Poise as a Tie Breaker

Girls--34 of them, aged 17 to 25. Not just any old 34 girls but the absolute cream of New York State, girls who had beaten back the very best their cities had to offer and emerged as the fairest flowers of Troy and Rochester, Setauket and Schenectady. Imagine the prettiest girl in Poughkeepsie alone--right there is a lot of pretty. And don't forget those Downstaters, Miss Manhattan and Miss Bronx, adding a little urban spice to an already delicious rustic brew. All of these East Coast peaches gathered in one hideaway, far from the baleful scrutiny of Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, putting their clean young Empire State limbs forward in the hope of influencing the judges and going on to be named prettiest girl in the whole state.

And what about that judge's slot? All that power. Just at a time when you were getting a little gray in your beard and even looked a little like a judge. Coolly, imperturbably checking them out, stroking your chin, pretending that your interest is in delicacy and grace of movement and that the last thing in the world you care about is tits and ass. Got to be as good as teaching Beowulf to Bennington girls. The contestants would be kept under lock and key, carefully chaperoned, but they had said that about Hillcrest Hall at Stephens College for women back in the Fifties, and that never stopped us. The winner would be interesting, of course, but come to think of it, who really cares about the winner? Consoling those 33 losers was the ticket, at the after-the-contest brawl, where a week of pent-up emotion would be unleashed and all hell was sure to break loose. Let me at it.

• • •

The man who tempted me with a judge's slot in the Miss New York-World Beauty Pageant was Nat Kanter, an old steam-bath buddy of mine and a reporter for the New York Daily News, whose affiliate TV station, WPIX, produces the pageant's TV show. "It's heartbreak every inch of the way," said Kanter. "Your fellow judges will be Tommy Mackell, the Queens district attorney, who you'll recall once made a move against Rockefeller for the governorship and just sent Alice Crimmins to jail. He's sure to bombard us with Alice Crimmins stories. Also Matt Snell, running back for the New York Jets. It's important to have at least one black judge, and preferably two, or you'd be surprised at all the mail you get." Kanter said the panel would be packed with other celebs but was a little vague about their identity, finally coming forth with S. Rodgers Benjamin, president of Flemington Furs, the largest retail furrier in the East, and "a terrifically classy dame" named Kathleen Levin, fashion director for Prince Matchabelli and Aziza cosmetics, who earns $75,000 a year and has ten women working for her. I said I'd think it over. A day later, I phoned Kanter. After some decoy remarks about my interest in social phenomena, I said I wanted in. "You'll love it," he said. "And by the way, trim your beard. Remember, Robert Alda, who was dying to be a judge, is standing by as an alternate."

The contest was to be held--and taped for television--at Kutsher's Country Club, a lovely 1000-acre resort in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, otherwise known as the Borscht Belt, a phrase that high-paid press agents have vainly tried to erase from the language. Aimed at Elks Clubbers and out-of-state conventioneers, even newspaper advertisements coyly describing the beautiful trout streams and rolling hills of Sullivan County have failed to make this area seem "less Jewish." It stubbornly remains the Borscht Belt and one wonders why they don't relax already and go with it. Get George Plimpton up to eat a few blintzes at Grossinger's and really swing with the Jewish bit. Make a plus out of it, like the Avis campaign. Times have changed. Updike is the one under pressure, not Bellow.

I am not one of the legion of waiters and bus boys who earned their college tuition hustling pot-roast dinners out of the kitchens at The Concord and the Nemerson and then went on to become heart specialists, producers, astrophysicists and Danny Kaye; but at the tail end of each summer, my mother would take me to a resort called Laurels Hotel and Country Club, where I would spend a lonely week rowing around Sackett Lake and some happy evenings memorizing every word in the routines of a brilliant comedian named Jackie Miles ("Miles and Miles of laughter"); so my trip to Kutsher's was a return of a kind. As I drove along the New York State Thruway, I skipped ahead to my trip back home and imagined Millett, Friedan and Greer waiting for me at a cordoned-off toll booth.

Millett-Friedan-Greer: Why were you a judge at a beauty pageant, a sickening outdated ritual that exploits female bodies?

ME: Because I'm interested in the way the country works.

M-F-G: Bullshit.

ME: All right, it's because I'm a dirty guy.

M-F-G: Now you're talking.

ME: That's right, I am. I'm a dirty filthy guy, because I like to see chicks parading in front of me and giving me winks. I'm filthy, filthy, filthy.

