You Have No Idea: A Famous Daughter, Her No-Nonsense Mother, and How They Survived Pageants, Hollywood, Love, Loss (6 page)

It was surreal. Nine months earlier, I’d had my picture taken with Dan Rather. Now I’m an “important” news story—wedged right in between presidential coverage. I was superseding campaign stories! I stared in awe, thinking,
Whoa, this isn’t me. I am watching this story just like everyone else, waiting to see what happens next.

What
would
happen next?

That isn’t to say it wasn’t traumatic. It was all painful, embarrassing, and miserable. But distancing myself from the events helped me cope. It allowed me to do what I do best—execute. I had a speech I was going to deliver and I was going to do it perfectly. That was the task, the part, the monologue. I had to perform flawlessly without breaking down. I kept saying, “Just motor through the speech and move on.” After all, that’s what we Williamses do. We move on. We don’t obsess. We don’t cry in our rooms for days. We figure out what’s next. We survive.

Vanessa, now look what you’ve done.

I read my speech. I stuck to the words written on the page.
Ramon and Dennis structured it beautifully and with no ambiguity.

“
The potential harm to the pageant, and the deep division that a bitter fight may cause, has convinced me that I must relinquish my title as Miss America.…
”

There were gasps and
no!
s along with the scribbling of notes and the pops of more and more flashbulbs.

There were a lot of people—even journalists, who were supposed to be impartial—who didn’t want me to resign. My parents and friends thought I should fight. At first I felt the same way. As far as I was concerned, I’d done nothing wrong. I hadn’t even thought about the photos when I signed on to the pageant; there’s no clause that says, “No nude pictures.” Looking back, I had signed a contract that had some guarantee that I hadn’t committed any acts of moral turpitude. Had I committed such an act? I didn’t think so.

The last few days had been absolutely insane. Three days earlier, July 20, I had been in Little Rock, Arkansas, at a corporate event for Gillette. I signed autographs at a local drugstore, where young black mothers and grandmothers lined up with their daughters and granddaughters, waiting to shake my hand and hug me as the first black Miss America.

“My little girls know they can do this because of you. Thank you for being a great role model,” these mothers and grandmothers said.

I smiled, cringing inside. Would they still feel that way when the photos came out?

After the event, Midge Stevenson, one of the chaperones who’d been assigned to me after I’d won Miss America, raced toward me, looking very upset and confused. She had no idea what was going on.

“Your lawyer wants you to call him as soon as possible. He told me to tell you the news is about to break all over.”

I called Dennis. He said that the press had just gotten advance copies of
Penthouse
’s September issue. He said I was on the cover
standing next to George Burns (I’d had my photo taken with him at his eighty-eighth birthday party six months before).

The caption read:
OH GOD, SHE’S NUDE!

This was 1984, so the news wasn’t as lightning fast as it is today. Still, the story would be all over the place in a matter of hours. It would be the headline in the morning newspapers. I didn’t know it then, but in just a little while I’d go from being the first black Miss America to, as the tabloids would proclaim:
VANESSA THE UNDRESSA AND MESS AMERICA
.

That night, I attended a dinner with a bunch of Gillette executives. My blood pressure was through the roof. The news was still hours from breaking, so I smiled and acted like everything was fine. I had no appetite and moved my food around the plate but couldn’t eat.

The next morning there was a knock on my door. The waiter who had brought breakfast to my hotel room told me that all the halls and exits were filled with reporters. Midge and I had to get out of there as fast as possible. Midge made a few phone calls. She arranged our flights and car service. But there was no way to sneak out of the hotel. We had to make a run for it.

“Just put your head down and keep moving,” she said. “Don’t stop for anything. Ignore the reporters.”

There were no secret back exits, so we just blew through the crowd, right into the lobby, and raced to the awaiting car.

We were chased all the way to the airport by the paparazzi. A man with a long lens in a jeep was on our tail as we sped, changed lanes, took side streets. We tried to lose him, but he stayed next to us, shooting away. We drove onto the tarmac and climbed up the steps to the plane—without going through security. That was crazy VIP service!

