It was this sort of press that had caused the pageant to disband in 1928. The city still hoped to reboot it, since the 1927 event had been a genuine financial success, and an epic $15 million convention center, covering seven acres—big enough to swallow Madison Square Garden in one bite—was slated to open by the end of the decade, promising whole new orders of extravagance. But the Depression delayed it until 1933, when the revamped pageant not only failed to restore order, command respect, make money, attract decent crowds, or even secure the support of the Hotel Men’s Association, but actively plunged it deeper into disrepute, causing Miss America 1933 to be snubbed for decades while pageant officials disavowed the rogue event.
She was Miss Connecticut, fifteen-year-old Marion Bergeron, a platinum blonde with a sheepish smile and an hourglass figure reflecting the fleshier ideal of the Depression era, as the reedy look of the flapper disappeared. Her typical day began at 6:00 a.m. when she milked ten cows. The daughter of a policeman, she’d won her first beauty pageant just weeks earlier after entering on a lark. Few of the thirty Miss America contestants that year were selected through newspaper nominations; most were sponsored by carnivals and amusement parks, attracting a rougher and more desperate range of beauties, some of whom cried openly when they were bested during the elimination judging. Neptune did not sail forth from the sea; rather, the hopefuls debuted at something called the Evening Dinner Party on the arms of uniformed Morris Guards—volunteer militia members who squired the women around the room for the benefit of onlookers. This was the first mistake—no one likes a beauty queen with a man attached.
The Bathers’ Revue moved from the beach indoors, opening with a parade led by twenty women in white swimsuits who rode bicycles ahead of the contestants, one of whom, as she passed the judges for inspection, keeled over and writhed around on the floor in pain from an abscessed tooth. The rolling chair parade also came indoors—the new Convention Hall and its $5,000 pipe organ had to be put to good use, though it broke down ten bars into the “Star-Spangled Banner,” forcing the mailmen’s band to step in. The finalists were trundled in on wicker rolling chairs and pushed around the aisles in what seemed more like bingo night in a retirement community than a beachside beauty contest. The contestants’ ranks were thinning at an alarming rate: one dropped out to get an emergency appendectomy, three were disqualified for lying about their home states, one was outed as married, and one quit before the final judging, claiming the pageant was fixed. At fifteen, Bergeron should have been disqualified, but she hadn’t mentioned her age, and no one asked.
The ten all-new judges included New Yorker illustrator Peter Arno, whose trailblazing one-panel cartoons skewered New York society, reserving special contempt for women, and Life illustrator Russell Patterson, whose leggy sophisticates had defined flapper fashion before it yielded, in the 1930s, to curvier silhouettes. They were joined by the Bronx-born Ziegfeld girl and Broadway actress Gladys Glad, herself the winner of a Daily News beauty contest. Her husband, theater columnist Mark Hellinger, covered the pageant, writing that “a funnier looking set of monkeys I never gazed upon in all my life. There are two or three cute ones among the group, but the rest are all depression Miss Americas.” Seven had arrived exhausted after touring all summer, unpaid, in a vaudeville show called The Pageant Beauties, on the promise of new clothes and job offers in Atlantic City. “They have been conned before they start,” wrote Hellinger, amazed that they’d signed contracts agreeing to work for free.
One day in their hotel lobby, Patterson and Arno were buttonholed by thugs sent by Nucky Johnson, who told them Nucky had chosen Miss New York to win. The men were outraged. “Look, that’s the way we run the contest down here,” one said, patting his chest where a pistol might be holstered.
“Or else?” Arno replied, pushing past them.
“Hey,” Patterson suggested as the two men walked away, “let’s cross them up altogether and pick a girl from out of left field. How about the little blonde from Connecticut?” He meant Bergeron.
Gladys Glad was already smitten with someone else, Miss Ohio; they’d even posed together for photos, and it seemed most of the judges preferred other contestants to Bergeron. But once it emerged that Nucky had bullied other judges as well, they all teamed up to fight corruption, agreeing to vote for Bergeron. Patterson claimed that many of the early Miss Americas were Nucky’s picks; a City Hall employee had even told him Bergeron was the first honestly chosen winner he’d ever seen, which, if true, would make an illegally entered, underage Miss America the only legitimately crowned one thus far.
But the audience had been rooting for Miss Ohio, a nineteen-year-old nanny who’d flouted protocol by appearing at one of the official events in a white evening gown instead of the pageant-approved sportswear, endearing her to fans. The rowdy crowd hissed when Bergeron’s victory was announced, and angry shouts rang out from the box seats reserved for city officials, presumably in Nucky’s pocket as well. (According to Nelson Johnson’s book Boardwalk Empire, by the mid-1920s, every Atlantic City employee top to bottom was beholden to Nucky.) Bergeron was backstage with no idea she’d won until she was told to pull a dress on over her swimsuit, slapped with a Miss America sash, and hustled out to take the crown, flanked by two runners-up who looked on with unhappy smiles. As the flashbulbs popped, said Bergeron, “I felt like I’d been hit with a stun gun.”
Afterward, Hellinger interviewed Bergeron backstage as other reporters vied for her attention. “She is a nice kid, natural and unaffected,” he wrote. “She probably doesn’t know that this mantle she has inherited has never brought more than momentary happiness to any girl in the past.” He asked about her ambitions; she told him she wanted to be a singer. In fact, she’d been singing blues on a local radio station since she was twelve.
“Be careful, honey,” he told her. “You’re in a tough racket now. Be wise in everything you do.”
“Don’t worry about me, Mr. Hellinger,” Bergeron said with a dismissive wave. “I know what you mean. You’re thinking of what has happened to other beauty winners. But don’t worry about me. I’m—I’m different.”
Bergeron won a lavish array of mostly age-inappropriate gifts: a Ford she was too young to drive, a diamond-studded watch, a trip to Bermuda, a piece of property on the Jersey Shore, and a fur coat. A screen-test offer vaporized when her age was revealed, but it was all good: unlike Lanphier, she got exactly what she wanted as Miss America. She began performing live when she turned sixteen, signed a record deal at seventeen, and was soon sailing through a career crooning with bandleaders Rudy Vallee, Guy Lombardo, and Gene Krupa.
Hellinger was entirely wrong about Bergeron. “If I hadn’t been Miss America,” she later told a reporter, “I would never have had a contract with CBS.” And she liked carrying the title (“You’re just a little bit special all the time,” she said), even if her crown was stolen from her hotel room that night and her Catholic school kicked her out when she returned home, but especially after the organization finally rallied—in 1965—to reclaim their Depression queen, the most talented and successful in Miss America’s short history.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, THE PAGEANT TOOK a powder in 1934. But the concept was pirated elsewhere, first in Madison Square Garden’s “Queen of American Beauty” competition that year, then again in early 1935, when the San Diego Exposition staged a beauty contest in Balboa Park next to two midget attractions, naming a professional nudist, Florence Cubitt, “Miss America of the Midway.” (When journalist Joseph Mitchell interviewed Cubitt a year later in a New York hotel room, she greeted him in her standard publicity attire: naked but for a blue G-string.) Nearby Wildwood, New Jersey, had even poached the title while it was dormant in 1932, throwing an “American Beauty Contest” and crowning the winner Miss America.
This wouldn’t do; the brand had to be reclaimed. An Atlantic City publicist who still saw profit in the pageant persuaded his boss