You Have No Idea: A Famous Daughter, Her No-Nonsense Mother, and How They Survived Pageants, Hollywood, Love, Loss (2 page)

WAAAAH!!!!!!

Mrs. Worthy, who was the mom of the “other black family” in our small town, came running out of her house as soon as she heard us. Then she called my mom. Seconds later, it seemed, her car screeched to a stop next to us.

I wanted Mom to say, “Oh, my poor sweetheart! You must be in terrible pain. Let me hug you and everything will be fine.”

Mom slammed the car door.

“What have you done to your face? Vanessa, look what you’ve done!”

How could she be so direct? Mom wasn’t the huggy, touchy, “I love you, sweetie” type mom. She didn’t show affection much, but I thought this time would somehow be different.

Look what I’ve done!

Maybe that’s what this book is all about.

Eventually my face healed. My dad had to use Krazy Glue to keep in my dental cap that fell out when I ate. I spent countless hours in the dentist’s chair getting root canals. (I still have a cap, but no Krazy Glue.) For months I’d cry myself to sleep because there was constant, throbbing pain from the exposed nerve where my tooth had been.

Throughout this ordeal, Mom never said,
I told you so.

I thought Mom was being unfeeling when she stood over me while I silently begged for her affection. But in her own way, she was holding me tighter than I could really understand—she was teaching me the lesson I needed.
You did it—deal with it, learn from it. One day, the consequences will be greater and I won’t be there to help you, much less carry you. Figure it out, Vanessa.

Mom was a schoolteacher and I was her most challenging student. Throughout my life, Mom’s lessons have helped me survive it all—scandal, love, marriages, divorces, disappointments, children, death, failures, success.

I’m still learning. Mom has yet to say,
I told you so.

Helen

The bike accident was typical Vanessa. It’s the story of her life.

Vanessa always learns the hard way. Milton—her father—and I didn’t have many rules, but she managed to break them. All of them. As she got older, the rules changed—but Vanessa never did. She’d do what she wanted, knowing she’d pay for it later. And she always paid for it later. (Usually with interest.) Vanessa didn’t make it easy for me. She did not and she does not.

A lot of parents think it’s important to be their child’s friend. When Vanessa was growing up, I didn’t care if she liked me. She could hate me as far as I was concerned—and sometimes I think she did. I wanted her to understand that I reacted the way I did because I knew she would continue to do things she would eventually regret. That was always my instinct with Vanessa.

When Ness was a teenager, I told her, “Never ever pose nude for anyone.”

You know what happened.

Well, a little of what happened.

There’s so much more.

You have no idea.

PART ONE

INTO THE
WOODS

CHAPTER

1

Never ever pose nude for anyone.

—HELEN WILLIAMS

T
he phone call from the
New York Post
reporter seemed like just another of the hundreds of interviews I’d done since becoming Miss America ten months earlier. They were all the same—I could predict the questions: “How has your life changed?” “What’s it like being the first black Miss America?” “Do you feel you’ve made history?” “What’s next?”

I had the standard patter down: “It was an unexpected honor, with lots of pressure and great opportunity.”

But “unexpected” was actually an understatement—I never had any desire to be a beauty queen, let alone Miss America. There had never been a black Miss America. Miss America was usually a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl (I do have blue eyes, though, just like my paternal grandfather, Milton Williams Sr.). I, on the other hand, was the girl who smoked pot and inhaled, drank beer at cast keg parties,
and had premarital sex with my boyfriend. I lived life! Or at least I was living a twenty-one-year-old’s version of life as a college junior.

My friends found the very idea of it hysterical. As we sipped our Rolling Rock beers at our theater parties before I won the crown, it became a punch line to a joke only we understood.

“Vanessa as Miss America? They have no idea who you are.”

When Gary Collins, the host of the pageant, announced my name as Miss America, my first thought was,
Damn! There goes my semester abroad studying theater in London. Gotta tell Diane to get another roommate. No scones and clotted cream; no greasy fish and chips in newspaper.
My second thought was,
What am I in for? What happens after I walk down the runway of the Convention Center and head back to the fake hugs from the other contestants whose dreams had just been crushed by a pageant first-timer from New York State? Then what?

