Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) by Kate Shindle Page A

sensible speech wasn’t ultimately drowned out by the overproduced shows.
    In Parks’s last year, clips of the contestants’ private interviews were shown in split-screen during the swimsuit competition, perhaps to balance the eye candy with a little brain candy. Even in those brief moments, the top ten finalists that night touched on freedom for women, legal careers, alternatives to becoming a homemaker by default, intelligence, whether the country was ready for a female president. Aside from one unfortunate sound bite about how becoming Miss America could help with “getting out of my accounting and back into entertainment,” it was painfully obvious that even the contestants themselves had evolved beyond the telecast.
    So Bert Parks was out, albeit abruptly and with a distinct lack of grace on the part of the pageant leadership. Or so the story goes. Who knows if he had actually been told in advance? Parks was a savvy showman, and could haverealized that playing to the public’s sympathies was the most likely path to getting his job back. No less formidable a force than Johnny Carson himself headed up a “We Want Bert” reinstatement campaign, and the pageant had to hire extra staff just to handle the massive influx of mail pouring in from all over the country. But Carson or no Carson, mail or no mail, Parks wouldn’t host the pageant again. In fact, he would make only a couple of cameos at future telecasts before his death in 1992; at his last, he crashed and burned while introducing the former Miss Americas, but earned a standing ovation and won the audience’s hearts with one final performance of “There She Is.” His successor, Ron Ely, lasted just one year before being replaced by Gary Collins (often accompanied by his wife, Miss America 1959 Mary Ann Mobley).
    What all the early 1980s chaos added up to, really, was the need for a game-changing Miss America. Despite the best efforts of pageant officials, the program had usually been pushed forward by winners who, for one reason or another, broke the mold. Not only did this kind of young woman set up new expectations for the pageant, but she also had the power to captivate the media. Some winners in the 1970s and 1980s showed hints of an ability to pull this off in various ways: Susan Powell (1981) was an Oklahoma girl who spoke her mind and dazzled audiences with her personality and talent, while Elizabeth Ward (1982) had sex appeal in spades—eventually gaining notoriety for a supposed dalliance with then–Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and her decision to pose for
Playboy
. Cheryl Prewitt (1980) had a remarkable story about the healing power of faith. Becky King (1974) and Tawny Godin (1976) both had potential as well, but none of them quite broke through during her actual year as Miss America. As with Phyllis George (1974), Terry Meeuwsen (1975), and Dorothy Benham (1977), their individual stars would shine brightest after their terms as Miss America ended; those three went on to careers as a journalist/entrepreneur, a well-known Christian broadcaster, and a Broadway performer, respectively.
    Author Frank Deford may have been somewhat off base with his assessment of Bert Parks’s irreplaceability, but he did zero in on one important uphill battle that each Miss America faced: the homogenizing effect of the telecast itself on the contestants. “TV traps them all into the same cookie mold. Each new Miss America is seen first in a stock setting. She is seen again, as a lame duck, one year later in the exact same setting. These are her two formative appearances that establish her image, and the sum and substance of her action includes walking, smiling, being crowned, crying, thanking, and crowning. No wonder all the girls seem the same. . . . Because Miss America is required to stay out in the sticks all year, hustling shampoo and working car circuses, she has no chance to make the additional TV appearances that could restore the identity that TV stole