Kutsher's is a rustic, sprawling resort that includes vast patches of woods and lakes and half-starved, half-blooming jungle growths that would be ideal for backgrounds in Ingmar Bergman films. It didn't look a bit like the image I'd had: a row of bungalows where you are advised to bring along your own cooking utensils. A bellhop led me to my quarters in the Rip van Winkle wing of the main building and said that the girls, who had been on hand for four days, were under heavy guard in a secluded section of the resort and that they certainly made a pretty picture as they strutted through the grounds in formation. He said the security on the girls was thick, with one chaperone guarding each six girls, presumably to fend off any employee who might attempt a daring and impregnating kamikaze swipe at one of them. I took a swim and a steam bath at the indoor health club, one of the guests advising me to be wary of Kutsher's sun lamp. "Cover your marbles," said the fellow. "Otherwise, that thing is sure to sterilize you."

• • •

Filling me in on past Miss World color and anecdote, Nat Kanter told me that a girl from Freeport with a "38-21-35 frame" had once won the contest but was disqualified when London immigration officials discovered she was only 15; and that last year, two chaperones had freaked out from all the abstinence and boredom and had to be put on a bus to the city for slipping off one night with a team of video technicians. I thanked Kanter for the background fill-in and let him steer me over to Seymour Seitz, head of BBS Productions, the pageant's executive producer, and Hal Blake, producer of the television show. Both Seitz, a natty 40ish type with massive today-style sideburns, and Blake, a lugubrious chap who'd co-authored the pageant song, Get That Face, were upset over the fact that at the last second, Jack Cassidy had come up with something very big in his career and had canceled out as m.c. for the TV competition. "I'd bring him up on charges," said Seitz, "but what the hell...."

John Raitt was being whisked in as a substitute, but it was the opinion of Marice "Sam" Tobias, lady writer for the show, that Cassidy's loss would really hurt. "When a comedian blows his lines, he can do a little shtick to recover," said Sam, "but when a straight singer goes up, he's lost at sea."

A further annoyance was that only two weeks after having her appendix taken out, Kaye Stevens, co-host of the TV show, had flown in from the Coast and there had been no limo to pick her up at Kennedy. "For Christ sakes, the scar hasn't even healed," said Seitz clenching his fists, "and we don't have a limo out there."

To top off these setbacks, Blake weighed in with the news that Matt Snell's aunt had taken ill and the star running back had had to cancel out as a judge. "A colored judge is no problem," said Blake, who seemed to have this one in hand. "I can get all we want. I've already spoken to Dick Barnett of the Knicks. He sounded a little sleepy on the phone, but I also have a call in to Emerson Boozer. We'll wind up with at least one and probably both."

At dinner, I met a gentle, soft-spoken fellow named Newton White, who informed me that he was the designer of the beauty-pageant set, which was being completed in the Palestra Room of Kutsher's All through the meal, people kept coming up and congratulating White on his work. He told me there really wasn't that much to designing beauty sets. "You shoot to keep them unbusy and whatever else you can manage on the twenty-nine cents they hand you. Lots of white and, of course, Philip Johnson of Lincoln Center says red makes women look regal, so you use that, too. On this set, I've brought in some old floral irises from last year's pageant."

Another guest came by and said, "Lovely, Newton, lovely," at which point the mild-mannered White, who had designed one Broadway floperoo and had seen An American in Paris 11 times, sketching the sets in the dark, exploded and said, "They'll take any shit I hang up there. Just once I'd like someone to drive me past my usual efforts into new territory. Not exactly to turn me down flat, but to say, 'Not quite, but how about trying it this way?'" I asked White what his plans were after the pageant and he said, "There's nothing on the horizon."

After dinner, Seitz gathered me up (continued on page 126)Poise as a Tie Breaker(continued from page 122) along with a group of beauty-pageant execs and took us all off to the Monticello Raceway, where the fifth race was going to be dedicated to the 34 girls in the pageant. Along the way, Seitz told me that the Miss World contest had been founded 21 years ago and was the oldest international beauty contest in existence. The winner of Kutsher's competition would enter the Miss World-U. S. A. contest at Hampton, Virginia, and the survivor of that free-for-all would move on to do battle with lovelies from other countries at London's Royal Albert Hall for the Miss World title. Seitz explained that the contest was a franchise operation, "like Carvel's," owned by a London company called Mecca Promotions, which turned the U. S. franchise over to a man named Alfred Patricelli, who in turn sold the various state franchises to people like Seitz for anywhere from $100 to $1500 a year. (Seitz then was permitted to sell subfranchises of the Miss New York State contest to small cities.) Seitz said that for some reason, New York girls had always fared poorly in national competitions and that not since Bess Myerson (Miss America 1945) and Jackie Lpughery (Miss U. S. A. 1952) had the Empire State come up with a national winner in a major beauty contest.

