You're Wrong About - Vanessa Williams Part 1: Becoming Miss America

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

Mike tells Sarah how a 20-year-old singer, actress and French horn player became Miss America with less than six months of practice. Digressions include Ted Bundy, Stephen King’s “It” and a bonus debunking of the "bra-burning feminist" trope. We're sorry to say that this episode includes a description of child sexual abuse. Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseClips! Opening musical numberVanessa introduces herselfTalent competitionSwimsuitVanessa wins!Links!Sarah's Miss America piece!Vanessa and Helen’s memoir, “You Have No Idea”Margot Mifflin’s “Looking for Miss America”Vanessa Williams, Whitney Houston and Hollywood’s Misogynoir ProblemVanessa Williams: A Beauty Queen’s Crown of ThornsMiss America--The Inside StoryFirst Black Miss America Finds Unforeseen IssuesAin’t I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant'A Felony Just to Own': The Sleazy Story Behind Penthouse’s Most Controversial IssueThere She Goes, Miss AmericaMost Famous Miss America In History1989 People magazine articleIn Black and WhitePutting on a Happy FaceSupport the show

Oh my god, it's like a cat or a dog show, but it's girls. It's just a girl show. Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast that is not a pageant, but a scholarship competition. And how dare anyone suggest otherwise. I scraped the bottom of my vast mis-congeniality knowledge of the pageant world for that one. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic. And if you want to support this show, we're on Patreon at patreon.com slash your wrong about. And as you may have noticed last week, we both have other podcasts. I have a show called

Maintenance Phase. Sarah has a show called Why Are Dads? And those are available on your telephone wherever you listen to podcasts. Yeah, we're just, you know, call 1-800-Y-R-Dads. And today we are talking about Vanessa Williams. I'm really excited. Oh my god. Do you know that I wrote a weird little prose poem once called Misses About the Fates of various Miss Americas? No way. Yes, I found it. I'll send this to you. Oh man, we're going to talk about some of these people today. This is great. Should I read it? Yeah, find some people you remember. Okay. Margaret Gorman, 1921, won the title of Miss America in a sea green chiffon and later owned a greyhound named Long Goodie. Bess Meyerson,

1945, the first and only Jewish Miss America, ignored multiple suggestions that she changed her name, served as chair of the Anti-Defamation League, and was arrested for shoplifting. Elizabeth Ward, 1982, admitted to having a one night stand with Bill Clinton during her reign as Miss America and filed for bankruptcy in 1999. Gretchen Carlson, 1989, was nannied by Michelle Bachman as a child. Shut the fuck up. Yeah, they all do each other's hair. Unbelievable. Oh, here's Vanessa. Vanessa Williams, 1984, the first black Miss America in the pageant's history, was forced to resign her post after Penthouse published photos taken of her before her reign as Miss America. Do you feel that to be accurate as a summary, Mike?

Yes, that is 100% true. Yay. Good job, 2012, Sarah. So yeah, what do you know about this story? Yeah, so my understanding was that Vanessa Williams became Miss America, nearly completed her entire reign, because I think Suzette Charles was only Miss America for like seven weeks or something like that. That is exactly correct. Seven weeks. Well done. Oh my gosh. I didn't remember before we pulled this up that Penthouse was involved, but I'm not surprised it was. She was forced to resign, and I don't know what the mechanics of that were or how much agency she had within that. And the other thing I will say about her is that she is the only Miss America who I can name off the top of my head and who has

any kind of cultural relevance for most people who aren't like pageant buffs. I know. This is one of my favorite types of maligned 90s women that things just go great for her afterwards. She was the first Miss America ever to relinquish the crown. It was a huge deal at the time. It's kind of incredible that she was able to pull a extremely successful career out of the ashes of what looked at the time like it was going to define her forever. And now like you talk to people about Vanessa Williams, and the first thing they say is, sometimes the snow comes down in June. So I would like to introduce you to Vanessa, but I think it is better to let Vanessa introduce herself. So I am sending you a clip. This is

Vanessa introducing herself at the 1984 Miss America pageant. Yay. Three, two, one, go. I'm 20 years old and presently a junior at Syracuse University, majoring in musical theater. Through hard work and perseverance, I hope to make my dream of a successful career on the Broadway stage come true. That was wonderful. It's funny because I've watched pageants kind of while I was growing up and I'm like, yep, there's the weird passive posing section. So she looks like the Statue of Liberty in that dress. Yeah, she really does. It is a white one shoulder. I don't know fabrics, but it's very flowy. It's got some spangles.

