Queen Bess

by Preston, Jennifer

  “I’d give him the number, and I’d come home at night, and I would say, ‘Mum, did anybody call?’

  “And she’d say, ‘Yeah.’

  “‘Who?’

  “‘I don’t know. Name somebody.’

  “I’d say, ‘Milton?’

  “‘Sounds like Milton. Another name.’

  “‘Robert?’

  “‘Oh, yeah. More like Robert. Not Milton. You know, I don’t know because the phone rings all the time. It’s so confusing for me, I can never remember names.’

  “So that was the end. I mean, each time somebody would call I’d have to go through this charade with her.”

  There was one name Bella didn’t forget: Frenchie. Bella was adamant that Bess stay away from this handsome young labor organizer she met during her senior year in high school. The problem for Bess’s parents was that he was not Jewish.

  One night Bess told her parents she was going to an orchestra rehearsal. Instead she went out on a date with Frenchie. When she returned home, her parents were waiting up for her. Her mother accused her of lying. Bess insisted that she was telling the truth.

  “Hit her,” her mother yelled.

  Her father rolled up his newspaper and struck her in the face.

  He later apologized, telling Bess that Bella made him do it and that he could not cross her.

  Years later, in Susan Dworkin’s book Miss America, 1945: Bess Myerson’s Own Story (New York: Newmarket Press, 1987), Bess would say the incident made her realize for the first time that her father would always be on her mother’s side. “Deep in my heart, I was in awe of my mother for the power she had over Dad,” Bess told Dworkin. “She drove him crazy, but he loved her, committed himself to her, and could not leave her. I believe that when I married I looked for men who had the same controlling powers.…”

  Bess’s success at the High School of Music and Art led her to enroll as a music major at Hunter College, the city’s public college for women. Even as a college student, though, her social life was limited—but not by her mother at this point. It was 1941, and all the boys were at war. “We lived four years without dating,” Bess said.

  Bess had thought about attending a music conservatory but realized she did not have the talent to become a concert pianist. And despite high test scores on state regent exams, she did not have the money to consider going away to college. Living at home and going to Hunter was her only alternative. It was free. Founded in 1870 to help meet the city’s demand for teachers, Hunter graduated, as Bess once said, the city’s smartest, poorest girls.

  Bess spent her first two years with other freshmen and sophomores at the college’s sixteen-acre campus in the Bronx, attending classes in ivy-covered Gothic buildings with large, cozy lounges. In 1943 the U.S. Navy took over the Bronx campus and turned it into a training station for the WAVES. All of Hunter’s seven thousand students were forced to double up in classrooms at the Manhattan campus, a sixteen-story building on the Upper East Side.

  With the creation of the WAVES, the noncombatant Women’s Army Corps, and the Women Marines, Americans for the first time saw women in military uniform.

  It was an extraordinary time for women. Between 1941 and 1945 more than six million women went to work for the first time. In newspapers, in magazines, and on the radio the national feminine model was a woman at work. “Rosie the Riveter” became a symbol of the times.

  Most of the jobs were clerical positions or factory jobs. There were some opportunities for women in medicine and law, but few women moved into professional careers during the war. The top-level positions in government and business were left for men.

  At Hunter College Bess juggled her classes and part-time jobs, working at Orbach’s and Franklin Simon. She worked hard on her music and dreamed of becoming a conductor, but in major orchestras there were few opportunities for women to become performers, never mind conductors. The major orchestras would not even offer a woman an audition.

  In any event, any dream of a life as a professional musician was secondary to what Bess and many of the other young women at Hunter wanted most of all: a husband and a family.

  As a senior at Hunter Bess was nominated by her classmates as Hunter’s “Personality Girl.” She was chosen by her fellow students on the basis of charm, regardless of beauty or class standing. Her dazzling smile, however, must have helped her rack up a few votes.

  “She was absolutely beautiful,” Marjorie Wallis said. “I can remember the first time she came to my house on 86th Street. She was wearing a white turban. I can remember my mother opening the door. She gasped.”

