“I hope so. I emailed it to my editor yesterday. He hasn’t gotten back to me yet. Wish me luck.”
“I do, not that you need it. You’re a talented writer, kiddo. That last Invincible Grrrl post you put up on Tumblr was brilliant.”
“Brilliant, huh? And it’s not like you’re subjective, right? Too bad blogging doesn’t pay the bills.”
“Well, like I told you before, you never can tell when one thing’s going to lead to another. But anyway, send me your Miss Rheingold article. I’d love to read it.”
“Thanks, Daddy.”
“You bet. By the way, did you ever get ahold of Shirley Shishmanian?”
“Oh yeah, I meant to tell you! Aunt Simone is still friends with her sister, so she got me Shirley’s number. Did you know she sells real estate out in California? Or that she’s on her fourth husband?”
“I did not. Wow.”
“She was fun to talk to, and I got some awesome quotes. She told me she dated that creepy lawyer Roy Cohn when she was in the contest.”
“Joe McCarthy’s and J. Edgar Hoover’s buddy? Really?”
“Uh-huh. I had never heard of him, but then I looked him up. What a motherfucking hypocrite he was, huh?”
I wince once more at my little girl using that kind of language—her New Yorkese, as she puts it—but concur that Cohn was indeed a motherfucker.
“Anyway, thanks for the lead.”
“You’re welcome. Oh, wait. Forgot you were still in the millennial demographic. What I meant to say was, ‘No worries.’”
“Oh, Daddy. You’re starting to sound like an old fuddy-duddy. So what are you up to today? You must be going down to the Garde, right?”
I flinch at the question. It’s been a week now, and I haven’t told anyone about what happened there. Or didn’t happen. But probably did. Maybe. “The Garde? Why are you asking about that?”
“Because it’s Monday. Isn’t Monday the day your movie club meets?”
“Uh, yeah. Yes it is.”
“And you go down earlier in the day to set things up. Right?”
“Why are you asking about . . . ?” Recover, damnit. Don’t sound so defensive. “No, that’s right. I do. In fact, I was just getting ready to leave.”
“Daddy? Is something wrong?”
“No, no. Not at all.” Don’t put this ghost stuff on her. She’ll start worrying about you, calling her mother or her aunts to see if you’re okay. “Uh-oh. Someone’s at the door, Aliza. Guess I’d better go.”
“Okay. Love you, Daddy.”
“Love you more.”
“Hey, Daddy?”
“What?”
“No, never mind.”
“Aliza, I’m fine.”
“It’s not about that. I may have some news, but I’m not sure yet.”
“Some news about what?” She’s not pregnant, is she?
“Nothing. It can wait.”
“Then just tell me. Is it good news or bad news?”
“Go answer the door, Daddy. It can wait. I’ll send you my article. But be honest about it, okay? Don’t tell me how brilliant it is if it sucks.”
“Deal. But I already know it doesn’t suck. See you.”
“See you. Have fun at the Garde.”
“Yup.” Click. Again she mentions it? But no, last time I said something about ghost sightings down there, she pooh-pooh’d it. And what’s her news? What’s that about? Should I call Kat? Maybe she knows something.
I’m about to head off to the theater when my laptop pings that I’ve gotten a new email. It’s from Aliza, subject line “Read It and Weep.” Her article’s in an attachment. I put down my car keys and open it. The Garde can wait. And the ghosts, too, if there are any. Or if there ever were . . .
MISS RHEINGOLD REDUX
How a Jewish Beer Maker’s “Shiksa Fantasy” Became a Marketing Bonanza
by Aliza Funicello
My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer
Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer
It’s not bitter, not sweet, it’s the extra dry treat
Why not try extra dry Rheingold beer?
For millions of East Coast baby boomers, the Rheingold beer jingle is one of those “ear worms” that will forever circulate in their collective memory. And chances are, if you recall that little ditty, you may also remember voting for your favorite among the six “Rheingold girls” in what was touted as “America’s second-largest election.” The Miss Rheingold contest—a perfect storm of democracy, consumerism, and demure sex appeal—became one of the most successful marketing campaigns of the twentieth century. That catchy jingle helped, of course, but it was the public’s yearly exhortation to choose the new Miss Rheingold that shot the “extra dry” beer to the top of the sales charts in the Northeast, a position it held through the reigns of twenty-five Miss Rheingolds.
