The bottom line (original) (raw)

It was 50 years ago this week that Eric Morley came up with the idea for Miss World, as a one-off publicity stunt to promote the Festival of Britain. He died last November, aged 82, but his widow, Julia Morley, is still full of energy. 'I've been rushing around trying to get the company back on its feet again,' she says. 'We have developed a new concept for the show and we're discussing ways we can do something pretty positive towards the contestants' education, with scholarships.'

Now head of the Miss World organisation, Mrs Morley is planning 'a huge operation on the web'. She has just sold satellite television rights around the world with projected viewing figures of more than two billion and is devising an international lifestyle magazine. She airs the possibility of a 'global network that nobody else has got, except CNN. It's a lot of talking, I know,' she says, pausing for a moment. 'But I do know it's going to happen. It's just that I've... I've got the reins now and it's a funny feeling being able to go down the roads that I've always dreamt of.'

It may come as a surprise to hear that the woman who married Eric Morley in 1960, and who has been heavily involved with the Miss World contest since 1969, should have harboured such dreams to change it. For years, Julia Morley has been the 'mother hen' figure who protected the girls from the eagle eye of the press, who made sure they were being chaperoned, who, while her husband was announcing the results 'in reverse order', operated backstage with military precision. She is a former model, and a self-professed 'tough bitch'. And yet, despite having been number two in charge of a competition long accused of being a sexist 'cattle market', Julia Morley has always supported women behind the scenes. She coined the phrase 'beauty with a purpose'; she banned the revelation of the contestants' vital statistics; and when the tabloids splashed a reported affair over their front pages, she spoke up for women everywhere, saying: 'I figure that a woman, like a man, is entitled to have a private life and to be respected.'

Now Julia Morley tells me that although she had 'enormous respect' for her husband's wisdom, their aims did differ. 'It did seem very unnatural to me as a woman,' she says, 'that girls should turn, turn, turn on the stage, for a start. And I didn't feel comfortable with swimsuits on stage. Not because I thought there was anything wrong with them, but I thought that you don't generally feel comfortable if someone's interviewing you in a dinner jacket and you're in a swimsuit. I thought it was pretty awful to see women standing there with practically nothing on, with old Aspel saying, "what did you eat for breakfast?" - it was so stupid. But you can't change things overnight.' Now however, Julia Morley has stepped out from behind the clichéd façade of glitter and bikinis, and, for the first time ever, Miss World is in the hands of a woman.

Miss World was very much of its time when it was invented; very much the brainchild of one man, and coloured by his background. Eric Morley was born the year the First World War ended. His father died when he was a baby, and his mother and stepfather both died of TB when he was 11. The young orphan was sent by the London County Council to a Royal Naval training ship, and five years later he became a band boy in the Royal Fusiliers, playing the French horn. During the war he was a captain in the Army: he organised entertainments for the troops, and made money by chopping a bar of toffee into 40 squares and selling them individually. By the time he was demobilised Eric Morley was an entertainer, an entrepreneur, and a patriot through and through.

He joined the leisure organisation Mecca in 1946 as publicity sales manager, and in the next few years he was responsible for three of the most popular entertainments of the postwar period. Come Dancing, the BBC's longest running programme, was his idea; he introduced commercial bingo to the UK; and in 1951, when asked to come up with something to publicise the Festival of Britain, he suggested a pageant of 'international bathing beauties'. There were 23 girls in that first contest, which was to develop as its theme tune a sort of patriotic march. The prize money was £1,000, and the bikinis, in a pre-page 3 girl era, caused a storm. A year later, an American organisation started up Miss Universe, and Morley, seeing this as a kind of galactic one-upmanship, was not to be outdone. He vowed to continue Miss World so the Americans could never say they got there first.

Morley met Julia Pritchard, who had trained as a nurse and worked as a model, in one of Mecca's dance halls, and they married soon afterwards. By 1975 he was running 100 dance halls and 700 betting shops. A firm Thatcherite, Morley stood as Tory candidate for Dulwich twice in the Seventies and lost both times. When he died of a heart attack last year, 20 former Miss Worlds attended his funeral.

Although the contest is now often thought to be something of an anachronism, it is, when looked at over the years, the opposite. If anything, Miss World reflects the times rather than contradicting them. It started as a postwar entertainment, something to televise when that medium was new; it went on to offer a life of unimaginable glamour to girls who, in the Sixties, had few opportunities in the way of a career; in the Seventies it was attacked by the women's movement, and tarnished, or enlivened, by sexual scandal; in the Eighties it was thought to be bland and unpopular and was taken off terrestrial television; in the Nineties it found a new home in India, where the arguments of the Seventies feminists were reborn: a group of women threatened mass suicide, and one man burnt himself to death in protest; in 2000, two weeks after its creator died, the contest was hosted by Jerry Springer in the Millennium Dome, making it, by association, a symbol of chaos and doom.

