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Chapter 8

Jacqueline Bennett Carter

Elkin, September 1978

Jacqueline Bennett had competed in 104 pageants over the course of her adolescence. As a beautiful child growing up in Kentucky, she was well suited to a life on display, her looks a source of power. Her delicate features, toasted-brown skin, and sweet speaking voice captivated judges all over the state. She won seventy-nine titles in total. (She didn’t count the ones where she was first runner-up.) Initially, the pageants had helped her develop poise and grace, plus they gave her the opportunity to earn cash prizes. It was somewhat expected that Jacqueline might lose interest in the whole thing, but as it turned out, she loved the stage and was a natural.

Her proclivity for performing netted an unforeseen windfall. From ages four to ten, her parents pocketed her earnings, using the extra cash flow to support their family, but after age eleven, she directly received prize money and could use it at her own discretion. Her parents didn’t object to this since her elder siblings began working and supporting themselves in their own ways. They opened a bank account for her at the local Black bank, and she deposited checks regularly, almost as if she were an adult with a full-time job. Like the husband she would marry later, she was self-made.

At first, the freedom she found from earning money was intoxicating. Unsurprisingly, she spent a lot of her cash on things like candy and toys. The excitement of spending on such frivolities eventually wore off, though, because how many Heath bars can one girl eat?

The Bennett family had been in Kentucky for several generations, first as enslaved people, then as sharecroppers, and then as independent farmers. By the time Jacqueline was born, there was still a lot of land but not much good farming left. Her father, Roy Bennett, sought out new work by graduating from wheat farming to working at a bourbon distillery plant. This required a ninety-minute commute each way daily. Her mother, Cecile Bennett, stayed home with their five children.

Of her four siblings, Jacqueline was the youngest, and therefore fighting for attention came quite naturally to her. Her mother enrolled her in pageants to give her daughter something to do and provide a proper outlet for her energy and theatrics.

As her career in pageants progressed, Jacqueline became more aware about the kinds of things that made a girl a beauty queen. Good posture was high on the list of traits that pageant girls had, as was the dismissal of pain of any kind. When the hair relaxer burned and the smell of lye made her shake, she just set her jaw. When she learned to walk in heels, her feet swelling with the pressure, she smiled through it. When the stage lights blinded her and made her sweat, she willed herself to be cool, which was why she was a winner.

She constantly observed older pageant winners, watching how brilliant the crystal crowns looked on top of their heads, a white-satin sash placed ceremoniously over a diaphanous gown. She wanted to siphon off their beauty and mannerisms for herself, and so she did—well, at least in her head. She rehearsed in the mirror constantly. She was self-possessed and careful. She spoke slowly, clearly. She trained herself out of her natural southern accent with diligent practice and kept her face and body blemish-free. She didn’t run. She didn’t jump. She didn’t swear or make choices that would sabotage her looks. She sacrificed. She knew even at a young age that becoming Miss America was a long shot, but she still had goals.

Her biggest goal was to get the hell out of Kentucky. She imagined that her parents had given her such a long French name so that she could be destined for a life that required an elegant assembly of letters. When she first learned to write, she loved to put extra flourish on the J and the q , training for signing the autographs that she knew people would want from her eventually. She never went by Jackie. Her full name was the promise of what she would become.

At some point, she decided what she could become was an actress. The Bennett family could agree on a single splurge and that was a television set, an ideal investment of both time and money. Nothing could nullify the energy of five kids like a television. Thus, the Bennetts were TV people, not like the people on the TV but the people who watched it. The local channels in Kentucky were lacking, but the national channels had everything. The sitcom Julia , starring Diahann Carroll, became a sort of beacon for Jacqueline. Jacqueline, more than any of her siblings, was mesmerized by the women that she saw onscreen, fascinated to learn that it was all pretend. The people within the tiny box were acting . She did a variation of that on pageant stages almost every single weekend to an enraptured audience. Surely she could be one of those people one day.

Jacqueline had a single friend on the pageant circuit who was also a classmate, Helen Hudson, a chubby girl with family money who participated in pageant theater for status, a validation that her parents wanted. Helen wore her goodness as unashamedly as a baby takes a fall when learning to walk. Helen’s father owned the Black funeral home in town and, well, death was good business, a reliable one. Helen never won any titles because congeniality does not make a queen. Helen was uncoordinated, undisciplined, spent too much time giggling with other contestants, and despite having everything needed to succeed at her disposal, she never learned to respond to the interview questions in the way that she was supposed to.

