Word: pageant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...self-righteous pageant officials who demanded Vanessa Williams' crown [PEOPLE, July 30] should have supported her and instead gone after the source of the problem-publishers of pornography...
...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...
...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...
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...
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...