What’s Behind Donald Trump’s Obsession with Beauty Pageants?
Donald Trump with Miss Universe 2013, Gabriela Isler of Venezuela after the crowning awards ceremony.
By Prokofyev Vyacheslav/Corbis.
Though he sold Miss Universe last year, the presidential candidate has always had an interesting relationship with the pageant world, as Judy Bachrach recalls.
At one time or another, Donald Trump, the presidential candidate and newly minted anti-sexism warrior, has owned or co-owned three beauty pageants: Miss U.S.A., Miss Teen U.S.A., and Miss Universe. (All three of which fall under the Miss Universe Organization parent company.) In addition, Trump, in 2002, also had his sights set on the Miss World competition around the time that I was writing a story for Vanity Fairabout the decision to hold that year’s competition in Nigeria—a nation with a large Muslim population—during the holy month of Ramadan. (Riots ensued, leaving 250 dead.) Trump’s reported intention was to wrest control of the beleaguered Miss World pageant—a rival to his Miss Universe—at a bargain price.
“Every time I try to put my head up there in the U.S., Trump used to try and blow it off,” Julia Morley, the owner of the Miss World Organization told me 13 years ago. “He actually took action against me for having a Miss World U.S.A.”
When I phoned Trump for his response back then, he blithely refrained from denying Morley’s allegations. Quite the opposite. He fairly crowed about his hopes of acquiring the competition: “Yeah, I’d buy it for almost nothing. . . . If I had it, it would be valuable—or maybe I’d close it.”
Alicia Machado, right, greeting Trump at the photocall for her daily fitness workout at a health center in New York, 1997.
By Jon Levy/AFP/Getty Images.
You’re aware, I asked him at the time, that Morley is trying to make swimsuits more modest in her own beauty contest? Trump chuckled on the other end of the line: “Honestly, when I bought [Miss Universe], the bathing suits got smaller and the heels got higher and the ratings went up.”
But not without strenuous effort on Trump’s part. Beauty-contest entrants, as the entrepreneur quickly discovered, need about as much care and grooming as a candidate’s hair. Here’s his take (as he explains in his book Trump: The Art of the Comeback) on his Year One—1997—as Miss Universe owner, at a time when the contest was held in Miami Beach, and Miss Venezuela was the reigning queen. Naturally, Trump begins by recalling the event as “a huge success . . . a mob scene.” And just as naturally, he attributes little of this acclaim to the beauty or talent of the participants. To the contrary: “I could just see Alicia Machado, the current Miss Universe, sitting there plumply [sic]. God, what problems I had with this woman.
“First, she wins. Second, she gains 50 pounds. Third, I urge the committee not to fire her. Fourth, I go to the gym with her, in a show of support. Final act: She trashes me in The Washington Post. . . . What’s wrong with this picture?”
Apparently a lot, according to Machado. She had been, she told thePost’s Lydia Martin, “anorexic and bulimic, but almost all of us are . . . it was an obsession for me to not gain weight [while preparing for the contest]. . . . And whatever I ate, I threw up.” She weighed 116 pounds on her night of triumph. Afterward, she recalled, she turned to Trump and, as she put it, “asked him to please send me to a trainer or a nutritionist or something because I needed some orientation.”
Instead, she recalled, “He sends me to a gym in New York,” which she really didn’t consider a show of support, because, as she pointed out, greeting her at that gym were “80 reporters” all waiting “to watch me sweat. I thought that was in very bad taste.”
But Trump was adamant. “When you win a beauty pageant,” he toldPeople magazine, “people don’t think you’re going to go from 118 to 160 in less than year.” He wasn’t discussing speed limits.
While a wide range of Trump’s interests have been on display this primary cycle (terrorism, military spending, immigration reform) we’ve heard less about another particular fascination: women and weight. As far back as the mid-1970s, when Louise Sunshine, a onetime political fund-raiser, joined Trump’s real-estate business, she was—as she told The Washington Post last November—struggling to keep herself trim. It was a battle, she noted, that her boss kept under close observation as well. Inside an office drawer, Trump, according to Sunshine, kept an unflattering photo of her—“a fat picture” she called it—and he supposedly pulled out the photo on occasions he disapproved of something she did. Trump denies her recollection of events, calling it “totally false and ridiculous.” In any case, Sunshine is philosophical about her former boss. “He just is that way,” she said.
Mid-rehearsal at the Imperial Ballroom in the Bahamas for Miss Universe in 2009.
By Patrick Prather/A.P. Images.
But it isn’t only the extra pounds that absorb Trump. He can’t seem to let go of Miss Universe, even though—in a financial sense—he actually has. On December 20, a few months after Trump sold his stake in the pageant to the agency WME/IMG, a contestant named Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach, of the Philippines, won the Miss Universe title. Although not without a struggle. Seconds before her name was finally called, poor Miss Colombia had been mistakenly declared the victor—at which point the crown was removed, and Trump tweeted: “Very sad what happened . . . I sold it 6 months ago for a record price. This would never have happened!”
It would be interesting to discover what that “record price” was, as by the time of the September sale both NBCUniversal and Univision had decided to dump the Miss U.S.A. contest—following Trump’s observation three months before that many Mexican immigrants were criminals and “rapists.” It was a remark that would also cast a decided pall on the Miss U.S.A. contest, which occurred just a month later. AsVariety reported: “The value of the Miss Universe organization was undoubtedly diminished by the upheaval surrounding this year’s Miss U.S.A. pageant.”
To make matters worse, Trump soon found himself under-appreciated by three of the very women who had once been lucky enough to win Miss Universe titles. Lupita Jones, a former Miss Universe from Mexico, announced that her country wouldn’t be participating in the 2015 pageant. Former Miss Universe Zuleyka Rivera, of Puerto Rico, dropped out of the panel of judges for Miss U.S.A. And Colombia’s Paulina Vega, the 2014 Miss Universe, declared his remarks “unjust and hurtful.” Trump’s response, in part: Vega was a “hypocrite” because she didn’t give up her crown.
On the other hand, as Trump once told Esquire, it doesn’t really matter what anyone writes about him “as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
He just is that way.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/01/donald-trump-miss-universe-beauty-pageants?mbid=social_facebook#17
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