What I'm most amazed by is that she's able to look to sell the idea that she feels comfortable doing this incredibly weird thing. Oh, yeah. I keep coming back to, I realize it's a cliche, but the word poise, she just has poise. She doesn't look nervous. She doesn't seem like she's rehearsed this line in her head, even though she obviously has. She just seems like she's coming out, she says a thing, and then she smiles because she's delighted at what she's just heard herself say. Yeah, and she's like, hello, audience in Atlantic City. I also like that Vanessa's obviously wearing heels, but she walks like she's wearing pajamas or something. She just looks comfortable. Yeah. She just looks like she's like clopping out to

the living room. No, I feel like she's like, welcome to my home. Yeah. So would you like to learn how Vanessa came to this place? Yes, I have so many questions. Needle scratch. I'll bet you're wondering how I get here. She's born March 18th, 1963. She is in Millwood, New York, which is about an hour north of New York City. Her dad is Milton. Her mother is Helen. Her family is the only black family on the block. And when her parents bought their house, all of the white neighbors formed a coalition to try to stop them. They got together. They tried to sort of challenge their mortgage papers, basically saying there's no way they could possibly afford this. And the only way that they were able to buy their house was because the guy

that was selling the house lived across the street. And he was like, I guess social justice warrior or something, something like he was committed to the idea of going through with this sale. Wow. Imagine moving into a house where you know all of your neighbors have tried to keep you from moving there. Yeah. You know, Vanessa talks about how eventually her father sort of won over all the neighbors just because he's like such a nice guy. He's like a fixer upper dude. And so he'll help the neighbors like repair a fence or whatever. Like he's super handy. She says he manages to have really great relationships eventually with the neighbors. But that's still sort of sitting in your head that is like you had to prove yourself. Well, and also I guess the I think the fact too

that like if things go well, it's also conditional. It's like things can't go well in a sense because you know, the acceptance that you experience if the world is that poisoned against you, it's the exception. Yeah. So a lot of the stuff about her childhood comes from her memoir, which is excellent, called You Have No Idea. And it's very cute. She wrote it with her mom. So the chapters will sort of switch off. There'll be like one chapter from Vanessa's perspective and then one chapter from her mom's perspective. So this is an excerpt of the kind of upbringing that she had because both of her parents are music teachers they met in the music department at Columbia University a couple years before they had Vanessa. And Vanessa says, Mom is downstairs in the family

room at the baby grand piano ordering students to play their scales. While my dad, a one man woodwind and brass ensemble is upstairs teaching trumpet or clarinet or saxophone or French horn or oboe to the neighborhood kids. Her parents are not particularly strict, but they say that she has to learn a musical instrument and she has to practice every day until she's 18. That's pretty good. Oh yeah. And basically everything else, their main value is just independence. Like I want you to be exploring the neighborhood. I want you to be out on your bicycle. I want you to be out in the woods. As long as you practice French horn every day, you should be going out and doing other stuff. I mean, that seems typical too. I feel like

like something I love about Stephen King's it is that in this town where we know that there is something or someone that is ripping the arms off of children, they're like, okay kids, because of the scary monster, we need you home by seven. But other than that, just run around, be free, go into the woods, hang out, climb into the sewers. But be home at seven though, because there is a killer clown. So as we see in a lot of these stories, Vanessa, even though she eventually becomes Miss America, right, she's obviously very pretty, she never feels pretty because she's the only black kid in the entire school. What she says in her book is that she's looking around and all of the pretty girls have long blonde hair and they're often like much more

wealthy families than she is. She's like a heroine in a romance novel who's like, I just don't know how beautiful I am because I grew up marooned on the island of blonde white girls. She also says, when the kids would do their classroom matchmaking in grade school, they would always suggest that I go out with Jacob, the Indian kid, because he was the only other brown kid in the grade. I've known several women over the years who are like women of color, but they're not black, but who were cast as scary spice. Whenever you had to do spice girls casting, because it was just like, okay, and you're scary spice. Sorry. She also gets the thing. I feel like this is very typical for kids of color in very white spaces that kids will say

