Baby Beauties : For Poised and Precocious, Peewee Pageantry Reigns Almost Any Weekend of Year in Southern California

Audience participation had begun to reach a manic level. Several mothers were poking thumbs in their ears and wiggling their fingers, crossing their eyes, sticking out their tongues, leaping and clowning.

Up on the stage of a ballroom at Anaheim’s Inn at the Park hotel, their 3-year-old daughters were posing prettily, obligingly producing the hoped-for response. Others, their composure collapsing, were laughing outright at the adults’ silliness. It was all too much for one mother.

“Smile, dammit!” she shouted.

But the children’s attention had wandered. Most of the girls had become absorbed with the contents of a small makeup kit each of them had been given. One child, dressed in white satin and lace, her short blond hair neatly curled, opened the kit and began applying the makeup to herself and anyone else who would let her.

“Look at that,” a member of the audience said, laughing. “Only 3 and already a beauty consultant.”

One mother, watching the makeup fly, became concerned.

“Someone should take that kit from her,” she said. “If she gets any on that dress, she’ll ruin it, and it cost a small fortune.”

And so these dresses do, sometimes upwards of $200. They are, after all, designer creations and are considered by some to be de rigeur for the dozens of children’s beauty pageants held in Southern California each year.

There are half a dozen major children’s pageant systems, as they are known, that hold competitions in the county, but pageant directors and parents of contestants said it is possible to find a pageant to enter somewhere in Southern California on almost any weekend of the year.

They are, in a sense, scaled-down versions of adult pageants, complete with awards in subcategories such as talent, modeling, personality, bathing suit and individual physical features--smile, eyes, hair. Each entrant is announced by a master of ceremonies as the child strolls down a runway, smiles and often does a model’s turn for the judges. Winners are given crowns, tiaras, sashes, flowers and trophies.

Some pageants award toys to young entrants, while others give the winners prizes such as videotape players, savings bonds or money for college scholarships.

From infants to pre-teens, however, the idea is to produce a maximum of cuteness in a minimum of time before the judges. At the recent Little Miss and Mr. Elegant pageant at the Inn at the Park, the kids got plenty of encouragement.

“Stephanie comes to us from Riverside,” the announcer said, introducing the first of a long list of 4-year-old competitors. “Her ambition is to become a model. Her favorite food is mashed potatoes, and her greatest achievement is that she cuts her own hair.”

The girl walked with assured poise to the center of the stage, performed a model’s turn, then walked to the end of the runway and paused to smile at the judges and her mother in the audience. Her hands rested lightly on her fingertip-length skirts, flared by several petticoats, giving the impression of an upside-down carnation.

Jackie Parker of Yorba Linda, one of the judges, said she thought the girl’s performance was a bit too pat.

“We like to see children with natural smiles and sparkle,” said Parker, the mother of four former child competitors and herself a former contestant in the Mrs. California pageant. “With the youngsters, we are not as strict about modeling technique. We look for good grooming, a coordinated outfit of proper length as well as that sparkling personality. Too many of the children come out like little robots.”

Sherry Lagasse of El Toro said such artificiality caused her to pull her daughter, Kelly, out of the pageants after she competed for the first time in the 5-year-old category--and won.

“It was so ridiculous,” she said. “Here are these tiny girls moving like little robots, completely programmed, blowing kisses at the judges, winking. It really made me sick. Kelly won her competition, but I decided that this just wasn’t something I wanted to be involved in. If she wanted to do it when she was older, then fine.”

She did. Kelly began competing again at age 11 because, she said, one of her best friends was competing and talked her into it. She now competes in the 11-12 age division.

“She’s won every competition except one, and in that competition she won all the optionals,” Lagasse said. “Now I enjoy the pageants because I know Kelly is doing this because she wants to. I’ve noticed that since competing she has become very self-confident. She has no fear of getting up in front of people.”

Patty Kahaunaele of Riverside said she began entering her daughter, Danielle, 9, in pageants to accomplish the same thing.

“She was quite shy,” Kahaunaele said. “and I wanted to see her become more outgoing. She’s been competing for 1 year now, and she’s won more than 100 awards. This is the girl who used to stand behind me when she was asked a question. And now she’s come to this.”

Danielle is the reigning Grand National Little Miss, the final winner of the Miss American Starlet pageant, a multistate competition operated out of Studio City by Dottie Stolz, a former Miss America competitor, and her daughter, Trudy, a former child competitor who continues today to compete in adult pageants.

Danielle attended one of the organization’s preliminary pageants Sunday at the Huntington Beach Holiday Inn. She was designated as “visiting royalty” and helped hand out prizes to the winners.

Becoming regal takes money, Kahaunaele said.

“It’s very habit-forming and very expensive,” she said, estimating that she spent an average of $60 to $100 for each of the 15 competitions Danielle entered in 1988.

But at one national competition, the bill for hotel room, meals, entry fees and clothes for competition came to about $1,300.

Depending on the level of competition, entry fees can run from $35 to $250. Optional fees, which allow children to compete in such ancillary categories as prettiest hair or eyes, are usually $10 per category.

