QUEEN

 

Under scrutiny, early 1930s: A contestant poses for judges in a Miss Turkey competition.

 

BY THE TIME LEON TROTSKY left Büyükada for France and Mexico, Nâzım Hikmet was serving one of his many jail sentences, Halide Edip was in voluntary exile with her husband, Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades was on his way to becoming Greece’s greatest industrialist, and Mustafa Kemal had fully consolidated his power as unrivaled leader of the Turkish Republic. Debates over socialism and republicanism, patriotism and feminism, loyalty and leadership had pushed Istanbullus in separate directions. They could even cause old comrades to part ways. Yunus Nadi, for example, had been Halide Edip’s partner in establishing the Anatolian News Agency, but from that point forward, their careers diverged. Where Halide became one of the regime’s foremost critics, Yunus Nadi was one of its most committed spokesmen.

He had worked as a newsman already in the late Ottoman period and had briefly served in the Ottoman parliament. His credentials as a reform-oriented publicist and bitingly effective writer were impeccable. He had been part of the Unionist underground, and, when Mustafa Kemal’s resistance movement emerged, he was one of the early enthusiasts who fled from Istanbul to Ankara to join it. After the proclamation of the republic, he returned to Istanbul and became the city’s leading newspaper editor and press entrepreneur. He could be fierce in criticizing specific government policies or the inefficiencies of state institutions, but he always did so from inside the circle of power around the president and his core associates.

The newspaper Yunus Nadi established in 1924, Cumhuriyet, quickly rose to become one of Turkey’s most widely read dailies and a mainstay of ardent Kemalism. Its opinion pages could both reflect and sway public attitudes. Foreign governments carefully scoured its pages for evidence of Turkey’s shifting foreign-policy orientations—from early flirtations with the Soviet Union to admiration for Adolf Hitler’s growing power in Germany. Turkey was modernizing, and Cumhuriyet was there both to record the revolution and to champion it. “For four or five years now, Turkey has been in a period of deep restructuring,” Yunus Nadi declared in its pages in 1928. “We want to import all traits of Western civilization to our country. Not long ago . . . our social life rested on Eastern principles. We are turning them upside down.”

Round and jowly, he wore his gray hair swept back severely. In broad-lapelled suits and the occasional wing collar, he could seem a cartoon of a press mogul, a Turkish version of Citizen Kane. He could rail on the page and gently persuade in person. Both of those skills came into play when he hit upon an idea for expanding newspaper sales and showcasing the new sense of modernity that Kemalism had brought to the ancient city. In February 1929, Yunus Nadi announced that Istanbul would host the republic’s first ever beauty contest.

“Why Wouldn’t We Do the Same?” a front-page headline asked. Since all civilized countries held beauty contests, with the winners competing in international pageants across Europe and the United States, a similar competition would mark another milestone in Turkey’s march toward social maturity. The newspaper soon announced a search for “the most beautiful Turkish woman,” who would be selected to represent Turkey abroad and demonstrate the elevated qualities of the new republican woman to a global audience. It would be no different from a soccer game, Yunus Nadi said, a chance to send the best Turkish citizens overseas and to measure themselves against the finest products of other civilized nations. Further particulars followed. All Turkish women and girls over the age of fifteen, regardless of religion or ethnicity, were invited to participate. Contestants were asked to send in a photograph, which would be printed in the newspaper, and readers would have a chance to vote on the finalists. There would be no swimsuit element, the newspaper explained, and the jury would consist only of the most respected citizens. Prostitutes were expressly forbidden from taking part.

In a country with one party, one leader, and one acceptable path to the future, being asked to vote freely on anything was a novelty, and Yunus Nadi’s idea had its desired effect. Photographs flowed into the newspaper’s editorial offices. Readers debated the merits of the various finalists. The Turkish winner should have a good chance of beating out other contestants in an international pageant, one writer declared. The recent winner of a European contest had been a Hungarian woman, and since Turks and Hungarians were genetic cousins—both descended from Central Asian nomads, apparently—odds were in the republic’s favor. The discussions were so intense that few people in Istanbul probably noticed the arrival of another celebrity, Leon Trotsky, in the same week the competition was announced.

After readers had selected around thirty finalists, the first competition was held at the newspaper’s editorial offices. A jury of fifty notables examined each of the women, who were required to wear a décolleté dress and to produce an identity document certifying their Turkish citizenship. By September 3, the results were in, and Cumhuriyet dedicated the entire front page to describing the competition and its winner, one Feriha Tevfik. The young woman rocketed from obscurity to fame in an instant. She went on to an international competition in Belgium, but despite Yunus Nadi’s high expectations, she failed to place. Still, moguls of Turkey’s emerging film industry came calling. She went on to star in several melodramas and romantic films, a well-known figure if not exactly a household name through much of the 1930s.

