PLAYING AT PAGEANTS

By now, the surreal videotapes have become hauntingly familiar. Look at the face: the huge, inviting mascaraed eyes, the fluttering false lashes, the layers of professionally applied makeup, the highlighted, upswept hair. Look at the clothes: the hand-stitched gowns, the Princess Di chapeaus, the high heels. Then do a double take over the teensy stick-figure bodies and the immature voices belting out God Bless America and Tomorrow. Like some human optical illusion, JonBenet Ramsey and her besequinned fellow beauty-pageant contestants are not in fact fully developed adults. They are pint-size little women often done up like trick ponies.

Nearly three weeks into the investigation of the murder of six-year-old JonBenet, the Little Miss Colorado whose battered body was found in the basement of her parent's Boulder home the day after Christmas, the mystery of her death has only become more confusing. Boulder police have not named a suspect, while JonBenet's parents, John and Patricia, are now communicating with investigators only through their lawyers and a media consultant. And as a side effect of the intense scrutiny the case is receiving, JonBenet's world--the glittering, multimillion-dollar world of children's beauty pageants--has been thrust onto a stage of its own.

JonBenet was a veteran of dozens of contests, a confident and adorable pixie who kept scrapbooks documenting her pageant appearances. Those who saw her perform say she was a force to be reckoned with. "She was such a natural," says LaDonna Griego, director of the Colorado program for the All Star Kids organization, based in Dallas. "But she was untouched by it. When JonBenet won, she was just as giddy as the first time, and she was just as happy, it seemed, to be an alternate. At the Christmas pageant, she sat there and just said to herself, 'Please call my name.' When they called it, her face lit up."

For JonBenet and her mother, Patricia Ramsey, a former Miss West Virginia, the contests may have been good fun. For pageant organizers, they often mean big bucks. Throughout the country, especially in California and the South, a complex network of pageant systems, as they are called, make up the circuit, with pageants sponsored by the likes of Hawaiian Tropic and Beauty Unlimited held in shopping malls and hotel ballrooms. According to Ted Cohen, editor of the International Directory of Pageants, there are about 3,000 pageants a year in the U.S., 500 of which cater to the preteen-and-under set. Children could compete every weekend, if they and their parents had the energy and resources. "There's a new pageant popping up all the time," says V. J. LaCour, publisher of Pageant Life, a Sacramento quarterly with a circulation of 60,000. "The reason for their existence is money. If the pageant makes a profit, it will continue. If not, it's gone tomorrow." Cohen says organizers of the larger statewide contests clear at least $100,000 per pageant.