Patty from New York stepped forward, away from the shadows next to the DJ’s shack, to take her rightful place in the sun. This was at a bikini contest, on a stage, close to the pool at the Howard Johnson’s in Daytona Beach.
Patty smiled, her silky auburn hair aflip, her entire body an alive, curvilinear and expectant thing. The guys out front – all two hundred of them – rocked back on their heels.
“It’s Patty from New Yawk!” Dean hollered into his microphone. Dean was the emcee here, a sharp, scrappy dude of the only-in-Florida kind. “Hey, guys, give it up for Patty one time!”
By the time Patty hit the stage today, many girls had been received before her. There were blondes and brunettes, tall girls and squat girls, big-breasted girls and smaller-built girls, girls with poots, girls with abs.
“Skin to win!” the guys yelled. They were college kids mostly, wearing baseball caps, knee-length shorts and sloshed, happy smiles. At the moment, they didn’t have a care in the world.
And now it was Patty’s turn. As she made her way onto the stage, an athletic sauciness overtook her step. She looked out at the swaying field of boys, stood a little taller, smiled a little broader – both with her eyes, which were large, chipper orbs, and with her lips, her frosty pink summertime lips. She was wearing a long white T-shirt. Well, off that came. Then, over her hazelnut tan, she had on only a swimsuit – if you could call it that – consisting of two strands of mist that ran up in a V from her crotch, then spanned her breasts, barely covering them.
Patty opened her arms, spread them wide, and as she did, the oddest thing happened. The crowd lost its voice. Gone, the bawling mewl of lust we’d heard for the other girls, the hyena-high chittering, the bleats. Something seemed wrong. You could hear insects. Patty stood there, arms outstretched, in shafts of sunlight, in a world of peace.
Only briefly, though, for the crowd’s voice then returned. A rolling thing, it started low, began to push forward locomotive-like, and soon marshaled itself into something palpable, collective, combustible. It was windy. It buffeted people around.
“Patt-eee!” the crowd was roaring.
“Patt-eee!”
“Patt-eee!”
HER NAME IS PATTY ARBAUGH, and she is not from New York but from Baltimore. Actually, she would be from wherever the guys wanted her to be from – Ohio, Michigan, anywhere. She was that Florida phenomenon, a “circuit girl,” a bikini-contest professional who traveled from one city to the next with a bag full of bikinis in hand, searching out contests to enter. These could be bikini contests or their variants, the wet-T-shirt contest, the hot-legs contest, the tight-fittin’-jeans contest. It didn’t matter, so long as the prizes were good.
There were lots of other girls besides Patty trying to make a living on the circuit, and a pretty fine living it could be: for winners, $200 in cash and prizes on a so-so day, $3,000 on a good one.
“Fifty grand a year, easy,” one observer of the scene told me. “Many of these girls are driving brand-new BMWs, Porsches and ‘vettes.”
I was astounded, for until recently I had not even known such a thing – a bikini circuit – existed. I’d heard about MTV’s Beauty and the Beach event and the annual Hawaiian Tropic event. But I’d assumed those dull, overstaged contests were about the extent of it. It took Howie Sonnenschein, who once produced a TV show called The Bikini Open, to set me straight.
“There are more than 10,000 bikini contests held each year,” he said. “It’s a big business, and big money’s involved. Why? Because Americans love to look at beautiful people.”
PATTY’S HOTEL ROOM OVERLOOKED the vast aqua-blue expanse of the HoJo pool, pool deck and stage. Out there you could rent an inflatable sumo-wrestling outfit and wrestle in it. Music throbbed. Guys tried to swing to it, white guys mostly, with a few days’ worth of golden stubble. A cocktail waitress moved among them, dispensing booze. Sometimes a guy would fall down on the concrete, his baseball cap blowing off. The main event, the bikini contest, was an hour or two away.
On this day, Patty wasn’t feeling all that great. She was suffering from PMS. From nerves too, despite having made the prize cut in every contest except four or five in her seven-year career. But that’s the way Patty was, a little tense sometimes.
Still, she was a tough competitor, and she had brought with her lots of bathing suits to compete in, 30 altogether, stored individually in Baggies sitting on a table. She also had with her seven pairs of high heels, 10 hats and six pairs of shades. She picked up three of her suits now, along with two pairs of pumps, some hair spray, a lipstick, a hairbrush, a mirror and a bottle of Zauder’s Latex Glue. Patty used the latex glue with what she called her “money-maker suits,” the real guy-killers, so marginal that her breasts had to be glued to the fabric to keep them from springing loose.
When we sat down to talk she immediately made it clear that she wanted to get one thing straight.
“I am a number of things,” she informed me, “but a bimbo is not one of them. I hate that word.”
Patty began telling me about bikini contests. Unlike the celebrity-judged MTV contest, here the audience calls the winner. The louder the guys wail for a girl, the better she’ll do. I wondered what kind of girl would win here, whether Patty was that kind of girl, and what the wailing of the crowd said, if anything, about the guys caught up in it.
