There She Goes, Miss America

By JAY COCKS

Vanessa Williams steps down, and the pageant lurches on

In our last chapter, reigning Miss America Vanessa Williams, a spirited 21 and going for the glory, got caught in some compromising positions. Ten of them, to be exact, to be published in Penthouse, a skin magazine with the luster of a no-wax floor. Officials of the Miss America Pageant, aghast, asked for her resignation. Williams said she would think about it over the weekend.

She met with lawyers, with family, with her flack. Last Monday, with a trace of hard dignity and without a tear, Vanessa Williams announced that she would step down. "I wish I could retain my title," she said, but she mentioned "potential harm to the pageant and the deep, deep division that a bitter fight may cause" as reasons that she could not. So Williams became not only the first black Miss America but the first ever to abdicate. The 63-year-old pageant, beamed live from Atlantic City to more than 50 million television viewers (NBC pays $250,000 for the privilege), teetered, trembled and almost faltered.

Penthouse, for the moment, flourished. That same Monday, 5 million copies of the September issue hit newsstands, were snapped up and by week's end were virtually sold out. Editor-Publisher Bob Guccione, who has steadfastly maintained that "it was a business decision" to run the pictures, "not a moral decision," ordered up another print run of 750,000 copies. He declined to say how much he had paid for the pictures, taken two years ago by a Mount Kisco, N.Y., photographer, Tom Chiapel, for whom Williams had once worked as a receptionist. Chiapel, who had been in financial straits before selling the Williams photographs, dodged the press.

It was Albert A. Marks Jr., 71, the nonsalaried chairman of the Miss America Pageant, who suggested on behalf of the pageant that Williams toss in the diadem. Marks at that time was one of the handful of people who had actually seen the pictures, and scrambling for the high road, kept getting the ground cut out from under him by indignant interviewers and splenetic editorialists who had not. He was a prig; his contest was an exercise in hypocrisy ... What about that swimsuit competition, huh? According to Marks, when Williams first told him about the pictures in a tearful meeting two weeks ago, she made them sound about as raunchy as what an earlier age would have called figure studies: "A little pearl here, a few drapes there," as Marks says. They turned out, of course, to be grainy, but also down and dirty, an easy 85 out of 100 on the sleaze scale, the sort of material that has become a Penthouse specialty: hot shots of two hot women.

Before going into seclusion after her press conference last week, Williams allowed that "this is the worst thing that ever happened to me," and that she felt "violated" by Penthouse, the photographer and the pageant too, because it told the press rather than her directly that it wanted her resignation. She claimed that she consented to have the pictures taken because she was "curious" and that she never agreed to let the shots be published. All this brings a derisive snort from Guccione, who says he has a model release form signed by Williams and authenticated by two handwriting experts. He has declined so far to produce the form or to say what date is on it, claiming that such information might help Williams' lawyers in case they are planning a lawsuit. Penthouse Attorney Roy Grutman, who calls the document "a comprehensive, cover-the-waterfront, adult-model release," is equally definite on another point. "Everything in my legally educated mind knows that a lawsuit is in the wind."

Also gusting around are some idle questions about the photos. Williams she was only 19 when they were that Chiapel told her he wanted to try "a new concept of silhouettes with two models" after he had done one nude session with her alone. The first nudes were unexceptionally raunchy (two of the Penthouse shots are apparently from this take). But material from the second session with Williams and another woman is enough to take the starch out of anyone's shirt, even the Playboy Bunny's. One of the minor amusements of this whole episode was the sight of Hugh Hefner, swathed in silk loungewear, being interviewed on the Today show show and expressing concern for Williams' career. "The single victim in all of this was the young woman herself, whose right to make this decision was taken away from her. If she wanted to make this kind of statement, that would be her business, but the statement wasn't made by her. What we're talking about here is going into someone's private life. And it's that invasion that is immoral here, and improper." Playboy, offered the photos first, turned them down, it said, because of uneasiness about the model release form and because it does not use what Spokesman Dave Salyers calls lesbian material.

Chances are there will decision no long-term damage on any side. The homogenized harmony of the Miss America Pageant continues. Suzette Charles, 21, first runner-up Williams last September, has gracefully stepped in to fill out the remaining weeks of the reign.

Williams, who has frequently mused in print about the possibility of a theatrical career, comes out with a bonanza sympathetic publicity, most of it kindled by stories on television and in print where the accompanying samples of the Penthouse pictures-- suitably edited-- look no racier than 1950s calendar art. Censorship, in a sense, has helped her. She comes across in the mainstream media as a woman dignified in adversity and just a little dangerous in private. Hollywood has gambled a lot on much less.

Williams was allowed to keep $125,000 or so she earned in personal-appearance fees while she held the title, as well as a $25,000 college scholarship. Certain penalties were exacted, however, Kellogg's stopped distribution of a promotional box of cereal with Williams' picture on the front. It was, after all, a particularly American kind of retribution. No crown. And no cornflakes.

-- By Jay Cocks.

Reported by Dorothy Ferenbaugh/New York

With reporting by Dorothy Ferenbaugh