The Wholesome, yet Exotic “Face of Jamaica”

Once she was crowned Miss World, Carol Joan Crawford became a global ambassador for her newly independent homeland. She acquiesced to pleas from the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) to continue her travels from London onward through Western Europe, where she promoted Jamaica in television, radio, and newspaper interviews. Crawford’s sudden global celebrity was a serendipitous development for the JTB, which saw continental Europeans as an untapped market for Jamaican tourism. Media dates in France, Belgium, and West Germany were already set for unveiling a new multimillion-dollar advertising campaign that starred another beauty queen, Marguerite LeWars, so Crawford’s attendance would assure even more attention.

A few months before Crawford’s victory, Marguerite LeWars took time off from her day job and sat for a photo shoot. The cameras focused on her facial features: framed with a subtle, inviting smile were her light brown skin, wide eyes, and straight hair—a combination that indicated her ancestral provenance of India, Africa, and Europe. Thus, when the new Miss World journeyed to towns like Hamburg, she sat for interviews at events under posters of Marguerite LeWars’s alluring visage accompanied by the headline, “The Face of Jamaica.”⁵ The JTB thereby offered potential visitors from Europe an enticing rendering of the new nation’s racial composition: it was light-skinned, straight-haired, and female, as much European and South Asian as African. This combination, embodied in Carol Joan Crawford and Marguerite LeWars at these media events, could run the gamut from wholesome to exotic.

Indeed, a sharp dichotomy arose between domestic and international press reporting of Carol Joan Crawford’s victory and its implications for questions of race. As noted, Jamaica’s Gleaner saw a series of firsts in Crawford’s victory but resisted labeling Crawford as African-descended or Black. Instead, this child of Jamaica’s upper crust was portrayed just like any white, well-to-do aspiring beauty queen in England, the United States, or Canada. She even had a white idol with whom she corresponded and whom she sought to emulate, actress Joan Crawford, her namesake.⁶ This tidbit, coupled with the account of her bedroom furnished to American-girl standards, reflected a decidedly elite Jamaican narrative regarding race: that light-skinned Jamaicans had, in tandem with the country’s political independence, attained parity with whites.

To establish this claim more overtly, the Gleaner quoted the well-known London-based white businessman Billy Butlin, a judge for Miss World 1963. He offered a color-blind analysis of Crawford’s beauty, stating that she “looked so fresh and so simple. The kind of girl any man would be proud to have as his daughter and prouder still to have as his wife.”⁷ By embodying the wholesomeness of a perfect daughter and wife, Crawford effectively broke down the cosmopolitan world’s most intimate color line, the fear of miscegenation, on beauty’s largest stage. Thus, just as brown Jamaicans had clawed their way to equal recognition alongside whites in the island’s pageants before Crawford, they now had emulated this success more globally.⁸

Yet, a different racial narrative arose in media accounts in Europe and North America. Here, the fact of Crawford’s blackness frequently became the leitmotif. The Spanish magazine ¡Hola! conjured up Jamaica’s history of slavery in accounting for Crawford’s exquisite beauty, which the reporter found to be characteristic of “the beauty of a nation formed in large part by descendants of African slaves transported a few centuries earlier to cultivate sugar cane in the West Indies.” The reporter added, “There must be a bit of black blood in Carol Joan Crawford’s veins” to account for her unique beauty.⁹ London’s Daily Express also greeted Crawford’s victory with an imperialist trope that gestured to her mixed-race and African heritage, referring to her as the “exotic Miss Jamaica.”¹⁰ In turn, one American publication cast itself as proud of, rather than titillated by, Crawford’s African descent. The African American glossy magazine Jet was eager to embrace Crawford’s victory as one for all African-descended women. Even so, the chosen headline was one that Crawford herself and many other light-skinned Jamaicans would likely have disavowed: “Negro Beauty Queen Wins Miss World Crown.”¹¹ In labeling her as Negro, Jet employed America’s reductionist Jim Crow categories—one was either only white or only Black—in a way that ignored Jamaica’s complex racial and chromatic hierarchies.

In sum, while Jamaica’s Gleaner sought to cast Crawford’s victory as a deracializing moment, erasing her blackness while affirming her parity with Europe’s and America’s white cosmopolitans, the press accounts from outside Jamaica continued to foreground Crawford’s race: her “black blood,” her “exotic” nature, and her Jim Crow status as a “Negro.” The takeaway is that the cosmopolitan world’s cultural center (the West) and its periphery (the Global South) were apprehending Crawford’s race in different ways. Moreover, they were doing so with strikingly discordant attractions to Crawford’s mixed-race body.

