Her Crowning Glory

Standing in the lobby of CaliforniaMart in downtown Los Angeles, wearing penny loafers and a prep-school blazer over jeans, Lyndsay Kahler seems almost to inhabit a parallel universe to the hyper-chic women who swirl around her.

Her blond hair is poofed and sprayed around an oval face that is carefully but lushly made up over a golden tan. A small gold cross with a diagonal slash of diamonds falls over her white T-shirt.

She draws stares from the couturiers as she and her entourage ride the elevator on a mid-August day to the wholesale salons. Shopkeepers stick their heads out doors, curious about this decidedly un-grunged young woman with a photographer flashing her every gesture.

Nobody who follows her into the entrance of Claire’s Collection wonders for long. There, along the walls of rooms housing hundreds of beaded gowns, hang the pictures of Miss Californias from years past.

And 22-year-old Kahler, who was Miss Orange before becoming Miss California, will be joining them. First, though, she has to decide between the red gown that gracefully snakes up her torso to her neckline or the more daring halter that threatens to expose one of her few weaknesses--protruding shoulder blades that form angel wings. With the Miss America contest just weeks away, she decides to take another day to decide.

This Saturday, the bright, talented, churchgoing women who inhabit Kahler’s universe will shoulder aside the Courtney Loves of pop culture and, for a few hours at least, take center stage as they vie to be the next Miss America.

The winner of that rhinestone crown will be required to uphold the tradition and image of an organization that has tried to change with society, even as it promotes the kind of clean living idealized on “The Donna Reed Show.”

“I don’t know of a single nonprofit organization such as ours that has taken the criticism, the ridicule, from the media and survived for 75 years,” says Bob Arnum, chief executive of the Miss California organization. “This program is not for everyone. We don’t suggest that it is. . . . I am not aware of a single contestant who has entered our program at gunpoint.”

*

Kahler’s calling to the runway came via a telephone call in May 1995.

The Miss Orange pageant, one of 45 local contests in the state that feed into Miss California, was in trouble, an organizer told Kahler. Only three women had responded to the pageant’s annual call for contestants.

At one low point, organizers had actually decided to cancel the city’s 66-year-old pageant. The decision was reversed, however.

“The more we talked to people in the community and talked among ourselves, we decided we couldn’t stop doing it,” says Marilyn Jensen, executive director of the Miss Orange pageant.

The initial recruitment drive in public schools and drama departments was widened and included a call to Lutheran High School of Orange County, Kahler’s alma mater. That contact led recruiters to the seemingly perfect candidate, by then a senior at Concordia University in Irvine.

The show went on at Chapman University on Sept. 28 with eight contestants. Kahler walked off with the crown.

“I wasn’t stressed about it,” Kahler recalls. “I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

It was good timing for the singer and pianist. She would graduate with a music major just before the Miss California pageant in Fresno on June 22.

Kahler’s life, which took an abrupt turn that spring night, could have been tailor-made for Miss America and its feeder pageants.

“We want someone to represent California the way you want it to be,” Jensen says. “Someone who has graduated from school, has a good home life, is happy and well-rounded. You don’t want someone who had an abusive childhood and has scars. . . . Of course, they don’t tend to apply.”

Kahler is deeply religious, deeply committed to public service, deeply Republican.

Kahler, the eldest of four girls, moved several times as a child, living in Iowa and Colorado, as her father’s job with Rockwell dictated. They lived briefly in Santa Ana and then settled in Orange nine years ago.

Her childhood, she says, was charmed.

“I have a wonderful family,” she says. “That might sound trite, but I’ve really been blessed. They have been my support. . . . My faith has also been every important to me.”

Except for one incident where she was robbed at knifepoint as a teenager, her life has been untouched by the drugs, crime and family turmoil that seem to be everyday afflictions for many suburban teens.

The idea of sneaking beers and cigarettes, much less drugs, simply never entered her head.

To her, that was a choice easily made: “I never allowed myself to be in a situation where drugs or alcohol were present,” she says, denying that she was either sheltered or naive. “My parents always trusted me to make the right decision.”

Instead, she filled her time with a healthy variety of activities, acting in musical theater, conducting the Church Mouse Choir of preschoolers at St. John’s Lutheran Church, attending the church’s summer camp program, where she got her professional voice lessons, and organizing blood drives for the Red Cross, a project that never failed to thrill her.

“It’s just the idea that you are literally, literally saving someone’s life. It’s the closest you can come to being a hero,” she says, showing one of her best features, full lips opening into a wide smile that quickly travels to her eyes and lights up her face.

So much of what she was doing involved performing, she says, that she was well prepared to enter the Miss California pageant, even with only one trial run--the pageant that almost wasn’t.

The Miss America pageant has had the occasional scandal. In the early days, contestants broke the rules by being secretly married or having had a child. But those infractions were eclipsed in 1984, when Miss New York, Vanessa Williams, stepped down as Miss America after explicit, nude photos she had posed for with another woman years earlier were republished in Penthouse magazine.

“All of us still feel very badly about Vanessa,” Arnum says, with a sigh. “It was a mistake in judgment she made when she was just a child.”

No pageant runs criminal checks of contestants, but most, such as Miss Orange, have clauses against moral turpitude for the young women to sign.

Many of those who try for the crown are, like Kahler, devoutly religious. Tiffany Stoker of Clovis, last year’s Miss California and a finalist at Miss America, is a Mormon who proposed to speak on a platform encouraging sexual abstinence until marriage.

