The Miss America pageant was founded in 1921, initially as a bathing suit contest. Later on, it became a beauty, talent and poise pageant whose contestants sought to bring about world peace, which is how we know it today. The competing and winning criteria have, however, changed a bit every few years. No one remembers most of the Miss America winners, but there some who are unforgettable, including Bess Myerson.
It took close to 25 years for a Jewish girl to win the coveted title. Bess Myerson, who was crowned in 1945, was the first Jewish Miss America, and the only one to date. She was 21 years old at the time, and the crown was placed on her head at an impressive ceremony held in the gambling capital of America’s East Coast, Atlantic City, New Jersey. The date was September 8, 1945 – a short time after the end of World War II – during a period that the United States still suffered from a serious virus of antisemitism. This is Myerson’s unbelievable story. She started out with great promise that was followed by huge success, but her standing as a public figure culminated in a sleazy scandal.
Myerson was born in 1924, the middle daughter of a poor family of Jewish immigrants from Russia, who lived in the Sholem Aleichem public housing project in the Bronx in New York. Many of the Jews who had fled the persecutions in Europe were disappointed to find antisemitism in their new country as well. And Myerson also felt the force of it. The organizers of the Miss America pageant received threats from anti-Semitic groups and were warned not to choose a Jewish contestant. The pageant director even tried to persuade Myerson to change her name so it wouldn’t sound so Jewish, but she refused.
Despite being Jewish, she was in the end crowned Miss America. And she truly stood out more than all the other contestants. She was beautiful, smart, talented (a classical pianist), statuesque and impressive. She won first place in the swimsuit category (a category that was cancelled in recent years) and also in the talent category, in which she played a piano concerto by Grieg and Gershwin’s “Summertime” on the flute. In her personal interview, she also impressed the judges with her high intelligence. Myerson, who was a graduate of Hunter College in New York, was the only college graduate among the 42 contestants in that year’s pageant.
As described in the documentary film about her made by David Arond – The One and Only Jewish Miss America – which was released in 2020, as a young girl Bess thought that she was ugly and too tall (she reached her final height of 1.78 meters – 5 foot 10 – by the age of 12). But her older sister and a photographer she modelled for when in college signed her up for the pageant without her knowledge.
Her victory in the pageant was a symbolic moment for American Jews. In her biography of Myerson that was published in 1987, Susan Dworkin wrote that “in the Jewish community, she was the most famous pretty girl since Queen Esther.” But the moment of her coronation did not have the happy end they hoped for. It was only the beginning of Myerson’s struggle. Some of the large commercial sponsors of the pageant pulled out as soon as they learned that a Jewish girl had won, fearing that they would be identified as supporters of Jews. Consequently, Myerson never received all of the promised prizes: a new Ford and $5,000. It appears, however, that she did receive part of the cash prize. With that money, she registered for a master’s degree program, but never got her degree (on one occasion, she said that she wanted the money in order to get a master’s degree in Music from The Juilliard School; on another occasion, she said that she wanted it in order to buy a Steinway piano).
It was customary that every winner of the Miss America pageant would spend a year traveling around the United States to promote an issue close to her heart. Myerson’s tour ended very quickly when she learned that quite a few hotels and convention centers barred her from entering. It was a time when many places in the United States still had signs hanging which said that “dogs, ‘niggers’ and Jews” were not allowed to come in.
But Myerson did not give up – on the contrary. Instead of the planned tour, she did an alternative tour sponsored by Bnai Brith’s Anti-Defamation League, whose aim was to combat antisemitism. She ended up going to 15 cities across the United States in her fight against antisemitism and racism. She spoke out against hate and racism at high schools and explained that beauty and hate don’t go together. Her slogan was” You Can’ Be Beautiful and Hate.” She appeared at fundraisers for Israel, and in 1965 won the Anti-Defamation League’s Woman of the Year Award. That same year, she was also appointed chair of the Israel Bonds in New York, a position that she filled for seven years.
“Bess Myerson symbolizes the spirit of standing up to prejudice of all kinds, David Arond said in an interview ahead of the premiere screening of his film at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. “Her tour of tolerance led to her work in media, politics and social justice.”
Myerson planned to become a concert pianist, but stopped performing quite quickly. Instead, she pursued a career in television. She was a television celebrity in the 1950’s and 1960’s, during which she had regular spots on a number of game shows. She channeled her popularity and fame to social action, after which she went into politics, in which she engaged in the 1970’s and 1980’s. For many years, Myerson was regarded as the most famous woman to emerge from the Miss America pageant, and that was the case until Vanessa Williams (the first black Miss America) and a few other beauty queens crowned in recent years surpassed her.
Among other things, she filled senior positions at City Hall in New York, initially under Mayor John Lindsay, and after that under the Jewish mayor, Ed Koch, whom she was very close to. They held hands and hugged at public events in order to dispel the rumors that he was gay, which would have ended his political career (only recently did the New York Times confirm that Koch was in fact a closet homosexual).
In 1969, Myerson was appointed commissioner of New York’s Department of Consumer Affairs, and in the 1980’s she was the commissioner of the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs. She also worked as a consumer affairs consultant and served on a number of presidential commissions dealing with a variety of issues. She became a leading advocate of consumer rights, voicing her opinions in newspaper columns and on TV shows. Myerson was a trailblazer in passing consumer protection laws, and also fought for legislation that would have mandated expiration dates and other data on food products.
But her political career ended in 1987 due to a high-profile corruption case. At the end of that decade, she unsuccessfully ran for the Senate and finished the campaign with huge debts. After that, her situation began to go downhill. She was divorced twice and had one daughter – the actress and screenwriter, Barra Grant. She took up with a wealthy and married sewer contractor named Carl Andrew “Andy” Capasso, who was more than 20 years her junior. Andy apparently had ties with the Mafia, and in 1987 – while the two were having an affair – he was convicted of tax evasion and was sentenced to four years in prison.
However, the story got really ugly after Capasso’s wife found out about the affair and filed for divorce. According to reports, the judge ordered Andy to pay his jilted wife weekly alimony payments amounting to $1,500. To help her lover, Myerson gave the judge’s daughter, who allegedly suffered from emotional problems, a job as her personal assistant at New York’s Department of Cultural Affairs. It didn’t take long for the judge to reduce Capasso’s alimony payments to $500 a week.
Myerson, Capasso and the judge were indicted for bribery, fraud and conspiracy. In the end, all three were acquitted because, among other things, the judge’s daughter, who testified against her mother, turned out to be an unreliable witness. But it was already too late for Myerson. Her reputation was tarnished and the affair – called The Bess Mess by the tabloids – was widely covered in the media. And a People magazine cover headline read: “The shocking story of how her love for a criminal led our most famous beauty queen to disgrace.” Following the affair, other stains on Myerson’s record began to emerge (like, for example, that she was arrested for stealing $44 worth of cosmetics from a store when traveling to visit Capasso in prison). Bess Myerson was finished.
As a result of the scandal, Myerson was forced to resign from her position at City Hall in New York. Her political career came to an end at the age of 63. She lived for nearly 30 more years, very far from the limelight, and died in 2014 at the age of 90. She will always be remembered as the pride of American Jewry in a dark period, when antisemitism was widespread and deeply ingrained in institutions in the United States. Against that backdrop, Myerson became a symbol of the Jews’ acceptance into American society.
