Miss Northridge Victor : Beauty Pageant Has Ugly Fallout

The beauty contest was beastly, said Miss Tarzana.

The beauties have been babies, replied an organizer of the Miss Universe pageant.

On one thing, both sides--and those who saw it on television Saturday night--agreed:

The selection of Miss California/USA, one step on the road to the Miss Universe title, was a muddle.

It left bad feelings and charges that the contest was not what it appeared to be to viewers, or perhaps even to the contestants.

Officials of the Miss Universe pageant felt obliged to issue a statement Wednesday declaring that the contest was honest and that the announced winners had been picked by the judges at the pageant, not selected earlier.

Clear Winner

There was no confusion over the winner. The new Miss California/USA is Kelly Parsons, who competed as Miss Northridge, (although she is actually from Chatsworth).

The problem arose when the field was cut to five finalists near the climax of the pageant, held at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park and televised on 14 stations across the state.

The pageant director, Summer Bartholomew, read a list of names that included Lisa Porter of San Diego. Trudy Stolz, competing as Miss Tarzana (although she is actually from Sepulveda), did not appear to make the cut.

Then co-host Chuck Henry announced the third runner-up, who wins several prizes including makeup, clothing, jewelry and a $500 scholarship.

The selection: Stolz, who seemingly had been eliminated earlier.

Audience Laughs

The finalists looked at each other in puzzlement. The audience laughed.

Bartholomew then told Porter, who had been standing with the other finalists through two commercials, that she was not among the finalists. Some members of the audience booed and shouted in protest, indicating that they were suspicious of the judging.

“I’ve never been so embarrassed,” Porter, a 19-year-old bank teller, said later.

Part of the problem, Stolz said after the pageant, was that there had been rumors about her even before the pageant began because it was her fourth year in the contest and she had been third runner-up last year and Miss Photogenic the year before. “All the girls thought it was fixed for me to begin with,” she said.

Judges said the audience blamed them for the confusion. After the show, “people came and hit us. They stepped on our shoes,” one judge said.

Bartholomew said there had been a mix-up in lists.

Pageants Franchised

Miss Universe Inc. of Los Angeles, which runs the international beauty contest and franchises the Miss California/USA pageant and other state competitions, said it would investigate.

Stacey Trachtman, the corporation’s vice president for pageants, issued a statement Wednesday that an investigation by the company and an outside accounting firm “concluded that an honest mistake was made in the initial announcement of the five finalists because of the pressures and demands of completing a live telecast. We have also concluded that the final announcement of the winner and four runners-up accurately reflected the decision of the judges.”

She dismissed rumors among the contestants that the winners may have been chosen earlier.

“At any pageant, including the nationals and the internationals, there are always those rumors,” Trachtman said. “Only one girl gets the crown, and it’s human nature for the other girls to justify their loss.”

Disputes Rumon

Trachtman pointed out that the pre-pageant rumor had been that the fix was in for Stolz. But Stolz did not win, she said, “so, so much for that.”

Bartholomew was not available for comment Wednesday. Dr. Leonard Stallcup, a retired dentist who has the California contest franchise from Miss Universe Inc., was hospitalized with an undisclosed ailment and also unavailable.

Even though the change in the list of finalists restored her to the ranks of the winners, Stolz also was unhappy at the outcome and skeptical of the judging. Not enough time elapsed for the judges’ ballots to be tallied before the winners were announced, she said.

Also, Stolz said, the supposedly impromptu questions the girls were asked during the contest--such as what their ideal husband would be or who had most influenced their lives--were no surprises at all.

“Every girl in the pageant had the questions in her hand before we went on the air,” she said. “One girl answered with a poem. And obviously you couldn’t just come up with a poem like that.”

‘Fill-in Time

Bartholomew said the questions “were just fill-in time . . . for audience viewing,” not a judged part of the contest.

Stolz complained that, if she had somehow been chosen in advance to be third runner-up, she wasted the $1,800 she spent on a dress for the evening gown competition, the last event.

“If it’s all pre-picked that’s not fair. If it didn’t matter, I’d have worn my slip,” she said.

“I’ve judged a couple of hundred contests and this was the worst,” said one of the pageant’s judges, Milton Shoong, president of the Cosmopolitan Talent and Model Agency in Hollywood. “If I thought this was going to happen I would never have been involved.”

“It was not a fraud,” Bartholomew said. “It was an unfortunate set of circumstances. Mistakes do happen.”

Porter, who was bounced from the beauty ranks on TV, was not mollified. Stolz, she said, “got my $500 cash scholarship, jewelry and the trophy. I’ve been working for two years to get to that contest. I spent $2,000 on my gown. I won’t ever enter another pageant.”

Also contributing to this article were staff writers Penelope McMillan and Patt Morrison .