A Fight to Be Taken Seriously

After her acquittal in the bribery case she retired to a quiet private life, remaining mostly out of public view and devoting herself to charities. In one instance she pledged $1.1 million to the building of the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in Battery Park City.

She is survived by her daughter. Complete information on her survivors was not available.

Ms. Myerson had expressed ambivalence about her life as she was living it. In her 1990 book, “Queen Bess: An Unauthorized Biography of Bess Myerson,” the journalist Jennifer Preston, who covered the trial for Newsday and later worked for The New York Times, recounted a moment during the “Bess Mess” when Ms. Myerson turned to a wealthy Jewish man at a dinner party and said, “I should have married someone like you at 24 and moved to Scarsdale.”

Ms. Myerson spoke of her fight to be taken seriously as an intelligent, educated woman and bristled at being stamped indelibly as “a former Miss America.” In 1995, she pointedly stayed away from the pageant’s 75th anniversary celebration in Atlantic City.

“People asked me, ‘Are you going to the pageant?’ ” Ms. Myerson told The Times. “And I said: ‘Are you kidding?’ It’s totally irrelevant.”

Yet in 1980, asked if she would compete for the Miss America title if she had her life to live over again, she replied: “Being the same girl from the Bronx that I was then? Having a great desire to be a concert pianist and not having the money to buy a big black Steinway piano? I sure would.”

But would she let her daughter do it, she asked herself rhetorically. “No!” she said. “I’ve got the money to buy her a piano.”