant, albeit one with a penis. No surprise, though, that the white girl won—another brunette.
OKAY, DON’T EXPECT me to be objective, but in her old man’s humble opinion, Aliza nailed it. This piece just may give her enough clout so that she gets to do the stories she wants instead of pitching them and then seeing them go to someone else.
And who knows? Maybe writing about this subject helped her to better appreciate the rocky road her mother and other feminists had to travel back then when they’d been raised with the message that the ultimate symbols of a woman’s worth were a tiara, a dozen long-stemmed roses, and a marriage certificate. “There she is, your ideal,” the host would croon whenever the new Miss America took her first walk down the runway in Atlantic City. Miss Rheingold, Miss Universe, Miss America: the titles may have differed but they were all “your ideal.” But who was the you? Impressionable young women with Cinderella fantasies? Young men looking for a marriageable girl they could take home to their mothers? Donald Trump’s predecessor, mogul and marketing mastermind Philip Liebmann?
But it was all a pose, wasn’t it? A myth? I remember when one of the Miss Americas from the 1950s wrote a book years later about how she’d been incested by her father throughout her childhood. And another winner who came out about getting beaten up by her pro football player boyfriend. How many trips to the altar did Aliza say Shirley Shishmanian had made? Four? Well, at least she hadn’t married Roy Cohn.
EIGHT
On the drive to New London from Three Rivers, I pull up to the same Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru as I did the week before. Tell the talking speaker that I want a medium hot coffee, one cream, no sugar. When I get up to the window, there he is again: that same sketchy guy who may have drugged my coffee the last time. When I pull back onto the road, I take a tentative sip. No sugar. I catch myself feeling a little disappointed—I mean, it was an awesome experience: returning to my childhood, communing with ghosts from Old Hollywood. I wonder what a film scholar like Jeanine Basinger at Wesleyan or a writer like the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane would give to have a conversation with a celluloid pioneer like Lois Weber. . . . But I guess I’m relieved, too, because it was freaky as hell to be tripping like that, if that’s what I was doing. At any rate, if I see any ghosts today when I get to the Garde, I guess I can rule out acid-laced coffee as the cause.
No good parking space out in front this week. I circle the block twice before I find a space. Get out of the car and head up the hill to the theater, key in hand.
Inside, I scan the lobby. Look down the hall to where the offices are. No lights, no action. I open one of the doors to the auditorium and gaze down at the stage. The ghost lamp’s lit; the curtain’s down. I cup my hands around my mouth. “Hello?” No answer. “Anyone here?” Okay then. We’re back to normal for a Monday—no one else here, living or dead. I head up the grand staircase to the projection room. I’ll get tonight’s film set up for my group, then get out of here until this evening. I’m still a little jumpy, but whatever happened last week is not going to happen again.
No, check that.
There they are: those film canisters. And here she is—Lois’s ghost, blurry at first, then coming into sharp-edged focus. “I was beginning to wonder if we’d see you today, Felix. Or if, perhaps, you had decided you were afraid of ghosts.”
There’s a trace of sarcasm in her tone. She’s outfitted differently than the week before—dressed more like a woman from the 1930s than the twenties. She’s using a cane now and her translucent hair has gone gray. Do ghosts age?
“No Billie Dove this time?” I ask.
While it’s still a jolt to commune with a spirit who knows so much about my past—has it on film, no less!—at least this time I know I’m not dead.
“Miss Dove sends her regrets. She has a tennis match with her doubles partner, Jinx Falkenburg. They’re hoping to upset the reigning doubles champs, the two Vivs.”
“The two Vivs?”
“Vivian Vance and Vivien Leigh. They’re favored to win three-to-one among the bettors in our ranks, but one never knows.”
“Ethel Mertz and Scarlett O’Hara are tennis partners? Wow. And there’s betting where you are? For money?”
“Not the kind of legal tender I imagine you’re thinking of, but there are many kinds of currencies, dear boy. Now let’s get down to the business at hand. I’ve brought along another member of our realm to assist us today, an actress from Hollywood’s Golden Age whom you will no doubt recognize.”
And indeed I do. Materializing before me is Casablanca’s Ilsa Lund and Hitchcock’s female lead in both Spellbound and Notorious. Yet she is costumed in the nun’s habit she wore as the feisty but tubercular Sister Benedict, Bing Crosby’s costar in the top-grossing film of 1945, The Bells of St. Mary’s. “It’s an honor to meet you, Miss Bergman,” I tell her, bowing before her. She is, after all, Hollywood royalty.
/> She laughs at the gesture and offers me her see-through hand. I can’t feel it, but kiss it nonetheless. “Now let’s dispense with the formality, shall we?” she says. “Lois tells me you’re a professor of film history. Yes?”
I nod. “And an admirer of your work. I screened Gaslight for my college students last semester and Anastasia for the little film club I run here at the Garde.”
“Ah, my two Best Actress roles. They were bookends, in a sense. I won the Oscar for Gaslight when my virtuous image was intact, and for Anastasia when Hollywood decided to forgive me after all for my love affair with Rossellini. During the intervening years, as you may know, I was maligned in the American press and boycotted by the studio for having strayed from my marriage. One of your ridiculous politicians went so far as to condemn me on the Senate floor for being ‘a powerful influence for evil.’ Thank goodness the Italians were not so provincial. The five pictures I made with Roberto during my exile did quite well in Italy, thank you.” She turns to Weber’s ghost. “Of course, you, too, felt the lash when you were a ‘living,’ Lois. How dare you film a woman in her natural state!”
