Opening the Pocket Doors: Beauty and the Beer (An Exhibit That Never Was)

[Beauty and the Beer exhibit advertisement], ca. 2000. Brooklyn Historical Society Institutional Records, ARC 288. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.

She’s beauty and she’s grace, she’s Miss..Rheingold? That’s right. From 1941 until 1965, the beer company, Rheingold Brewery—best known as the official beer of the New York Mets—also ran a beauty contest called Miss Rheingold. The beer company was founded by German-Jewish immigrant Samuel Liebmann in the 1850s in Brooklyn. His sons took over their father’s brewery about a decade later and eventually changed the name to Rheingold in 1883. The brewery was kept in the Liebmann family until the company was sold in 1964 to Pepsi-Cola.  

[Miss Rheingold Winners Elise Gammon, 1951, and Pat McElroy, 1949], 1949-1951. Brooklyn Historical Society Institutional Records, ARC 288. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.

However, well before the company was sold, owner Philip Liebmann came up with the idea to promote his family’s beer with a beauty contest. He and marketing partner Robert Wechsler promoted the Miss Rheingold contest as a way to “directly [engage] the public in a voting campaign—whether they drank beer or not...as a civics lesson.” The Miss Rheingold contest went on to give “the female entrant incomparable visibility, gave the public a voice in corporate America, and made Rheingold Extra Dry the highest selling beer in America.” The contest took off during a time when beauty contests were incredibly popular in New York; the famous Miss Subway contest began the same year in 1941, and 1945 was the first year a Miss New York won the Miss America pageant with Jewish-American contestant Bess Myerson. What started as a local contest quickly became popular nationwide, which gave the contest its staying power for over two decades.  

[Miss Rheingold 1960 Advertisement], 1960. Brooklyn Historical Society Institutional Records, ARC 288. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.

In the early 2000s, the Brooklyn Historical Society wanted to put together an exhibit to celebrate the reinstatement of the Miss Rheingold contest in 2003. However, the contest—seemingly updated for modern audiences—didn't seem to be nearly as popular as its original concept and ended after only a year. The exhibit too fell apart and never came to fruition. Luckily for us, some remaining plans are still part of the Brooklyn Historical Society Institutional Records and can still therefore be shared here.  

[Miss Rheingold 1953 Poster Facsimile], 1953. Brooklyn Historical Society Institutional Records, ARC 288. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.

My personal favorite snippet is seeing a young Tippi Hedren, when she was still an unknown model, well before she ever became famous for her leading role in The Birds (or becoming mother to Working Girl actress Melanie Griffith and grandmother to actress Dakota Johnson).  

If you are interested in reading more about the history of exhibitions that did come to full fruition at the Brooklyn Historical Society, please see this blog post written by my colleague, Nicole Font.

Many thanks to Esther Cohen, Anne Newman Bacal, and Melissa Rachleff Burtt, whose curatorial notes I referred to and provided the quotations for this blog post.  

The Brooklyn Historical Society Institutional Archive Project is generously funded by the Leon Levy Foundation.

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We welcome appointments to research our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.