The genteel readers of Jamaica’s Gleaner saw Crawford as an ideal ambassador of the nation, at least its lighter-skinned members, with such Jamaicans increasingly countenanced as ideal daughters and wives. Meanwhile, European and American audiences still saw Crawford as exotic and titillating, an example of imperialist societies’ attraction to non-white subjects, as noted by cultural theorists from Edward Said to Anne McClintock.¹² This dichotomy is significant. Like Crawford, the “face of Jamaica” whose future was closely linked with Air Jamaica stewardesses, Marguerite LeWars was also perceived simultaneously as a genteel ambassador for the new nation and as an erotically charged woman who was only a shade removed from her nation’s enslaved forebears.

Aviation and the “Face of Jamaica”

Marguerite LeWars always had two profound passions, beauty and aviation, which she successfully intertwined soon after completing high school in 1958 at one of the capital city’s elite institutions, Wolmer’s Girls School. She almost certainly knew Carol Joan Crawford, who was also enrolled there and just a couple of years her junior.¹³ Young Marguerite’s role model was her older sister Barbara, who also was poised to use her mixture of good looks, intelligence, and privileged background to become famous in her own right. But, while Barbara entered university to study English and theater, Marguerite was too impatient for studies. “I read many books and wanted to travel,” she noted, channeling Clare Boothe Luce’s assertion from 1943 that the youth of the world were yearning for mobility. In explaining how she signed on at BWIA in 1958, Marguerite added matter-of-factly, “the least expensive way to fly was to join the airlines.”¹⁴

Of course, for a Jamaican woman coming of age in the preindependence and pre-jet years, opportunities in aviation were exceptionally limited. BWIA was the only potential employer since neither BOAC nor Pan Am hired Jamaicans for anything but basic ground-based operations. Indeed, in 1958, American citizens of African descent were still banned from public-fronting positions with airlines in the United States, especially the in-flight positions of piloting and stewardessing. Until the NAACP pursued high-profile cases in the late 1950s on the part of aspiring Black pilots and flight attendants, Black Americans were channeled instead into positions like baggage handling and custodial work.

For Marguerite LeWars, however, BWIA did offer the chance to fly as a stewardess, and she would have followed through on that opportunity save for the opposition of her parents. Their compromise was that Marguerite worked as the closest approximation: a ground hostess who remained anchored on the terra firma of Kingston Airport while assisting needy customers. LeWars immediately found her passion: “After the first twenty-four hours I knew I was going to make it my career and started to plan how I was going to climb the ladder.”¹⁵

The young LeWars sisters were beautiful enough to attract national and international attention. Barbara ended up on the cover of Life magazine’s international edition in 1959, with reporters using her image and life story to emblematize what the cover headline termed “Jamaica’s new generation,” who were coming of age in a soon-to-be-independent state that was a “bustling paradise.”¹⁶ In the ensuing years as a career woman in corporate communications, Barbara fell in love with and married Jamaica’s most promising young politician, the future prime minister Michael Manley. Manley won his first election to parliament in 1967 during their brief marriage, though their relationship ended tragically and too quickly, when Barbara was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1968. Together they had one child, Sarah, whom the LeWars family helped to raise along with Michael and his future wife, Beverley Anderson Manley.¹⁷

Sarah Manley’s childhood memories of being raised by her grandmother, the same woman who raised Marguerite and Barbara, offers insight into how the LeWars family negotiated Jamaica’s racial politics, which preserved beauty as the exclusive domain of light-skinned women. After detailing how Gloria LeWars imposed strict regimens to help diminish Sarah’s African features—no sunbathing after 11:00 a.m. and before then only with heaps of sunscreen, nightly rituals of combing out the curls from her hair—Sarah added this about her grandmother:

I did not know then, and still work to unravel now, how these small rituals taught me from childhood about good and bad skin, good and bad hair, worth and worthlessness. She was, with each layer of Coppertone green, with each brush stroke, both creating and preserving my power, as an act of kindness and motherly love, not an act of cruelty. It was what she knew to be true of her world. My pale yellow skin, my hair without kinks, was my power.

But Jamaica was evolving in these years at the dawn of the Jet Age. Marguerite and her sister were unmistakably products of the preindependence era when yellow skin “was … power,” whereas their dark-skinned peer, Beverley Anderson Manley, who began helping to raise young Sarah after marrying the prime minister in 1972, had a different attitude toward race and beauty. At the Anderson Manley home, young Sarah could sunbathe to her heart’s content and leave the hairbrush at her grandmother’s. As Sarah registered this contrast: “The implication of this was that my ‘dark’ stepmother at the time either didn’t know how or didn’t care to raise me properly. She wanted to drag me down with her … [It was a] robbing of my birthright, my power, so traitorous, that my grandmother died never forgiving her for what she did to me.”¹⁸

Raised like her sister Barbara to safeguard the power of her light skin tone and to wield this power for her own benefit, Marguerite entered the light-skinned woman’s world of Jamaican beauty pageants in the late 1950s while holding down her job at BWIA. Her perseverance paid off in 1961, when she was selected to represent her local area of Kingston-Saint Andrew’s at the nationwide Miss Jamaica beauty contest, the last pageant to take place in Jamaica’s colonial era. As it happened, Warner Brothers’ Caribbean representatives were filming the event and created a feature-length documentary, which was then distributed to cinemas throughout Jamaica.¹⁹ Thus, when Marguerite LeWars was crowned Miss Jamaica, she also assumed the lead role in a local feature film. Her candidacy at the Miss World contest in Miami was not as successful as Carol Joan Crawford’s two years later, but it nonetheless broadened LeWars’s horizons and her exposure to local and global media.