Yunus Nadi soon announced that the competition would be an annual event. Beginning in 1930, twenty finalists would be invited to a grand ball at the Turquoise club, where they would parade before judges and paying guests in the style of other foreign pageants. “Beauty Is Not Something to Be Ashamed Of,” an editorial headline read. All of this was still shockingly new, however. Yunus Nadi had had to defend the contest from the moment he originally broached the idea, and the negative reaction began to swell. He found himself managing an enormous backlash, not only from conservatives in Istanbul society but also from the Turkish government. When judges selected Naide Saffet, a Turkish schoolteacher, as Miss Turkey 1931, the Ministry of Education issued a circular threatening dismissal for any teachers and pupils who participated in such contests. Teachers in particular were held up as models of propriety and good sense—and were, to boot, state employees—so having one of their number placed before ogling judges was considered an offense to public morality.

Even worse, Yunus Nadi had failed to deliver the most important thing he had promised: that in bending good taste by staging a beauty contest that included Muslim women, he would at least produce someone who could go on to win an international crown. Three years of entrants fell by the wayside when they stepped onto stages in Belgium and France. The title of Miss Europe 1930 had gone to the entrant from Greece, trouncing her Turkish competitor and delivering a major blow to national prestige. It was at this point that Yunus Nadi seems to have come up with an inspired idea. If beauty contests were seen by conservatives as somehow beneath the dignity of Muslim women—in part because the winners had gone on to film or acting careers, which were still considered a sign of loose morals and déclassé origins—one way to solve that problem would be to put forth a contestant whose background was itself beyond reproach. The person he found was Keriman Halis.

Keriman was only ten years old when the republic was declared, but for families such as hers, the fall of the Ottoman Empire was less the end of an old way of life than a rising wave that, with the right planning and connections, could lift fortunes and redefine opportunities. Her great-grandfather had been eyhülislam of the Islamic community. He was, next to the sultan in his role as caliph, the most powerful religious leader in the entire empire. Her grandfather had been a pasha, a senior general in the imperial land forces. Her father, Halis Bey, was a merchant who built a successful business in the late nineteenth century when Ottoman consumers were hungry for items that marked them as modern and European. He had been among the first importers to introduce fire extinguishers to the empire and, in a way, helped alleviate what had been one of Istanbul’s preeminent problems for centuries.

With such a pedigree, Keriman spent her childhood among French nannies, equestrian outings, and the social season of balls and chaperoned excursions. With a round face and sparkling brown eyes, she was regarded as a considerable beauty, and the family home in Fındıklı, on the European shore of the Bosphorus, was a place of quick conversation and optimism about the future. Her father’s passion for literature and the arts meant that she was surrounded by a cadre of Muslim writers, artists, and thinkers who were helping to reshape the city in the transition from Allied occupation to national sovereignty. It was an atmosphere similar to the one that Halide Edip, three decades Keriman’s senior, had known in her own childhood, but the differences were also stark. Halide had been a member of the first generation of women whose adult lives spanned the turbulent years from empire to republic. Their struggles had been over veiling, seclusion, and civil rights. Keriman’s generation, by contrast, took the new public lives and legal status of women for granted. They were the first cohort of young women who, as adults, had known no country but the Turkish Republic.

In the late 1920s, Keriman had little reason to frequent the jazz cafés and ballrooms in Pera, uphill from her family home. Finding someone of her breeding and social standing in such venues—surrounded by Russian singers, Levantine partygoers, and sometime prostitutes—would have been nearly unthinkable. But one of Yunus Nadi’s signature talents was bridging these two very different worlds.

Istanbul was in many ways a big village, at least for the thin stratum of Muslims in the highest echelons of business and government. It was easy for one of the city’s most respected newspaper editors to fall into the orbit of Halis Bey and his talented and beautiful children. Yunus Nadi reportedly approached Halis Bey on more than one occasion to inquire whether Keriman might be allowed to stand as a contestant in his beauty contest. But in an age when seeing Muslim women on stage in any capacity was still a rarity, it was hard to imagine a father’s placing his daughter in a position where she would be intentionally examined by strangers. Keriman was technically old enough to participate in the competition, at least according to Yunus Nadi’s own rules, but her father was skeptical. On each approach Halis Bey had demurred. Finally, after several years of gentle cajoling, her father relented, and in 1932 Keriman Halis was put forward as an entrant in Cumhuriyet’s Miss Turkey contest. At the competition in Pera that July, she walked away with the prize.