extremely racist shit to her, but they'll be like, oh, you don't count. I can say this in front of you because you're not really black. She's like, her first big awakening on this is apparently when she's eight years old, she's on the school bus and another little girl just walks up to her and calls her the n-word. She says, I had no idea what the word meant, but I knew it was ugly because they said it with such venom. Her mom talks about very movingly in the book about how we knew that this was going to happen to her, but we didn't want to introduce that concept to her yet. We wanted to keep that away from her for as long as possible. Eventually, when it happens, she comes home crying and her mom tells her, it doesn't define you,

but it does define the person saying it to you. As opposed to a lot of the other women that we've covered on this show, Vanessa knew, it seems like from day one, exactly what she wanted to do with her life. From her earliest days, Vanessa wanted to be sort of singer, actress, dancer, like something on Broadway in movies. She's obsessed with Meryl Streep, so she just watches Meryl Streep movies over and over again, and I guess she like practices the accents. Oh, that's so great. It feels like she's also unusual because from what you've said, she came from a loving and secure home. Yeah, it sounds like they're very nurturing, and she's sort of living out their dreams to some extent too. There's this really adorable photo of

them all playing music together as a family. I think after dinner, they would all as an ensemble play songs together. It seems important to acknowledge that it is possible to just genuinely and sincerely and truthfully believe that you have a talent that you want to share with the world and that you want to sing and dance for a living. Throughout her book, she doesn't have a lot of sort of self-consciousness. She seems to just be like, I am good at singing, I am good at acting, I would like to be a singer and actress, please. And that's what it is to have a vocation, right? Is that like, if you're a professional singer, if you're in the arts, you can't wake up and be like, am I good? Am I bad? Will they like me? Will they not? You have to be like, okay,

I have my voice lesson in the morning. I am my instrument, and like each day, I'm figuring out how to improve myself. And I think we don't know how to really recognize confidence from women also in American media. Totally. Especially like young black girls who are comfortable just saying like, yeah, I'm good at singing and I'm good at acting and I'm going to do this. Yeah. So all of this family togetherness, band practice after dinner type upbringing starts to rend at the seams when Vanessa is 10 and she experiences sexual abuse. So it's 1973, her father's brother is dying of cancer, and they have good family friends in Orange County. And so to just give him and Vanessa's mom a little bit of time to sort of manage all of the various logistics that come along with this,

they send their kids off to their friends in Orange County. So these family friends have two kids. There's Susan, an 18-year-old daughter, and John, a 12-year-old son. They sort of hang out with his family for a couple days. Then on one evening, they're all watching TV together with the family, and John invites Vanessa to walk around the neighborhood with him, and he takes her to an abandoned construction site. She likes John. She has a crush on him. He's cute. They're talking at this construction site, and he leans over and kisses her on the mouth. This becomes a big thing in the legal cases later, the fact that she had experienced abuse as a child. And so I was reading this very trepidatious. I was like, oh, fuck, what's John going to do now? And after this little peck,

John walks her back to the house of this family. She says, good night. She goes to bed. And when she's asleep, in the middle of the night, Susan comes into her room. And so this 18-year-old daughter, Susan, asks her to lie down on the floor, get out of bed, and Vanessa lies down on the floor, and Susan molests her. And then is just like, go back to sleep. Don't tell anybody. And goes back upstairs. And I feel like this is a time when we're just barely beginning to hear that anyone is sexually abused as a child. And there's no literacy around the idea that there can be young female perpetrators of this. Yes. And that it can be other young people too. Right, other kids. Yeah. And we don't know Susan's story. Most of the children that abuse other

children are experiencing abuse themselves. It's just one of these things that we're just not well set up to deal with at all. This is really sad that Vanessa knows that something bad has happened. She feels extremely uncomfortable. As she's flying home, she decides she's not going to tell her mom because she's nervous about what her mom is going to say. She's afraid her mom is going to say, well, what did you do to invite this? Or what were you wearing or something? So she's just nervous to tell her mom. But she decides that she is going to tell her dad. I need to tell somebody about this. And she lands at the airport and her parents pick her up. And both of her parents are just ashen. Her dad has visibly lost weight. His brother just died. And so she basically tells herself,

