Looking for Miss Right : Good Looks and Baton Twirling Are Not Enough to Capture the Tiara in Today’s Beauty Pageants
Anna Marie Dalmatin hugged last year’s champion, cradled a dozen red roses, adjusted her rhinestone tiara and began the traditional winner’s walk.
There she went, the new Miss Northridge, down the long, narrow runway at the Odyssey Restaurant in Granada Hills. It was the first formal duty of a one-year reign that will include ribbon cuttings, charity functions and civic gatherings.
“I don’t know when I’ll climb down from my cloud,” said Dalmatin, 18, shortly after winning the pageant Sunday afternoon. “I didn’t think I did that well.”
The judges did. They liked her speech, her poise, her swimsuit.
“My eye goes right to her,” said Marjorie Goodson Cutt, the hostess on “Classic Concentration,” a television game show. “She didn’t try to be the seductress. She’s wholesome, not a Barbie doll.”
Dalmatin, pageant veterans say, is typical of today’s beauty contestant: attractive, ambitious, articulate. She studies history at College of the Canyons in Valencia and dreams of working to improve the environment. Indeed, many pageants have evolved from mere demonstrations of natural physical beauty to comprehensive evaluations of a woman’s poise, maturity, and intellect.
Floyd Beck, who has worked on dozens of San Fernando Valley pageants, including Miss Northridge, for several decades, says women use the contest today as a vehicle for career advancement, even in such professions as business and law.
“We’re finding a more intellectual girl, a girl more interested in a college education, in the future,” said Beck. “Not the Valley girl, bubbly type.”
Soon after Miss Northridge was crowned, the contestants and crowds departed. Someone took down the decorations and special lights. Another beauty pageant had begun its fade into memory.
No matter. There will be more pageants next week, and the following week, and the week after that. The United States, a land obsessed with looks and grounded in ritual, has long counted the beauty contest among its favorite pastimes.
According to Carl Dunn, publisher of the Louisiana-based Pageantry Magazine, there were over 12,000 contests nationwide last year, with about 3 million participants, and that figure doesn’t even include independent competitions or Junior Miss and baby events.
“Pageants are getting more popular all the time,” Dunn said. “And that’s because of television. Television is the name of the game. There’s so much money involved these days. Winners can make thousands of dollars.”
The winners of the state events such as Miss California and Miss Texas can make anywhere from $60,000 to $90,000 in prizes and scholarships. Miss America can earn $350,000 to $450,000 during her yearlong reign. Nationwide, over $15 million in scholarships is awarded to beauty pageant winners each year.
A number of Valley chambers of commerce sponsor contests--Granada Hills, Tarzana, Sylmar, Tujunga and Northridge among them. Local businesses, such as florists, jewelry stores and cosmetic supply outlets, donate merchandise to the winners.
While the sponsors emphasize the way pageants help to promote a woman’s future career and build her self-esteem, they acknowledge that contests promote their businesses.
Over her bathing suit, evening gown and business attire, each Miss Northridge contestant wore her sponsor’s name and gave a speech urging the audience to look further into the company.
The companies paid $195 to be a sponsor, and many consider the fee to be well worth the publicity. Bob Giacobbe, president of Premier Bank in Northridge, which sponsored Dalmatin, said: “There’s another year of Premier Bank’s name being out there.”
And Premier Bank--like all other sponsors--wants an articulate, poised spokeswoman.
Michael Welsh, a writer for Faces International Magazine who has judged dozens of pageants, said beauty is no longer enough.
“I always make it a point to ask girls what they think the woman of the ‘80s has meant, and what the woman of the ‘90s will mean,” Welsh said. “A good answer to that question is worth a lot of points. And I don’t look to see whether a girl has a great figure. I look to see if she is physically fit, if she knows how to take care of herself.”
Some Valley pageants have eliminated the swimsuit competition.
“We see very few occasions where we would need the winners representing us in a bathing suit,” said Jo Ann Ainsworth, manager of the Sylmar Chamber of Commerce. “We are a business organization, and there was no reason to parade bathing beauties.”
In San Fernando, contestants are required to undertake a community service project and write an essay about the experience.
In Chatsworth, Chamber of Commerce members have been adamantly opposed to pageants for years.
“We never have had a pageant, and we never will,” said Debra Sakacs, the chamber manager. “This is a very non-sexist organization, and we don’t think a young woman should be judged by her looks.”
In Sylmar, the chamber sponsors a Mr. Ambassador contest in addition to a Miss Sylmar contest, although officials expect only about five contestants.
“Most of the sexist stuff about pageants has receded in the Valley,” said David Miller, president of the Granada Hills Chamber of Commerce. “It was strong a few years ago.”
The 1989 Miss Northridge pageant drew 25 contestants and about 320 observers. All contestants had to be between 17 and 24 years old, single, without children and a resident of the San Fernando Valley for at least six months. Resumes could not include professional modeling or acting experience.