Yikes!

And now my year was almost finished. It was Friday, July 13, 1984 (yes, Friday the 13th), and I had just six weeks left in my reign. I was in yet another hotel room on the road, the Ramada in Watertown, New York. The tiny town near the Thousand Islands, one of New York’s natural wonders, was home to the New York State pageant, which I’d won last year. I was there to crown my successor.

It had been a typical day so far. Midge Stevenson, my bubbly, fit, blond chaperone and a pageant pro, had given me my itinerary in the morning. There was breakfast, pageant rehearsals, and some interviews, including this one with the
New York Post
reporter. I sat on the edge of the bed discussing Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale’s running mate in the upcoming presidential election and the first woman vice presidential candidate.

A first commenting on another first.

“I think it’s fantastic. She’ll do a wonderful job. It’s a great thing for our country.”

That about wrapped up the usual fifteen-minute question and answer, but before I could hang up, the reporter said, “Oh, by the
way, I heard from a very reliable source that there are nude photos of you coming out in September’s
Penthouse
. Is it true?”

“Excuse me?”

My heart froze. Nude pictures? Impossible.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What reliable source?”

“Well, we heard it from a very reliable source—but if you don’t know about it, then I won’t print it.”

I hung up the phone and could not breathe.

This has got to be a mistake. Reporters always get facts wrong, right?

Plus I never signed a release for
those
pictures.

But that thought didn’t calm me—instead my heart felt like it was about to explode. Is this really happening? How could I be so stupid to even get into this kind of situation?

I had to do something. My parents were on their way and I’d have to let them in on my monstrous secret. How disappointed they would be! That’s the worst. The “D” word coming from the lips of your parents.

I decided to call Dennis Dowdell, a neighbor from Millwood and a corporate lawyer at American Can Company. He’d become my counsel, handling the offers that were rolling in.

I told Dennis about the reporter’s question. I then confessed to the stupid summer of my nineteenth year.

“You’ve got to find out if this is real,” I told him. He said he would. We were in detective mode, hoping to uncover a hoax.

Two years earlier, 1982, had been my “summer of freedom.” I was nineteen and on a “break” from my boyfriend, Bruce Hanson, after nearly three years together. We had one of those relationships where we were almost consumed with each other. We were crazy in love. If we were apart for even a few hours it was tragic. I’d skip class or jog to meet him in the park, jumping into his waiting burgundy Camaro to make out. Once, we drove to his dorm room
at Fairleigh Dickinson University, a college in Madison, New Jersey. When we were together, there was no one else in the world (except for the time my mother walked in on us in the den, stereo blasting, mid-stroke).

But what had once been so intensely pleasurable was sometimes suffocating. I told him I needed some time apart, some space. I needed to break free. I don’t even think my parents knew we weren’t together. They weren’t fans of our relationship—and that’s putting it mildly. More than once they forbade us from seeing each other. Bruce and I were a volatile combination. Too possessive, too reckless, too much for my folks to handle. Where I’d go, he’d follow. (He even transferred to Syracuse University to be with me during my freshman year.)

Bruce was handsome, with sandy brown hair and deep-set, brown, Richard Gere–like eyes—and he was white. While my mom had plenty of white friends, the idea of a white boyfriend was uncomfortable to her. She once called me into her bedroom during an episode of
The Phil Donahue Show
that was addressing the struggles interracial couples faced.

“You need to watch this,” she said.

But even though this was my self-proclaimed summer of freedom, I still had to work. Every summer since I was eleven, I had some kind of job—babysitting, selling vegetables from our garden, peddling Avon cosmetics. I worked at a furrier, at a men’s clothing store, a junior boutique, and a discount outlet shop.

My parents paid for my college tuition, and each year I had gotten partial scholarships for my acting, dancing, and singing. But I needed money to live on, to buy gas and spend on discount fashion. My parents wanted my younger brother, Chris, and me to learn how to be independent in case anything ever happened to them. By age three, we had learned to tie our shoes. By ten, we did our own laundry. If we had no clean clothes, that was our problem.

