Phyllis George: Competing in the Talk-Show Pageant

NEW YORK —  There she is, Miss America 1971, striding into her sumptuous Fifth Avenue apartment and announcing, with a frown, that something smells, yuck, like fish.

It does?

Her living room, overlooking Central Park, is abloom with fragrant flowers. A perfumed candle flickers in the air-conditioned air. None of the five people awaiting the arrival of Phyllis George had complained of fishy odors, so perhaps this is some olfactory version of “The Princess and the Pea.”

At 49, George is a rarefied presence even in the pantheon of former Miss Americas, queen of queens when it comes to parlaying momentary fame into lasting celebrity and enduring fortune.

Especially fortune.

“I’ve always said timing is everything in life,” says the former beauty queen, having settled into an L-shaped beige couch, the elusive fishy odor forgotten. “You lose some, you win some.”

But losses have been in short supply lately, and timing once again is on George’s side. She is co-host of “Woman’s Day,” half an hour devoted to happy chat and light, women-oriented features on Pax TV, a broadcast network that debuted Aug. 31. Based on the magazine of the same name, the show pairs George with Sloan Lindemann, 30, a former Manhattan prosecutor. Some segments focus on health; others are devoted to daytime froth: eyebrow tweezing, doggie spas, apple know-how and “how to turn every evening into a night of romance and passion.”

“I just thought this looked like a no-brainer,” George says of the show. Her “Woman’s Day” role is not exactly a comeback, she says, since “I’ve always been kind of out there”--”Candid Camera,” CBS Sports, first lady of Kentucky, chicken (she developed a supermarket product called Chicken by George), crafts development and now back to TV.

“But it is kind of like coming home again, to my first love.”

Cameras catch her fingering her notes and fidgeting a little, and once, when she was supposed to segue from a cooking segment to a commercial break, she was caught with her mouth full of hot corn chowder. She gamely talked through it, and she can be counted on to laugh, hug, touch her guests and even succumb to the urge to tap-dance--not once but twice on one recent show.

On the show, “I can just be myself--for the first time, probably, in my career. You can say what you think, you can say what you feel; you do not have to pull it back in.”

So in introducing a segment on basic auto maintenance, she admitted she could “maybe fill up the car with gas in a full-service service station . . . and I know what a lug wrench is!”

At 30, co-host Lindemann is young enough to be her daughter; as a self-described “real serious New Yorker,” she is yin to George’s yang.

“But being a woman transcends all that,” Lindemann says. “Phyllis is the best part of my job. From the moment we met, we hit it off gangbusters. I don’t know if I should think of her as my sister, my mother, my cousin . . . but I clearly was related to her in another life. We spend the whole day laughing and giggling.”

“Woman’s Day” is taped without a studio audience on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, two shows one day, three the other. For the 26-week run, George is paid yet another salary fit for a queen, what one George associate calls the “high six figures.”

“And she’s worth every dime she charges,” says Michael Berman, president and chief operating officer of Hachette Productions Inc., which produces “Woman’s Day.” “She’s a household name and she’s good. Damn good.”

Berman, one of the co-founders of George magazine, had considered “dozens” of potential co-hosts before settling on a short list of three. He was having dinner at a Manhattan restaurant when in walked George, who had retained her star presence well into middle age.

Her name had come up before, Berman says, “but I hadn’t realized she’d moved back to New York, and the show was going to be produced in New York. The next morning I had the magazine do a quick survey, and she continued to score extremely well in relate-ability and likability.” So they had a meeting (George took her lawyer), there was good chemistry with Lindemann, George fit the demographic target (women ages 25 to 53) and the program debuted Aug. 31.

After her Miss America reign, George was briefly married to Hollywood producer Robert Evans. (In his unsparing memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” Evans has harsh words for almost everyone but George. “Her only fault,” he writes, “was in choosing me.”)

The Rev. Normal Vincent Peale presided over her second marriage to John Y. Brown, who had turned Kentucky Fried Chicken into an international success. Ten days after the nuptials, Brown announced his candidacy for governor of Kentucky. George helped him campaign, and he won a four-year term. They had two children and divorced after 19 years of marriage. Last month, Brown, 64, married Jill Roach, 38, a former Mrs. Kentucky.

After Brown’s term ended, George commuted to New York to work for CBS Sports and then “CBS Morning News.” After that debacle in 1985--she lasted eight months of a three-year contract to anchor the news program--George threw herself into mom-hood; her son, Lincoln, now 18, is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, and her daughter, Pamela, 14, just started boarding school in Virginia. George became an avid promoter and collector of Kentucky crafts--she’s the author of two crafts books and has a quilt book coming out next month--and also became what she calls a “mom-preneur,” founding Chicken by George, acquired by Hormel in 1989. George stayed on as spokeswoman.

George also stayed on the national radar screen by co-hosting Rose Bowl parades, Super Bowls, Miss America pageants and a crafts program on QVC, and by doing occasional interviews for the Nashville Network. One of her interview guests in 1994 was President Clinton.

George became acquainted with Clinton, Hillary and Chelsea when he was governor of Arkansas. The many framed pictures throughout her home contain several of the Clintons. They have stayed in touch.

George can’t bring herself to say she’s disappointed in the president or even that she feels let down by recent developments in Washington. “It’s very tough for me because they’re friends of mine,” she says.

“I’m still in denial. I just wonder why. I want to know . . . why? Don’t you?

“I am disappointed that Hillary has to go through this, and I worry about Chelsea, who’s the same age as my son. But mostly I’m sad. Just sad.”

Asked if she was interested in returning to the major networks, rather than a tiny, rerun-heavy start-up with limited viewership, George doesn’t answer directly.

“Television has changed so much,” she says. “It’s been so splintered by cable. . . . I’m very happy in this stage of my life.”

* “Woman’s Day” airs weekdays at 2 p.m on Pax TV.