“Here’s the game plan for today,” Patty said brightly. “I’m going to do the bikini and the wet T-shirt here, then go over to the Whitehall Hotel and find out when their contest is. I won Razzles last night, so I can’t go back there until Thursday – that’s the rule.”‘
Patty explained that it would not do for me to be seen with her too much.
“Appearing to be single is real important,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to think, ‘She’s with that guy over there.’
I need the facade of being available. The less you appear to be a pro, the better.”
She gnawed on her lower lip and scanned the crowd.
“From what I hear, the competition’s going to be really tough this year. Girls from Miami and South Florida. Really tough.”
Two of the toughest competitors were the legendary contest girl known everywhere as Tammy from Daytona and the totally blonde and fabulously clever Tiffany Cara of Miami, who won the MTV event in 1992.
I aked Patty if she knew Tiffany.
“Tiffany? Cara?” Patty said, seemingly perplexed. “No, I don’t think I do.”
RIGHT AT THAT VERY moment, 215 miles to the south, Tiffany Cara was deciding not to visit Daytona for a while. I know this because I’d left her 40 million messages and she’d returned three of them. During one call she added, “I’m sorry I’m cracking gum in your ear.”During another call she said, “Did you ask Patty about me? Did she say she knew me?”
“Said she didn’t.”
Tiffany chuckled. “Oh, she knows me.”
By this I understood Tiffany to be implying several things – primarily, that her figure was vastly superior to Patty’s, and that Patty knew it and feared it. She went on to suggest that Patty was in fact a dilettante, nothing more than a bikini-contest poseur. “She’s not like a big-circuit girl that’s been on the big shows and everything,” Tiffany said.
I thought this was pretty unsporting. Also, if Patty was just a bikini-circuit pipsqueak, why did Tiffany know all about her? Even so, I detected rivalry, and that pleased me to no end.
Meanwhile, 45 miles to the southwest of me, Tammy from Daytona was zipping along Route 4 on her way from Orlando to Daytona. She was feeling dizzy. Though she did not know it, her car had sprung a carbon-monoxide leak. Tammy thought maybe it was the nail fumes from school. About to get married and maybe even hang up her bikini, she would shortly graduate from Orlando’s Academy of Nail Tech-Neks school of fingernails, 120 course hours nearly completed.
On the circuit, if Tammy was known for anything (beside her long, wonderfully lush mane, currently blond) it was for two things. One, her bathing suits. She owned 80 of them, all custom-tailored, in a style plucked from her own teeming mind.
“Cup-top, T-back, two-piece, mono, triangle-top, chain-back, full-bottom, sling-bottom, suspender-bottom – the suit’s everything,” she once told me. “When I first started, I went with white, then a bright pink, then a fluorescent green, then a royal blue, then black. I’m back to white again. The reason is, girls copy me. See, you have to be original. You have to stand out.”
Though Tammy Likes to stand out on the bikini stage, she totally eschews wet T-shirt and other “lesser” contests. Patty isn’t too happy about it either.
“They don’t make me feel comfortable,” she told me, “but they do show that you have a versatility of personality, that you’re not too prissy. It’ll help with the other contests.”
As she shook out her hair and recalled her first contest, at Hammerjacks in Baltimore.
“My friend Heather talked me into it,” she said. “I was like, ‘No way!’ But Heather said, ‘Next week you’re going to be in that contest!’ Well, I won the contest, and got $500. From that point on I was hooked. The high, the rush, the roar of the crowd. The cash was awesome.”
Looking back, she is still amazed that she had the courage to climb up on the stage.
“Until five years ago I was the most inhibited person in the world. In high school I would come home crying every day. ‘Mom, when is it going to happen for me?’ I never developed breasts, never grew into a bra, except a training bra.
“I’ll never forget my first date. I was 16. I stuffed some tissues down there. At the end of the date this boy was kissing me. We both looked down, and the tissue was coming out. I never saw him again. . . . At school, a boy named Mike used to call me Flatty Patty.
“So I went to a doctor. I told him, ‘Proportion me. I don’t want huge boobs, I just want to be in proportion.’ “
BEFORE THE ADVENT OF the bikini and the wet T-shirt you couldn’t really have girls like Patty or Tammy. Flesh didn’t come out into the open until 1946, with the introduction of the Atome, so named for its atomlike shrimpiness, and later that year the bikini, a roughly identical design so named for reasons no one can agree upon.
Of bikinis and the women who could wear them, actress Jayne Mansfield said it all in 1952: A woman needs “a flat tummy, a firm bosom and a nice derriere. Then you’re in business.”
Heeding this message, American women ditched the bikini for the one-piece and didn’t return to it until the early ’60s when Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland informed the nation, “Bikini says to me the best things in life are free. The world of the bikini is . . . a world completely consumed by the elements.”
That did it. Annette Funicello got one. Barbie got one. Suburban matrons let it all hang out.
Occasionally this will get the wearer into trouble. Not long ago, police in Sarasota arrested five sunbathers for illegally revealing the “anal cleft.”It takes mighty good vision to make such busts, however, and more recently they have been rare. Certainly, it was not a thing the girls at HoJo’s gave any thought to at all.
