She Walks in Beauty (10 page)

“Bugle beads,” said Sally Griffin. “You’ve got to get the terminology right.”

Where did they find those dresses anyway?

“In pageant stores, when they’re beginners. Further along, most girls get them custom made from designers like Stephen Yearick, Jeannie Carpenter, or Randy Dimitt. Jeannie and Randy both have stores in Russellville, Arkansas. Girls fly in from all over the country for fittings. And then some go to designers like Bob Mackie, who designs for Cher.”

Pageant stores? Sam hadn’t gotten past that.

“Sure,” said Sally. “They have everything, the beaded gowns, the acrylic rhinestone pumps. Come over to the trade show in the Trump Regency, you’ll see everything—but wait, I want to hear Susan Davidson.” Trade show? Did she say trade show?

A Miss America first runner-up from several years past sang “With a Song in My Heart” in the spot where a commercial would be on Saturday night.

Then the panel of preliminary judges, who sat in a V between stage right and the runway, was introduced. Mimi Bregman was in red sequins. Eloise Lemon had chosen blue metallic. The men wore handsome evening clothes. Julian Peacock’s ruffled shirt and cloth-of-gold vest stood out in the field of black and white.

Cindy Lou Jacklin took her bow in apricot chiffon and sunglasses. “Is she afraid she’ll be blinded by the spangles, I mean bugle beads?” Sam wondered aloud.

“It’s her shiner she thinks she’s hiding,” said the
Inquirer.

Shiner?

“Yeah, wait a minute. I want to see how they handle this. You notice someone’s missing?”

Sam took a closer look. Why, of course, that slimebag Kurt Roberts was nowhere in sight. But there’d been no mention of his absence. “Where
is
he? What happened to him?”

USA Today
on the other side of the
Inquirer
couldn’t keep out of it. “What
I
heard is that he rang up Barbara Stein very late this afternoon and said something had come up in New York and he had to go home.”

That was preposterous. If you’d agreed to be a judge for the Miss America Pageant, for Pete’s sake, you’d clear your calendar months in advance.

“That’s the skinny,” said the
Inquirer.
“Of course, Barb was fit to be tied, but I guess they just decided to go ahead with the six. What’re they going to do, bring in somebody else for these three nights, after they’ve already done the interviews?”

“His mother died? His girlfriend threatened suicide? What could have happened?” Sam asked.

“Taking this business awfully serious already,” warned the
Inquirer.

“I just think a deal’s a deal. You tell somebody you’re going to do something—”

“That’s exactly what I teach the girls,” said Sally. “You agree to make an appearance, then you darned well better show up on time with every hair in place, your shoes shined and color-coordinated to your outfit, nails polished, yourself fed, fragrant, bathed, fresh-breathed, with your clothes clean, good-looking, pressed, and accessorized.”

The three reporters stared at one another, and finally
USA Today
giggled, “I guess Kurt Roberts didn’t do any of that.”

*

No, Kurt didn’t. He definitely wasn’t fed, bathed, or fresh-breathed, though he was becoming a little fragrant. Or perhaps ripe would be more accurate.

His clothes were a mess. There was blood on his peach-colored T-shirt, and even the best cleaners would play hell trying to get the stains out of his creamy Armani suit. Roberts was no Jay Gatsby at this juncture, though Gatsby, if Kurt had been the kind of guy who read, would have been one of his heroes. He’d have loved Gatsby’s style—his tailoring, his great house on Long Island, his heavy saloon of a car—for style was Roberts’s whole life. He wouldn’t have appreciated Gatsby’s adoration of Daisy Buchanan, however. Women? Women were playthings. They were like Kleenex. You were finished with one, you threw her away.

But speaking of disposable, look at Roberts now.

*

“What about Cindy Lou’s shiner?” asked Sam.

“Well.” The
Inquirer
leaned closer. “I just happened to worm my way into a table beside the judges at dinner in Monopoly’s steakhouse. Somebody popped her one good, all right.” She nodded with the certainty of a reporter who had her facts straight. But in this case, she might know the what of it, but she didn’t know the who, when, why, where.

“Interesting, huh?” She cocked an eyebrow. “One judge splits, the other’s sporting dark glasses. Especially since they seemed to be, shall we say, cozy?”

So others had noticed, too. But of course they would. That’s why the press was here, to sniff out, in the great tradition of pageant coverage, every little trace of scandal and innuendo.

But what Sam had witnessed—and as far as she knew, no one else from the press corps had—was Kurt Roberts’s attack on the young boy at poolside and his subsequent departure from the scene arm in arm with the lovely Cindy Lou. He seemed to have called Barbara Stein with his apologies soon after.

So what did that mean? Anything, nothing? Were the two events related?

But there was no time to ponder such intrigue, for Gary and Phyllis were explaining the judging.

The girls were divided into three groups: Alpha, Mu, and Sigma. Tonight Alpha did talent, Mu did evening gown, Sigma did swimsuit. Then they rotated events each of the other two nights until they’d been judged in all three categories. Sam punched the information into her laptop. This beauty business was foreign territory with its own lingo, and she wanted to get it straight.

*

“The girls will be judged on
physical fitness
in swimsuit, on
talent,
and on
onstage presence
in evening gown.”

Interesting word choices. But then, if you listened to the official pageant line, here were the priorities:

Talent

Intelligence

Olympic ability (whatever that was)

Energy

Communication

Poise

Attractiveness

Pretty is as pretty does, and beauty was dead last, or so they said.

“The swimsuit and evening gown are going to go very quickly,” warned the
Inquirer.
“If you want to score, use whole numbers. Ten’s the top.”

When Price Waterhouse did the tabulations, talent counted forty percent. The interview conducted earlier in the week was 30. Evening gown and swimsuit were each 15.