The women who have won Miss World did so because they were thought to reflect a certain type of womanhood, in a certain era. But their lives did not stop there; they've become other kinds of women too, with new perspectives. Their memories, and those of other women involved, offer a perhaps unique view of the changes wrought over the last half century.

Denise Perrier, who is now 66 and lives in Nice, was the third Miss World. She won the contest in 1953, when she was 18, and had just come out of boarding school. 'I spent a very pleasant week with the other Misses,' she remembers, 'but there were very few of us then - you know, the "world" was much smaller! No one from African or Asian countries was represented.'

Perrier thought she wanted to be an archaeologist before she fell into the beauty pageant circuit on holiday in Eastbourne. But once she had won Miss World, she was launched into a career as a model. 'I was in Diamonds Are Forever,' she says, adding as a self-dismissive parenthesis: 'Sean Connery strangles me at the beginning'.

She went on to organise fashion shows in the South of France, stopping briefly to sell her own paintings to King Farouk and the Aga Khan, and, in the Eighties, she also worked for the local council in Nice, arranging art exhibitions and exchanges between museums. Perrier retired last year. 'I had a career,' she reflects, 'and on some level, I regret not doing more for my son. I don't know. People more intelligent than me have written about this, but women's lives have changed totally since then. When I was at school, the children whose mothers worked were seen as supernatural beings. It was unimaginable. I don't want to sound like I'm behind the times but I can only conclude that our home lives were more relaxed then.'

Ann Sidney won Miss World 37 years ago. 'Isn't that scary?' she asks me, 'I mean, how we've changed, thank goodness.' For her, the Miss World contest was a ticket out of Poole in Dorset and away from her parents' expectations. She now lives in Los Angeles, and has spent the intervening years as an actress, a dancer and a singer. 'It sounds daft to make an analogy with boxing, about people getting out of their environment or escaping what their destiny was,' Sidney says, 'but to a certain degree, Miss World was something that enabled me financially to go and do something else, instead of saying that my destiny was to not get any further education, to marry, to have children, and stay within the same society that was expected of me. I'm not blaming my parents - it's just how we were then. Now we have many more choices.'

She was born in 1944, towards the end of the war. Her father was ill for a long time afterwards, and she remembers her mother having rationing. 'I had a good upbringing, but it was a very simple upbringing,' Sidney recalls. 'Very working class - my mother was a waitress, and my father worked for a wholesale meat company. So for me, at 19, to win the Miss World was a phenomenal experience, and a big, big change'. She didn't think for a moment that she'd win, and was due to start work as a hairdresser in John Lewis the week after.

'I would love to have got a further education at that point,' Sidney says, 'but I feel that in lots of ways the Miss World was a tremendous education for me. I was extremely naive, in fact I think I'd only been to the Isle of Wight. When I won the Miss World contest, I found myself on the Bob Hope show, flying to Vietnam. My first trip was to LA, and I was picked up in the limousine that the Beatles had used - there were kids still screaming and chasing the limousine. And it wasn't just showbusiness: in Vietnam we would see 18 year-old men with their legs blown off. You saw what war could do to people.'

Though Miss World became her education, Ann Sidney says she wouldn't do it if she were 19 now: 'We've changed - women have changed, everything's changed. And change is good.'

In 1965 Sidney handed over her crown to Lesley Langley, a perfect peroxide blonde, with hair that flicked up at the ends. 'You get used to people looking at you,' Langley remembers now, 'It was part of my life then, because I was a model anyway. I was in it for the money, I guess. It was another job to me. I loved it. But I like my life now, too.'

Langley now works part-time as a receptionist in a private dental surgery in Weymouth. During her year as Miss World she met Alan Haven, a jazz musician who became her husband. She learnt latin percussion, and toured with him, so the end of her tenure wasn't a shock. Many others found that being a beauty queen qualified them for very little, and that their year of first-class travel was suddenly up. After a while, Langley says, 'if you're relying on your looks, it was too much for me, I didn't want to know any more'. The couple had a daughter, Chloe. They split up when Chloe was eight, and Langley moved back to Weymouth, so she could be near her elderly parents and bring Chloe up on her own.