Yunus Nadi had far grander designs than simply ushering Keriman toward national fame, however. He immediately entered her into the competition known as the International Pageant of Pulchritude, more popularly known as the Miss Universe competition. Like Yunus Nadi’s contest, the pageant was a public relations stunt. Its origins had lain in Galveston, Texas, a city flattened by a hurricane in 1900 and, even three decades later, still seeking ways of luring visitors. Most of the winners had been Americans—most of the competitions, in fact, had been held in Galveston, even though they were marketed as global talent searches—but pageant organizers soon realized that they had a franchise that could be offered to any city or town seeking to revitalize tourism and develop a brand. That year, the competition moved to Spa, the resort in Belgium. With the worldwide economic depression, hotel and restaurant revenues had dwindled, and the pageant was intended to be a source of money as well as good press. In August 1932, contestants, friends, and reporters began arriving in Spa in droves, just as Istanbul was preparing to send off its own champion.

Miss Universe, 1932: Keriman Halis in a publicity photograph.

Twenty thousand Istanbullus reportedly turned up for Keriman Halis’s farewell reception in Taksim Square. She set off by train for Belgium with her father as chaperone. Along the way, crowds gathered at Turkish stations to see her pass by. Once in Spa, all the competitors were the object of intense media attention, but Keriman was of particular interest. She was the only contestant from the Muslim world and a young woman whose family background seemed to give her an air of respectability and grace—which was precisely why Yunus Nadi had worked so hard to convince her father to allow her to compete. It was also perhaps the reason that she took to the stage in Belgium with the full backing of the Turkish government, in great contrast to Yunus Nadi’s entrants from earlier seasons.

In Spa, she performed much as she had done in Istanbul, walking regally in a ball gown, conversing with judges, and posing discreetly for the world’s press. By the end of the competition, she was certain one of the other contestants, a German, had won the grand prize. But when her name was called, she stepped forward with a tentative smile and into the flash of cameras. She was declared Miss Universe 1932. In the ensuing days, nearly thirty thousand telegrams came in with congratulations, and Yunus Nadi devoted an entire issue of Cumhuriyet to covering each minute detail of the story. Mustafa Kemal telegraphed his warm wishes, as did the Grand National Assembly, the minister of the interior, and the governor of Istanbul. Yunus Nadi was summoned to the president’s office to receive congratulations from Mustafa Kemal in person. smet Pasha, the old war hero and prime minister, rose in parliament to proclaim Keriman “a living argument against the numerous voices raised in our disfavor.” Cumhuriyet, never missing an opportunity for hype, dubbed Keriman “The Turkish Girl Who Conquered the World.”

Public engagements and invitations followed. Keriman was hailed in Belgium, feted in Paris, and celebrated in Cairo. She appeared in Berlin and Chicago, and even stopped over in Athens on a courtesy visit with Eleftherios Venizelos, the old Hellenic enemy who had since patched up relations with Mustafa Kemal. She became an ambassador not only for the pageant but, even more important, for her country. She was never quite what her hosts expected. At one gala dinner, an enthusiastic organizer used small paper fezzes as centerpieces, thinking that the Oriental decorations would please the world’s first Muslim beauty queen. Since the hats were a symbol of the old empire and illegal in republican Turkey, she refused to enter the hall until they were removed.

Keriman arrived back in Istanbul to an uproarious welcome. She toured the nation, greeted at each stop with an enthusiasm that rivaled only that shown for President Mustafa Kemal himself. She was invited to appear in a film but refused. Honor demanded otherwise, she said. She eventually married, started a family, and became a celebrated symbol of Kemalist virtue. Pageant participants would pay a ritual visit to her for decades to come. She always rejected the label of beauty maven and insisted that the competition had been an exhibition of female emancipation and Turkish modernity.

Two years after her victory in Belgium, when Turks were required by law to take surnames, Mustafa Kemal announced that Keriman’s would be Ece—meaning Queen. It remained the family name thereafter. Halide Edip was still on the lecture circuit abroad, but Turkey’s most famous feminist had already been eclipsed by a person who had become both the republic’s most recognizable woman and, for an instant, the world’s. When Istanbul’s commuters drove along the coast road near the Bosphorus, past Keriman’s old family home, they found themselves traveling on a street that had been renamed Queen Avenue in her honor.