It was an out-of-body experience.

Finally we boarded the TWA plane that would take us to St.
Louis, where we’d transfer to a flight heading for New York. Midge and I were settling in our first-class seats, trying to catch our breath.

“I don’t believe this,” I said as the plane took off.

A few minutes later, the flight attendant announced that we could unbuckle our seatbelts. Suddenly, the guy across from me pulled out a big video camera and turned it on: “Vanessa, how about a comment?” he said. He was part of a crew from CBS News that had somehow found out my itinerary—before I even knew what it was!

Midge put her hands in front of the lens. “Stop it,” she yelled. I turned my head and faced the window.

The back of my head was an image that made it to the news that night.

Earlier that day, Albert Marks, the pageant chairman, had publicly requested my resignation within seventy-two hours. He didn’t call me personally; he told every media outlet instead.

Should I resign? Should I let them dethrone me? Should I fight?

As much as I had seen Miss America as a temporary interruption to my goals, I had taken it seriously and given it my all. I’d done more appearances than any other Miss America in the pageant’s history. I’d shown up at all the scheduled events, but I also did a lot of extra events in the black community. It was double-duty and exhausting. I felt like I’d done a really good job at it all. I had six weeks to go. Shouldn’t I expect some loyalty from the pageant?

My father was furious. “They have no right to do this to you,” he said. My father hated the injustice of it all. Fairness was a big part of his character. He believed they had no case against me. My mom agreed. They were my biggest champions and I didn’t want to disappoint them. I wanted to fight, too, but was it worth it? It had become so much bigger than what it was. It had been transformed into a racial issue. Some black folks were saying, “Of course—she’s black, so they’re trying to get rid of her. We should have seen this coming. It’s a conspiracy. They planned this all along.”

After the press conference I went into hiding. I stayed with Dennis and his family just down the street from my parents’ home, while hundreds of photographers and reporters were camped in front of my house. I was on practically every cover of the
Daily News
and the
New York Post
and other newspapers across the country.

One day, my dad picked me up from the Dowdells’ to see how I was handling everything mentally. I remember his somber expression.

“Well, you really blew it, Ness,” he said.

“I know, Dad.”

There wasn’t any rage or anger in his voice. It was almost matter-of-fact. My dad had been accustomed to my mistakes, but here was a mistake on a grand scale. Here was a mistake he and my mom had never in their wildest dreams imagined. There was almost a sense of humor to his words. He seemed to be telling me,
It’s you and me against the world. We’re in this together. But wow, this is big—even for you.

I wouldn’t have been able to power through this if it hadn’t been for my parents. I never received any judgment from either of them. I never got “How could you?” “What were you thinking?”(Although I’m sure that’s what they were thinking.) It was more like “Holy smokes—this is a doozy. How are we going to get through this? Well, no matter—we’ll get through this!”

Dennis had hired a young black publicist from Los Angeles to help write my speech and plan my strategy. I was at the kitchen table when this handsome thirtyish man with a big, thick beard and curly hair introduced himself. He’d just taken the red-eye.

“I’m Ramon Hervey. I’m here to help you get through this,” he said.

I thought,
Oh God, could he be any more L.A., with his Hawaiian shirt and Girbaud jeans?

We sat down to work out a speech and decide whether or not I should resign or fight. We discussed it for hours. The lawyers had to incorporate their notes into the speech. Ramon said no matter what I decided, if I was holding a press conference, the speech would be the speech of my career.

“You have to say something that’s meaningful. What you say in front of these journalists has to last forever,” Ramon said. “No matter what you do for the rest of your life, this will be the most important speech you’ll ever give.”

He said I could be a footnote in history or I could tell the world that yes, I’m sorry this happened, but I’m not done. I’ll be back. This is an embarrassing episode, but it doesn’t define who I am and it doesn’t take away from what I’ll be. Once the dust settled, I would be seen for more than this episode. There were plenty of opportunities awaiting me. This experience was only a detour.