When we got to the track, a chipper, bouncy young fellow named Ave Butensky, vice-president in charge of spot television buying for Dancer-Fitzgerald, supplied what he felt was the answer. "It's because we always vote poise," said Butensky, whose clients, such as Best Foods, Bounty Paper Towels, BP Oil and Schick, were participating sponsors of the WPIX show. "We send poise to the nationals and we go right down the toilet. I can see poise as a tie breaker, but just once I'd like to see us vote for a klutz, a beautiful Klutz. You can't see poise on the goddamned television screen anyway, so what the hell do we need it for?"

At the track, I got my first look at the girls, but I was careful to keep it a collective look and not to start any early judging. All I saw was a lot of eyes and yellow hair and long legs and great noses. The girls were all fenced off in a special beauty-pageant section, sipping soft drinks and cheering on the trotters; whenever the number of girls who wanted to relieve themselves reached a total of four, a chaperone would be dispatched to trot them over to the John. Though betting on the horses was against the rules,. I learned that some of the girls were slipping two-dollar wagers to the chaperones; Miss Merrick and Miss Nassau were already big winners.

Sam Tobias, writer of the WPIX show, caught me looking at the girls and asked if I'd picked a winner yet. I told her I was holding off until the actual judging, to which she replied, rather cryptically, "Remember, blondes say yes, brunettes say listen."

Before the start of the fifth race, an announcer silenced the crowd and said, "This race is being dedicated to the girls of the Miss New York-World Beauty Contest, being held at Kutsher's Country Club. They are the world's most beautiful girls."

"I wrote that line," whispered Sam, "just dashed it off while I was sitting here in the stands." Bing Senator won the fifth race and while the pageant girls all crowded around the triumphant horse and jockey, I had a chat with Peggy Molitor, last year's Miss New York-World, who'd come to Kutsher's to hand over her scepter after a year's reign. Had she given me a little leg pressure while I watched Bing Senator overtake Luscious Lou and Little Sport in the stretch? I thought she had. Yes, she definitely had. Last year's finalist, the fairest of thousands of Empire State lovelies, unmistakably squeezing her prize-winning right calf against my own journalistic left one. What a country. There'd been a rumor circulating that the pageant bigwigs were dissatisfied with Peggy's reign; instead of being on hand to endorse supermarkets, she had suddenly dashed off with a biker to lead a hippie-style life. Nat Kanter had batted down this story, saying that she was a terrific kid and had been perfectly willing to endorse supermarkets but that it had to be on her own hippie-style terms, take it or leave it.

A tall, clear-eyed, healthy-looking girl to whom all those descriptions apply--Junoesque, statuesque, well endowed, nifty--Miss Molitor, who, in the New York tradition, had been knocked off quickly in the nationals, apologized for the extra 20 pounds she had packed on in the past year. "Working in an office doesn't help your fanny." She was a bit sad about having to step down, but she said it would be good to be relieved of all the chaperonage and various pressures. "As Miss New York-World, you're not supposed to drink, smoke or say dirty words. They don't watch you as much in the nationals, although one night when I goofed off slightly, they took a bed check, didn't find me and assumed I was dead in the bushes. Those restrictions. When they read them to us, one of the contestants, who was a junkie, suddenly freaked out and ran away, saying she couldn't take it." A Valley Stream girl of modest means, Miss Molitor had had to borrow clothing to get into the New York State competition; her who most vivid recollections were of a girl nicknamed Mirror Mary, who repeatedly elbowed other contestants away from mirrors so she could have them all to herself--and of her roommate, who almost drowned in a bathtub the night before the final judging. "The water was up to her nose when we dashed in and found her." Although Peggy had bitten the dust early in the nationals, her one-year reign had had some compensations. "I took a trip to the island of Nassau with Miss Suffolk and I got a mink coat, which I wore to work, and also a typewriter and a stereo cassette outfit, all of it worth around $6000, although, believe me. I would have preferred the cash. Another good thing was going to the nationals as Miss New York-World and having all the other girls gather around me assuming that since I was from New York, I was some kind of sophisticated swinger. There were other nice things, too. My girlfriends would introduce me as Miss New York-World at parties and that turned people on, although once at a Hilton jewelry convention, somebody kept saying I wasn't the real Miss New York and that made me cry. Old boyfriends would call up--for example, a cop who once tried to choke me. He sounded sheepish on the phone and then pretended he was calling to get his blackjack back. I'd kept it, to sort of fool around with. Then there are the obscene phone calls. You get a lot, although I was surprised that my younger sister got more for being Miss Rockaways."

