HUNGARIAN BEAUTIES BARE FOR HOMELAND

By Gabriel Ronay
The Sunday Times, London

Glamor and profit have become compatible in reformist Hungary, which is poised to become the first Warsaw pact country to hold a western-style beauty contest. Thousands of girls eager to enter the contest, which will be held later this year, have inundated the organizers, the staterun advertising agency Magyar Media, with their photographs and vital statistics.

According to the rules, anyone who is at least 5 feet 3 inches tall can join the Miss Hungary contest. In their eagerness to break into the Western beauty circuit and raise the competition to international standards, the organizers have decided to let professional models take part along side the amateurs. This summer there will be four elimination contests in the provinces and two in the capital.

A delicate subject

The degree of nudity and open commercial exploitation of the finalists had to be considered with special care by the organizers. Not long ago the party-controlled media described the Miss World contest as "an exercise in commercial exploitation of feminine beauty", and some journals have even compared the London contest to "the corralling of cattle for the market". Some hard-line party officials, appalled by the "vulgar commercialism" of the forthcoming Hungarian contest, have pointed to the Chinese Human Beauty Pageant, held in Canton in March, as a preferable alternative. There was, they point out, no profit motive or commercial exploitation. Contestants in China had to wear high-necked dresses instead of disporting themselves in bikinis, and they were judged not merely on their vital statistics but had to sing and answer general knowledge questions. The organizers of the Miss Hungary contest, however, do not deny that they see the selection of the country's first beauty queen since the war as a hard-currency-yielding exercise. According to Dr. Istvan Fodros,, director of Magar Media, the purpose of the contest is, first and foremost, commercial.

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