Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) (11 page)

People who know me sometimes find it surprising that
I’ve done all that. It’s always been hard to explain, even to myself. Ultimately, I think it was a combination of factors. I was a dreamer, a student, a drama geek. My brother’s smart, but I am The Smart One. I’m athletic, but he is The Athlete. He was popular; I was awkward. I didn’t know how to talk to other girls, and I definitely didn’t know how to talk to boys. I developed a lacerating wit to protect my innocence and idealism once I started to learn how cruel people could be
.

For me, I think Miss America became a ticket to acceptance. Not only would I prove, once and for all, that I could hang with the popular kids—I’d figured out how to leapfrog right over them. I believed that if I could accomplish this one huge thing, it would change everything. Guys I was talking to at frat parties wouldn’t look over my shoulder at my roommate. The girls who were nasty to me in middle school would finally be proven wrong. My mom would stop pushing me toward being perfect, because she’d see that I had already achieved it. I would capital-M Matter, and people would capital-N Notice
.

Winning Miss America gave me all of those things and more. But it’s amazing how shallow the wrong priorities feel, once you’ve actually had your wishes fulfilled. Thank God for the platform issue, or I seriously might have lost my mind
.

In the end, it’s the first hazy memory that I always come back to. I’m probably four or five, by all accounts a well-behaved, pretty animated kid who hasn’t learned about feeling awkward yet. My mom, the hostess, walks Miss Oklahoma down to the beach during a bit of free time. The three of us—me, my mom, and Miss Oklahoma—stand in the sand, with my brother looking adorable a few feet away. It’s late afternoon or early evening; the sun has reached that golden hour. And I look up at this person—really, she’s more like an exotic creature than anything—and feel like I’ve been touched by something special
.

And I guess you could say that it sticks
.

EIGHT

In terms of newsworthiness, nothing in the pageant’s history has garnered as much attention as the meteoric rise and devastating fall of Miss America 1984, Vanessa Williams. In terms of timing, hers couldn’t have been better . . . with one notable and far-reaching exception. Miss America needed Vanessa Williams at exactly the moment she arrived on the scene; for those playing the long game, of course, it seems that Vanessa Williams needed Miss America somewhat less.

By the late seventies, Miss America was in a rut. Gone were the days when sixty million people tuned in by rote on the second Saturday in September. The pageant still had a loyal following and—especially by today’s standards—gigantic ratings. But the formula hadn’t changed enough to draw the new audience necessary to sustain those huge numbers. In the eighties, television viewers caused as many headaches for the pageant as feminists did in the sixties and seventies, and for much the same reason: as the years rolled by, there were simply more choices. Women chose from a spectrum of identities; audiences chose from an ever-growing array of TV shows and networks.

Miss America, meanwhile, had made few alterations to
the time-honored telecast structure. Wardrobes and hairstyles evolved, but in general, much of the annual program remained consistent. Sure, there were efforts to update the show. One particularly cringe-worthy attempt featured former Miss Americas singing and dancing in a production number titled “Call Me ‘Ms.’
” The best that can be said about it is that it was a genuine but toothless shot at catching up with the women’s movement. Despite the best intentions on the part of the Miss America leadership—although it’s unclear whether the goal was actually to evolve the pageant’s image or merely to prop up the ratings—much of the country, and most of the mainstream media, had already left the event behind. Miss-America-as-relic had become the pageant’s new identity in the minds of many; the fight for relevancy would define the pageant’s next quarter century and beyond.

There were, of course, a couple of changes in Miss America’s landscape that can only be defined as major, and ultimately proved to be bold moves that largely backfired. At the beginning of the decade, the pageant decided to unceremoniously dump longtime emcee Bert Parks. In characteristic fashion, the leadership made a mess of things; a reporter broke the news to Parks before he had received his termination letter.

Like the pageant, Parks’s shtick had begun to wear thin by 1980. In addition, as he grew older and the contestants didn’t, an air of condescension crept into his performance. With each dutiful cheek kiss from a pair of Miss Americas or a trio (or more) of female dancers, Parks moved further from his “cool young uncle” persona of 1954 and closer to a less appealing identity. Still, he was practiced and effective. He may have been on the way to becoming a parody of himself, but at least he seemed to be in on the joke.