Now Chloe has finished university and had gone travelling. 'I loved it when she was at university,' Langley says, 'I'd go and visit, and we'd all go out. When I went to take Chloe up to Worcester the first time, I thought, oh I could have liked this, university life. I should have carried on and gone to university really.'

She remembers that in those days 'there just weren't as many options. And maybe we relied on our looks more. But now there are the supermodels - there have always been glamorous women cashing in on their looks. I suppose if you've got it, you've got to use it a bit in this world today - and people do, everybody does.'

'After my time, the women's lib people took it all so seriously,' Langley tells me. 'I used to go on various chat shows and debate the point, but really it comes down to just frivolous entertainment. Nobody makes the girls do it. To me, these contests are just entertainment.'

In 1970, history was made at the Royal Albert Hall. While Bob Hope was busy making sexist jokes on stage ('it's been quite a cattle market - I've been out there checking calves') a group of Women's Liberation demonstrators prepared for action. A football rattle resounded through the hall, loud and untraceable. Hope, now halfway through a sentence, looked up from his mike, suddenly startled. On the live telecast of the event, you can see him in close-up, his mouth half-open, pausing and scanning the auditorium for the culprit. At that moment, from behind him comes a bursting balloon of flour. He turns around, like a rabbit in headlights, and runs for the wings.

There were stink bombs and tomatoes thrown too, though they are invisible in the grainy images of the archives. In fact, the physical sabotage looks rather low-scale, but as a piece of activism it was a triumph. Hope returned to the stage, flustered and stricken, and gave an impromptu speech in impeccably bad taste, about dope and Vietnam; he was condemned more by his own words than by any flour bomb.

Sally Alexander, now a historian at Goldmith's College London, was one of the demonstrators. She was arrested that night; later she was tried for assault and found not guilty. 'Our targets were the people who ran Miss World,' Alexander explains, 'and Bob Hope, because he'd been to Vietnam, and we wanted the media to be aware of the Women's Liberation Movement. The object of our anger and our frustration was, as we saw it, a system that left women with no other economic opportunities, except cleaning, or low-paid jobs at the very bottom of the wage hierarchy. So we decided to make a spectacle out of the event.'

But, contrary to what might be supposed, they were not against the girls participating in Miss World. 'The demonstration was not against the contestants at all,' says Alexander, 'that's an important point. For the young women who wanted to enter a Miss World contest, it was a way out, it was exciting, it was fun - that was their choice. It was Mecca's activities we were opposed to. As we were arrested and dragged out, we bumped into the contestants, most of whom were very nice to us, and said, "let them alone, they're only having their say" - that kind of stuff.'

More than 30 years after the event, Julia Morley, who had been standing backstage on that occasion, gripping Bob Hope's ankle so he wouldn't run away, tells me that no one has ever asked her opinion about it before. 'I had a lot of sympathy for women's lib,' she says now. 'The only thing that I found very difficult was that they didn't actually come to see me or talk to me. At the time, I was actually very much involved, and trying really hard to change things, but it takes time.'

The 1970 demonstration did not have an immediate effect on Miss World, in the sense that the contest continues to this day. But the spectacle was symbolic of less visible work done for women's lives behind the scenes. And over time, the effects of that work have reverberated even on Miss World. Whether or not the contest is politically correct is not the crucial issue now: what is important is that it is not needed the way it was, that women have other options, and that wearing a bikini for a man's inspection is no longer seen as the road to freedom.

Last year, two weeks after the fiftieth Miss World was crowned, Rosemarie Frankland, Miss World 1961 and the first Miss UK to win the title, committed suicide. She had told a newspaper not long beforehand that 'beauty queens are dressed up and paraded down the catwalk just so some fellow can get a quick thrill. They should shove it in the archives and forget about it.'

Instead, Julia Morley is trying to resurrect it. The Miss World Organisation suggested that I speak to Diana Hayden, Miss World 1997. Hayden is one of the four Miss Indias who have won Miss World in the past seven years. She clearly represents the new model, since, as she tells me, 'they've been up on stage saying I'm the best Miss World they've ever had'. Hayden still does a lot of work for charity, and is now an international spokesperson for L'Oréal. She is having her hair done at the Dorchester hotel when we speak.

I ask Hayden what she thinks of the demonstrations that took place in her home country the year before she won. 'They threatened to burn themselves,' she says, 'and nothing came of it, because they were just threats.' One man did burn himself to death, I tell her. 'Did he really?' Hayden asks. 'What a silly man! All they had to do was ask the girls, do you want to be here or not? You get treated like royalty, you travel first class, you live in presidential suites, you have bodyguards and chaperones, the prize money is $100,000 - hello! Who's complaining?'