like, okay, I can't tell him now because he's going through so much else. So I'm going to wait until sort of he's a little bit better. And then I'll tell him. And it just sort of falls off of her radar. Yeah. I think most kids don't look at themselves and be like, wow, I'm a kid. Like, I'm very vulnerable. Yeah, I am not big enough or mature enough to be tasked with handling this trauma all by myself. And it is my parents' job to take care of me. When you're a kid, you're like, this is the oldest I've ever been. Yeah. And I take my responsibilities seriously. And this is my job. Like, I think, you know, kids are, are more likely to think that than we might realize once we're once we're so big and they seem so small. There's also the element of like,

the story that she tells herself about the abuse. So there's a really interesting passage in her book where she says, I struggled to make sense of it. I thought, okay, there's this thing I did. It felt good. And since it was with another girl, it was probably okay. That's how I rationalized it. But even as I told myself this, I felt it wasn't really okay at all. Yeah, she feels really uncomfortable with it. But she's sort of talking herself into, oh, it wasn't, it wasn't such a big deal. And it's with a girl. And part of it felt good. And maybe it's okay. Like, she's just sort of torn in a million directions, like trying to figure out how she feels about this. Well, and this is also the thing where like, if you want to minimize your trauma, which there are

a million reasons to do, like, there's always something worse, there's always something mitigating, you can always find a way, you know, to tell yourself, like, it's not that bad. Yeah. Look to the work of Roxanne Gay for explication on the phrase, not that bad. Well, there's no, there, this is not like a binary distinction. So it's just really difficult to deal with all these complexities, especially when you're fucking 10. And it's like 1973. Like, everyone's terrible on this shit. Yeah, Jesus. Oh my God. Yeah. And 1973, I mean, these are the years when like, Ted Bundy is abducting and murdering college students and the police are like, sometimes college girls just leave a big bloodstain in their pillow and walk away in the middle of

the night. Don't tell anyone where they're going. Like, yeah, crimes against women, which have never been taken seriously or like, not in a particularly great place. Exactly. Either. Yeah. So what happens after this, and we see this in so many of these stories, is she just starts to pull away from her parents. This secret between them just creates this distance. And so, yeah, over the next couple years, she just becomes more rebellious. She becomes more moody. She starts lashing out at them for random things. They start fighting a lot more. Her and her mom are fighting so much, and she's slamming the door so much at one point that her dad takes her door off its hinges. That he's like, I can't take this anymore. So like, it just gets really tense in the house.

And there's a really funny sequence in the book where she talks about how, you know, she started smoking weed at this point. She's like a freshman in high school. And her and her friend are in the backyard in a sort of, they have like a greenhouse that's sort of like a lean to, it's just like walls on a roof. And they're smoking weed in the middle of the night in this little greenhouse. And then they're done and they want to go back inside and watch TV and eat vianetta. And so they just pour like whatever is in the bowl of the pipe, like just on the ground. And they're like, all right, let's go back inside. And you know, when you're a teenager and you're buying super shitty weed, you often get weed with like stems and seeds in it.

Uh-huh. I do. So what Vanessa does not know is like, because this is a greenhouse, there's like this little seed in her shitty weed ends up turning into a plant. And so like four months later, her mom like storms into her room and is like, you're growing weed out there. Like you're a trafficker. And Vanessa's like, what? I have no idea. I don't even know how to grow weed. And then her mom takes her outside and like, yes, there is a legit weed plant in their greenhouse. Boy, it's like when a district attorney escalates something, you know, to like felony trafficking, it should be possession, but like it's your mom and it's through greenhouse magic. Yeah. And it also, it sounds like something that somebody would say as a lie to defend

themselves in court. Like, oh, it just fell out of the pipe and then it became a plant. But like, it actually happened. Like, I totally believe that that happened. And that is exactly the kind of thing that is always happening to me. But also I like the idea that that is a lie that Vanessa Williams came up with in the moment. And then they're writing this book together and just be like, yeah. She's like, I'll tell my mom about everything else. This is the lie I'm going to die with. You just got to keep one secret and then you can let everything else go. But no one can ever. No, I do think that happened, though. That's great. Like weed seeds are very durable. So this is also the time when she starts dating. When she's 16, she starts dating a guy named Joe,