For hours and hours Ramon worked on the speech. We decided to hold the press conference on the final hour of the pageant’s seventy-two-hour window. I couldn’t eat or sleep. We went back and forth. Resign? Fight? No! Yes! When we had only about an hour until the conference, I decided to resign. Ramon quickly rewrote a few lines of the speech.

And here I was, motoring on:
“It has never been and it is not my desire to injure in any way the Miss America title or pageant.”

My reign had been filled with highs and lows. From the start it was never typical. I hadn’t planned to win, so I never thought,
If I win, what happens next? What’s my itinerary? What’s expected of me? What will I be asked? Can I handle it?

“Are you pro-choice? Pro ERA?” These were the rapid-fire questions reporters asked moments after I won.

“Yes. Yes,” I answered. I wanted to establish myself as a modern woman who believed in equality, who believed in a woman’s right
to choose. I didn’t have the standard Miss America patter down. My responses were considered pretty scandalous at the time. No Miss America had ever said anything like that before. But I was talking from my heart, not from a script. I was considered this extremely liberal New Yorker. But that’s who I was at twenty.

“Name your favorite designers.”

Designers? I wish I had money for designer clothes! Back then I worked and shopped at Discovery in Fashion on Route 117 in Bedford. There was a five-dollar rack and a ten-dollar rack. That was as designer as it got for me.

A foreign journalist explained, “If anyone asks you who your favorite designer is, always go for the Italian ones because they’re the best.”

Some people assumed I was from the “projects.” I found out years later that the night I was crowned, Mary Ann Mobley, a former Miss America from Mississippi, had pulled my soon-to-be chaperone Midge Stevenson to the side and said, “Are you ready to go to Harlem now?” She knew nothing about me—she just thought that because I’m black, I must have been from a dangerous part of the inner city. Her husband, Gary Collins, was the host the year I won and sang to me “Miss America, You’re Beautiful.” That must have killed her.

The most heartbreaking part for me was the reaction from some black people. I had made history by toppling a barrier, but for some, winning wouldn’t suffice. Some didn’t think I was black enough. “She is light-skinned and light-eyed.” “She’s not from the hood.” “She’s not really black.”

I come from a black mother and a black father. I have black grandparents on both sides. And that’s who I am. I live the black experience every day because I’m a black woman born in America!

Then the next month, the New York
Daily News
ran a photo of Bruce and me having lunch at Maxwell’s Plum—and the response
was “
Oh my God! She has a white boyfriend!
” Here we go again with the barrage of angry phone calls and letters.

“You’re a disgrace to your race,” one letter sent to my parents’ home said. “How can you represent black America with a white boyfriend? How can you screw a member of the white master race?”

I was invited to speak at Lincoln University, a small black college in Pennsylvania. During the question and answer period, one young brother, my age, asked why I didn’t date black men. I did date black men. My first boyfriend, Joe, was black.

That taught me that you can’t please everyone and no one really knows who you are through headlines, blurbs, and media sound bites.

The weekend I won had been a real whirlwind. I went from Atlantic City to New York City, and stayed in a suite at the Plaza Hotel, a legendary landmark, to kick off my first night on the road. On Monday, my parents; my brother, Chris; and I were interviewed by David Hartman on
Good Morning America
. I had a photo shoot in front of the Plaza by the big fountain with the statue of Pomona, the Roman goddess of orchards.

Then that Monday night, I was exhausted and ready to flop in my hotel room, so I turned on
The Tonight Show
to unwind. That’s when I heard my name. Johnny Carson was talking about me in his monologue!

“Did you hear we have the first black Miss America? I bet you didn’t know that Mr. T was one of the judges.”

Wow—racist much? That hurt.

I stared at the television and thought,
That’s so screwed up
. It was like a little punch to the gut. I wasn’t stung by his comment, but it was a surprise. I called my mom. “Did you hear that?”

“Of course.” My mom always has her radar on for comments like this. I knew she’d just put Johnny Carson on “the List”—it was her
growing collection of people who’d done something unforgivable, at least in her eyes.