A Beauty Queen, But For Whom?

Every picture of JonBenet Ramsey shows a child in motion, a little bird that never lights.

To watch the 6-year-old beauty queen, slain in her Boulder, Colo., home the day after Christmas, is to become vicariously exhausted. Now she’s dancing. Now she’s singing. Now she’s twirling a hula hoop, wearing a tot-size aerobics costume. Now she’s strutting in a sophisticated black and white dress and matching chapeau, smiling, trying hard to please.

Maybe trying too hard. Smile for the video camera, honey. You’re a winner!

The images of JonBenet’s face, painted in grown-up makeup and circled in carefully crafted blond ringlets, are haunting in their revelation of a child-made-woman, like a rosebud plunged into hot water and forced to bloom. This was no 6-year-old. She had an old soul.

As with other child stars, it’s unlikely JonBenet chose her career. Prodigies are made, not born, and it’s parents who make them.

Tennis star Andre Agassi’s father put a pingpong paddle in his baby son’s crib and taught the infant to swat at suspended balls. In 1992, Agassi swatted his way to a Wimbledon championship.

Even exemplary young golfer Tiger Woods began puttering around as a toddler, wielding miniature clubs as he followed his dad to the driving range, parlaying miniature aspirations into maximum destiny.

What was supposed to be JonBenet’s destiny? America’s darling, perhaps. This country still seeks another Shirley Temple, still tells every little boy he can grow up to be president and every little girl she can grow up to be Miss America.

Baby beauty pageants send shudders up the spine in 1,000-volt jolts. Anyone who has ever watched a documentary on these contests has been witness to parents living through their children with rogue pride and misplaced ambitions.

Little girls are preened, coached and cajoled on their way to the runway, tarted up in cosmetics and frothy dresses, dancing like marionettes at the pleasure of their parents, preserved in amber from one pageant to the next lest they muss their childhoods.

Childhoods are meant to be mussed. They are supposed to be rolled in sandboxes and smeared with peanut butter and jelly, licked in the face by muddy dogs. JonBenet doesn’t look as if she was ever muddy or mussed. She was too busy dancing, too busy pleasing.

The saddest revelation of her case came from the autopsy, which indicated she had been sexually molested before her skull was fractured and she was strangled with cording. JonBenet’s last act on Earth, it seems, was to have once more served at the pleasure of an adult. Her final performance brought the curtain down on her life. Santa Claus was barely out of the chimney before she was extinguished.

If JonBenet led a strange, short life, she surely suffered an even stranger death, one still cloaked in mystery. Homicide detectives are mostly being held at bay while the parents let their hired media consultant do the talking for them.

It’s unwise and unkind to judge the grieving process of heartsick families, but forgive me for being uncomfortable when parents think to hire a media consultant in the wake of the death of their child.

Society embraces the norm and suspects the unconventional. If nothing else, this case is unconventional.

Some in Boulder are charging that the police are treating the Ramseys delicately because they are wealthy. Certainly a less prominent family would suffer the wrath and the search warrants of an unrestrained investigation.

JonBenet’s murder happened two weeks ago. Since then, John and Patricia Ramsey have retained attorneys. They have engaged private investigators. They hired the media consultant. But Boulder police, trying to unravel the mystery of their only murder in 1996, are still negotiating their first extended interview.

According to one account, police consider a conversation with the Ramseys “an important aspect” of the investigation. This is what we call an understatement.

These tragedies have such ripple effects, victimizing not only families and friends but those outside the immediate circle of grief as well. Children at JonBenet’s elementary school met with counselors who tried to explain why their friend isn’t coming back to class.

Children so young don’t understand the concept of death. Here’s what to tell them:

JonBenet Ramsey has stopped dancing. The beauty queen has come to rest. The little bird can land.

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