Driving Miss World

By GEOFF CUMMING

Holed up in her beachside home on the Whangaparaoa Peninsula, Ros Taylor hopes the storm of protest over Miss World will recede with the tide.

The 69-year-old widow and her airline pilot son Mark, 47, have run the Miss World New Zealand pageant for six years.

If the contest conjures up images of glamour, flesh, money and power over impressionable young women, the Taylors seem more likely candidates to be running the annual school play.

"It's a hobby with us," says Ros. "I'm the organiser and Mark gets dragged in to help. He's the legal eagle and does the artwork for the programme."

By most accounts the pair put on a good show, despite dwindling media and sponsor interest.

But the beauty pageant which most dismiss as an anachronism is suddenly on the front pages. Calls have come from as high as the Prime Minister's office for a boycott of this year's Miss World contest in Nigeria after an Islamic court in Katsina state ordered Amina Lawal to be stoned to death for adultery.

At her Stanmore Bay home, Ros is in casual wear inspired by the surrounding retirement belt - fluffy slip-ons, blue velvet pants and a camel sweater with faux fur collar. She is without makeup, her hair a natural grey.

Mark exudes off-duty airline pilot - black polo jersey, blue jeans and white sneakers. He has a daughter but is single and lives a couple of bays away from his mother. He looks like he needs a good sleep before taking the next day's Air New Zealand long-haul flight to Los Angeles and London.

But these old-stagers should not be judged on presentation alone. It's only a fortnight since Rachel Huljich was crowned Miss World New Zealand before an audience of 600 on a glittering night at the Sky City Theatre.

The period since has been "an education," says Mark. "We've had to do a lot of research on Nigeria and we still are."

The New Zealand public, and media, have been quick to judge the contest organisers and the winner. Huljich, an Auckland schoolgirl, has lost marks for her intention to proceed to Nigeria and parade her talents before millions watching on live television in 140 countries.

The Taylors have been pilloried for leaving the 17-year-old to explain her stance to the media, and for prevaricating over whether she should go. They say they were given no time to think before Huljich was put on the spot over Nigeria on the Holmes television show.

As the clamour for a boycott reached a crescendo this week, Huljich and the Taylors have increasingly seemed like stage debutantes frozen in the spotlight, and have become media shy. The Taylors say they have been misquoted and had words put in their mouths by journalists with preconceptions. They take some convincing before talking to the Weekend Herald.

For them, it's been interesting enough avoiding the claws of catwalk politics without debating internal politics in Nigeria, where Islamic fundamentalists are threatening violent protests against the "pageant of nudity" scheduled for November 30 during the holy month of Ramadan.

The Taylors dismiss claims that Miss World is exploitative or demeaning to women.

"There are two types of beauty contests," says Mark. "We don't associate with the itzy-bitzy teeny-weeny bikini-type contests at the pub."

Miss World New Zealand contestants do not parade in swimsuits and high heels. Before the big night, they receive lessons in deportment, elocution and public speaking which can be applied to job interviews and future careers.

"With us, it's about helping people," says Mark. "We are after girls who are going to represent New Zealand overseas. They have to be able to carry on a conversation with dignitaries. They need a good knowledge of New Zealand culture so they can promote New Zealand while they are there."

Ros: "We get a lot of girls coming in rather shy. They come out totally different girls, their confidence grows, they start dressing nicely ... It's personal development."

The pair's involvement with beauty pageants stems from the late 1980s when Ros' late husband, Roy, organised the Miss Hibiscus Coast contest as a Rotary fundraiser.

A bank manager with the BNZ, Roy was a fine singer who loved theatre, says Ros. "They used to call him the singing banker."

He incorporated elements of theatre, such as dance, into the show. Before he died of cancer in 1991, he asked Ros to keep the contest going.

In 1997, after Dunedin promoter Dennis Brown relinquished the rights to the Miss World New Zealand contest, the Taylors applied to the British organisers for the licence.

"We thought it would be a shame if New Zealand wasn't there and we wanted to keep the continuity, so the girls could go on from the regional level to something bigger and better."

She has since attended four world pageants and Mark two. "The whole experience of meeting people from different cultures has been amazing."

But boycott advocates point out the culture clash of staging Miss World in a country which, they say, allows women to be stoned to death for having sex outside wedlock.

As rights groups and international governments pressure the organisers to relocate, there is much at stake for the Nigerian Government, which is trying to improve its human rights image. It hopes to showcase its progress while staging the country's biggest entertainment event in a brand new 60,000-seat stadium.