Some competitors are sponsored by local businesses, Kahaunaele said, but most have their tabs picked up by family members.

Occasionally, however, there can be a payoff. Both Kelly Lagasse and Danielle Kahaunaele have been signed to modeling or commercial contracts.

Many parents never think of entering their children in pageants on their own, said Trudy Stolz, the co-director of the Miss American Starlet competition. They need a reminder.

“People always call me up and say, ‘I was in the grocery store and people kept telling me what a beautiful kid I had,’ ” she said. “So they decide to enter them. Other times, though, a girl will see something about a pageant on television, and she’ll tell her mom that she just has to do that herself.”

Whatever the motivation, Stolz said, Southern California seems to be “very heavy into pageants.” The Miss American Starlet pageant will receive entries from 12 states this year, but most competitors are expected to come from Southern California, she said. The recent Orange County preliminary pageant drew 124 children, 34 of them boys, who compete in a separate division titled Little Mister, as well as a bathing suit category called Mister Beach Boy.

While Kahaunaele said several of the same faces appear regularly at many pageants, Stolz said that “about 70% of (the entrants) will never have been to a pageant before.”

About 20% of the entrants, she added, are likely to go on to work in modeling, acting or commercials.

Part of that percentage is male, for although the great majority of the competitors are girls, boys are also entered, competing in divisions separate from the girls. Their attire, however, is no less formal. They are variously required to appear in a tuxedo or formal suit and a sportswear outfit.

At the Little Mr. Elegant pageant, Larry Valdez looked about as dashing in a tuxedo as a 3-year-old can. He competes along with his two brothers, Timothy, 9, and Richard, 5. His oldest brother, Shawn, 12, used to compete but has retired to play football.

Patti Valdez said she believes her sons’ participation in pageants has helped them develop confidence.

“Richard had pretty low self-esteem and . . . was a pretty ornery fellow,” she said. “Once he started competing and winning, his personality completely changed. (My) boys don’t get upset if they don’t win. They know that if they do their best at anything, then it’s OK.”

The Valdez boys are serious competitors, having won more than 600 trophies in a year. The money they win in the form of savings bonds goes into savings accounts set up for them, their mother said.

Trudy Stolz said the pageant that she and her mother established 3 years ago is one of the few that offer monetary prizes, in this case scholarships.

“I’ve heard of other pageants saying the kids will get an interview with a Hollywood agent,” she said, “but we’re not looking for stage mothers who want their kids to become stars. People sometimes spend an arm and a leg on this, but that isn’t what makes a winner. You can come out here and win in a dress from K-mart if it’s neat and you look natural.”

Not that a little theatricality doesn’t help. In such ancillary competitive categories as bathing suits, modeling and talent, a gimmick helps.

The winner of the talent contest at the Inn at the Park was a 3-year-old who walked on stage with two inflatable palm trees. She dropped them at her feet and, dressed in a halter top and a grass skirt, danced a hula, mimicking the movements of her mother in the audience.

One girl at the Huntington Beach Holiday Inn showed up for the bathing suit competition dressed in a black, one-piece suit emblazoned with Coca-Cola logos, carrying an empty six-pack of Coke Classic and peering at the audience through heart-shaped sunglasses.

Another, entered in the modeling competition, was dressed in a bright-orange Chinese pantsuit and fluttered a fan as she pirouetted before the judges.

Competing can turn into a kind of family business, said Judi Stone of Riverside, a single parent whose 4-year-old, Katie Jones, competes regularly.

“There are very few activities for a 4-year-old in which the whole family can participate,” Stone said, “but this is one. Katie’s made a lot of friends, learns how to win and, most importantly, how to lose. She learns patience. If she didn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t make her. But she just loves it. She’s been walking on stage by herself since she was 2 1/2.

“The media have been showing the down side of competing in pageants,” Stone said. “I wish they’d show the kids playing together off stage and clapping for their friends when they win. There’s more of that than the pushy mother and the unhappy child.”

While some children go on to compete as teens and adults--Kahaunaele said she won more than 400 awards when she was younger--the number of entrants in pageants tends to thin out as the age bracket of the categories increases, Stolz said.

“A lot of it, I think, has to do with parents divorcing or both parents going to work and not having the time to spend with their kids on something like this,” she said.

Still, she said, for many girls, competing in pageants fulfills a kind of universal wish: “I think every little girl dreams at one point of being a princess, of being a queen. Being that special lady. And when she’s in a pageant, she can feel like that.”

Even at 1 1/2 years old. Sandy Thomas of Hawaiian Gardens (a Los Angeles County community immediately west of Cypress) entered her 18-month-old daughter, Rebecca Beem, in the Little Miss and Mr. Elegant pageant. It was Rebecca’s first competition. She won in her division.

“Rebecca’s baby-sitter has a daughter who competes,” Thomas said. “She thought Rebecca was such a ham that she would really enjoy it. She taught Rebecca how to do ‘pretty feet’ (a model’s stance), and she picked it up right away. She’s not even potty-trained, and she can do ‘pretty feet.’

“She does have fun. She blows kisses spontaneously and laughs and giggles. I sit in the back of the audience where she can’t see me and hope her diaper holds out.”