Most of the contestants were between 17 and 20, and their reasons for entering ranged from fulfilling girlhood dreams of glory to enhancing communication skills.
As a child, Lisa Horn, 18, a senior at Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, used to watch beauty pageants on television. She and her mother would write down their evaluations and predict the winners.
“I want to be just like Miss America,” Horn said during rehearsals. “It’s inspiring because she’s done so much, because she can be so responsible.”
Horn’s dream faded during her one-minute speech to the audience. After her opening statement, Horn stumbled and lost her place. Backstage, after her performance, she sobbed.
“I had memorized it so well,” Horn said, “but when my boyfriend waved to me, I froze.”
Quickly, the other contestants moved in to reassure her. Deborah Stern, last year’s Miss Northridge, who helped the women through all the rehearsals, told Horn to concentrate on the rest of the pageant.
For other contestants, like Eileen Leiner, the dream was not about winning. It was about competing in the first place.
“I’m here because I am real insecure,” said Leiner, 22, during a rehearsal. “You have no idea about how hard it is for me to go through this. I feel like I’m chubby. Getting in front of all those people in a bathing suit scares me. But I already feel better about myself. I’ve worn conservative clothing, and now I just want to go wild.”
Leiner, a teacher’s aide, didn’t finish in the final 10, but that didn’t seem to matter.
“I belong here,” she said on Sunday. “I learned how to walk, and I learned how to respect myself.”
Christine Wagman said she entered the Miss Northridge contest to further develop her speaking skills.
“I want to show people all I’ve got without being nervous,” Wagman said. “Maybe I’m not so good in my bathing suit or evening gown, but instead of wearing a hot bathing suit, I want to give a good speech.”
(The judges thought Wagman gave a great speech--which contributed to her finish as first runner-up.)
Nonetheless, Wagman was concerned about her appearance. During a rehearsal she said she was worried that her black evening dress would look “too trashy.”
And looks were stressed throughout the contest. During the bathing suit competition, the master of ceremonies read the contestant’s measurements. At rehearsals, pageant instructors repeatedly emphasized the importance of the right color of bathing suit.
“Don’t wear black,” Deborah Stern told the contestants. “It will make you look pale. You want to look hot.”
Colleen Ann Frashure, who finished as the first runner-up in Miss Northridge 1988, spent a whole day at the mall looking for the right bathing suit. She finally settled on something in purple.
“When you try on a certain bathing suit and look at it in the mirror, you know if it’s the right one,” Frashure said. “I spent $54 on it.”
At the same time, she wasn’t looking forward to parading the suit in front of hundreds of strangers.
“There you are in front of 500 people and your back is to the audience,” she said. “That’s all they’re looking at. I don’t think a beauty pageant as a whole is degrading, but I think that part is degrading.”
Many women want to win so badly they come back year after year. And intensity can breed controversy.
In last year’s Miss California pageant, the winner was Miss San Fernando Valley. But there is no Miss San Fernando Valley contest. The state winner, Christina Faust of Woodland Hills, simply lined up a sponsor and entered--which is within the rules. Some contestants who had participated in community contests said her participation was unfair.
Said one Valley Chamber of Commerce manager, “It’s just not right. But what are you going to do? It’s all about money, and if you’ve got it, you can compete anywhere.”
At-large contestants enter beauty pageants all the time, said Richard Guy, co-owner of Guyrex, a company that runs the Miss California pageant.
“And often, they win,” Guy said. “That’s because they usually have the dedication to do it all themselves, which makes for better businesswomen. It would be unfair to not allow a girl to compete just because there wasn’t a pageant in her town, or that she didn’t win it.”
In Sunday’s Miss Northridge pageant, a handful of women claimed the contest was rigged in favor of Dalmatin.
Dalmatin and chamber officials denied the accusation. “Anytime you have something like this somebody says it was fixed,” said Sandra Dack, executive director of the Northridge Chamber of Commerce. “But these judges were television personalities. They didn’t know any of the girls or anybody on the chamber.”
Dalmatin also denied those accusations, acknowledging that the bank “does choose its contestants” very carefully. Last year, Premier Bank, which has now sponsored the last three pageant winners, interviewed Stern three times. “I thought I was going for president of the bank,” she said.
Last year, Dalmatin was a judge at the Miss Northridge contest. As a previous contestant in Miss Teen California, she was regarded as something of an expert--Sunday’s competition was, in fact, her ninth since she was 11. Premier Bank gave her a tape of last year’s event, which she carefully monitored to see how the women walked and how they delivered their speeches.
Now Dalmatin of Northridge moves on to assume her duties. “I want to be a role model,” she said. “I want to be a woman who has a say in what’s going on in this world.”
Dalmatin won a $500 scholarship to a modeling school, a one night’s stay in a fantasy suite of her choice, a picture frame, a gift certificate from Bullock’s, and a $600 registration fee for the Miss California Pageant, which she plans on entering in Palm Springs in August.
She hopes to take another traditional walk.
