Vanessa Williams: Don't Look Back

I have to ask, seeing as I have a genuine former Miss America in front of me, if the pageant isn't, in fact, a pretty corny event. Williams laughs, then says, tactfully, "The bottom line is that it's a small-town, hometown operation." Still, all those toothy, blinding smiles the poor girls flash every two seconds, Vaseline smeared on their teeth so their lips won't stick! Interestingly, the footage I've seen of Williams as Miss America shows not one of those "small-town" Stepford smiles, but a perfectly genuine one. 'That's probably why I won," she says, "I'd never done [the pageant circuit] before and I was natural. Besides also being talented." Well, of course. By all accounts her rendition of "Happy Days Are Here Again" was a showstopper. But more impressive to me is the fact that Williams, who was a theater arts major at Syracuse University at the time, won the whole enchilada only six months after entering her first pageant. The whole thing, she has said, was "kind of a lark."

There were, however, certain harsh realities that went along with being the first black Miss America, things Williams's fairly idyllic youth as the child of two music teachers in the genteel, rolling plains of Westchester County didn't prepare her for. "I was getting hate mail and death threats from the Aryan Nation and having black people think I wasn't--I don't know--black enough." she says. All of which became much more difficult once the nude photos of her in suggestive poses with another woman came out in Penthouse. Williams had posed for them over a year earlier at the request of a home-town photographer she'd worked for.

In the post-publication firestorm, she was attacked from all sides: by bigots, by self-proclaimed arbiters of American morality and, most painfully of all, by those in the black community who called her a disgrace. "Miss America was as far from me as those pictures were," she says. "I had won this, and I had done that, but I was, you know, a human being in the middie whom nobody really knew." The whole thing was, she would later say. "like a death in the family." She tells me now, "I will never have to go through the heat that I did when I was 21. Unless I kill somebody or there's some other major thing in my life, which I don't think will happen. I'll never have that much attention."

Ramon Hervey, a Los Angeles publicist 12 years Williams's senior, was hired to help Williams draft her Miss America resignation speech. Within a few years, Hervey would become her husband and manager, but initially the two set out to craft her an entertainment career. In the first few years, her efforts at acting were largely futile. "I auditioned to be Twiggy's replacement in My One and Only, to star with Tommy Tune. Then Lee Gershwin, Ira's widow, nixed that because she thought it would not be the appropriate image for the theater at the time." In fact, the Widow Gershwin said Williams would bring "the wrong type of audience" into the theater. On some auditions, Williams says, it was obvious that "some people were just taking meetings in order to tell their buddies they met Vanessa Williams, because I was hot in every exploitative magazine and tabloid at the time."

With no concrete career success to bolster her confidence. Williams still sought to assert herself. She declared she wouldn't be a guest on the late-night talk show circuit. "That was my angry, resentful period. I was 21, living in Manhattan and there was a point where I couldn't turn on the TV without seeing some comic like Joan Rivers or Letterman doing something on me. So I said I'd never talk to them, never do their shows. There came a time, obviously, when I had no more issues. I did Letterman last year. He said hi and gave me a kiss. It was great."

A chance to play the lead in a feature film--Spike Lee's 1987 School Daze, about racial tensions on a black college campus--ended with Variety reporting "creative differences" between Lee and Williams. Big differences, Williams says. "I read the script and, being a woman who's considered light-skinned, I was offended that all the light-skinned characters were just concerned about themselves and all the dark-skinned students had integrity. I said to Spike. 'I don't know who you've been burned by, but I know a lot of sisters who have the same tone as me, and we're intelligent. We aren't narcissists.'"

That same year, Williams became pregnant with her first child. Before she turned 30, she had two more kids. "Not to get it out of the way, but to have kids and be able to do what I wanted to in my 30s." Carefully planned for efficiency or not, Williams's first baby was good timing. The next year, she released her first album. The move to music was one Hervey had long recommended as a way of gaining some control over her career. Her debut album The Right Stuff went gold and led to three Grammy nominations. The two albums that followed, The Comfort Zone and The Sweetest Days, went platinum, establishing Williams as a major force in adult contemporary R&.B music.

Acting triumphs, however, remained elusive as the '90s began. Harley Davidson & the Marlboro Man was probably a bomb from the get-go. "I remember Mickey Rourke sucking limes before each of his takes to get rid of his saliva or--I don't know. And I remember him saying he wanted to work with me again." Truly, these are memories that shouldn't have to last anyone a lifetime. Another You, that same year, was an even grimmer affair. It was Richard Pryor's last film, and Williams, who played his girlfriend, recalls having to lend the MS-ravaged comic out of shots "because he was shaking so bad. It was really sad." I ask her about roles during this period that she was up for and didn't get--parts that might have swerved her acting career into a faster lane. She thinks for a few seconds and says, "I tested for Boomerang [1992]--Robin Givens got that. I was down to the last wire on Coming to America [1988]--Shari Headley got that. Those are the only two that didn't end up working out."

In 1994, Williams auditioned for a new Broadway production of Showboat for producer Garth Drabinsky, who asked her to consider instead taking over the lead in the Tony-winning Kiss of the Spider Woman. When she did, it became an even bigger hit-- ticket sales went up 20 percent--and she won raves. In Newsweek, Spider Woman director Harold Prince called her "a director's dream ... she's got that combination of innocence and sly innuendo that Mary Martin had." Being compared to the Great White Way's quintessential Peter Pan was definitely a heady new brand of publicity for Williams. The positive notices continued with Sidney Sheldon's Nothing Lasts Forever and Bye Bye Birdie.

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