  Bess did not take her success in the contest or the reports of her beauty too seriously. “You see, I did not live in a family where they said, ‘Oh, isn’t Bessie beautiful?’ Nobody really said that. They said, ‘So you are taking dancing lessons. So dance. Let me see you dance.’ They didn’t say you were beautiful.

  “First of all, you were not allowed to say that. If you walked up to a baby carriage and said, ‘Oh, the baby is so beautiful,’ the woman would spit three times and say, ‘Pooh, pooh, pooh’ to protect the baby from the ‘evil eye.’”

  During her senior year a neighbor at the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses suggested Bess earn some extra money modeling for a group of retired men who had formed an amateur photographers’ club in Manhattan. Bess made an appointment and got the job.

  Out of concern that her mother might disapprove, she did not tell Bella that John C. Pape, a retired steel executive from New Jersey, was paying her $5 an hour as a sitting fee. Her mother thought modeling was a disgrace.

  Bess did, though, tell her older sister, Sylvia, who was now married and the mother of two baby girls. She could tell Sylvia almost anything. They had always been close, even though Sylvia was seven years older than she. She could count on Sylvia in ways in which she could not count on their mother. Sylvia knew and understood the way the world worked beyond the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses. She was good-humored and warm and offered encouragement and hope when Bess felt depressed and pulled down by their mother’s negative attitude and harsh criticism.

  Sylvia encouraged her to pose for Pape: why not try to earn some extra money on her looks? Sylvia thought Bess had been an extraordinary beauty since Bess was sixteen. With her high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, Bess looked like their father. Sylvia looked more like Bella, with her large brown eyes, wide shoulders, and wide hips. Sylvia also suggested that Bess have John Pape take some photographs that could be used in a modeling portfolio even though a modeling career wasn’t exactly the kind of profession that a smart Jewish girl like Bess might aspire to. They both thought, however, that she might be able to earn a lot of money and that it might even be fun.

  As Bess was preparing to graduate from Hunter College in early 1945, Sylvia sent a couple of John Pape’s photographs to Harry Con-over and John Robert Powers, the two most powerful agents for models in New York, glamorous men who negotiated contracts with major Hollywood studios, big advertising agencies, and the fledgling television industry. Sylvia was certain they would snap up her sister right away.

  But John Robert Powers rejected her. So did Harry Conover. She wasn’t the All-American type they were looking for to advertise products.

  Bess was crushed. The rejection confirmed what she had thought about her looks. She put modeling out of her mind. Following graduation, she returned to the Birchwood Camp for Girls nestled in the Green Mountains in Brandon, Vermont, where she had worked as a music counselor for the past four summers. She had no idea what she would do in September other than give piano lessons. She didn’t have any money to pursue graduate studies, and there had been no marriage proposals. “I felt that I wanted to be like everybody else, and I wanted to do what everybody else was doing, which was to get married and have children. And teach piano again.”

  4

  Miss New York City

  While Bess was away at camp that summer of 1945, Sylvia gave permission to John Pape t
o send a photograph of Bess to WJZ, a New York radio station sponsoring the Miss New York City contest. The winner would go to Atlantic City that September and compete for the Miss America title. The pageant was offering a $5,000 scholarship for the first time that year. Sylvia thought Bess could use the scholarship to continue her education or perhaps buy the black baby grand Steinway she had always longed for.

  As it turned out, Bess was one of sixty contestants chosen from 1,200 photographs to participate in the contest. Sylvia called Bess with the good news and told her that she had to return to New York in a few days for the semifinal competition. At first Bess did not want to go. She took her position as music counselor very seriously, and she did not want to ask the camp’s owners for the time off, remembers Louise Sugarman, who slept in the bunk next to Bess’s. “She was very reluctant. We all had to push her to go.”

  Sugarman also recalled that Bess was hesitant about entering a beauty contest because she was shy and modest. “In spite of all of her beauty, she wasn’t a show-off kind of person. She was very reserved.”

