Miss California, Responding to Some Ugly Rumors, Defends Her Relentless Push to Wear a Beauty Crown

Miss California is fixing herself a snack.

And like a motorist passing an accident or a moviegoer sitting through a horror film, you can’t help yourself. You look, though you know you shouldn’t.

You stare as Marlise Ricardos slaps together a sandwich: two slices of white bread, one slice of bologna, slathered with mayonnaise. You scrutinize how much orange juice she pours.

You count the number of corn chips she puts on her plate. There are 12. She eats six. You note she finishes almost the whole sandwich--except for a corner of crusts--and drinks most of the juice.

You watch her eat, and she knows you are watching her eat, because, sad as it is strange, Ricardos now draws as much attention at meals as she did when she was one of the objects of a protest at last month’s Miss California pageant.

That’s when Michelle Anderson, the self-described “great pretender” contestant, disrupted the televised pageant finale by screaming allegations that Ricardos was an “anorexic” who had bruises all over her body from excessive dieting.

Anderson since has emerged as an overnight media star, appearing on “Geraldo!” and fielding movie offers, basking in her 15 minutes of fame.

Meantime, Ricardos, the first Latina to win the state title, has been in semi-seclusion. She has been diligently preparing for the Sept. 10 Miss America contest behind a protective wall of pageant organizers who have kept reporters at bay, until now.

As a result, many questions about her have gone unanswered. Is she really older than 26, and thus ineligible to wear her crown? Does she pretend to be a USC student when she really is an ambitious actress who dropped out of college? Is she a Latina filled with self-loathing because she paraded as a blue-eyed blond woman in several events with the help of hair dye and colored contact lenses?

And was she, as another contestant in the event has asserted, known at the 1986 Miss California contest as “the girl with the finger down her throat” because of rumors that she was a binge-and-purge bulimic?

Though the questions would haunt most anyone else, probably even provoking tears, they haven’t caused this beauty queen’s carefully applied mascara to so much as smudge. Ricardos maintains she has no animosity for Anderson.

“I don’t hate her,” Ricardos says, wide-eyed. “Michelle has given me publicity that I couldn’t have paid for. Really. I’m going to send her a thank-you note.”

A thank-you note? For spoiling what should have been Ricardos’ glorious moment after an 8-year pageant career and four tries for the Miss California title? And for possibly even destroying Ricardos’ chances in Atlantic City, since Miss America winners have definitely--or designedly--been free of scandal since the Vanessa Williams debacle?

“No, I don’t think this has ruined my chances. I think it’s only going to help,” Ricardos says. “I would be the perfect girl for them to choose at this point because I am exactly what this program represents.”

And what is that, exactly? Pageant proponents would point to Ricardos as a super-svelte, smart and supremely talented ideal of womanhood who won the swimsuit competition three years in a row and this time captured the talent competition, too.

But she also is a savvy, steely competitor. Forget her demure, pretty-in-pink disguise: the pastel sweater dress that would be perfect for a Junior League luncheon, if it weren’t paired with beige stiletto-heeled pumps; the hair artfully fanned to frame a heart-shaped face; the mouth exactly outlined in a peppermint shade of lipstick guaranteed to offend no one.

She does admit that in this year’s pageant, she wore blue and green contact lenses for some events, “but it was only when my brown eyes didn’t match my clothes.” As to whether this signaled she was ashamed of looking Latino, her reply is nonchalant.

“I did it because various judges suggested I lighten my look.”

She also acknowledges that competition gets her blood racing and “brings out the best in me.”

Unfortunately, she can’t always say the same about its effect on others, “the bad eggs,” as Ricardos calls them.

“You’d have to interview those individual women to see what’s going through their mind because I can’t speak for them. I can only speak for myself,” she says.

“But you have to remember that there are some girls who enter pageants, and they want to win so badly that it’s hard for them to be sportsmanlike or friendly or hospitable to other contestants, especially if the other contestant is a threat to their winning the title.”

As for herself, she says with confidence: “I’ve always been considered a strong contender because I’m a good contestant. And, because of that, it puts me at the center of things. I’m at the center of the limelight, and I’m always at the center of the controversy.”

Consider, for instance, the accusations made by Elisabeth Moretti, who was Miss Los Angeles County in 1986 and competed against Ricardos for the Miss California title that year.

After reading Anderson’s remarks, Moretti wrote to the Los Angeles Times that she, too, had observed that Ricardos had starved herself to win the 1986 swimsuit competition.

Moretti recalled sitting next to Ricardos one day at Wendy’s when Ricardos told her she had not eaten in two days. Moretti also said that at the pageant Ricardos became known as “the girl with the finger down her throat.”

Hearing this, Ricardos winces, then replies: “She’s lying.”

At first, she can’t place Moretti by name. But hearing the substance of her letter, Ricardos remarks, “Oh, now I remember her. She didn’t make Top 10.”

Ricardos then tells her side of the story: “In 1986, people ran it around that I was bulimic. I remember somebody--a contestant--coming up to me and saying, ‘Marlise, we understand there’s a rumor going around that you’re binging and purging.’