Out of nowhere, Miss Molitor jumped up, said, "I'm just a good straight simple kid" and raced off to join a quartet of pageant chaperones; they reminded me of the tight-lipped matrons at the old Fleetwood Theater in the Bronx, where I had seen She and The Last Days of Pompeii 12 times each. A lovely racetrack waitress came by and said she didn't think the contestants were all that hot. I told her she could certainly hold her own with the best of them and found myself saying that I could probably slip her into next year's competition. It was my first trip to the races and I was mysteriously jumpy. Then I remembered that I had once worked on a musical and the producer had promised me a race horse if we came up with a winner. The show was buried in Baltimore. After the fifth race, the girls were shuttled back to Kutsher's on a bus and I settled down to some serious horse playing, picking entries whose names were slightly literary. They all lost and in the final race, I switched over to what I considered a "showbiz" horse, North by Northwest. He held to the third position and in the stretch, with a very (continued on page 199)Poise as a Tie Breaker(continued from page 126) sure and inevitable move, glided past the two leaders to win, the way Jim Ryun was supposed to glide past Marty Liquori but didn't. I got all my money back and $18 in winnings.

• • •

Great buzz of excitement in the dining room next morning. Nat Kanter told me that John Raitt had swept in and sung all through breakfast, snatches of tunes from every show he'd ever been in. "There was no stopping him," said Kanter, who then informed me that Tom Mackell was a great singer of barroomstyle Irish tunes and that maybe we could get Raitt and Mackell to sing a duet. I said I'd vote for that and then cornered Raitt, a chesty stalwart type who walked about as though he were constantly marveling at the quality of the air. "It's Kismet for me in the summer with Anna Maria Alberghetti," he began rather brightly, but his mood swiftly darkened and he said, "There's really nothing for me. A few conventions--that's a tough dollar. I talked to Hal Prince about Follies, but it really wasn't right. Terrific for Alexis, though." I felt sorry for the man who'd once thrilled me as Billy Bigelow in Carousel, as if it were my fault that he was doing conventions, and found myself making a silent vow to see if I could drum something up for him.

At breakfast, I met a newly arrived fellow judge named S. Rodgers Benjamin, the furrier, who told me, "We're the second-largest retailer in the country," and said he had sent 46 units worth $110,000 to Kutsher's to be worn on the TV show by the pageant girls but that Kutsher's security system was zilch, so he'd had to ship two of his own men down to guard the garments. "Each one of my men takes twenty-three furs to his room at night and sleeps with them," said Benjamin. Mrs. Benjamin, a stylish and quite dazzling brunette, sidled up to the table and said, "OK, if you're so big in the fur business, how come I wear a trench coat from Klein's?" A bell rang and a spry oldster introduced a dozen contestants who strolled into the dining room to mild applause. As was later explained, the mealtime salutes were designed to buoy up their confidence before the contest. Miss Lynbrook marched in wearing no bra and it was difficult to avoid doing a little premature judging. "If I were a judge," said Mrs. Benjamin, "I'd pick the one I'd like to bang."

"Negative," said her husband. "You'd pick the one you think I'd like to bang."

I excused myself to hustle off and corral John Russell Lowell, whose agency had screened the girls for Kutsher's pageant and handles 92 other competitions a year. "I'm no relation to the poet," said Lowell, a zesty gray-haired senior citizen, "though I can quote liberally from his works. I've been in this business for twenty-three years and got started doing the promotion of the world premiere of The Girl from Jones Beach, starring Virginia Mayo and Ronald Reagan. We held a Miss Rheingold-type competition and when I saw all that pulchritude, I said this is for me. What have I learned about girls in all this time? They are naturalborn liars, unbelievably enchanting and devious at the same time. Take what they tell you with a grain of salt. You'll get an ulcer anyway. One will go along pure and honest for six years then suddenly show her teeth, like she's swallowed a Mr. Hyde solution. Neither God nor man should dwell in the same house with more than one woman. If such is your lot, get a chair and a whip and settle in for peevishness and pettiness, with fair play an unheard-of dream." More specifically, Lowell said that the most dangerous of beauty contestants was the one who was getting on in age and was suddenly confronted with "a frothy young number" some eight or nine years her junior. "Suddenly, Miss Oldster turns into a spitting thing. I remember one such girl who waited till the final moment of the contest and then just happened to spill four scoops of raspberry ice cream on a sure winner's yellow gown. Another girl kept threatening to jump off a building if she didn't win, driving her roommate into a nervous breakdown. She wouldn't have jumped five feet."

