‘When I would go up on stage, I never stopped smiling.’

When she attended Reseda High School, Margo Demattio was too busy making money after school at a computer firm to care about being a cheerleader. Her business career took a detour when she walked down the runway of her first beauty pageant and won. Now 30, Margo is director of marketing for Ash Inc. in Woodland Hills, where she sells apartment buildings. But, when the pageants make the news, she has to smile.

When I was 16 years old, my grandmother thought it would be a great idea for me to enter the Miss Reseda contest because she said I was a little backward and needed to step forward a little more. I didn’t tell anyone I was going to be in it. I was embarrassed. I didn’t think I was special enough to be a beauty queen.

When I won, I cried for days. I took my trophy and ran to every one of my friends on the block. I couldn’t believe I won. After the pageant, somebody asked me, “Why hasn’t this gone to your head?” I said, “Well, gosh, I guess I learned I was smart before I learned I was pretty.”

That started a whirlwind of pageants. An astrologer called me to be in her Miss Ireland contest. If you can imagine, with my looks. My father had a little bit of Irish in him. So I was in the Miss Ireland pageant in the social hall of a North Hollywood church with all red-headed, freckle-faced girls. The girl with the dark brown hair, me, ended up winning the pageant. My picture appeared on the front page of the Dublin, Ireland, newspaper.

There were other spinoffs from the first pageant directors I met, such as the Miss Zodiac pageant--I was Miss Virgo--the Miss Santa’s Helper pageant and the Miss Louisiana Purchase pageant. One title I won was Beauty of Beauties. In the Huntington Park parade I was Dream Girl of the Year.

When I would go up on stage, I never stopped smiling. At pageants with real strong lights we would put Blistex on our teeth. It acted as a lubricant to keep your lips from drying onto your teeth, so you could keep smiling.

There were times that I think there was hanky-panky going on in a few contests as far as the judges being asked to select certain girls. One pageant director called me backstage and said, “Don’t plan on winning anything here tonight young lady.” It’s too bad I couldn’t have thought of something creative like coming on stage with a big sign that said “fix.” That would have been the highlight. But, from my experiences, most contests are on the up and up. I won several of them and I didn’t know anybody.

When you’re 17 years old and all this is happening, you can do some pretty rash things. I went on these things called beauty shoots at the beach. Photographers would take a hundred pretty girls every Saturday and Sunday and photograph them upside down, sideways, backwards, up on the sand dunes and down on the ground. They took me inside their little apartment studio. Nothing ever happened to me, but when I think back about some of the things I did and the men I trusted back during the years when it first started, I would never do it today. I wouldn’t go off with those people unless I brought a chaperon. Thank God, nothing happened. I was brought up in a Catholic school, a little Italian family. The most risque my career ever got was I shot a bikini calendar for a concrete company in the Philippines for a week.

The end of the pageants was the beginning of modeling in Tokyo and Australia. When I came back, I didn’t give up modeling jobs and commercials, but I went on to get my real estate license and started selling condominiums.

I still have maybe five tiaras, 15 trophies, a whole bunch of banners and Oriental rugs. I gave my great grandmother, now 89 years old, a trophy because she’s the head of the family. I’ve got all my tiaras wrapped up in tissue paper and placed in their own individual boxes in a big box. I pull them out once in a while and have a little chuckle looking at them. It was a special time in my life.