Venus Ramey: disenchanted Miss America turned political activist

The forces pin-up supported the war effort and later opposed discrimination

Ramey won the title in 1944, but declined the subsequent product-promotion tours as they made her ‘feel like a prisoner’

"Whoever named her Venus wasn't kidding," read a photo caption in The Washington Post when Venus Ramey, with her red hair and violet eyes, was crowned Miss America in 1944. Never before had a redhead conquered the pageant. A girdle would have been superfluous on her hourglass frame, and her 37½-inch bust, Life magazine noted, was the largest in the contest's history.

A daughter of Kentucky coal country, Miss Ramey had moved to Washington in search of work, entered the Miss Washington, District of Columbia, competition on a whim and found herself draped in the sash with the national title. But Ramey, who has died of complications from pneumonia aged 92, made no secret of her disenchantment with a title that was not, in her experience, as shimmeringly glamorous as it might have seemed.

As a newly crowned winner, she was pushed toward product-promotion tours that, however lucrative, made her "feel suspiciously like a prisoner", Life magazine wrote in 1946. Instead of spending all her time flogging products, she became the first Miss America to become a political activist, also championing women’s rights and voting rights for DC residents. She also sold $5m in war bonds, receiving a recognition from the US Treasury Department.

After she passed the crown to Bess Myerson, the first and only Jewish Miss America, in 1945, Ramey returned to private life but lived, she said, as an “adventuress”. At various points, she picked up and moved to Mexico, ran for state and local office, unsuccessfully sued the federal government for $300bn on behalf of aggrieved tobacco farmers and declared herself a write-in candidate in the 2000 presidential election.

Venus Ramey - her mother wanted her to have a good stage name - was born in Ashland, in eastern Kentucky, in 1924. She later moved to the central part of the state, where her family ran a farm. She was a page in the Kentucky legislature, whose members had included her father and grandfather.

After her parents divorced, Ramey moved to Cincinnati, where her mother ran a boarding house. She entered beauty contests on her mother's urging, winning a few – including Miss Northern Kentucky at 14 – before going after Miss Washington DC, when she moved to the capital in the early 1940s. She entered that contest, with only a day's forethought, by forging her mother's signature on the application.

For Ramey, the national title quickly lost its lustre. According to Life magazine, she was carried off to New York with handlers who refused phone calls from her family. After being told that she would receive her $10,000 payment for a promotional tour only “after the trip if you're a good girl”, she declined to go.

The war-bond effort was the beneficiary of Ramey’s discomfort with the pageant. Her image decorated the side of a fighter plane. Its unit called her “the girl we'd most like to bail out with over a deserted Pacific isle”, according to a history of Miss America.

Ramey tried to break into show business but told Life magazine that her act, in which she sang Xavier Cugat’s “Take it Easy” in English and Spanish and danced the tango and rumba, was “just pitiful”. (The reviews were kinder.) After some commercials and voiceover work in Hollywood she returned to Kentucky in 1951; at 26, she unsuccessfully ran in the Democratic primary for the Kentucky legislature.

"The men figured I was a little too young to be a representative," she told The Washington Post in 1989. “And besides, many of them actually believed the old canard that beauty and brains don’t mix.”

By that time, she had married Joseph Murphy Jr, a Ford dealer, and had two sons. The marriage ended in divorce. She moved her children to Mexico, where she was a freelance dress designer, and then to California.

She later returned to Cincinnati, where she worked as a historical preservationist, ran a Christmas-tree farm and unsuccessfully sought a seat on the city council. In retirement, she lived on her Kentucky farm. Her pets at various times included a dozen dogs, 15 cats and four pigeons. Survivors include two sons, Hank and Wally Murphy; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Ramey was unimpressed with the Miss America pageant as it evolved in later years. She wrote in a Penthouse magazine essay that when she won, “artifice would automatically disqualify contestants. Nowadays, the girls are resorting to artificial tanning, dental bonding, hairpieces, false eyelashes, false fingernails, padded busts and hips, and bobbed noses. Caught in the rain, part of them could fall off – or at least start squeaking.”

But then, she wasn't particularly fond of the contest even in her day. During her post-pageant performing career, one of her routines included a song that went:

For the benefit of those who never knew
I'm a Miss America! How do you do!
They had me posing like I wouldn't
And they photographed me where they shouldn't
But it's nice to be Miss America, it makes life so très gai
Now if I could only find a way to eat three times a day

Venus Ramey, beauty queen and campaigner, born 26 September 1924, died 17 June 2017

© Washington Post