In Lowell's estimate, despite the seemingly apathetic style of many of the girls, there wasn't one among them who wouldn't kill to walk away with first prize. And there was one creature even more treacherous than a contestant. "Your Bengal tiger, Kodiak bear, wounded African buffalo, they're all timid, indeed, compared with the mother of a loser in a beauty pageant." Despite his innate suspicion of young girls and their moms and his reputation as a fierce taskmaster, Lowell made it clear that he was quite protective of his young ladies and a foe of those who would try to compromise or insult them. "I'm a testy bastard," he said, "and won't tolerate anyone fooling with my kids. Anyone refers to them as 'fresh meat,' I don't care if he's thirty years younger, I'll invite the man outside and break his glasses. I once took twenty-six girls to a Queen of Queens beauty pageant. The convention man asked, 'Which broad would you like to win?' and before it was out of his mouth, I said, 'Let's go, girls,' and we all got back on the bus."

As far as Lowell was concerned, the girls were the name of the game and each TV pageant was a 90-minute flowthrough story with a single punch line--the winner--and it was a shame to let it get spoiled by an m.c. with a buck and wing. "Then there are the judges," said Lowell, not bothering to spare my feelings, "your weakest link. They'll vote for Elsie, the girl they used to go with, or Bessie, the girl who turned them down, all the while failing to notice a perfect swanlike neck and dignity of movement." Silently pledging to be on the lookout for classic necks, I asked Lowell if pageant entries were allowed to beef up their natural wonderfulness with artificial aids. "Falls and supplementary hairpieces, yes," said Lowell. "Wigs, no. Contouring the bustline is in bounds, too, but of course you're risking a pop-out situation, so the girls tend to take it easy in this department. A single ejected sponge can destroy a girl with embarrassment."

Lowell dashed off to prep his girls for their TV runway strolls, his place immediately taken by Peggy Molitor, who said, "I can see now you're looking for dirt. I won't give you any, but long after you've finished your story, make sure to ask me about a certain dirty old man who wound up in my hotel room last night." Before I could give further thought to the mystery, Blake turned up and said that both Boozer and Barnett had passed the contest by, but there was no need to worry, since he was confident that by hardly moving a muscle, he could induce either Monte Irvin or Jesse Owens to speed up to Kutsher's and fill the empty judge slot. "Just for fun, though, do you know any colored athletes?" I mentioned a friend of mine, an ex-athlete now in public relations, and Blake said, "Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go. Let's get him up." I said I wasn't sure my buddy would be interested and Blake said, "Look, it's no problem. Forget it. One thing you can always get is a colored judge."

• • •

At seven the next morning, Blake woke me up with a phone call, his voice a trifle anxious this time. "I understand you know Artie Shaw." I said yes, I'd met the great clarinetist at a party, and Blake said, "Well, what about him?"

"For a black judge?" I said.

"Well, you know...he's a wild guy...all those wives...."

"But he's not black," I said. "There's no way it'll work."

"You're probably right," said Blake. "Well, look, go back to sleep. There's absolutely no problem. Walt Frazier's personal manager is on the highway now and nine chances out of ten, we can get Clyde himself up here. What's the big deal?"

• • •

Later I got caught up in the Day Before the Finals tempo. Kanter told me that the girls were nervous as fillies and that later in the evening there would be a preliminary shakedown, the judges knocking out 19 girls but not daring to tell them, for fear they would check out on the next bus and not be on hand for the TV taping of the finals. In other words, 19 of the girls would go to bed that night thinking they were in the running when actually they'd been wiped out hours before and didn't stand a chance. Kanter informed me of another development--that Milton Kutsher, president of the family corporation that owns the hotel, who'd been slated to be one of the judges, had stepped aside in favor of his wife, who wanted to be seen on television.

Soon, other judges began to turn up, among them a genial ex-pilot named Bob Dobbin, vice-president and marketing director for Best Foods, a $300,000,000 subsidiary of CPC International. No stranger to beauty contests, Dobbin told me over cocktails that his company had once sponsored the National College Queen Pageant, a contest designed to show the world that not all of our youths are hippies and activists.