Marguerite LeWars’s flirtation with the film industry deepened later in 1961, when Kingston and the island’s more serene beaches hosted the filming of Dr. No, the very first of British author Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories to be turned into a movie. LeWars caught the eye of Dr. No’s producers as they passed through Kingston’s airport and found the Miss World candidate assisting passengers in the terminal. They encouraged LeWars to try out for a small role, which did not proceed fully to plan. As she later explained, “They wanted me to try out for the part of a woman in a towel on a bed kissing a man … . I asked, ‘Who is this man?’ It was Sean Connery. I replied, ‘Well, I’ve never heard of him.’ And I stupidly said no.”²⁰ Instead, LeWars agreed to play a Chinese-Jamaican photographer and femme fatale, Annabel Chung, who encounters James Bond in a bar and tries to seduce him and throw him off the evil Dr. No’s track.

British author Ian Fleming was a longtime Jamaica resident, who spent part of his year in Jamaica at his estate famously named “Goldeneye.” Fleming originally wrote a plot for what became Dr. No as a television show to promote Jamaican tourism, doing so in cooperation with his close friends who ran the Jamaica Tourist Board. In the end, though, Dr. No, in both its book and film form, became a piece of Cold War drama rather than an appeal to vacation in Jamaica. The film placed Jamaica at the center of a struggle between a sinister Chinese-German criminal overlord and the heroic duo of Britain’s MI6 and the United States’ CIA, with James Bond leading the charge. The film’s plot played on Jamaica’s proximity to the home of the American space program in Florida, with Dr. No operating a radio signal from an island just off Jamaica’s north coast that was sabotaging NASA space launches.

For her scene opposite Sean Connery, Marguerite LeWars sported a stunning Chinese-inspired magenta silk dress (her character was coded as mixed-race Chinese to emulate the film’s main Chinese-German villain). This dress was, however, a bolder and more risqué choice than LeWars had worn as Miss Jamaica: not only was it Chinese-inspired but it was also suggestively tight everywhere. It was sleeveless, cut above the knees, and boasted a large slit up to the hipline. LeWars’s likeness appeared in many of the film’s promotional posters, which placed her abstract magenta-hued figure as the last in a line of rainbow-colored femmes fatales that appear in the movie. As such, she was introducing Jamaica’s elite, light-skinned beauty culture into venues that not even Carol Joan Crawford managed to enter. Indeed, Marguerite LeWars was fusing strands comprising contemporary notions of womanhood: she was a working woman, still traditionally beautiful, and she was boldly self-actualized as seductive. Marguerite LeWars thereby belonged more to the soon-to-be-unleashed era of Jamaican independence—and of Jet Age feminism—than to Jamaica’s colonial era. That said, she still relied on the colonial-era marker of light skin to open these doors of career, celebrity, and sexual agency.

The year 1963 was not only important for Jamaican women due to Carol Joan Crawford’s victory, but also due to Marguerite LeWars’s Hollywood debut. Dr. No premiered in Jamaican theaters that September, including a star-studded affair with music by the ska celebrity Byron Lee and, of course, Marguerite LeWars and her family sitting among the guests of honor. This premiere transpired a few weeks before the film’s official opening at London’s Pavilion Theatre on Piccadilly Circus on October 5, where stars Sean Connery and Ursula Andress would delight the crowd.²¹ While audiences looking for sexual titillation focused primarily on the famous scene when lead actress Andress rose out of the ocean sporting a white bikini while singing a calypso tune, much to the delight of the onlooking James Bond, Marguerite LeWars’s sexy and seductive portrayal of Annabel Chung assured Jamaican women that they also enjoyed access to this elite iteration of sexual desire. LeWars’s role in Dr. No also facilitated the tourist board’s choice that year to use her as the “face of Jamaica,” a campaign that ran all the way through 1967.²²

