Abdicating The Throne

Besides being unthinkable, an organization for former Jerry Springer guests would be hard-pressed to match the achievement of the “Queen for a Day” club. An early milestone in so-called reality programming, “Queen’s” nearly 20-year reign started on radio in 1945; it ascended to daytime TV during the ‘50s and ruled until 1964 with the formula of “crowning” the woman who recited the most pathetic hard-luck story. But Southern California’s “Queens” didn’t merely win merchandise or a whirlwind vacation. They joined a dynasty.

For 55 years starting in 1946, an informal, privately organized club of winners from the area (and a few hardy commuters) socialized monthly at local restaurants such as Howard Johnson’s in North Hollywood and held yard sales and raffles for charity. The highlight of the year was the group’s February installation of officers, a solemn ritual where officers in purple-and-gold dresses passed a candle as they took their oath. “This has been my life,” says 82-year-old Claribel Anderson of Las Vegas, who says she has driven three successive Cadillacs across the desert to club luncheons over the years.

This February, however, the group, whose membership numbered about 250 at its height, threw in the scepter. “We’re down to seven active members,” says the club’s 17th president (many officers served consecutive terms), Lucille Helwig, 79, who lives in Van Nuys with her husband, George. “It’s sad to see the dream end.”

For needy women in the years after WWII, “hitting the crown,” as Anderson puts it, was indeed a dream come true. Each afternoon at sets such as the now-vanished Moulin Rouge restaurant in Hollywood, host Jack Bailey would bound out from behind purple velvet curtains to ask, “Would you like to be Queen for a Day?” Applause meters measured which of the four or five contestants’ true stories had most touched the audience. (A classic winner: a plea for tires and gasoline to help transport a couple’s adopted blind toddler to San Francisco for medical treatment because the contestant’s unemployed husband had broken five ribs after falling off a ladder.) “Being Queen gave us an identity,” says Virginia Lovell, who lives in Arlington Heights, Ill.

Anderson, for one, insists she’s not letting the dream die. “Queen Claribel” hauled her own candelabra from Las Vegas on a bus for the final luncheon, lit a candle and installed herself as the 18th president. “Jack Bailey used to tell me, ‘Queenie, you make sure this club goes on.’ I promised him as long as I stand on my two feet that this club will never die,” says Anderson, a fiery empress who’s kept vigil at numerous Queens’ deathbeds and still guards the original crown. “The one that’s been on over 5,000 Queens’ heads,” she says. “I keep it in my curio cabinet.”

The show’s first Queen, L.A. resident Millie Brown, says the club has “definitely folded.” But the dream of being Queen for a Day lingers as long as the women do. Until that day, they say, they’ll follow the club’s motto, “Queenly Forever,” and obey the benediction once given at each club luncheon: “To be divine is your task and mine.”