At dinner, Dobbin and I were introduced to another fellow judge, Thomas J. Mackell, the celebrated Queens D.A. A huge, good-natured, crime-busting Santa Claus type, Mackell stuck one hand over his face and when the girls made their dining-room entrance, coyly peered through his fingers and said, "I guess we're not supposed to start judging yet, are we?" Nimbly ducking all feelers for Crimmins anecdotes, Mackell dug into the delicious Kutsher's food, patting his girth after each course and saying, "Well, I could just inhale five pounds around here. And those waister-cizers don't do me any good, either."

When the girls paraded by again, I said, "Wow, it's a lucky thing I don't like girls."

"That has got to be one of the funniest lines I've heard around a beauty contest," said Kanter. "Mind if I use it in my story?"

Then Lowell told the judges' table it was time for our first eliminations. I suddenly felt some tension and responsibility and had a fantasy in which I lost a contact lens and wound up voting for a stagehand. We were short a few judges, the most conspicuous absentee being the black one Blake had promised to supply. Anticipating my concern, Blake said he had the matter in hand; no, it was not to be the great Knick guard Walt Frazier but a chap named John Kress, who would be rolling in the following night for the finals. What if all three black girls were eliminated before Kress arrived? Wouldn't that seem fishy? Blake didn't think so, as long as Kress was on hand for the finals on TV. Lowell got us all together in the Palestra Room and informed us that on this first elimination, we would get three shots at the girls, who would first walk through so that we could familiarize ourselves with them and then glide by for scoring in swimsuits and gowns. Each girl was to be awarded from one to 36 points in each category, according to Lowell, who gave us this rough scoring guide to follow: 1-6 fair, 7-14 good, 15-24 excellent and 25-36 through the roof. In Lowell's experience, some judges were liberal in scoring, while others doled out points in a miserly fashion, but the two tendencies canceled each other out. Lowell warned us that we might tend to be niggardly in our scoring of the first girls and then give out great panicky showers of points as the supply of girls ran out. If this were true, it occurred to me that Miss Albany, first out of the paddock, would be in big trouble.

Kanter leaned across and told me that one girl had won several contests by tossing long sucking kisses at each judge as she paraded by. One by one, the girls came out, while Lowell hollered their names, favorite actors and hobbies. By and large, I'd liked them more collectively; they were about on the level of St. Luke's Hospital student nurses--not bad--but I had an idea I could round up a handsomer batch any afternoon outside Bloomingdale's. I got very self-conscious about my scoring and found I tended to tack on an extra five points or so for contestants who winked at me, whispered "Hi" and tossed off a kiss, even if it wasn't of the long sucking variety. At one point, I peeked over at Benjamin's score sheet--as though we were taking a biology quiz--and learned that he was a much more generous pointgiver than I was. One girl caused a stir by turning up with an unmistakably distended stomach, giving rise to speculations about whether it was the result of a recent pregnancy. Another quickly picked up the nickname Miss Tiny Tim, showing a remarkable resemblance to the famed showbiz personality. As the three black girls strolled by, I wondered about the current notion in publishing that white critics lack the sensibility for judging black literature. Did this apply to beauty pageants? There was little time to sink my teeth into this, so I took no chances and gave them each terrific scores, although down deep, I didn't think any one of them was standing room only.

Midway through the parade, I felt confident I'd spotted the winner: a sultry, budding Ava Gardner type; but she failed to cast so much as a glance at the judges' table and, to my disappointment, I heard one of my colleagues let out a disgusted snort as another said, "What a zombi." As it turned out, my candidate was quickly eliminated and told me later that she had been on "heavy downs." After the last contestant, an overbrimming girl representing Troy, had glided by in her gown, a tiny man named Sol Shields, of the accounting firm of Rosenfeld, Hauptman and Shields, scooped up our scoring sheets and we all retired to the bar with the knowledge that we had clipped the wings of 19 of the aspiring lovelies. Tom Mackell ordered a round of drinks, saying he had opened up Queens to Cutty Sark, getting the brand into 100 bars in the borough. A guest tapped me on the shoulder and wanted to know if I judged the girls constantly, every second, for every move they made throughout the day. I told him no, just when they were on the stage--and he seemed surprised.

• • •

I was amazed the following day when a slender sandy-haired young fellow turned to me in Kutsher's steam room and said he was John Kress, assistant coach and head scout for the New York Nets. Blake had failed to come up with a black judge, after all, unless he felt that Kress's association with black ballplayers qualified him for the role. As it turned out, with my dark beard, Bronx-Jewish heritage and work in the theater, I was the closest to being a black judge on the panel. In any case, my conscience was clear: I'd given each of the black girls massive scores.

