Slaughter was hired away on a temporary assignment with the blessing of her boss at the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce, who told her she should “go up there and show those Yankees how to do a real job with a pageant.” So she did, and the following January, back in Florida, after her bid to become the Festival of States Parade chair was rejected, she quit, then headed to New Jersey for good. Slaughter spent the next thirty-one years in New Jersey, engineering the Miss America pageant, for the most part, as it survives today. She added a talent section, formal entry requirements, a coronation ceremony with evening gowns instead of bathing suits, a Miss Congeniality prize, and—most significantly—the scholarship program that endures as the pageant’s greatest point of pride. “I didn’t like having nothing but swimsuits,” she said. “I had to get Atlantic City to understand that it couldn’t just be a beauty contest.”
Forceful, efficient, controlling, outspoken, censorious, sometimes terrifying, and often affectionate with her “girls,” Slaughter was a tangle of contradictions. She pushed the women to make money while grooming them for matrimony (in 1970, she was still telling them “the most important thing in your lives will be your marriage”); she was socially conservative but kept her surname professionally after her own wedding in 1948; she was a Southern Baptist laboring to save the very leg show the Southern Baptist Convention, along with other religious groups, had condemned in the 1920s. Perhaps the one biographical fact that meshed with her mission was that, for lack of money, she had never finished college.
“She was extremely articulate and persuasive, and very determined,” said lifelong board member Adrian Phillips. “She had an innate sense of diplomacy. But there was another side to Lenora. She could be really rough and tough if the situation called for it.” Her polarities were perfectly calibrated: she could rumble with the big boys of Atlantic City, and if any women’s clubbers were still exercised about seeing a bathing beauty pageant in their town, a proper Southern lady had come to reform it.
She began with the recruiting process. Slaughter learned that the pageant director, a huckster named George Tyson, was tapping women from amusement parks and fairs and making state contestants loiter in swimsuits outside the contest venues like prostitutes. “It was awful,” she said. “I wanted to throw out all the cheap promotions. I said I believe I can get civic organizations to run the [feeder] pageants and we can get a better class of girl.” That class explicitly excluded women of color. Sometime in the 1940s, after Slaughter had become executive director, the notorious Rule Seven surfaced, stating that contestants must be “in good health and of the white race.” It stood until the 1950s.
In Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race, Maxine Leeds Craig traces black beauty pageants back to the 1890s, explaining that they served as “non-confrontational ways of expressing racial pride.” There was no sustained push to integrate white contests, she says, until after World War II, with a watershed moment in 1948 when a black Brooklyn College student named Thelma Porter was named Miss Subways and her smiling face appeared on 9,000 subway posters throughout New York City. After that, black women competed in formerly white contests in the North, and sometimes even in the Deep South and Midwest. But neither that, nor the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, nor the gale-force wind of the Black Power movement of the 1960s could move the Miss America pageant to integrate—until 1970.
Slaughter’s racism targeted black women directly. In 1948, when the South Dakota Black Hills Indian Council pressed the issue by writing her to question the whites-only rule, she responded that they were welcome to compete, explaining, “We have eliminated the Negro from this contest due to the fact that it is absolutely impossible to judge fairly the beauty of the Negro race in comparison with the white race.” Her claim that this was a matter of categorical fairness was a perfect inversion of the truth. Miss America’s ideal was hierarchical, built on classifications of class and race that put black women at the bottom, drawing on centuries of prejudice that presumed they were ungroomed, unfashionable, socially unrefined, hypersexual, and, with declining segregation, a threat to white supremacy. Unlike newly arrived European immigrants or fully subordinated Native Americans, they were, in Slaughter’s eyes, uniquely unassimilable. In fact, the pageant’s first full Native American contestant, Mifaunwy Shunatona, an Otoe-Pawnee-Wyandot of Oklahoma, had broken the race barrier in 1941, before Rule Seven was added. (A year earlier, Ada Woods, a part Choctaw Oklahoman, had placed sixth.) Asians and Latinas were accepted before the rule was retired—in 1948, Chinese American Yun Tau Chee, Miss Hawaii, competed, as did Miss Puerto Rico Irma Nydia Vázquez, upgrading Puerto Rico from “official guest” to contestant.
The 1935 pageant, now part of the Showman’s Variety Jubilee’s weeklong festival of sports, circus, fashion, and entertainment events, featured one of Slaughter’s first adjustments: talent was now an option, though, thankfully, it wasn’t judged. Slaughter believed a winner shouldn’t just be pretty but admitted that “at least half of the girls would get out there on the Steel Pier and sing or dance or do something—badly.” It would take a few years to perfect the format (three women sang the same song in 1938) and attract and reward more decorous contestants. Through the late 1930s, she used a whack-a-mole approach to controlling the obstreperous beauties, laying down new rules for each new infraction. And there were plenty: a new naked sculpture model; a pissed-off contestant, disqualified for wearing mascara, who held a press conference dubbing herself “The People’s Choice” Miss America and set off on her own tour using the title; and the one who—literally—got away: Bette Cooper, the 1937 Miss America who wasn’t.
A private high school junior from Hackettstown, New Jersey, Cooper had won an amusement park pageant that led her to Miss America. Though her parents were reluctant to let her compete in Atlantic City, they decided it would make a good vacation. Cooper didn’t expect to win; more to the point, she didn’t want to. She caught a cold and was sick all week in Atlantic City, her father said, from dieting and drinking only orange juice, and she was disappointed to discover that Miss America fans were “a couple of ticket-takers on a roller coaster, a barker or two, and a few hot dog vendors.” One of the contestants was a stripper. That summer, Atlantic City was making national headlines because of a crackdown on prostitution.
There was one bright spot: Cooper’s twenty-one-year-old pageant-appointed chauffeur was all class. The handsome, urbane son of a hotelman with his own cabin cruiser, Louis Off provided comfort as Cooper’s anxiety about getting mixed up in the pageant mounted. They fell in love. The night she was crowned, she called him at 2:00 a.m. from her hotel room, desperate to get out of it. Off rushed over to find her—and her parents—crying. With their approval, he smuggled her out through a side door and the two sped away in his boat, leaving baffled pageant officials looking for her the next morning on Steel Pier, where she was expected for a photo shoot. By then Off had taken her home, where the blinds were drawn and the phone was unplugged. The most surreal pageant photo in Miss America history shows Cooper’s runners-up posing gamely next to an empty throne draped with an ermine robe, the crown on its seat. It raced around front pages across the country.
Everyone had a position on Cooper’s reason for quitting. Her father told reporters that not all that glitters is gold, referencing the Persian lamb coat she’d been promised, which turned out to be an offer to buy the coat at a discount. Plus, he said, “She’s so young and we feel it’s not proper to shove a kid into vaudeville.”
Slaughter, spinning it just right, suggested love had made her girl bolt. In 1981, Off said he’d told her the day before she was crowned, “You realize, Bette, that if you become Miss America, I’m not going to be your Mister America. I’m not going to follow you around on your coattails.”
Cooper cheerily told the press she just wanted to finish high school and wasn’t ready for vaudeville, though she still considered herself Miss America and even directed a reporter to call her “queen.” She said she was happy to have been chosen but didn’t think it was sensible