who is 20 years old and a bodybuilder and studying to be a mortician. And I love in the book that both Vanessa and her mom go out of their way numerous times, talk about how hot Joe was. They want you to know that Joe was extremely hot. I think there's something really wholesome about like parents being like excited for them, being like, oh, that Joe, he's great if Joe really is great. So according to her, the sort of the central thing in the relationship is she's a virgin, she's 16 and he's 20 and he's presumably not. And so he keeps trying to get in her pants and she's not ready yet. And so she's just sort of rebuffing his advances. But he basically gets

bored of this, it seems like. And she also gets bored of this. And so within sort of a couple months, it's like they're still technically dating, but it's kind of petering out at this point. And so when she's 17, she goes to a New Year's Eve party. She goes with Joe. And as soon as she gets there, Joe just like wanders off and she spots him later on, like flirting with some other girl who Vanessa mentions very briefly is Pam Greer's cousin. He's so uninterested in her by that point that midnight comes and he's not even around to kiss her at midnight. So she's just sort of there with one of her female friends. And this random dude just comes up and says, happy New Year and kisses her on the lips and then walks away. And she's like, okay. Well, that night went sideways.

So this is Bruce, who she ends up dating for the next three years. And here, let me show you a photo. Vanessa would also like you to know that Bruce is extremely hot. Like this is something she brings up throughout her book. All right, here's a photo from her book. Wow. Yeah. I would join, I would join a cult if these two let it. Seriously. Okay. So the caption is Bruce and I posing for a Syracuse photography project on campus. And they're both wearing like peak late 70s, early 80s workout gear. She has a sweat band and some sneaks and leg warmers. And he's tying his sneaker. And he's got his foot up on a chair and is leaning over her shoulder and looking smolderingly at the camera. He like, okay, this I think this explains it best. He has a like relatively thin mustache

and he doesn't look like a serial killer slash highway patrolman to me. Right. Or like the villain from Sonic the Hedgehog. Yes. Yes. Like he's pulling it off. So they start dating kinda semi sorta in secret because her parents don't approve of him. To this day, her parents say that they didn't approve of him because like they were very codependent very fast. They just start spending all of their time together. She is a senior in high school. He is a freshman in college. And he eventually transfers colleges so that he can be closer to her. So her parents say they don't like him because they're just too codependent too fast. And she says they don't like him because he's white. And apparently, according to her, they will give her lectures about sort of the

difficulties of being in an interracial relationship. So they're kind of sort of dating in secret. They're both young and they're both hot. And Vanessa is very open in her book. And I really appreciate this about the fact that like they start having sex with each other relatively early and she's just like, yeah, the sex was great. He was hot. Like she talks about it a lot. Isn't it amazing that like women like one of the things that makes you know that historically has made us credible or not or like assassinated as public figures or not is like plausible deniability about virginity. Yes. We just want to not have affirmative proof that they are having sex or God forbid enjoying it. Exactly. And this is like one of the reasons why I appreciate her

book so much because she's like, yeah, I dated hot dudes and we fucked and it was lit. It's like, yes. How dare someone enjoy the fact that they're beautiful and they get to pull hot dudes and have sex with them. So there's this event where they are hanging out in her parents' house and it's middle of the day, her parents aren't home. And so they're feeling sort of frisky and they pull out like the couch in the living room is a pullout couch and they pull it out into the bed and they start like apparently going at it. And then Vanessa's mom walks in. You know, they don't even know that she's really dating Bruce. They don't approve of Bruce. And then her mom walks in and the way that Vanessa puts it in her book is that they are mid-stroke.

