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By Root 801 0

day, girls and their mothers lined up around the block. Some wanted to be models; others hoped to learn etiquette and manners. I also taught elocution by recording students’ speaking voices and playing them back. When I listened to my own voice for the first time, I was horrified. All I could hear was a nasal Missour-a drawl, which made me say things like “Kaaan-sas Ciddy” and “shugg-ah.” Clearly, I had work to do, so for months afterward I stayed late in my office reading Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees” aloud until I had buffed my accent into one that sounded acceptable. “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.…”

Business flourished, and I soon had ten teenagers in each class, plus some older models who asked me to find them work. I did, and even sent some to Las Vegas for the chorus line. The majority of my pupils seemed to hang on my every word. I wasn’t that much older than they were, and they related to my youthfulness. I think it helped that I dressed and looked the part. I had my hair in a “poodle cut” like Kim Novak’s and always wore the latest styles from my mother’s store.

When Bob wasn’t trying to hit on my students, he continued running the bar, singing, and gambling. If ever he had a pocket full of money, he certainly didn’t give me a dime, and I learned to stash what I earned. One time he slammed into our bedroom in the middle of the night sporting a black eye and demanding the money I’d saved for our baby. He claimed men would kill him if he didn’t pay them what he owed. Sobbing as I handed him the six hundred dollars I’d taped to the underside of a drawer, I felt our baby kicking inside and knew that my marriage was doomed.

On October 10, 1950, after a two-day labor that Bob walked out of because he couldn’t bear my screams, I gave birth to an eight-and-a-half-pound baby boy. We named him Robert Blake Oliver—forever and always my beloved Bobby.

I was very happy with the baby but not with his father, who flew back to New York to pursue a singing career soon afterward. It was a separation, although neither of us used that word. Marge doted on her first grandson to her dying day and was a great help looking after him, but she couldn’t do anything about her errant son. Resigning myself to life as a single parent, I realized that it was up to me to make enough to raise my child. Mother gave up her job to help me, and my sister, Pat, joined me at the school. As soon as one class graduated, another would be ready to start, and we had two classes running at any time.

Then Oscar Meinhardt of Catalina swimwear contacted me. He was setting up a rival to the Miss America pageant called Miss Universe, with entrants from around the world. The first contest would be in Long Beach the following year, and Oscar asked me to be its official beauty consultant. I leapt at the chance. It was hard work but so glamorous and exciting. I loved cajoling dress shops into lending the girls evening gowns, coaxing hairdressers into offering their services in return for a credit, or persuading local citizens to take in nervous young women who barely spoke English. When the contestants embraced the makeup tips I gave them, I came up with the idea of my own cosmetics line. I persuaded Buffums’ department store to stock the new Barbara Blakeley Cosmetics and promoted them via the pageant.

Bob came back broke from New York and we talked about divorce, but I was too preoccupied to pursue it, so we muddled along as before. The first Miss Universe Pageant was held on June 28, 1952, at the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium in front of twenty thousand people. I had a dressmaker copy a gown worn by Lana Turner in A Life of Her Own, a favorite movie of mine about an aspiring model who leaves her small Midwest town to seek her fortune in New York. In that dress, I truly felt like a film star. The actress Piper Laurie, who’d just starred in a movie with Rock Hudson, crowned our winner—a teenager from Finland. Bob had somehow talked his way into becoming an executive to the pageant and an assistant to Oscar Meinhardt. It was, I soon