The Rheingold story reaches back to nineteenth-century Germany. Samuel Liebmann was a successful Braumeister whose inn was a popular watering hole for the royal soldiers of the Kingdom of Württemberg until he fell into political disfavor for espousing personal freedoms over subservience to the monarchy. When an irate King Wilhelm forbade his soldiers to drink Liebmann’s beer or frequent his tavern, business dropped off dramatically. But rather than censor himself, the brewmaster cast his eyes westward. With his wife and six children, Sam Liebmann emigrated to the U.S. in 1854.
The family settled in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn and Liebmann and his sons opened a brewery plant at the corner of Forest and Bremen Streets. Progressive, civic-minded leadership, and an embrace of such industry innovations as artificial refrigeration and packaging in “modern cans,” kept the company in the black through the early years of the twentieth century. Then the U.S. entered World War I against Germany. As anti-German backlash spread across the United States, S. Liebmann’s Sons experienced a sizable drop in market share. Nor did the business recover when, shortly after the armistice, Prohibition became the law of the land. At a reduced rate of production, the plant survived by manufacturing lemonade and “near beer.”
Following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the brewery rebounded and expanded, adding plants in the Bronx and Orange, New Jersey. Ironically, Hitler’s rise to power further fueled the company’s success. The Third Reich had begun to harass German-Jewish businessmen, among them Dr. Hermann Schülein, the brilliant manager of Germany’s world-famous Löwenbräu brewing plant. When the Nazi persecutions turned deadly, Schülein escaped to the U.S. and Löwenbräu’s loss became Liebmann’s gain. Named the plant’s general manager, Dr. Schülein proved a valuable steward. Together with Philip Liebmann, founder Samuel’s great-grandson, he developed a dry, golden-colored lager they branded as “Brooklyn’s Rheingold.” Originally, Rheingold had been conceived as a special brew to commemorate a Metropolitan Opera Company’s production of Das Rheingold by German composer Richard Wagner, an avowed anti-Semite. Rheingold proved so popular with the public, however, that it became the company’s leading brand.
Rheingold was marketed as a down-to-earth working-class beer. From the start, sales were healthy, but it wasn’t until Miss Rheingold that they became phenomenal. Using photographs of pretty women to sell products had not been an advertising industry standard until the mid-1920s, when it came about as the result of a labor strike by commercial artists. It’s hard to believe, but prior to this, advertisers had relied on illustrators to draw the imagery that promoted their clients’ wares. But a desperate mail-order company preparing a spring catalog needed pictures pronto. And so, comely chorus girls were borrowed from Broadway and photographed. Their halftone images replaced the hand-drawn illustrations that had been the norm and sales improved significantly. As a result, a new Manhattan-based industry—professional modeling—was born.
Barcelona-born Eugenia “Jinx” Falkenburg, arguably America’s original “supermodel,” was the first Miss Rheingold—and she was selected, not elected, via a bit of chicanery. Philip Liebmann, an aficionado of pretty
ladies (he later married Hollywood glamour queen Linda Darnell), asked Paul Hesse, Hollywood’s persnickety “photographer for the stars,” to show him a number of models’ photos. From these, he would choose the Rheingold Girl of 1940. Intent on ensuring that the photogenic Falkenberg would be selected, Hesse tricked Liebmann by presenting only pictures of his model of choice in different costumes and wigs. No surprise, then, that Liebmann picked Falkenburg to be the star of print ads and store displays in which she declared that her beer was Rheingold, the dry beer.
The decision to tie the brew to the face of a beautiful spokeswoman was strategic. Rheingold had already captured blue-collar guys as customers, but market research revealed that more women than men purchased the six-packs that sat in New Yorkers’ family fridges. Thus, Rheingold was targeting a demographic that included homemakers and working women. Ads featured an attractive woman with the well-scrubbed “American look,” who by example could coach her less glamorous female brethren in the techniques and trade secrets of feminine desirability. Fashionable and female-friendly, Falkenburg was an instant hit with both consumers and the company’s bottom line. Jinx made sales jump!
The following year, Jinx Falkenburg made it clear to Liebmann executives that she and her now-famous face were on their way to Hollywood. And so, the barkeeps and package store proprietors who sold Rheingold were invited to choose Falkenburg’s successor. They selected raven-haired Ruth Ownbey, who was named the Rheingold Girl of 1941. As Ownbey’s reign wound down and she, too, packed her bags for Tinsel Town, the “Mad Men” who handled the Liebmann account hit upon a stroke of promotional genius. Rheingold, after all, was a populist beer. Why not invite the public to choose the company’s next spokesmodel?