That's so great. We were at it in the living room and her mom walks in. Oh boy. What her mom says really pisses her off is not only are they having sex, but after they stop having sex and you know wrap themselves in a sheet or whatever and sit down on the couch, her mom is lecturing both of them. And neither one of them seem ashamed of it at all. They're just like sitting there holding hands and they're just like, yeah, we're having sex. We are dating. I am 18. He is 19. This is what 18 and 19 year olds do. And her mom is like, no, you're supposed to feel bad about your mom walking in on you. She played her French horn today. I know exactly. It's unclear if sort of like it was this sex or other sex that they were having. But during her senior year of high school, she

doesn't get her period for six weeks. She's like, that's a little weird. But because it's the 70s and there's like not great sex ed, she doesn't really know what the symptoms of pregnancy are. So she has to like go into her parents room and like sneak one of their weird health books off of the shelf. And she like has to flip to the pages that are like symptoms of pregnancy. And she's like, yep, my boobs are sore. Yep, I've been puking in the mornings. I haven't had my period. And she's like, oh, shit, I might actually be pregnant. And she goes and she gets a pregnancy test. And there it is. It tests positive. You know, she tells Bruce immediately. And she says at no point was not getting an abortion and option. The minute she told him, he was like, okay,

we can find a clinic for you. There's Planned Parenthoods. And she's like, yep, let's get me an appointment. And so she doesn't tell her mom, she says, she's like, I'm at a rehearsal. And she goes to the clinic gets an abortion. And again, she doesn't tell her mom until they're writing the book together. So we are now fast forwarding to the summer of 1982. Vanessa has just finished her freshman year at Syracuse University. Bruce has proposed to her and she has said yes. But she's also starting to feel a little bit smothered. She's just like, I'm spending too much time with Bruce. Bruce is way too into this. And I'm trying to build a career. Her current plan is she wants to study abroad in London her junior year so that she can like

audition for plays and stuff and like go see plays on the West End. So she's just sort of drifting away like I need a summer of freedom. And so I'm going to send you a photo. Oh, cool. All right. So this is an action shot. This is her jumping. It's black and white. And she's fully nude. It's basically like the human body in motion, I would say is the theme here. Yes. She looks like she's in a trampoline exercise class and Superman's looking at her. So this is the summer that she ends up posing for the nude photos. So how old is she? 18, 19? She's 19 at this point when she poses. Okay. The way that it happens is, you know, she needs to earn money for the summer. She's looking through the classified ads. And there's an ad that just says models wanted.

So she's like, oh, like modeling might be an interesting way into acting, being on the stage, et cetera, for me. So she answers the ad. She meets this photographer, Tom Chappell, who runs this modeling agency. And he says, you know, the first stage to becoming a model is getting a portfolio, right? Like she doesn't have any professional photos taken. She pays him a hundred bucks. And he takes a bunch of sort of professional looking studio, well lit modeling type shots so that now she has this portfolio. He does this. He says, come back in a couple of days, pick up the proofs. She goes away. She comes back in a couple of days and they end up just sort of making small talk. And he mentions like, you know, it's hard to run

an agency like this because I really need a receptionist and I need somebody to sort of do makeup and other like various logistics for the women that come in to have their shots taken. And so she says like, well, why don't you hire me? And so he's like, yeah, sure, sounds good. So she she gets this receptionist gig. It pays decently well. It's regular hours. And, you know, she's sort of slightly proximate to the sort of modeling world, right? She can like find out how the industry works. One of the first things that she finds out when she starts working for Tom Chappell is that this is a total scam. Great. This is not a modeling agency. Tom Chappell has no inroads with the modeling industry. Well, I'm sure he's the only guy who's unscrupulously claiming

to run a modeling agency and then just getting contacts for a bunch of hot young women and taking their money, I assume. Well, this is the thing. So apparently this is a well known business model where you pretend to be a modeling agency, but you're actually a modeling quote unquote registry. It's like you're officially registered as a model now, which means nothing. Like I'm officially registered as a podcast host. Like there's not that's not a thing. I mean, if they pull you over and you're modeling without a license, you could get three months of hard time. Exactly. It's just something that sounds legit, but it's not in any way legit. And the whole scam is, I can start selling you to the agencies. I can get you hooked up with an agency,

but you need a portfolio first. Hey, guess what? I'm also a photographer and I happen to do portfolios. That's the scam is you're getting them in the door and then you charge them to make these portfolios and then nothing ever happens. Which is like not that bad because I guess you're selling them a service that they do actually need. So I would make that like a 4.4 on the scamometer. Vanessa figures out that she got scanned, but whatever. She now has a portfolio. So as she starts working for Tom Chappell, he seems nice. She goes and meets his wife and they have a good working relationship. He pays her on time and he is a photographer. He does, in fact, consider himself a photographer and he's kind of a little bit pretentious about it. At one point

