Mary Ann Mobley

Real talk, Miss America’s not as good a scholarship program as they claim. A lot of those alleged scholarships, no one ever qualifies for. There’s a lot of history with body negativity, racism, and other issues. There’s a Wikipedia page for every winner, but I’m really not sure why. I don’t think a lot of them meet the notability requirements for it. Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America 1959, is not the best known of the lot, but she’s better known than most of them.

She was the first of four women from Mississippi to win the title. Her talent was singing—she could do opera and jazz with equal skill. She was on variety shows, and she did summer stock. She sang show tunes. She made two movies with Elvis and another with Nancy Sinatra and a whole slew of bands. I don’t know if she sang on her episode of The Partridge Family, but it wouldn’t surprise me. And if she didn’t, she was fully capable of doing so.

Obviously, she was also pretty. Hard to be a Miss America if you’re not, even in the current day where they’re claiming to be about body positivity and so forth. She played a model on Perry Mason twice. She was originally cast as Batgirl, though I can’t find out why she was replaced with Yvonne Craig. She was pretty and shapely, the sort of thing you get from a Miss America, and the sort of thing you expect for a ‘60s starlet.

Her TV career was solid, though. It lasted forty years, apparently starting with General Hospital, though that’s one of the shows where IMDb’s information is spotty, and going all the way through Dead Like Me. Wikipedia says it started with Take a Good Look in 1960, but I don’t have a lot of detail on that. Either way, there are a lot of familiar names on the list. (Four episodes of The Love Boat and a whopping eight of Fantasy Island. No Murder, She Wrote, though.) She even ended up as a regular on later episodes of Diff’rent Strokes.

Would she have had the career she did without Miss America? Who even knows at this point? She wasn’t the most talented person we’ve covered in these columns, but I’d argue she wasn’t the least, either. She was one of those women who did a lot of middle-of-the-road acting in a time when the TV industry required a lot of middle-of-the-road actresses. This is by no means intended to shame her. I don’t even think I qualify as a middle-of-the-road actress, when I’m acting, though I’m not bad, either. Also I never could’ve won Miss America, so there’s that.