“And I said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying.’ I didn’t know what purging meant. And they said, ‘Well, that’s eating and then sticking a finger down your throat.’ ”

Ricardos screws her face into a grimace. “I said, ‘Oh my God, I can’t even do that when I’m actually sick and need to.’ ”

She pauses for a moment, trying to remember the week of the 1986 pageant.

“Well, I might have said I hadn’t eaten in two days,” she adds. “I’d been living on fruits and vegetables and fish, while, for me, eating is burgers. And Wendy’s happens to be one of my favorite burger places. So it’s not like I hadn’t really eaten. I mean, I couldn’t go 12 hours without eating. I don’t think anyone can.”

She takes a bite of her bologna sandwich, chews slowly, then swallows before continuing. “Again, these are just accusations.”

Though she defends the Miss America program--she talks up its scholarship money and prizes in every other sentence--ironically, the contest has been the chief source for her encounters with society’s “bad eggs,” whom she had rarely met before.

Ricardos was born into a close-knit working-class family in San Pedro. There was a 15-year difference between her older sister and herself. She was sheltered almost from the beginning by her father, a Filipino-born shipyard welder, now retired, and her mother, a Mexican-American housewife.

Her parents had old-fashioned ideas on how to raise their younger daughter. While her friends more or less did what they wanted to in high school, she had to obey strict, sternly enforced rules.

She recalls chafing at the restrictions. But she now congratulates her parents for guaranteeing her what she describes as her “moralistic” upbringing.

Her parents’ protectiveness did not extend to one place: drama class. There, as her school’s star actress, Ricardos was cast in a succession of “bad girl” roles.

“With my dark hair and dark eyes, I guess I looked like I could play someone who knew about the dark side of life,” she says.

By the time she graduated, she knew she wanted to pursue a show business career. She decided to train at USC, though it is one of the state’s most expensive schools. When she wasn’t granted a scholarship, she took a year off and worked as a bank teller to help her parents pay for her college.

But after trying to go to school, prepare for plays and work part-time as a model and waitress, Ricardos says she had to give up something.

She lightened her academic load, until, finally, she gave up attending USC. Even now, she can’t recall exactly when she took her last college class.

USC officials say Ricardos has not been enrolled since 1984. As to why pageant officials for several years described her as being a USC student, Ricardos merely shrugged.

“I never said I was,” she says, though each contestant fills out an information sheet about herself, which goes to the Miss California officials for background.

The day after winning the Miss California contest, Ricardos told reporters she would use her $10,000 scholarship to pay for acting classes at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, instead of at USC, because “a college degree isn’t that important in the acting industry.”

But Ricardos on Wednesday stressed that she plans to graduate from college “at some point.”

By her own account, she wasn’t attracted to beauty pageants in the beginning because of scholarships. In fact, the first title she sought was Miss San Pedro, a small local contest that lacks any state or national affiliation.

“My sister entered me,” Ricardos recalls. “And I told her there was no way I would be able to parade in front of people in just a swimsuit.”

She did--and she won. The next year, she was crowned Miss Port of Los Angeles in one of the preliminary pageants in the Miss USA program. When she did not even place at the state level, it didn’t matter. She was hooked, especially after she met a “Days of Our Lives” producer who was a judge and who helped her get a five-line part on the television soap opera.

Ricardos says she switched to the Miss America preliminaries only when she learned the program emphasizes talent as well as looks. She won at the local level so many times that at this year’s Miss California pageant she had to pinch herself to remember that “I was Miss Lomita, instead of Miss Palos Verdes-San Pedro or Miss Lawndale.”

But the state title eluded her. She was a perennial first runner-up.

Then she lost 20 pounds from her 5-foot-10 frame, going from 140 to 120 pounds. She changed from brunette to auburn and finally to frosted blond. Immediately, she says, rival contestants began passing around rumors.

Losing the weight was hard, she says.

“I never knew anything about nutrition, so I had to learn. And when I pigged out on my favorite meal--a bacon cheeseburger, fries and chocolate shake--I had to get on my bike immediately afterward and do 45 minutes of exercise.

“Is that anorexic behavior? I don’t think so. It’s just good health.”

As for the bruises that pageant rival Anderson shouted about, Ricardos dismisses them as “three, small, dime-sized marks on my leg that I still don’t know how I got.”

Despite the changes she made, she kept losing. But she kept her faith in herself and kept on.

She had to win this year, or else. She had turned 26, the age limit to compete for Miss America. She believes that grousing by rivals at this year’s pageant led to the allegation she was a year older.

“Immediately after I won Miss California, several reporters called me saying they had proof I had lied about my age,” she says. “Well, I told them to show it to me and they never did.”

She knows controversies about her will not die. She expects them to resurface as soon as she checks into her Atlantic City, N.J., hotel. Already she says Miss California officials have urged her to gain about 5 pounds. “I can gain the weight as muscle if I do exercises.”

Yet she still is trying to work off a burger she ate just two days ago, she says as she pats her Nautilus-tightened stomach.

“It’s not going to be hard at all,” she boasts of the extra weight.

And with that, she pushes away what remains of lunch.