The Cooper mutiny left Slaughter at an entrepreneurial impasse. She was just the kind of polished contestant the pageant wanted. (Off described her as “a very dignified person,” who “couldn’t stand cheapness. Even that little bit of leg that the pageant demanded at the time was not for her.”) Slaughter needed to attract this kind of refinement, crown it, and keep it leashed. The solution: more rules. She set the minimum age at eighteen. Female chaperones were assigned to shadow contestants nonstop, day and night, to keep them out of trouble and protect them from exploitative “talent agents” who might try to rope them into shady deals. Even the chaperones had a chaperone: their manager was a well-known Quaker socialite married to the mayor, whom Slaughter described as “the Quakerest of the Quakers.” (“Why, one time I went to see her,” she said, “I was so scared I took off all my nail polish and lipstick.”)
Then the rules got weirder. 1937: Contestants were banned from bars and nightclubs and couldn’t be seen talking to any men all week—even their fathers (because how else to shield them from menacing men short of asking the dads to wear name tags?). 1938: Contestants had to be single, childless, and never married. Chastity became a lasting mandate for this perennial “Miss”; even today, she must be childless and unmarried. The restrictions simultaneously tamped down the erotic implications of women vamping in swimwear and sustained the impression that they were sexually available. It was as American as apple pie: cranking up interest in female sexuality while punishing women who acted on it.
Once the talent section was boosted to one third of the total score in 1938, the live show got better and the women’s careers flew higher. That year, in a stroke of media savvy, Slaughter persuaded fashion features director Vyvyan Donner, one of the few successful female Hollywood directors, to do a short film highlighting the swimsuits, the parade, and the crowning of Marilyn Meseke, Miss Ohio. It ran on Movietone, a news service shown in theaters before feature films, reaching millions of people and pushing Miss America into the national consciousness. Donner would return as a judge in the 1940s.
By 1940, the pageant stood on solid financial footing, rebuilt with the support of civic groups and local businesses, refueled by endorsement deals, registered as a nonprofit corporation with a large board and bylaws, and officially named the Miss America pageant. Most of the contestants now represented states, as opposed to sometimes obscure regions. (Cooper had competed as Miss Bertrand Island, prompting her predecessor to ask, as she crowned her, where it was.) “We are past the time,” Atlantic City mayor Charles D. White had declared—no doubt praying this was true—“when beauty parades are in the nature of floor shows. This is a cultural event seeking a high type of beauty.”
In 1941, after butting heads with the board over a harebrained plan to stage the pageant on ice, Tyson stepped down and Slaughter was named executive director. Thus, the real queen ascended, carefully coiffed and manicured, to steer the pageant out of the dire straits of the Depression toward a bright future of decorum and substance. A week later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Atlantic City resort culture was utterly transformed during World War II. Nearly fifty resort hotels were converted to barracks and hospitals. The town was hit hard by labor shortages and rationing. Soldiers simulated attacks up and down the shoreline and snipers trained on rooftops, unnerving pedestrians below. In The Last Good Time: Skinny D’Amato, the Notorious 500 Club, and the Rise and Fall of Atlantic City, journalist Jonathan Van Meter describes what “The World’s Playground” looked like by spring of 1942: “Because of its location between Delaware Bay and the New York Harbor, New Jersey had more commercial ships targeted by German U-boats off its coast than any other state along the shore. The beaches were awash in tarlike slicks of oil, and pieces of sunken ships began to wash up on the shore. The coast guard patrolled the boardwalk, and armed, mounted troops with dogs covered the beaches, on the lookout for spies attempting to come ashore from the U-boats.” For the entire month of March, when Nazi submarines were feared to be prowling offshore, the city went dark: streetlights were snuffed, and the riot of electric signs on the boardwalk were unplugged.
But though the war strained the pageant’s finances, it strengthened its patriotic underpinnings. After talk of suspending the event until peacetime, Slaughter persuaded city officials that it was “emblematic of the spirit of America” and should continue, even if that meant moving to the Warner Theater from 1942 to 1945, while Convention Hall, repurposed as “Camp Boardwalk,” served the Army Air Forces.
The war presented not just a new way for the pageant to channel its patriotic aspirations, but also a fresh reason for showcasing American beauty. As women entered factories and shipyards to fill servicemen’s jobs—supplying 57 percent of the workforce by war’s end—new assurances about American femininity were marshaled to allay fears about their unladylike new roles. The beauty industry expressed this through advertising; Miss America reified it through pageantry.
“This conundrum of glamour and grime, of Miss America and Rosie the Riveter, defines the America of 1941–45,” writes the scholar Mary Anne Schofield. She cites a 1943 lipstick ad in Ladies’ Home Journal as its crystallization: “For the first time in history,” it read, “woman-power is a factor in war . . . It’s a reflection of the free democratic way of life that you have succeeded in keeping your femininity—even though you are doing a man’s work! . . . No lipstick—ours or anyone else’s—will win the war. But it symbolizes one of the reasons why we are fighting . . . the precious right of women to be feminine and lovely—under any circumstances.”
While Miss America was busy embodying the feminine and the lovely, she was also evolving into a boots-on-the-ground war worker, traveling with the United Service Organization (USO), which delivered entertainment to servicemen, and visiting hospitals and Red Cross canteens. In 1943, when the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall and the Traymore became Thomas M. England General Hospital, the largest amputee hospital in the world, contestants visited troops there. The soap manufacturer Lever Brothers Co. offered the pageant $5,000 and 1943 winner Jean Bartel $2,500 if she would go on a national tour with Slaughter selling war bonds to finance military operations. The War Finance Department approved it, and Bartel sold $2.5 million in bonds. One headline chirped, “Miss America Arrives to Smash Hearts, Banks” above an article listing Bartel’s measurements from bust, waist, hips, and thigh to calf, ankle, neck, and arms. But 80 percent of her sales were made to women, cultivating a hefty new fan base.
Bartel was a terrifically popular, successful, and hardworking (though poorly paid) winner—the first to star in a Broadway musical, and one who helped dispel women’s misgivings about beauty queens. “The fact that I approached them as their contemporary helped,” she told Frank Deford. She’s routinely misidentified as the first college student to win the title (that was Smallwood), but she was the first coed, and she faced the unhappy task of coping with relentless public surprise at the discovery that beautiful women could indeed be intelligent.
Bartel’s successor, Venus Ramey, doubled her record, selling $5 million in bonds in 1944 and receiving a citation from the Treasury Department. She also inadvertently made Miss America a pinup. When a GI based in Foggia, Italy, wrote her asking for a signed photo, she complied; it was scaled up and painted on the nosecone of a B-17 that flew sixty-eight missions by men who named Ramey “the girl we’d most like to bail out with over a deserted Pacific isle.”
Ramey, who became the first Miss America to run for office when she campaigned as a Democrat in the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1951, was no Miss America booster. She felt the pageant abandoned her after her win, when she was exploited by one of the dreaded talent agents Slaughter had hoped to deter through chaperones; he took Ramey to New York and deflected all her phone calls, including one from