Even veteran pageant volunteers are somewhat surprised at the depth of wholesomeness displayed by the average contestant today.

“I am stunned by the number of young women who are reborn Christians,” Arnum says. “It’s increasing with each passing year. It’s almost as if they may be fleeing a counterculture. It’s really quite remarkable. I think we attract them because they know, in this environment, there will be others.”

*

In California, preparation of the state’s candidate for the Miss America contest begins as soon as the crown lands on her head at the finale of the Fresno event.

Mary Bye, who previously ran an Anaheim modeling studio, has been acting as handler and groomer for Miss Californias for 13 years on a five-member prep team. Bye, team chairwoman, and the team are responsible for polishing every aspect of Kahler’s being--from walking to talking to eating.

Bye met up with her new protege the night of the Fresno pageant and shared a hotel suite with her. The next day, she whisked Kahler to the home of volunteer Angie Burt, whose home, which is not far from the Miss California headquarters in San Diego, serves as a “safe house” for the titleholder.

Burt, a hearty hostess with a ready, throaty laugh, has welcomed Miss Californias for the past 11 years. She has seen all kinds of personalities--scared, aloof, dependent, confident--but wholesomeness is one element they share.

“None of them have ever smoked in front of me or had a drink in front of me,” she says. “The one thing I have found that I don’t think you hear much about is that they come from religious homes. . . . I wondered myself why these young ladies are so focused on God.”

Preparing for the Miss America competition has occupied Kahler’s life for the past three months.

Kahler’s platform--a political agenda that would become the focus of her speaking engagements should she become Miss America--needed to be refined for the interview portion of the competition.

Bye immediately arranged a routine with the physical trainer, whose job it is to ensure that not one molecule of cellulite remains on thighs that will be exposed to a national viewing audience during the swimsuit competition.

Kahler, who carries 115 pounds on her small-boned, 5-foot-7 frame, has been a snap for the prep team.

“This hasn’t been so easy some years, I’ll tell you,” Bye confided under her breath as Kahler tried on gowns.

Kahler, along with fashion expert Connie Oliver, has chosen about two dozen outfits to wear during the event, which began in Orlando, Fla., on Aug. 29 for contestants and lasts until the finals Saturday night.

Everything must be just so for the finale of what everyone involved calls “the scholarship pageant.”

Though it was founded as a bathing suit beauty contest in 1921 by Atlantic City merchants eager to drag out the summer season past Labor Day, promoters insist it has come a long, long way. Protests by feminists in recent decades no doubt did some consciousness-raising.

Today, the winner of the Miss America pageant receives a $40,000 cash scholarship, with lesser academic awards given to every participant. Kahler has already racked up about $10,000 in aid to pursue graduate degrees in conducting and teaching.

The swimsuit walk, which, as a bone to the 1990s, now is done barefoot instead of in high heels, demonstrates “physical fitness,” according to Arnum and others. By the same token, the evening gown competition is more about “good grooming” than good legs.

And the pageant interviews in which judges test the contestants’ wit have made great strides. Gone are the days when a nervous finalist might be asked what she would do if two dates unexpectedly came to her front door on the same night.

*

Arnum readily concedes that the 1960s and 1970s turned out an array of “Stepford Wives,” wearing too much hair spray and bearing uncanny resemblances to Barbie dolls.

“It has been the emergence of women in every area that has changed the face of the Miss America pageant,” Arnum says. “What we really, honestly call ourselves is a scholarship and personal development program.”

The first scholarships were awarded in 1945, the same year Bess Myerson became Miss America. Since then, the organization has contributed about $125 million to the education of contestants.

Kahler, herself a bright and ambitious student, says she is most fearful of falling short in comparison to the intellect rather than the looks of her competitors.

“These are women who have demonstrated that they are not your average bimbos,” she says.

Kahler does not subscribe to notions of what she calls “radical feminism.” But, she says, “if you’re talking about the worth of women in society, then I say yes, I’m a feminist. Certainly.”

She decided to sing the song “Where Is It Written,” from Barbra Streisand’s 1983 film “Yentl” for her talent presentation because the song deals with the unfair limitations women have had to cope with throughout history.

“It gives me chills when I sing it,” she says.

*

Before any singing, though, come interviews with the judges, the first preliminaries of the competition and which tend to affect everything that comes after.

Miss America is, after all, a public relations role. The ability to articulate a consistent opinion is vital. Miss America will immediately begin a grueling cross-country schedule of speaking and engagements that will involve traveling up to 30,000 miles each month, with stays in each city averaging only about 36 hours.

Her prep team counsels Kahler to read the opinion pages of the newspapers regularly and to be aware of current events and issues facing young women. Arnum and Kahler have reviewed tapes of interviews past, largely to fend off nervous habits that detract from the contestant.

She and the others will begin the competition with a composite score from the preliminaries that counts for 30% of the total. The rest will be decided the last night, with the talent portion counting 30%, the swimsuit and evening gown competition 15% each, with the final 10% resting on the interviews conducted with the five finalists.

Kahler will make the integration of music into school curricula her platform issue.

While she might well consider a career as a vocalist, the lifestyle turns her off.

“I’m not comfortable with some of that,” she says of the life of America’s top musical performers. “I like working with people more. I like focusing my attention on others. There is sometimes a tendency in the performing industry to be self-centered.”

The self-destruction so often apparent in stars is also beyond her ken.

But before she settles down in that classroom or university music center, she wants one of the most high-profile gigs she can think of.

“The job of Miss America is very appealing,” she says.