Along with photographer Paul Hesse, Manhattan’s top modeling agents, John Robert Powers and Harry Conover, narrowed the field to six lovely ladies, who were photographed and prepped for the coming campaign. Newspaper and magazine ads featured head shots of the six hopefuls and posed the question, “Want to give a pretty girl a great big break?” Signs announcing “Board of Rheingold Voters Meets Here” were placed in no fewer than 30,000 tavern and storefront windows. Inside, customers were greeted by “festoons”—life-size posters of the six smiling Miss Rheingold finalists strung from the rafters. Collectively, they proclaimed, “Our Beer Is Rheingold, the Dry Beer!” A cardboard ballot box with headshots of each “candidate” was placed next to the cash register. Customers could vote by tearing a ballot from the pad, checking off a contestant’s name with the little pencil tethered to the box, and dropping said ballot into the slot. Or several ballots for those who were particularly partisan. Ballot box stuffing was allowed—this was, after all, Tammany Hall country—and no age requirement precluded children from registering their choice, too. After 200,000 votes were tabulated, brunette commercial artist Nancy Drake emerged victorious as the first publicly elected Miss Rheingold, beating out runner-up Elyse Knox, a blond cover girl who lost the contest but won the photographer. Hesse and his bride returned to Hollywood and Elyse became a starlet. (Later, she divorced Hesse to marry football star and World War II fighter pilot Tom Harmon, with whom she had three children, including actor Mark Harmon of the popular television series NCIS.) Meanwhile, back in Rheingold country, the public election proved worth all the hoopla and expense. Beer sales blasted through the roof and the contest became an annual event, which grew in size each year. Those 200,000 votes cast during the first contest eventually became 25 million—so many that, instead of counting the ballots, Rheingold’s election supervisors had them sorted into barrels and bins and weighed on the plant’s loading docks. The new Miss Rheingold would be the girl with the most paper poundage.
Vote, vote for Miss Rheingold—Miss Rheingold 1961
Vote, vote for Miss Rheingold—step right up and join the fun!
Time to vote for your selection in our annual election
Time to choose the name of the gal you’ll send to fame!
Don’t wait! Choose a candidate! And vote!
So sang dancing husband-and-wife movie stars Marge and Gower Champion in the five-minute TV commercial that introduced the public to the six finalists vying to be the twenty-second Miss Rheingold. The Miss R promotion was at its peak of popularity, fueled by a massive and now well-oiled publicity campaign. The Rheingold girls were everywhere: on television and radio; in full-page, full-color newspaper and magazine ads; on billboards and subway car cards; in die-cut displays propped up in storefront windows that invited customers to come inside, vote for their favorite, and, while they were at it, pick up a six-pack or two. For six late-summer weeks, the contestants traveled nonstop with their sharp-eyed chaperone and their company drivers—two finalists to each gleaming white Pontiac convertible. They made personal appearances at parades and policemen’s benevolent association picnics, roller rinks and supermarket openings, county fairs and Knights of Columbus carnivals. They smiled for the local press, waved to the crowds, and then rode on to the next gig, often having to reapply their makeup and change their outfits in the car en route. The schedule was exhausting, but the Rheingold girls’ ubiquity translated into millions of votes and, more importantly, phenomenal sales that, year after year, topped themselves. The company climbed from number six to number one in the greater New York market.
Here’s how it all worked. Each May, cover girls and college homecoming queens, housewives and Hollywood hopefuls, secretaries, socialites, stewardesses—virtually any pretty girl with her eyes on the prizes—up to $50,000 in cash, modeling fees, travel, wide visibility, and, in the early years, war bonds—would converge on New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Portfolios in hand, they were paraded before a panel of celebrity judges who chatted with them (Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Art Linkletter) or flirted with them (Tony Randall, Fernando Lamas, Tallulah Bankhead). The hordes were thinned and herded into three groups—brunettes, blondes, and redheads—then winnowed down to a sextet of finalists. Before they were introduced to the public, the lucky six were fitted for identical outfits, photographed, and investigated by private detectives. Miss Rheingold was, perennially, a girl-next-door type of a higher order, devoid of the “va-va-voom” of the Vargas girls, the overt sexiness of film icons Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, or, god forbid, the bare-breasted cheesecake of free-spirited Bettie Page. She could be pretty, beautiful even, but because the high-stakes contest was inextricably linked to the company’s bottom line, scandal had to be avoided at all costs. A Rheingold girl with a tawdry past could sink the ship. One finalist was shown the door after she was photographed at the Stork Club with a reputed mafioso. Another was abruptly dropped after an investigator reported that her Greenwich Village roommate was a lesbian poet. A third finalist, German-born Hildegarde “Hillie” Merritt, was cleared after it was determined that she had no Nazi skeletons in her family closet. She went on to win, becoming Miss Rheingold of 1956—even though, in private life, she was both a Mrs. and a mom. Marriage and motherhood did not exclude women from the competition, but pity the Miss R who became pregnant during her twelve-month reign. It happened a couple of times, and photographer Hesse—by all reports a demanding perfectionist—could get testy about having to pose Miss Rheingold and her baby bump behind flower carts, rumpus room bars, or prizewinning pumpkins at the harvest fair.