So I checked out the trusty PennySaver Classifieds. I found an ad for models wanted. I asked my dad what he thought and he told me to see what it was about.

A few days later, I climbed to the top floor of an old walk-up above an unpainted furniture store in Mount Kisco, New York. The sign on the door read
THE MODELING REGISTRY BY TOM CHIAPEL
. I walked in and was greeted by the owner—a Henry VIII lookalike, complete with a scruffy beard, jowls, and obesity.

“So you want to be a model?” Tom asked.

“Yes,” I said. That would have been the easiest of all summer jobs in the world!

Then he hit me with a reality check. “I also need a receptionist plus someone who can do makeup for the models when I shoot their portfolios.”

As I quickly learned, it wasn’t a modeling agency—it was a “registry.” All these poor hopefuls (guys included) would come for a consultation, have a lengthy discussion about their potential, and then Tom would declare: “You’ve got a great look. But you need a portfolio. I’ll shoot it.”

That was his hook: Here’s the package; I’ll shoot it for a good price.

And that’s how he made his living. Tom also considered himself an artist. Little did I know, he would become the biggest scam artist of my life.

On shoot days, these poor suckers (myself included) would bring their own wardrobes. I’d do a full makeup job—I was hired as a makeup artist—complete with fashion contouring for black-and-white film. I’d apply blush, eyeliner, the whole nine yards, which was a lot more fun than serving fries at Burger King. Tom also snapped some “fashion shots” of me on location in a wooded area when I started working for him.

One hot summer day, Tom asked if I could stay after hours to do a shoot.

“My friend Ami is coming over. I’m going to shoot her and I’d like to use you in a few black-and-white nude silhouettes. It’s going to be very artsy—you won’t even see your face, only shapes and forms.”

I immediately heard my mom:
Bad idea! If anyone ever asks you to pose nude, you say no!

I knew why Mom said, “Don’t take nude pictures.” Mom believed I had a future that could be bright, and those pictures could one day haunt me. She also told me, “Men can be dogs.” She was trying to protect me. She knew men would prey on me, and she knew how trusting I was: “You’re just like your father. You’ll give everyone the benefit of the doubt.”

At the time I thought,
Here goes Mom again, telling me what I shouldn’t do. I’m an adult now. I finished one year of college, for God’s sake.

Tom’s pitch was that nudes were a work of art. I agreed. I still believe that the human body is beautiful.

There was something so freeing about doing what you’re not supposed to. At nine, it was riding my bike with my cousin on the back. Ten years later, it was posing nude with a stranger.

“These are just for me. Don’t worry—no one will know it’s you anyway,” Tom said.

Tom was my employer but also had become a friend. I’d met his wife and kids. He paid me on time and was respectful. Why shouldn’t I trust him?

“Okay,” I said.

Ami arrived for the photo shoot after the office closed for the day. She was about my age, maybe a little older. It was a hot summer evening in July and we drank plenty of white wine to take the edge off. Tom locked the door so we wouldn’t have to worry about intruders.
I was nervous and it felt like an awkward blind date. Tom probably sensed my discomfort. He knew I was a trained dancer, so he asked me to do some jumps while he photographed me.

Tom photographed solos of Ami. After he felt we had loosened up, he asked us to pose together. He positioned us and told us what to do. It felt silly, stupid, and not very artistic.

We’d pose, frozen in these awkward positions, and then wait for the next command, giggling the entire time. We were two young women giving the man behind the lens all the power in the room.

Why? Why didn’t I stop it?

Part of me felt like we were being crazy and adventurous. It felt awkward having a naked woman’s body so close to me, but I pretended it was no big deal. I was grown-up, artsy Vanessa. After all, this was what I wanted that summer—to break free.

A few days after the shoot, Tom showed me the contact sheets. The pictures were so tiny on the glossy paper that I had to look through a loupe to see any detail. I saw myself jumping in midair. I looked at the silhouette shots. Tom was right. You couldn’t tell who those bodies belonged to on the sheet. But they were way more erotic than I remembered or had meant them to be.