Pfeiffer's Yearbook Photo (76?). Miss Orange County Win (78)
Pfandom. Episode 1.
Michelle Pfeiffer Retrospective. Every Saturday in 2017 at TFE
by Nathaniel R
The time is spring 1978. Fountain Valley High School graduate and Vons Supermarket checkout girl Michelle Pfeiffer is 19 going on 20 when she takes the Miss Orange County beauty pageant crown. She's dreaming of bigger things and community college isn't quite it.
The first bigger thing is the "Miss California" pageant. The young future-very-big-deal walks stiffly down a makeshift runway for Miss California in that highly practical ready-to-wear combo of swimsuit and high heels...
From Orange County, Michelle Pfeiffer, a softball player who also oil paints. She'd like to become an actress. Mexican food is her favorite. Her measurements are 33-24-34.
A softball player who also oil paints?!? Global fame was a given.
But what kind of fame, wasn't always a given. To hear David Thompson tell it in the book "Pfeiffer: Beyond the Age of Innocence," the young girl was something of a mess of contradictions: Smart but uninterested in school, attractive but wary of attention, popular but a loner, and directionless until she suddenly wasn't.
Pfeiffer recalls her deciding moment very casually. She had been listening to a customer, a large overbearing lady, going on and on about the quality of a cantaloupe. It's the sort of scene where you'd want to kick the lady. And the cantaloupe. 'I guess I just asked myself: If you could have anything, somebody could just hand it to you, what would you want to do. And it was acting.'
It may not be up there wither the Road to Damascus but it worked for her; she had purpose."
She knew a Hollywood agent was one of the judges of the pageant. But, of course nobody 'just handed it' to her. For what it's worth the world's most beautiful woman lost the larger beauty contest, making it to only sixth place. Very soon, however, she'd become more famous than any winner of Miss California ever had or has.
A purrrfect postscript.
At least one Miss California winner did go on to significant fame as an actress. Miss California 1954 (and Miss America 1955) also launched an enduring acting career. Her name is Lee Meriwether and she's still working at 81. Meriwether's most famous role outside of television was, get this, playing "Catwoman" in the first feature version of Batman (1966), three decades before Pfeiffer claimed the role for her own.
Catwoman & Penguin x 2 (1966/1992)
By the time Michelle vacantly paced those pageant runways in high heels, Lee Meriwether was a TV star, wrapping up her sixth season on the hit show Barnaby Jones; her role as Barnaby's daughter-in-law and business partner, garnered her an Emmy nomination and two Golden Globe nominations.
Next Saturday: Michelle gets her first TV roles as "The Bombshell," natch.