Vanessa Williams Posters & Photographs for Sale

Vanessa Williams was born in Tarrytown, New York, the daughter of music teachers
Helen and Milton Augustine Williams Jr. Williams and her younger brother Chris,
who is also an actor, grew up in the predominantly white middle-class suburban
area of Millwood, New York. Prophetically, her parents put "Here she is:
Miss America" on her birth announcement.

Pageants and Miss America Title

Williams began competing in beauty pageants in the early 1980s. Williams won
Miss New York in 1983, and went to the Miss America national pageant in Atlantic
City. She was crowned Miss America 1984 on September 17, 1983 making her the
first-ever African American Miss America. Prior to the final night of competition,
Williams won both the Preliminary Talent and Swimsuit Competitions from earlier
in the week. Williams' reign as Miss America was not without its challenges
and controversies. For the first time in pageant history, a reigning Miss America
was the target of death threats and angry racist hate mail.

Ten months into her reign as Miss America, she received an anonymous phone
call stating that nude photos of her taken by a photographer prior to her pageant
days had surfaced. Williams believed the photographs were private and had been
destroyed; she claims she never signed a release permitting the photos to be
used.

The genesis of the photos dated back to 1982, when she worked as an assistant
and makeup artist for Mount Kisco, New York photographer Tom Chiapel. According
to Williams, Chiapel advised her that he wanted to try a "new concept of
silhouettes with two models." He photographed Williams and another woman
in several nude poses. The photographs depicted mild overtones of simulated
lesbian sex, which was quite controversial for its time.

Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, was initially offered the photos, but
turned them down. Later Hefner would explain why in People Weekly, "Vanessa
Williams is a beautiful woman. There was never any question of our interest
in the photos. But they clearly weren't authorized and because they would be
the source of considerable embarrassment to her, we decided not to publish them.
We were also mindful that she was the first black Miss America." Days later,
Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse, announced that his magazine would
publish the photos in their September 1984 issue, and paid Chiapel for the rights
to them without Williams' consent. According to the PBS documentary Miss America,
Williams' issue of Penthouse would ultimately bring Guccione a $14 million windfall.

After days of media frenzy and sponsors threatening to pull out of the upcoming
1985 pageant, Williams felt pressured by Miss America Pageant officials to resign,
and did so in a press conference on July 23, 1984. The title subsequently went
to first-runner up, African-Italian Suzette Charles. In early September 1984,
Williams filed an unheralded $500 million lawsuit against Chiapel and Guccione.
According to a Williams family representative, she eventually dropped the suit
to avoid further legal battles choosing to move on with her life. Williams is
quoted as saying "the best revenge is success."

Although she resigned from fulfilling the duties of a current Miss America,
she was allowed to keep the bejeweled crown and scholarship money and is officially
recognized by the Miss America Organization today as "Miss America 1984"
and Suzette Charles as "Miss America 1984b."

Williams' controversial reign as Miss America is referenced in the musical
Smile, which chronicles the fictitious Young American Miss pageant of 1985.