There are also tangible rewards - the host country receives half the proceeds from Miss World organisers for charity. In a country where children wander the streets begging for food, the charity selected by the President's wife, Stella Obasanjo, is child care.

This week Nigeria's Foreign Minister, Duben Onyia, said the federal Government had the power to override state laws and would protect Lawal. In a statement on the Miss World website, Onyia said: "It is worthy to mention that in the history of justice in Nigeria, no woman has ever been punished in such a dastardly manner as pre-empted by this case and this will not be an exception."

He also gave assurances that contestants and organisers would be protected from Islamic fundamentalists who oppose the pageant on moral grounds.

And state officials in Katsina, the northern Muslim state that upheld Lawal's conviction, say the case against her will be abandoned if she chooses not to show up in an Islamic court for her next appeal this month.

With the contest still 10 weeks away, the Taylors say there is plenty of time to make a decision.

Mark Taylor says the venue, Abuja, is a modern city, far from the strife-ridden north. Look up the city's website, he says, "and the first thing that comes up is about empowering women. From what I've learnt, the Nigerian Government is doing a lot towards improving women's status."

But it may take more than sparing Lawal to silence those who oppose Huljich's attendance as an "ambassador" for New Zealand. The court ruling has raised wider concerns about Nigeria's treatment of women - including female circumcision and the keeping of multiple wives - and been seized on by those who see beauty contests as demeaning to women.

Of course, the contest has long been a target for women's rights advocates. The most recent stoush came in 1996 when feminist groups in Bangalore, India, threatened to halt the pageant, claiming that it flaunted women as sex objects. Bangalore became a city under siege, schools were closed and 2000 police were on hand during the event.

The wonder for many is that beauty pageants continue at all in these post-feminist times and that New Zealand girls still line up to enter. But people have got the wrong idea about Miss World, says Ros Taylor. The pageant is billed as "beauty with a purpose" and the contests have raised more than US$150 million ($318 million) for charities worldwide. She cites hair lip and cleft palate operations for 200 children in Sri Lanka.

"I'm very proud to be part of them."

The Taylors pay the Miss World organisation about $10,000 a year for the rights to the contest. Staging the annual show, which includes housing and feeding the contestants for a week of rehearsals and training, takes the total cost to about $50,000.

The former office accountant says she runs a tight ship, but it is no money-spinner.

"It's hard work to keep within the budget that we set and harder work still to get your money back and get bums on seats. You have to put on a really good show."

Some costs are met by regional licence holders, who pay $1100 to the Taylors, which meets the cost of their winner's participation in the national show.

Strict criteria control the standard of the regional shows and prize-money is limited.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Miss New Zealand and Miss World contests were major events, televised live in prime time despite protests from feminist groups.

Television NZ says falling ratings and high production costs led to their demise. Without television exposure, sponsorship fell away and promoter Dennis Brown - who still runs the Miss Universe contest, which carries the Miss New Zealand title - let the Miss World licence go.

Under Brown, the Miss New Zealand winner went to both international contests. But in 1997, an unseemly row developed when the new Miss World franchise-holder, Steve Hobden, identified Miss Counties representative Kelly Mischewski as Miss New Zealand. This made it hard for the real Miss New Zealand, Marina McCartney, to get sponsors. Though the pair remain best friends, the fiasco attracted front-page media coverage and a memorable Herald headline: "Tiaras at dawn as beauty queens fight over crown."

There is no current Miss New Zealand. Brown, son of the legendary Joe Brown who ran the contest for 13 years, says he cancelled this year's pageant "because of September 11". He plans to revive the contest next year but industry insiders are sceptical.

"He says that every year," says McCartney, now a top model. She says the pageant industry is struggling and should revert to the previous arrangement where Miss New Zealand attended Miss World and Miss Universe.

Former contestants and model industry observers say more could have been done to market the event when television interest waned in the 1980s.

Caroline Millington, who runs the Miss Waitakere pageant, says the show must go on.

"It's a shame TV doesn't come on board and create a more positive image for the girls.

"A lot of my generation and older people all used to sit down on Saturday night waiting for Miss New Zealand to come on TV. We thought it was fantastic. It's a fairytale world for children."

Marguerite Vanderkolk, president of the YWCA, said this week that the pageant hid a shocking disregard for the value of women's lives through the thin veneer of social acceptability.

"Will we manage to smile and teeter on our national high-heels as if our right and ability to do these two things at once make the world a better place for women?"