Veteran reporter Doreen Levin has been intrigued by the Miss South Africa beauty pageant since first covering the event in 1972 Rachel Martens ‘The first Miss South Africa competition I attended was held at the Johannesburg City Hall,” recalls Doreen Levin, wryly adding that much of the evening was spent carrying messages for irate performers who couldn’t get on to the stage.
It was an assignment that, in her own words, she “absolutely adored” and the following year, in 1973, she was chosen to accompany Shelley Latham to the Miss World pageant in London.
Going on to cover the Miss South Africa pageant 18 times and accompany eight of the winners abroad, Levin quickly became regarded as an expert on the subject. “People suddenly decided that I was an authority,” she says. “And I wasn’t.” But the endless stream of questions (“Who was that girl who ..?”) prompted Levin to find out what the answers were.
“I love research,” she says, “and having started out finding information on all the winners in the Seventies, it soon expanded to the pageants of the Fifties and Sixties. Then one of the Miss South Africa committee members told me about the Miss Union competition in 1910 and I suddenly realised that any girl who went overseas representing South Africa was, in fact, a Miss South Africa.”
Levin’s research began with a file at the Sunday Times, on beauty pageants, but when the file went missing (it was either lost, destroyed or sent to an unknown museum archive), Levin sat in the Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria libraries, paging through old newspapers and women’s magazines for clues.
As her research expanded, families or relatives of past winners would occasionally contact Levin and supply her with valuable information. “I’ve been doing this, in my spare time, for more than 20 years,” Levin says, “and the tragedy is that I’d often find people and then lose them again when they moved.”
Undaunted, Levin’s investigation has taken her as far as the Missing Persons Bureau in Australia, where she successfully tracked down a past winner.
While the nature of beauty pageants has changed significantly over the years, Levin is still an attentive observer.
“My individual choice is not usually the one who wins … I see things that other people don’t see. The only time I have been completely stunned by a contestant’s beauty was when I saw Anneline Kriel. I knew that she would go on to become Miss South Africa, and Miss World.”
The years of observation have also yielded some valuable insights. “Some people have a fixation about being beautiful, which they think means looking a certain way. But they eventually learn it isn’t so,” she muses. “Those with real, enduring beauty have something about them … an essence … like a perfume. You’ve either got it or you haven’t.”
People who would like to contribute information to Doreen Levin’s book can write to her at PO Box 46290, Orange Grove, 2119