Hayden thinks Miss World has changed, and that the best policy is honesty. 'You don't bullshit them and tell them you want to save the world and heal the ozone layer and, you know, be Mother Teresa. I can't give up everything, I love life too much... Sorry...' she trails off, 'I sound awful.'

Julia Morley's global expansion has hit one stumbling block so far: Donald Trump. Trump owns Miss Universe, and every time she tries to get into the US market, she says, 'Trump won't let me through the door. He's offered to buy me out, but he won't let me in. I've got to take his Miss America and their principles are different. I don't want a swimsuit walking around on stage - that's out and that's old.'

Morley comes back to this subject later. 'I don't think I need to sell,' she tells me, unprompted. 'I don't want to hand it over, I know what I'm doing, I just need a little bit of time to put it all in place.' And then, mixing formidable determination with a tinge of uncertainty, she asks, 'There's nothing wrong with a woman running it, is there?'

Additional research by Kim Bunce

Ann Sidney, Miss World 1964, UK

'I never ever expected to have to live with the Miss World title for the rest of my life. Not that I'm complaining, but you have the feeling that when you're 84 years old with a walking stick someone will come up and say, "Oh, you know, she was Miss World in 1964." Once, when I was acting in a rep theatre in Manchester, I had my teeth blacked out and warts on to play the third witch in Macbeth.

While I was onstage, I heard a kid in the audience say, "Which witch is Miss World?"'

Lesley Langley, Miss World 1965, UK

'Eric Morley and I did not get on at all. He didn't like the fact that I already had an agent. Mecca wanted to represent you because they took something like 25 per cent of the fee, whereas my agent was taking 10. Morley didn't want me to win - and he was on the panel of judges, it was very unfair - but they outvoted him. There were three Miss UKs in five years, but there's no way it was fixed, because if anything he would have tried to fix it for me not to win. After me, they made the girls sign a contract upfront, saying that they would be represented by Mecca solely.'

Diana Hayden, Miss World 1997, India

'Miss World has changed. It's more of a complete woman they're looking for. And you can tell that, especially in the pre-judging, because the contestants spend about three minutes with each judge. They interview you and get to know how you speak, how you carry yourself, if you have anything upstairs, and how you look, of course. They really get to know your personality. You don't bullshit them any more and tell them you want to save the world and heal the ozone layer and be Mother Teresa. You can't give up everything. I love life too much.'

Miss World League Table

Joint First (five times) India and Great Britain India 1966, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2000; Britain 1961, 1964, 1965, 1974, 1983

Second (four times) Venezuela 1955, 1981, 1991, 1995

Third (three times) Jamaica 1963, 1976, 1993

Joint Fourth (twice) Sweden 1952, 1977; Germany 1956, 1980; South Africa 1958, 1974; Netherlands 1959, 1962; Argentina 1960, 1978; Australia 1968, 1972; Austria 1969, 1987; United States 1973, 1990; Dominican Republic 1982, 1984; Iceland 1985, 1988

Joint Fifth (one-time winners) France 1953; Egypt 1954; Finland 1957; Peru 1967; Grenada 1970; Brazil 1971; Puerto Rico 1975; Bermuda 1979; Trinidad & Tobago 1986; Poland 1989; Russia 1992; Greece 1996; Israel 1998

Fifty years of Miss World

1951 Eric Morley launches Miss World in London, where it is staged for the next 38 years.

1959 The contest is first televised on the BBC.

1961 Rosemarie Frankland becomes the first British Miss World. (She was found dead in LA last year from a drugs overdose).

1970 Bob Hope hosts the event at the Royal Albert Hall in London and is flour-bombed.

1973 Marjorie Wallace (Miss USA) is sacked for dating too many high-profile men, including the footballer George Best and singer Tom Jones.

1974 Helen Morgan, Miss UK and an unmarried mother, resigns. The Morleys introduce a 'no children' clause to the regulations.

1977 The UN calls for a boycott if South Africa takes part. South Africa pulls out the next year.

1978 Winner Silvana Suarez of Argentina gains so much weight that organisers ban her from wearing a swimsuit to hand over her crown.

1979 The BBC loses Miss World to ITV.

1988 ITV drops the contest, citing sexism.

1996 The contest is held in India for the first time amid protests by religious fundamentalists. Ninety-six percent of people in India with televisions watch the contest: 300 million people.

1999 Channel 5 signs a two-year deal to screen Miss World.

2000 The contest takes place at the Millennium Dome, hosted by Jerry Springer.

Eric Morley dies in November aged 82.