The beauty contest now included elimination rounds in which finalists in each section were judged against Gorman. On the pier where the contenders were evaluated in evening gowns and “afternoon dress,” The New York Times reported, the public “fairly rocked the great structure with its demonstration, in which Gorman appeared to be a favorite.” But this year, the popular vote (by cheering) was eliminated, making the judges sole arbiters. Christy had returned, joined now by a graphic designer, a photographer, three other illustrators, and the celebrated artist Norman Rockwell.
Though he had come to appraise the shapely young beauties, Rockwell was battling his own body image problem: he was a lanky six feet tall and just twenty-eight, but his incipient pot belly was a growing source of embarrassment. When he and his fellow judges took a dip in the ocean, the contestants gathered around to heckle and laugh at them in a show of attitude that would be unimaginable today. “You’re judging us?” they asked. “Look at yourselves. Old crows and bean poles.”
Rockwell blushed, sinking into the water to hide his belly, and later that day visited a corset shop where he’d seen a sign reading GENTLEMEN ACCOMMODATED. There he faced further humiliation, eliciting titters from female shoppers as he discussed his purchase with the owner, who answered his hushed questions at theatrical volume: “A corset?” “Weeeeel, pink or baby blue?” The artist wore his new corset out of the store and admired his svelte reflection in a shop window, but later, talking to a friend, he saw the man was looking down in astonishment at two pink silk laces that had slipped below the hem of his shirt. “Oh my gosh,” Rockwell exclaimed, clasping his stomach and running back to his hotel, where he peeled off the corset and threw it in the trash.
In Norman Rockwell: My Adventures as an Illustrator, Rockwell offers a rare look at the contest’s free-form early years. The judging was still informal; the women socialized with the judges over lunch as bystanders came and went. (At one point, the world heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Dempsey, on vacation in Atlantic City, strolled in and pulled up a chair.) The artist-judges, many known for their magazine illustrations of elegant women, were enlisted not just to impart their professional wisdom about female beauty, but also to confer class on the spectacle, framing it as a formal aesthetic exercise, just as Barnum had attempted with his 1854 contest. (His recruitment ad, written in expertly coded Barnumese, claimed it would inspire “a more popular taste for the fine arts, stimulate to extra exertion the genius of our Painters, and laudably gratify the public curiosity.”)
And so the judges were fed caviar, crepes, and sturgeon, plied with champagne, and assigned chauffeurs. The men, all well-known public figures, brought star power to the event: James Montgomery Flagg had created the Uncle Sam recruitment poster; Coles Phillips, a cover artist for Life magazine, was known for his sophisticated fade-away technique. They were given no guidelines for picking a winner. “Just judge it,” the Chamber of Commerce instructed, so they talked it out and agreed on someone who looked gorgeous in her evening dress. But when they saw her the next day in her bathing suit, they noticed she was knock-kneed.
One of the artists proposed assigning numerical values to facial features—eyes, noses, lips—and body parts—legs, shoulders, necks—then adding up the scores to select a winner. But the point system failed. “A girl might not have anything wrong with her features or figure and so receive a very high score,” wrote Rockwell. “But then she might not have anything right either. Individually her features were lovely, but put together they left one cold or bored. We found you can’t judge a woman’s beauty piecemeal; you have to take the whole woman at once.”
They ended up voting on impulse, choosing Mary Katherine Campbell, a hazel-eyed brunette with adorable dimples, barely sixteen years old, from Columbus, Ohio, who was hoisted on the shoulders of the mermaid court and paraded around the ballroom. The decision, said Rockwell, incited the jealous wrath of the other contestants’ disappointed mothers, including one who looked “like an enraged lizard,” according to one judge. Campbell, the daughter of a CPA, had studied French, played Bianca in a high school production of The Taming of the Shrew, enjoyed writing, drawing, tennis, golf, and fishing with her grandfather, and could cook a very fine dish of ham and cabbage. When she’d learned at school she’d been chosen as Miss Columbus because of her figure, she went home and asked, “Mother, what’s a figure?”
“That’s none of your business,” her mother snapped.
Unlike Gorman, Campbell had an athletic build and stood at a more commanding five feet six, weighing 125 pounds. Like Gorman, she wore her hair long and eschewed makeup. In one of her first interviews after winning, battling a cold and holding a thermometer, flanked by her mother and her doctor at the Waldorf Hotel, she announced, “I don’t use cosmetics.” She explained that she never had, because “I don’t need them.” It was a political statement. Wholesome girls didn’t. (The New Yorker magazine drolly reported on her subsequent appearance in a full-page ad for “a certain tonic” and quipped, “If Miss America comes to Atlantic City proclaiming that she never used cosmetics in her life and in future months subscribes her testimonial to a cosmetic ad, be lenient with her, girls. She has but a brief while to gather the berries.”)
Hair, too, was a political matter. When the judges noticed that the vast majority of Inter-City Beauties had “natural” (not bobbed) hair, they concluded that the contestants had been chosen with “loaded dice.” They certainly didn’t resemble the women dancing on the pier at the pageant ball—“piquant jazz babies, who shook the meanest kind of shoulders,” according to The Atlantic City Daily Press. A New York Times editorial agreed, lamenting that “bobbed hair disqualifies or handicaps its wearers. Our enthusiastic feminists . . . ought to have something to say about this obvious attempt to restore the double standard.”
Bobbed hair and makeup were two emblems of women’s new liberty, which the emerging hairdressing and cosmetics industries enabled. For women who danced, who swam, who played sports and rode bikes, who studied, who worked as nurses or cooks, who zipped around in automobiles with wind in their hair, bobbing was a practical choice. For women who wore the new streamlined fashions, with clean lines and drop waists, it made more aesthetic sense than billowing tresses. The celebrity soprano and actress Mary Garden, who bobbed her hair in 1921 at age forty-seven, called long hair “one of the many little shackles that women have cast aside in their passage to freedom.”
The contest’s bias toward tradition was not just a default embrace of the familiar; it was also key to the paradoxical essence of the exercise: exploiting women’s bodies while suppressing their sexual and physical power, a double standard best dramatized when a contestant was arrested on the beach for wearing the swimsuit she’d competed in the day before.
Campbell competed again the following year and won, beating more than seventy girls and women and becoming the only queen ever to be crowned twice. By 1924, the pageant was a national event, running for five frenetic days and drawing entrants from cities west of the Mississippi. Governors, mayors, and a senator attended. Even President Harding, a notorious womanizer, vacationing with his wife in Atlantic City, had formally greeted Gorman and—creepily—held her hand for a meaningful moment. But some Christian and women’s groups were already intent on axing it. The New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs condemned beauty pageants as “detrimental to the morality and modesty of our young women,” inviting seventy-five organizations in nearby states to do the same. “The girls are exposed to grave dangers from unscrupulous persons,” their statement read, “and the shocking costumes which such contests encourage certainly call for protests.”
Ratifying the view that the pageant filled contestants’ heads with “vicious ideas,” the eighty-four beauties who competed in 1924 were slicker in their self-presentation, especially the four New Yorkers, who, The New York Times said, “seemed to have been well primed for the long series of poses and parades” they appeared in that week. Miss St. Louis, a crowd-pleaser that year