One thing I learned about circuit girls is that, cops aside, they still have many fears. They fear their period, for it bloats them terribly. Some fear the tax man, for they may not have declared all of their booty. Others fear questions about geography, about states they say they are from but have never seen. They all fear the inevitable appearance of a bottom in need of foundations.
Today, Patty moved easily among the guys, laughing, smiling, greeting, quipping, waving. Today she was fearless.
“I’ve had women say that what I do is degrading to other women,” she told me later. “Usually I say, ‘I apologize if I have offended you, but I feel very confident in myself. I work hard to keep myself in shape, I make good money, and I have a life outside of this.’ “
Patty’s life outside of bikini contests includes planning for the post-contest world. She wants to help other people, probably because her own family was often in need of help. She had an alcoholic grandmother, her parents divorced when she was 3, and her mom has remarried three times since. Recently Patty won a scholarship to the University of Maryland to study sociology.
“I’ve always wanted to be a social worker or a counselor,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to help.”
TAMMY FROM DAYTONA MADE it from Orlando and fingernail school with time to spare. She and her custom suits found their way onto the pool deck. Like Patty, Tammy had her breasts augmented. Unlike Patty, she didn’t believe in circulating among the guys. She believed her suits gave her the edge, and today they were spectacular. In golds and reds, visually complex and slickly engineered, they were spanned with more spaghetti straps than I had ever seen. The effect was one of advanced bridge-rigging systems.
Patty saw Tammy and came right up. I braced myself; I was sure there’d be words.
“Hey, Tammy,” Patty said. “You said you had suits you were selling?”
“Hey, Patty. Yeah, a couple.”
“The only thing is,” said Patty, “with my boobs, I’m afraid they won’t fit me here.”
“Well, I have some B-cup tops I’ve been selling. I had them made and they were too little.”
“I need a C or D cup.”
“Probably a D,” Tammy said helpfully. “They’re big.”
I was stunned. What was their problem? Tammy from Daytona and Patty of Baltimore getting along? I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Soon they were talking about joining forces and splitting the pot. Then about trading off contests. On behalf of guys everywhere, I was outraged. Where was North versus South, the pitched Battle of the Bikinis? Where the petty hatred and spite so common among today’s athletes? Where the wheedling and nasty insinuations, the good old-fashioned rivalry?
In other words, where was Tiffany Cara of Miami when you needed her?
THE CONTEST WAS ALMOST over. Dean the emcee called the girls back for the vote. They came out, a line of 11 that included Patty but not Tammy, who’d decided to sit this one out. The girls waved and smiled their best smiles.
“Pick out one lady and scream for her,” Dean told the guys.
At that moment, the contest was between Patty and a newcomer named Cheyenne. Cheyenne had appeared out of nowhere, a silky Asian stunner. When the guys first saw her, they slapped themselves on the forehead, bellowing.
Cheyenne knew how to keep them going. Leaning back, she grabbed the front of her suit and pulled it up, then turned around and made triple-time humping gestures.
“Aaaiii!” the guys shrieked.
Patty, on the other hand, had been strangely demure. She only cavorted and leaned just so far forward. At one point, she snatched up a guy’s camera and pointed it at her fanny, but she didn’t snap the shot. In the end, the guys clapped and hooted, though not nearly so loudly, nor with such percussive force, as they had for Cheyenne.
I felt bad for Patty, the former Flatty Patty, standing there now, grinning as if she had it sewn up, so naively confident.
She was a true, smiling beauty. I’d never seen anyone stand so tall or so proud. She kept her hands on her hips. Her back was a perfect arch, with two perfectly placed ilium-high dimples. It did not matter that her breasts were not real. In a sense, they were more rightly hers and more a part of her than if she’d been born with them.
But why hadn’t she been a little more daring onstage? Had Tiffany been right about her? Did she not know her crowd? Her defeat was sure. It was depressing. This was more than just a bikini contest. It had turned into a showdown pitting all that was good against some stuff that was pretty bad. And bad was about to win. I hoped the end would be swift and merciful.
“Okay,” Dean said. He looked at his clipboard. “Let’s hear it for Cheyenne!” Cheyenne spun around to loud applause. But it died down just like that. I could see guys looking off, looking up, shuffling their feet, and otherwise appearing pretty mortified.
“Now, let’s hear it for Patty!” Dean said.
Patty stepped forward, laughing with her mouth open. She pranced around and waved at the crowd. At first, there was silence – and then I heard a noise. It was a sound that took hold and grew. Pretty soon it was real loud.
“Patt-eee!”
“Patt-eee!”
“Patt-eee!”
IT TOOK ME A WHILE, but I have finally figured out what happened when it came time to vote. The guys had suddenly seen and understood that their future, their right and proper future, was with a girl like Patty, a good girl with whom they could decently live their lives.
Patty herself summed it up later as she packed the seven pairs of high heels, the 10 hats and six pairs of shades, and slipped the 30 bathing suits back into the Baggies, ready to head off to the next town and the next contest.
“It’s a funny thing,” she said, “but, you know, I think I’m ready to settle down and get married. I get so attached to kids. I want to have babies.”
ERIK HEDEGAARD is a contributing editor at Details, a Conde Nast magazine, where this article originally appeared.