The taping of the finals was set for nine o'clock in the evening and would be shown late at night the following Saturday. According to the Dancer-Fitzgerald man, Ave Butensky, the show was good for a 10 percent or 11 percent Neilsen, which meant that roughly 1,250,000 folks in the New York area would have their dials turned to it. It was Butensky's view that people watched beauty pageants not so much to see gorgeous girls in their skivvies as to root for their favorites, much in the same way they cheered on entries in a horse race. At the appointed time, we each took a seat at the judges' table, the ladies in gowns, the men decked out in tuxedos. In my view, Bob Dobbin, the Best Foods man, took top honors in the tuxedo competition with a wild ruffled ensemble that might have come out of the court of Louis XIV.

John Raitt loosened us up a bit with a story about a friend, working in Desert Song, who'd mixed up his lines and said, "Shoot one step further and I'll come." I got to meet Kathleen Levin, the "terrifically classy" girl from Prince Matchabelli, who said, "I understand you're to write an account of this evening. My hope is that it will avoid the straight approach and concentrate on the various satirical aspects of such events as these. To do otherwise would be trite." The last of the judges was a tall, rakish fellow named Eddie Schaffer, who described himself as the country's top roastmaster, the term making reference to the type of m.c. who insults rather than praises the honored guest at charity benefits. "I rip and tear, cut the fellow to pieces," said Schaffer. "When I go out onstage, this mild-mannered fellow before you turns into worse than twenty Don Rickles rolled into one. Slash, chop, cut and rip." Schaffer said that his home base was Florida, where, as a top-ranking officer in one of the local hospitals, he got to roast for many diseases, such as leukemia and muscular dystrophy. As the girls assembled nervously, Schaffer hollered, "You're all winners; I'm in room fourteen," drawing a titter from the hitherto imperious Prince Matchabelli woman, who said, "I'd invite all you men judges to my island in the Hudson, except that who knows what you'd look like in the morning?"

The show began with songs and patter from Raitt and Kaye Stevens and a stroll-through of the contestants in the choicest of S. Rodgers Benjamin's fur units. My Ava Gardner-style favorite, evidently off downs, came to brilliant life, with sly winks and secretive smiles at the judges; but, of course, without knowing it, she'd already been wiped out in the preliminaries. Raitt sang (I Did It) My Way, and when he came to the phrase "And now the end is near," Schaffer cracked up the Prince Matchabelli rep again by whispering, "It's the newest fag song." The girls were whittled down to 15 semifinalists (the rejects taking a forlorn position beneath set designer Newton White's irises) and were then cut down to a group of seven, from which there would be chosen one winner and four runners-up. Pointing to one of them, Schaffer said, "I never could go for a girl with a trick knee," practically knocking the Prince Matchabelli woman off her chair.

The crowd favorite was clearly Miss Setauket, whose favorite actor was Paul Newman, but the winner turned out to be Miss Rochester, a somewhat sweet though vacant-eyed blonde whose favorite food was Wiener Schnitzel and whose ambition was to be "a good human being." She'd been among my top three selections, so I didn't really feel the fix was in, but I couldn't find a judge who had picked her as the winner. A contest official told me that if she was "close" on all the judges' cards and a single judge went bananas over her, it was possible for her to go over the top.

I felt a little sad about the losers, remembering my freshman year at college, when my essay Hemingway's Lost Generation placed sixth in a school competition. The losers all flocked around Miss Rochester, a cool customer who failed to break out in the traditional crying jag, and then moms began to pour out in the traditional crying jag, and then moms began to pout out of the stands to take pictures of their also-ran daughters. One such mother told me she was proud of her daughter, though she had known she didn't have a prayer. "She's Jewish...and, well...you know...." Minutes later, a second mom, snapping away with a Polaroid, told me her daughter had entered just for the fun of it. "She's the only Jewish girl in the contest and knew she was out of business...." At the bar, I cornered my Ava Gardner look-alike, who told me she had been gobbling up downs because she was sure they were going to pick a blonde, blueeyed type. "I'm Jewish, of course, and you know where that is."

I asked Miss Manhasset how things were in that trim little suburban community and she looked at me as if I were crazy. Having been led to believe that each of the girls was the fairest flower of the town denoted on her bosom sign, I said, "You mean you're not from Manhasset?"