  Determined that Bess should enter the contest, Sylvia called the camp’s owners and arranged for Bess to take a few days off. Helen, the youngest Myerson girl, was also working as a music counselor at the camp, so she took over the HMS Pinafore production that Bess was in charge of. Sylvia had made it almost impossible for Bess not to return to New York. With even the camp’s owners now encouraging her to enter, Bess reluctantly agreed to go. She borrowed a white bathing suit from one of the camp counselors and took the train to New York.

  On the stage of the Ritz Theater on a hot summer night in late July, Bess paraded past the judges in the two-piece bathing suit. She must have felt more comfortable when they began the talent part of the competition. After having performed so many times in school concerts and recitals, she looked confident playing a three-minute arrangement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor and Gershwin’s “Summertime” on the flute in front of an audience. At the end of the night she was one of fifteen young women asked to return on August 15, for the Miss New York City finals.

  On the afternoon of the finals she was rehearsing at the Ritz with the other finalists when she attracted the attention of Lenora Slaughter, executive director of the Miss America pageant, who was sitting in the front row. “She had a white scarf tied around her hair,” Lenora remembered. “She was tall. She was a beautiful girl. I thought to myself that she looked like just the type of girl that we wanted in the pageant.”

  Bess was bright and talented, classy and educated, the kind of girl Lenora wanted to help change the image of the beauty contest. Lenora was looking for a Miss America more interested in furthering her education than pursuing a modeling or acting career in Hollywood. A smart, strong, outspoken woman whose southern charm helped make her a master saleswoman, she had single-handedly raised $5,000 for the college scholarship to be awarded to the winner that year. She had hoped the scholarship program would transform the seaside beauty contest into a national event. That had been her goal since she arrived in Atlantic City a few years earlier from St. Petersburg, Florida, where she had worked for the chamber of commerce.

  “What I was fighting for was giving little girls a chance to go to college,” said Lenora, who ruled the pageant through 1967. “My job was to help American girls get an education. I had a dream, and I saw the dream come true.” The scholarship program now distributes $5 million each year to winners in local, state, and national contests.

  After the rehearsal that day Lenora invited Bess to sit with her in the empty theater for a talk. According to Bess, Lenora told her that she had a good chance of becoming Miss New York City and asked what Bess intended to do with the scholarship money should she win the Miss America title. Bess was stunned by the suggestion that she might win. She assured Lenora that the scholarship money would be used to attend graduate school.

  Lenora was visibly pleased. She then offered Bess some advice: why not change your name from Bessie Myerson to Betty Merrick?

  Bess smiled and said no.

  Lenora persisted. How about Betty Meredith?

  Bess was adamant. She wasn’t quite sure why, but she felt very strongly that changing her name would be terribly wrong. Her father’s words floated back to her: “Never forget who you are.” That meant “Never forget you are a Jew.”

  “Suddenly, when she said to me, ‘Well, have you ever thought of changing your name?’ what happened suddenly was ‘Hey, Bessie, this may be far more important than you realize. She wants you to go through the process of denying a part of yourself. She must feel in some way that you may move toward winning.’ The other side of it was ‘If you are going to move toward winning, just think how 250 people who live up in the Bronx are going to feel when you win.’ I mean my father was a housepainter. Someone else’s father was a truck driver. Somebody else worked in a little shop. These were not people who had a lot of exciting, luxurious things happen to them. It was exciting and luxurious when they were able to luxuriate in my victory, and since we shared the bad times, I thought, why not share the good times?

  “I lived in a place where everyone was Jewish. I lived in a city where people were what they were. I went to a school, the High School of Music and Art, where people were chosen for their talent, and I went to Hunter College, where people were chosen for their intense efforts to work hard and move along with their own lives and their careers. Being Jewish didn’t matter.”

  Lenora does not recall asking Bess to change her name but acknowledges she might have out of concern that Bess would encounter anti-Semitism: “I thought it would be a good idea because I knew how Atlantic City felt about Jews. I figured that if I could get her name changed it would help because she didn’t look Jewish or anything like that. There wasn’t a damn thing wrong with that girl.