during the summer, he asked her if she's ever posed nude and she's like, no, I've never done it. He's do you want to try it sometime? And she's like, sure. This is her daring summer. This is the summer of freedom. She's finally away from Bruce after three years. I also wonder if this is a situation where someone kind of not thinking too much about being photographed nude because it just doesn't seem that significant to them. It's going to bite them in the ass later. Because also in modeling, posing nude, it doesn't have to be prurient. You do it a lot for just a normal campaign where you might not be particularly sexualized. It's just something that people do. And also she has no idea that she's going to be Miss America. So much of the problem for Vanessa

is the juxtaposition between Miss America that's like wholesome, all-American image and there's nude photos. Because in Miss America is about grown men sitting in a panel and numerically judging women on how they look in bathing suits. And that's a wholesome family activity. It would be so horrible to corrupt that with images of a woman fully nude because that's worse. Also she trusts Tom Chappell and she says these are just for you. It's up to you if you ever want to release them or not. And interestingly, he takes her out into a forest and they do these artsy nude, whatever photos. And to this day, these have never leaked. I don't know if he gave her the negatives and she destroyed them or if he destroyed them or whatever. But we've never

seen these. They're in a vault with all the Al Capone stuff that Geraldo wanted to get. So they've already done this nude photo shoot and everything goes fine. But then like a week later, it's sort of after work and he says, well, look, I think the nude shot went really well last week. Have you ever thought about doing nudes with another woman? Just like Botticelli used to say. I know. And he says, well, I've got this sort of contact. Her name is Amy. She's 18. She also wants to be a model. And I'm thinking of doing these new photo techniques. I think there could be something really interesting, the sort of shapes and silhouettes. He sort of talks her into this as like an art project that they're doing together. Vanessa talks about these photos

in her book. She has never expressed any shame about the actual photos. She's always been very clear about like the human body is beautiful. Nude art is a perfectly legitimate form of expression. So like to this day and at the time, she was never like, I never should have done the nudes. She's like, the nudes were fine. It was the world's reaction to the nudes that was not fine. You know, just I'm not going to agree to the thing where I'm like, yes, that thing I did was terrible. Like everything about it was wrong. It was wrong for me to be naked ever. It was wrong for me to have sex with anyone. Again, like I really can't stress enough how relatively insignificant nudity is. Yes. It's strange to act as if the object of everyone's wholesome apparently

fascination while slightly clothed is like suddenly dangerous when unclothed. Yeah. And also, I mean, she talks about this entire shoot that they did together. It was like 35 minutes. And you know, she had had like a beer or two after work with Tom. And you know, he was very adamant like, of course, I'm not going to publish these. I'm mostly just like testing out the lighting and no one's going to be able to see your face anyway. And is she thinking like, yes, I would like to see how I look in these maybe. Yes. And another thing she says in her book is there's something so freeing about doing what you're not supposed to. And that seems like a part of this too, that there's just some very standard teenage rebellion stuff going on. Like

this is a little bit forbidden. It's a little bit sexy. It's kind of cool to do something you're not supposed to. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it seems like things were fine until the Miss America Package got its filthy little mind wrapped around all this stuff. So I'm going to send you some photos from this shoot. Okay. I will not be putting these on our website or anything, but you can pretty easily Google to them. So it's Vanessa and this other girl and they are standing facing each other with their legs touching and their arms around each other and each of them have their hands placed on the others like lower back slash butt. And they're sort of like symmetrically loosely holding each other. They both have their heads bent and their foreheads kind of together.

They're totally nude. It's pretty lovely. Like I'm noticing that Vanessa has like, she's doing the thing that I as an expert in modeling from watching one million hours of America's Next Top Model when I was growing up. She's doing the thing that I think is important in modeling, which is like creating a narrative. Like she has this expression of like kind of wonder and like peaceful joy on her face. If you're going to project anything onto it, it doesn't look lascivious. It looks like they're in love. Yeah. And like they're touching each other's butts because that's what you do when you love someone. You touch their butt. Yeah. And you have to go boop. Yeah. And then I sent you two more. So the second photo, the second photo is kind of an action shot.