This was the cultural milieu into which the first Air Jamaica was launched on May 1, 1966. Recall that this version of the national airline was a joint venture with BWIA and BOAC that used these carriers’ planes, pilots, and stewardesses. Thus, when Marguerite LeWars—now known as Marguerite Kirkpatrick, thanks to her first marriage in 1965—switched her affiliation from BWIA to Air Jamaica in 1966, she became the airline’s first hostess, albeit one still confined to ground duties.²³ An Air Jamaica ad from 1966 showed an eagerness to cash in on her good looks, warm demeanor, and local fame, as it neatly conflated the ground hostess position with Kirkpatrick herself: instead of referring to her job title, the text simply states, “When you’re six years old, an airport can be a lonely place. That’s why we have Marguerite Kirkpatrick.”²⁴ By 1967, with the joint venture growing more successful, Air Jamaica added more ground hostesses and designated Kirkpatrick as their supervisor. Then, when the second Air Jamaica began hiring stewardesses of its own in 1968, she leaned on her decade of experience to become director of stewardesses. These women were selected and trained to fill Kirkpatrick’s own shoes: attractive, self-confident, composed under pressure, and sexually energized. These so-called “rare tropical birds” (the salacious name Air Jamaica’s first stewardesses were given) played their own roles as femmes fatales, akin to Marguerite LeWars when she starred as James Bond’s Annabel Chung and as the “face of Jamaica.”

Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick, Miss Jamaica 1961, shared much in common with Carol Joan Crawford, Miss World 1963. Both overlapped at an elite girl’s high school in the late 1950s, and both came from well-established, light-skinned elite families in Kingston. Carol Joan Crawford’s father ran a successful import-export firm, a source of income that allowed the family to settle into a spacious home next to one of Jamaica’s most glamourous addresses, the Devon House estate above the city of Kingston. Marguerite LeWars’s father was politically well-connected, as he served as town clerk of Kingston and ultimately as general manager of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association, both positions that gave him access to political and economic power brokers.²⁵

The most glaring difference between the two beauty queens is that Crawford proceeded from her victory at the Miss Jamaica pageant to win Miss World, while LeWars did not place in the global pageant’s final fifteen. Yet, a more subtle difference is also evident, one which is operative for this narrative: Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick embodied Jet Age feminism, an updated iteration of cosmopolitan womanhood that developed in tandem with the Jet Age. Carol Joan Crawford lived under her parents’ roof through at least 1964, and she worked at her father’s business only sporadically, between stints at modeling school. By 1966, around age twenty-three, Crawford was married and soon thereafter was raising children as a housewife. As such, Crawford—in the years before, during, and after her glorious run as Miss World—lacked the crucial markers that young, cosmopolitan women were embodying in the early 1960s. She possessed neither a career nor a reliable source of income in her own name, and, being always under the roof of a man, she also lacked the personal and sexual independence that became de rigueur for a new generation of empowered women.

Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick, however, possessed all the features of the Jet Age feminism that was percolating both in American society and in Jamaica, at least among a group of better-off women like LeWars Kirkpatrick. For her, no less than for Crawford, adulation came through her physical beauty. However, her path to becoming an empowered femme fatale coupled her beauty with greater independence. LeWars Kirkpatrick enjoyed a fulfilling career that combined responsibility with a penchant for feminine charm; a desire to travel widely (even if this was somewhat unfulfilled while working as a ground hostess); a flirtatious deployment of her sexuality to eventually secure a husband and, before such a commitment, to seduce the likes of Sean Connery; and the boldness to insist on keeping her career even after marriage. Kirkpatrick thereby served as a bridge from Jamaica’s preindependence, pre-jet norms for elite women to the postindependence, Jet Age norms that took root together with the launch of Air Jamaica’s first flight attendants in 1969.

This chapter leaves Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick right at the cusp of this moment: it is 1966, she is married, working as a ground stewardess for the first iteration of Air Jamaica, and still starring as the “face of Jamaica” in ads distributed across North America and Western Europe. At work, however, Kirkpatrick is chafing against the traditions of aviation from the pre-jet age, especially those dictating her ground hostess uniform, a derivative design that Air Jamaica adopted from the staid patterns of 1950s stewardesses. At any opportunity, Kirkpatrick buttonholed Air Jamaica executives, pointing to her simple white blouse, solid-colored skirt that fell below the knee, and dainty matching cap.

She begged for their approval to radically update the garb to fit the Jet Age, with the goal of following the innovators working for Dallas-based Braniff Airways: ad executive Mary Wells and famous fashion designer Emilio Pucci. Together, Wells and Pucci introduced the first colorful and ultramodern remake of stewardess uniforms. “Look, what Braniff did with their crazy coloured planes, plastic space helmets, boots and culottes,” Kirkpatrick confided when she finally convinced Air Jamaica executives to redo her ground hostess uniform in 1967 in modest but progressive ways, “It’s crazy, it’s great, but too flipped out for Jamaica.”²⁶ However, by 1969, with Kirkpatrick still at the helm, such novelties were no longer “too flipped out.” At that time, she finally won permission to create a uniform for Air Jamaica’s “rare tropical birds” that fully synced with the Jet Age feminism of the day.