So much for how it worked. But why did it work—so effectively that it is considered by many to be the most successful advertising campaign of the twentieth century? Filmmaker Anne Newman, herself a finalist in the running to become Miss Rheingold of 1960, explores this question in her documentary about the contest’s impact, Beauty and the Beer. Answers emerge in Newman’s interviews with past winners, culture critics, and fans of the yearly ritual. Novelist Esther Cohen likens the candidates to human paper dolls, recalling that “as a kid it was really nice to have these beautiful women in the world that you could have a relationship with just by voting.” Advertising executive Jerry Della Femina concurs. “You had a choice,” he says. ??
?I’d never had a choice about anything. I equate Miss Rheingold with rooting for your favorite baseball team.” Former Miss Rheingold Emily Banks observes that each year’s winner was reliably “clean, lovely, graceful.”
“But not sexy,” notes playwright Ilene Beckerman.
“Virgins all,” quips Della Femina, who gets no argument from filmmaker-finalist Newman. “Women [of that bygone era] didn’t even expect to have orgasms. They had sex but weren’t necessarily supposed to enjoy it. That would have been unladylike—and, perhaps, sweaty.”
Miss Rheingold was a mid-century myth, “a triumph of style over substance,” notes Celeste Yarnall, Miss Rheingold of 1964.
Shirley Greenglass, a 1959 finalist, shed her Armenian surname, Shishmanian, and ran for Miss Rheingold under the pseudonym Dulcet Tone. “The biggest reward wasn’t the title or the lucrative contract that went with it,” she says. “What we were really competing for was the best prospective husband, meaning a guy who’d wine and dine you, buy you nice jewelry and a beautiful home, father your children, and if the marriage didn’t work out, set you up with a generous divorce settlement and monthly alimony in the four-figures range.” She recalls the brief period in 1959 when she dated attorney Roy Cohn, whose clients later included John Gotti, Donald Trump, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. “Roy was famous for his roles in the Rosenberg trials and the McCarthy hearings. He took me to the Copa, the Latin Quarter, El Morocco—the kinds of places where we’d be noticed and written about in the gossip columns. Photographed for the tabloids, too. He was a short, bug-eyed man. I towered over him, so he always insisted the photographer take our picture sitting down. He wasn’t interested in me, personally. It was about the fact that I was one of the finalists. We were interchangeable. A Rheingold girl made for good copy and good eye candy. I had no idea at the time that the little toad was in the closet, but I should have guessed. He was a lousy kisser.”
The six finalists were, indeed, interchangeable. Each wore red lipstick, white gloves, identical powder blue shirtwaist dresses with Peter Pan collars, and matching powder blue pumps. They carried hatboxes with their names emblazoned on them and distributed campaign cards with their pictures on one side, their bios, height, and weight on the other. (No breast, waist, and hips measurements, thank you.) Unlike Miss America contestants, the Rheingold girls were not required to sashay down runways in bathing suits and high heels, wear lame costumes that pegged them as representatives of the Beehive State or the Hawkeye State, demonstrate their talent for tap dancing or baton twirling, or give “Kumbaya”-like answers to interview questions posed by Miss America’s perennial master of ceremonies, Bert Parks. They merely had to look lovely, exude charm, and be photogenic—and, during that grueling six-week campaign, try to convince the public that they were the most lovely, the most charming, the most photogenic of that year’s six, so that in December after the votes were in, they could be declared the winner and climb on to the Miss Rheingold pedestal for the next twelve months’ worth of photo shoots, ribbon cuttings, and fashion shows.