"Are you kidding?" she said. She turned out to be from Bayside; Miss Lynbrook, from Atlantic Beach; and Miss Setauket, from Bayport. The winner, Miss Rochester, hailing from Oceanside, had never set foot in the city whose colors she bore. The only explanation I could get was that Lowell, acting as talent scout, found them and then the names of various cities had more or less arbitrarily been tacked onto them, the contest rules specifying that the girls can enter any area competition where they think they have a chance of winning. Oh, well, it wasn't much of a scandal--and there was still that wild party to look forward to, the one I'd been told about in which the girls, spilling over with accumulated tension, would finally cut loose and fill Kutsher's with orgiastic frenzy. All I could find were a couple of contestants doing an antique twist in the lounge and several befuddled Upstaters, wandering about in search of the john, announcing they were going to the if they didn't get to "tinkle."

• • •

The next morning, in Kutsher's dining room, I was awarded an interview with the winner, Susan Dishaw, who said her mother was a librarian, her father a sales rep and that she was always in a good mood. Her previous laurels were runner-up honors in the Miss American Teenager, Miss Palisades and Miss Times Square competitions, but this was the first time she had ever landed a number-one slot. Right in the middle of the baked herring and Nova Scotia salmon and trays of sweet rolls and bagels, I had a furious temptation to ask her what she thought of Germaine Greer's contention that the fem-libbers' obsession with clitoral stimulation and orgasm, with its attendant substitution of genital sexuality for spiritual satisfaction, was a cop-out and a ruse foisted upon women by male chauvinists. I held off, however, and made my way to the lobby, where I quickly learned that three pageant girls had broken their curfew the night before and that Lowell, true to his reputation of being a no-nonsense enforcer of the rules, was now refusing to take them back to New York in his beauty bus. "I really would sort of like them out of my lobby," said Mrs. Kutsher, nodding toward the forlorn trio of curfew breakers. Visibly upset, Seymour Seitz raced into the lobby and said he'd been in touch with Lowell, who was waiting outside in his bus and, indeed, was not about to budge an inch. Was I driving to New York City and, if so, was there the slightest chance I might find room in my car for the three wayward lovelies? I looked them over; one was a hefty blonde gumchewer, the second a south-of-the-border-style nifty and the third a slender yellow-haired rascal I recalled as having the neatest body in the group. She was decked out in tiny hotpants for the long ride back to the city.

"What the hell," I said to Seitz, "I'll find room for them." Seitz threw his arms around me in gratitude and promised to find work for me in future pageants.

The girls piled into my car, a bellhop loading their airline-hostess luggage and saying, "It's all right to be bad." We made three stops in the first ten miles, so that the still-jittery girls could "tinkle," and then hit the highway, the blonde saying she would serve as a lookout for "bubbletops" while I floored the accelerator. I told her I had two tickets already and one more would put me out of business, whereupon she spotted a fellow on a motorbike and said she sure wished she could be heading for the city on a scrambler. The girl with the tiny shorts said she was still upset about being locked out by Lowell. "I had to call a security guard and finally spent the night sleeping in a strange bed next to two girls' feet." Still, she had only good things to say about the beauty king. "At least he's straight," she said. "Not like other directors, who insist on getting into your pants before they'll put you in a contest." The Latin-style girl delivered a lecture on the merits of various ups and downs, putting in a big plug for "beanies" and telling me to think twice before getting involved with "angel dust," since it had embalming fluid in it. The girl in the hotpants said there certainly were some weirdos in the contest, particularly one quartet of girls who were always parading through the halls naked, scrubbing one another down with sponges and insisting that she join in and get scrubbed, too. As we approached the city, the girls got into a laughing jag over one contestant who'd had a "corroded navel." By the time we reached Penn Station, they were on the floor of the car, in stitches.

• • •

After I said goodbye, I wondered about pageants in general. Was it true that the beauty contest is a Neanderthal custom, a sad relic of the Forties and Fifties that has to go? A corrupt ritual that demeans woman, ignoring her real worth and concentrating instead on the neatness of her profile and the swell of her bosom? Wasn't it all just a cynical money-making device for the sponsors, an apparatus for selling useless products to women who have been slyly led to believe they need them but really don't? And would not Miss Utica, for example, be miles ahead of the game if, at some early age, she'd been encouraged in a natural bent for biochemical research rather than pushed along the road that took her to the reviewing stand at Kutsher's? Maybe so. But I certainly wish my favorite hadn't been on downs.