Sam didn’t get it. “Swimsuit’s only fifteen? Then why do swimsuit winners take the crown so often?”

“She’s been doing her homework,” sighed Sally.

“But don’t they?”

“Yes,” said the
Inquirer.
“Nine of the last twelve Miss A’s were preliminary swimsuit winners.”

“So?”

“I guess you’d prefer they didn’t
do
swimsuits?” Sally didn’t try to hide her irritation. The controversy over the swimsuit competition was an old wound, reopened every year.

“Hey,” said Sam, both hands up. “I’d probably prefer they didn’t do Miss America, if you want to know the truth.”

“It wouldn’t be the pageant without the cynicism of the press.
You
all are as much a part of the tradition as the damned swimsuits you’re so high and mighty about.”

“Now, wait just a minute—” But Sam didn’t finish as the curtain rose on a stage set that replicated the Boardwalk outside. While strains of “Summertime” filled the air, fifty girls in gold lamé beach togs thrown over their white swimsuits perambulated down in roller chairs, played volleyball, built sand castles in the pseudo-sand.

Then they did some more dancing, singing, and posing with the Miss America dancers.

What did Sam think? She thought they looked terrific. They looked like showgirls, even if they couldn’t dance. And she couldn’t help it; she wished she looked just like that.

But see? That’s what this kind of crap did to you. Beauty pageants and girlie magazines, starlets, they made you think that’s what women really looked like. And how many women felt rotten about themselves because they didn’t? Even women who came close would call themselves old hags the moment their breasts began to migrate south.

She said as much to Sally, who replied, “Barbara Stein has been campaigning for years to try to drop the swimsuit category—and you know what? If they did, people out there in TV land would scream their heads off. Watching beautiful girls parade in swimsuits and then bitching about it is as much a part of the American way of life as—”

“—the cynicism of the press,” said Sam.

“That’s right.” Sally laughed.

The emcees held forth about the judges’ looking for fitness, grace, an all-over statement of health. The American woman worked out and was in better shape than anytime in history.

What it sounded like was an apologia for a T&A show.

However, up on the stage, no matter what
anyone
thought, the girls of the Sigma group were ready to strut their stuff. One by one, and much more quickly than Sam had imagined, each girl—wearing only her white swimsuit, her taupe pumps, and a big smile—made the trek down to center stage, where she paused, turned to show her full backside, stopped for a count of five before the judges, and hit the runway.

There, close up, they looked great. Again Sam thought of athletes pumped up for the big game. Because, she’d have to give it to them, for whatever reason, these girls had worked hard and sacrificed God knows what to arrive here at their peak. Their bodies were toned drum-tight, their skin flawless, their ample bosoms high, their waists tiny, their buns bounce-free, their racehorse legs went on and on. They were nigh unto perfect. They were all 10s, by God, and proud of it.

Or so Sam thought.

*

Had Kurt Roberts been there, he would have told Sam she knew nothing about womanflesh, not the way a pro like himself did.

That’s what a big-time fashion photographer did for a living, coax beauty from girls who came in on the Greyhound from Paducah with their heads full of silly notions of what modeling was all about.

They didn’t know it was hard work. They didn’t know they needed more than a little turned-up nose, nice boobs, and a face that made the “beauty” section of their high-school yearbook.

They didn’t know that if they were extraordinarily lucky, what they had for a face was a blank canvas. A face you could make into a thousand different women. A face that if you laid your portfolio open, the client would say, “That’s her? And
that’s
her, too?” She had a face you wouldn’t look at twice walking down the street. A blank canvas, as he said, for the genius of someone like himself who, along with a good stylist, could coax her, and coke her, and kiss her, and baby her into making love to that camera.

That’s what it was all about. Doing that camera with your face. Doing those judges, giving it to them, oompah-pah, oompah-pah, ooh ooh ooh.

That’s what the famous fashion photographer Kurt Roberts would have said to Sam about beauty, if he could have, if he’d been there.

*

“Oh, God,” said Sally. “Look at that makeup.”

Sam stared at the leggy brunette on the ramp. Her face looked fine to Sam. Overdone, of course. But they were all painted for the stage.

“No, on her legs. See that?” Sally pointed. “She tried to sculpt them, to make them look thinner by using a darker shade of makeup down the outer and inner sides of her legs and a lighter shade in one straight line down the middle. But you can
see
it. That’s a no-no.” She gave the girl a three.

“And look at Miss Arkansas’s tan line,” said
USA Today.
“They should tan in the altogether to avoid that.” Another three.

Leg makeup, Sam wrote. Tan lines.

“Oh, my God. Check out those pads,” said the
Inquirer.

Where?

“Right there.” Sally pointed. “Miss Colorado. You can see her bust pads through that white swimsuit. With white you have to be
so
careful. That’s why the girls hate it. But you do what the pageant tells you. Another three. Next.”

It was okay to wear falsies?

“Oh, Sam!” cried the
Inquirer.
“Honey, what century do you live in? They use the latest in silicon mastectomy pads. Eighty bucks apiece.”

She was as shocked as Hoke had been when she had implied the same thing as a joke.

“There’s no rule against breast augmentation—”

Were we talking boob jobs too?

“—of any sort in the Miss America Pageant. Now, Miss Universe is different, but it’s a different pageant.” Sally added that last, looking down her nose.

“What about noses?” Sam stared up at Miss Texas. She was a gorgeous willowy redhead with a nose as straight as Sam’s had been before Skeeter Bosarge had whacked her. The jury was still out on whether or not Sam’s was going to need rehauling when all the swelling finally subsided, and she’d found herself paying special attention to schnozzes lately. She gave Miss Texas a 10.