By that time, he was certainly the most famous individual on the stage. His cohosts each year included the outgoing Miss America and an assortment of former Miss
Americas: usually Phyllis George, often Lee Meriwether, and a few others. But one moment in a single telecast is emblematic of how his influence had evolved from charming upstart to monopolizing presence. The 1977–1978 show opens with Parks’s talking, disembodied head floating against a backdrop of Atlantic City’s skyline. Cut to the inside of Convention Hall, where the introductions start with outgoing Miss America Dorothy Benham and continue with the guest entertainers and Miss America Dancers. And finally, Parks himself, facing upstage in silhouette, turning to the audience, Norma Desmond-style, and descending a giant staircase to great applause. At the time, it was an utterly acceptable variety-show introduction for a host; again, though, it emphasizes how entirely he had evolved from facilitator to star of the Miss America Pageant.

Watching the telecasts of the mid- to late 1970s, it’s obvious that the formula had gotten stale. The production numbers were too long, featuring endless variations on patriotism, and too many non-singing former Miss Americas were being asked to sing. Most desperate and borderline depressing of all was the ongoing attempt to make the telecast more current simply by using contemporary music. Once you hear Bert Parks sing “Blues in the Night,” or do the Charleston to a Wings song, you can’t ever un-have that experience. In these later years, the contestants seem almost an afterthought, filler between opportunities for Phyllis George to sing the Beatles or a former state winner to perform “Feelings.” It’s a shame, because, given its still-significant popularity, the pageant probably could have attracted the most current artists of the day to perform their
own
songs. Instead, the audience endured the cognitive dissonance of disco music played by the Glen Osser Orchestra—an accomplished group, but one that certainly didn’t count any electric guitarists among its ranks. Those years did showcase some very talented contestants and produced
some interesting winners, a couple of whom were outside the box and at least one (Dorothy Benham, 1977) who was such an obvious winner that the contestant next to her—still technically in contention—turned and smiled at Benham for several seconds before her name was announced. But the pageant as a whole had become a quaint tradition with an identity crisis. Juxtaposed against the backdrop of “tune in, turn on, drop out,” and subsequently, second-wave feminism, those shows seem almost preposterous.

Even an annual intervention by Miss America president Al Marks met with mixed success. Over the course of several telecasts, he made brief appearances to clarify the pageant’s mission. One year, he chatted with former Miss America Terry Meeuwsen (1975) about the positive career effect of having been Miss America; another time, Marks explained the scoring in the context of Miss-America-as-well-rounded-woman. A third appearance had him flatly stating that “this is not a beauty contest.” But it’s hard to argue that his plain, sensible speech wasn’t ultimately drowned out by the overproduced shows.

In Parks’s last year, clips of the contestants’ private interviews were shown in split-screen during the swimsuit competition, perhaps to balance the eye candy with a little brain candy. Even in those brief moments, the top ten finalists that night touched on freedom for women, legal careers, alternatives to becoming a homemaker by default, intelligence, whether the country was ready for a female president. Aside from one unfortunate sound bite about how becoming Miss America could help with “getting out of my accounting and back into entertainment,” it was painfully obvious that even the contestants themselves had evolved beyond the telecast.

So Bert Parks was out, albeit abruptly and with a distinct lack of grace on the part of the pageant leadership. Or so the story goes. Who knows if he had actually been told in advance? Parks was a savvy showman, and could have
realized that playing to the public’s sympathies was the most likely path to getting his job back. No less formidable a force than Johnny Carson himself headed up a “We Want Bert” reinstatement campaign, and the pageant had to hire extra staff just to handle the massive influx of mail pouring in from all over the country. But Carson or no Carson, mail or no mail, Parks wouldn’t host the pageant again. In fact, he would make only a couple of cameos at future telecasts before his death in 1992; at his last, he crashed and burned while introducing the former Miss Americas, but earned a standing ovation and won the audience’s hearts with one final performance of “There She Is.” His successor, Ron Ely, lasted just one year before being replaced by Gary Collins (often accompanied by his wife, Miss America 1959 Mary Ann Mobley).