For example, during a regional competition, she was asked, “In what ways have philosophers like Confucius contributed to society?” To which Helen earnestly delivered the response, “Confucius invented confusion, and that probably made a lot of people happy because they felt confused before that but didn’t know what it was.”

Onstage that day, Jacqueline did not react while other eyes were still on her, but she did privately marvel at how her friend rambled like she had nothing to lose. Helen could play like she had nothing to lose because she didn’t. She would not be changed by a win or a loss; she would still be the same person with the same position with or without a crown.

Jacqueline remained smiling, patiently waiting for her own question, which was, “Where would you like to travel in the world and why?” Jacqueline responded by saying, “I would love to experience as much of the world as I can. I think it is a beautiful thing to be able to learn from other cultures and to be able to exchange information and customs. I look forward to going to places in South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. I probably don’t want to go to Antarctica because it’s very cold there.”

“I just do this pageant stuff because it’s fun,” Helen said cheerfully backstage at the next pageant, unfazed by her poor performance while she flooded her orbit with a cloud of exhaust from a can of hairspray.

“Well, I’m doing it because it’s good acting experience,” Jacqueline replied in her best grown-up voice, fighting the urge to cough.

Her high school didn’t have a theater offering. The Bennetts’ church did, though, limiting Jacqueline’s repertoire to religious texts. There were only so many years that she could exclaim “He has risen!” with a new inflection before it became stale. (According to her personal calculations, the limit was three.) She also joined the choir and developed the ability to float her voice above the others, demanding that she be heard.

Since she couldn’t be in secular plays, she found a way to improve her acting abilities on her own, purchasing screenplays at the local used bookstore, with Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof becoming personal favorites. Even though she’d learned many of the songs from Porgy and Bess in elementary school, she got records and cassette tapes of other Broadway shows like My Fair Lady and West Side Story so that she could learn their lyrics and hear them with an orchestra. She closed her eyes and tried to envision what they would look like as real productions. She practiced crying and laughing on cue. Every chance she got, she found an opportunity to perform. She liked to experiment by giving new people a fake name when she met them just to see if they would believe her.

Helen hated to be a bystander when this was happening, feeling caught off guard when Jacqueline decided on a new outlandish narrative, like when she told people she was an orphan from Illinois, or that her father was a famous surgeon, or that she was concussed from being kicked in the head by a horse.

“You can’t just lie to people,” Helen would say after being forced to corroborate to a couple of strangers that Jacqueline was Helen’s cousin visiting from out of state.

“Why not?” Jacqueline replied. “People lie every day. Look at Norma. You think she has a real headache every single PE class? No way. She just says that so she won’t have to run around, and we all know it and don’t say anything. At least my stories are interesting. And just so you know, I’m not lying . I’m acting.”

“Well, it feels like the same thing, and I don’t know what to do when it happens. I never know who you’re going to be,” Helen complained, her voice bordering on whiny.

“I’m always me,” Jacqueline said. “Mostly.”

Helen, who was more religious than Jacqueline, planned to marry immediately after high school, very certain that her future would start the day she became a mother. Jacqueline occasionally flirted with the idea of being more like Helen: moving closer to Louisville, finding a man to be with, raising kids of her own. It might be easier but the thought of being bored and isolated and with child made her want to jump through her skin. She knew her destiny was elsewhere.

Jacqueline’s plan was to make it appear to her family that she was applying to junior colleges and endeavoring to pay the tuition with the money from her pageant wins. But the real plan was to use all the money to get to New York City however she could. She picked New York because it was geographically closer than Los Angeles, and therefore the bus fare would allow for her to still have funds left over to get a place to live and food to eat.

In New York, she would have to work, and it would be challenging, perhaps difficult. But from what she’d read, many actresses began their careers in the service industry. She was prepared to pay her dues to earn her place in a community where the action happened in the moment, where commitment to a character could happen unashamedly, nakedly, in front of a captivated audience. The dreams of what would be empowered her. Her imagination was powerful, but she hadn’t quite imagined exactly what she would be giving up in order to have the life that she got.