  “There weren’t many Jewish hotels. These Quakers who organized the pageant did not like Jews, but that didn’t bother me one way or another, because I was a Southern Baptist. I didn’t know a Jew from a gentile from a Quaker. And they were all changing names. You see, movie stars were always changing their names.”

  Later that night Bessie Myerson was crowned Miss New York City. She returned home to the Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses with a new watch and with a deeper understanding of her father’s caveat.

  5

  Atlantic City, 1945

  When Bess awoke the next morning, she soon found that a photograph of her in the two-piece white bathing suit appeared in almost all of the city’s newspapers. Her victory took her parents by surprise.

  Neither knew she had entered the Miss New York City contest, and when they saw their Bessie in a bathing suit, they were not pleased. It was only after Bess explained she might win a scholarship for graduate studies that they agreed she should pursue the Miss America title in Atlantic City. “When I explained that I might also bring back a black baby grand Steinway piano, and my mother knew, therefore, that I would be practicing the piano for forty years, she was fine,” Bess said years later.

  Her celebrity brought her invitations to New York City nightspots like the Monte Carlo and El Morocco. She drank champagne and flirted with men who promised to set up deals with Howard Hughes. She appeared on television and played the piano on radio. And she visited Mayor La Guardia at City Hall, where he made her promise to stick to her music.

  It was a heady time for Bess, then twenty-one years old and still living with her parents in the Bronx. Yet within a week she began feeling anxious and depressed. Bewildered by her success, she belittled her appearance and her talent: “I thought I didn’t have a good physical appearance. I felt like a skinny boy.” Then the form letter Lenora Slaughter sent to all of the Miss America contestants in August 1945 arrived at the Myersons’ home in the Bronx. It must have added to her anxiety:

  We are eagerly anticipating your arrival in this resort on Monday, Sept. 3, and we promise you the happiest experience in your life. We know you are going to enjoy every event we have planned
for you, and we also know it is going to be a grand experience for you to meet the charming girls from every section of this great nation of ours, as well as Cuba and British Columbia.…

  Be sure to bring a minimum of three and a maximum of four evening gowns. You will wear evening gowns at all formal appearances where you are judged. Street clothes should be simple and youthful. At no time are you judged in your street clothes. You appear in the Boardwalk Parade in an evening gown. Therefore, concentrate on your evening clothes, which do not have to be expensive but should be most flattering.

  Evening gowns? A minimum of three and a maximum of four? Where was she going to get evening gowns? All she had was the one long white dress that she had worn in the Miss New York City contest. Unlike other local contests, the Miss New York City contest had not made any arrangements for a wardrobe with a department store or a sponsor.

  After being informed of her problem, John Pape, the amateur photographer, offered to pay a seamstress to make her two daytime outfits: one a royal blue, the other chartreuse. And Samuel Kass, a Seventh Avenue clothing manufacturer, called to offer evening dresses from his showroom. Despite such good fortune and kindness, Bess still felt blue. Sylvia, sensing her younger sister’s high anxiety, tried to comfort Bess with her good humor and by telling her to think of the pageant as a free vacation at the seashore. “We’ve never been away from home,” Bess recalled Sylvia told her. “We’ve never been in a hotel. We’re going to have a wonderful week. We’ll enjoy ourselves and not to worry.”

  On Labor Day, September 3, Bess and Sylvia boarded an early morning train for Atlantic City, then a fashionable seaside resort for New Yorkers and Philadelphians. It was the home of the first Ferris wheel and saltwater taffy. The game Monopoly, which makes use of the city’s street names, was invented there during the 1930s.

  Bess saw hotels, shops, and amusements lining the six-mile boardwalk when she arrived that steaming hot day in 1945. The famous Steel Pier jutted out into the ocean. Rolling chairs offered tourists a pleasant ride down the boardwalk. It would be thirty years before legalized gambling would transform the resort into a gambler’s mecca.