What all the early 1980s chaos added up to, really, was the need for a game-changing Miss America. Despite the best efforts of pageant officials, the program had usually been pushed forward by winners who, for one reason or another, broke the mold. Not only did this kind of young woman set up new expectations for the pageant, but she also had the power to captivate the media. Some winners in the 1970s and 1980s showed hints of an ability to pull this off in various ways: Susan Powell (1981) was an Oklahoma girl who spoke her mind and dazzled audiences with her personality and talent, while Elizabeth Ward (1982) had sex appeal in spades—eventually gaining notoriety for a supposed dalliance with then–Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and her decision to pose for
Playboy
. Cheryl Prewitt (1980) had a remarkable story about the healing power of faith. Becky King (1974) and Tawny Godin (1976) both had potential as well, but none of them quite broke through during her actual year as Miss America. As with Phyllis George (1974), Terry Meeuwsen (1975), and Dorothy Benham (1977), their individual stars would shine bright
est after their terms as Miss America ended; those three went on to careers as a journalist/entrepreneur, a well-known Christian broadcaster, and a Broadway performer, respectively.

Author Frank Deford may have been somewhat off base with his assessment of Bert Parks’s irreplaceability, but he did zero in on one important uphill battle that each Miss America faced: the homogenizing effect of the telecast itself on the contestants. “TV traps them all into the same cookie mold. Each new Miss America is seen first in a stock setting. She is seen again, as a lame duck, one year later in the exact same setting. These are her two formative appearances that establish her image, and the sum and substance of her action includes walking, smiling, being crowned, crying, thanking, and crowning. No wonder all the girls seem the same. . . . Because Miss America is required to stay out in the sticks all year, hustling shampoo and working car circuses, she has no chance to make the additional TV appearances that could restore the identity that TV stole from her in the first place.” For this institution entering its seventh decade, the need to re-brand was critical. But as long as the pageant was limited to its standard structure of crowning and uncrowning its winners, it would be very hard to create a new and exciting identity. What was needed was a Miss America who could shake things up
during
her twelve-month reign.

1984 was a year of significant change around the world: Russia boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics, Indira Ghandi was assassinated and Ferdinand Marcos was protested, Hezbollah car-bombed the United States Embassy in Beirut and kidnapped CIA station chief William Francis Buckley, the UK coal miners began a yearlong strike, Apple marketed the first Macintosh personal computers, and the Space Shuttle
Challenger
launched its first (and, tragically, final) mission. And Miss America, appropriately for
this context, would change more in twelve months than she had in decades. The road to this transformation began in a middle-class town in Westchester County, New York.

The great irony, of course, is that no one—including Miss America 1984 herself—ever expected that she actually would wear the coveted crown.

Much has been made of the birth announcements sent out in the spring of 1963, when Milton and Helen Williams shared the news that they had added a baby girl to their family. Vanessa Lynne Williams was presented to the world via cards that read “Here She Is—Miss America!” (yet another of the many, many inaccurate iterations of the pageant’s “There She Is” catchphrase). Her parents’ choice has been called prescient, even eerie; in reality, the cards were standard fill-in-the-blank types bought at a stationery store.

In fact, it’s highly unlikely that the Williams family imagined their child’s future so vividly. At the time, women of color were few and far between at Miss America. Aside from Bess Myerson and Norma Smallwood, no woman of an ethnic or racial minority had ever worn the crown. Black contestants began competing at the Miss America level in 1970, but it was 1980 before Arkansas’s Lencola Sullivan became the first to finish in the top five.

Vanessa Williams does not seem to have grown up with the Miss America title in her sights. Although the pageant is fond of claiming that “every little girl dreams of being Miss America,” there was no way that a young African American child in the 1960s could have anticipated exactly when she and her peers might actually be allowed to enter the contest. Instead, Williams channeled her energy into the performing arts. After being voted “Best Actress” in her high school graduating class, she continued her studies in the highly regarded musical theater program at Syr
acuse University. While it’s always been fashionable for Miss America contestants to bury their ambition by claiming that they entered the pageant on a lark—or even a dare—Williams’s own account appears to verify that in at least one case, this was the reality. In the midst of her college years, she was aggressively recruited by a director from the Miss Greater Syracuse pageant. She needed scholarship money, and the show she was scheduled to perform in had been abruptly canceled. So she decided to give it a go.