The other girl is like kind of on top of Vanessa and they're laughing and Vanessa is pointing at her chest kind of between her boobs. And they're like having, you know, acting out, having some kind of a moment or just having some kind of a moment. Yeah. It's just like girl intimacy. It feels very real to me. And this is like the thing of like when you're having sex with somebody and like you're about to or you've just finished and you're like joking around about like, what's this scar do? Or like making fun of their chest hair or making fun of their lack of chest hair or whatever. Like this sort of playful pre-post sex thing. Like it's a very good reenactment of that vibe. Yeah. Or like putting your fingers on their veins. Yeah. Yeah. And then

this final one is like the sexiest one. Yeah. The most explicitly sexy one. It is Amy on a stool and she's like on her knees on a stool and then doing a back bend so that her hands are on her her ankles and she's like arching her back bent back. It's very yoga. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also very joy of sex. Yes. I'm calling on like all of all of the print media I secretly consumed when I was a kid to contextualize these images and Vanessa is on her knees in front of her again with this like very kind of rapture. They both look rapturous. Yeah. But Vanessa I have to say I like her her modeling chops more in this. She has her face like resting lightly like against the skin like right above the pubic hair. Yeah. On Amy. And she is based on context clues

perhaps either about to perform some oral sex or just has. Yes. She also Vanessa also talks about how extremely fake all of these setups were. Her knees hurt. The other modeling her back hurts. This is like a performance of spontaneity. Right. But the procedure of making photos like this is the least sexy and spontaneous thing imaginable. Right. And I mean it's a testament it's unfortunate that like she's good at what she's doing here because you're like wow it's so sexy what a sexy scene and it's like yes what a sexy scene between two freezing underpaid people. Yes. Holding it. Being like yeah. I mean this is kind of one of the you're wrong about about this episode is that there is one or two nude photos from the shoot. He's like why don't we take some nudes of you

alone while like Amy is getting ready. So like that's the jumping shot that you saw. But it's not nude photos that gets her kicked out as Miss America. It's lesbian photos. The lesbianness of these photos is central to why she loses the crown. God that lead was buried. Oh my yeah of course. There's nothing more dangerous than a lesbian Michael. Nothing. This is why Playboy doesn't publish the photos. Hugh Hefner won't publish lesbian stuff and they're too dirty for Playboy. He's like no no no I know what's sexy. What is sexy is a woman standing next to a cow in a little halter top gingham shirt and jean cutoffs and she's standing there staring lasciviously at the camera and we're just going to do that for 60 years. Yeah so there's like two layers

to the quote unquote immorality that Vanessa Williams is accused of that not only is she nude but she's nude with another woman and she's simulating sex with another woman and like that's not something that Mainstream America is ready to reckon with. Right. But so she does this on like a Thursday afternoon or whatever about a week later he comes back and he's like hey do you remember that thing last week with the other woman and the silhouettes and stuff like hey I got the contact sheets I got the negatives why don't you take a look and this is very important she never sees them blown up to photo size she only ever sees like the contact sheet so she has to look at it with a little loop yeah and like maybe they're negatives maybe they're not like it's not clear

what she can see in those and so he shows them to her like hey remember how I said you wouldn't be able to see your face in these look you can't really see your face in these they're just silhouettes and she looks at them and she's like yep you can't really see my face in those no big deal she looks at these and she leaves very confident she's like a you can't see my face and b Tom says he's never going to publish them it's just testing this stuff whatever. Yeah and if she was looking at the negatives especially it would you would have no way of knowing like how he was going to develop them like how much you can do with contrast or whatever to make someone's face more visible. Yeah so at the time she's not even like hurt or offended or feels betrayed at all she just she

works for him the rest of the summer she's like yeah yeah I know Tom and you know it's not like I'm going to become massively famous in the next year anyway right like nobody expects this to happen to them. Yeah I was cleaning out my room at my parents house last summer and I found a nude Polaroid of myself after I saw it I remembered how it happened I was like drinking with like a friend of mine and like asked her to take a Polaroid of me so I could see my boobs I think actually and then completely forgot about it for like 13 years and then I found it and I was like oh if I hadn't found this in a drawer I would never have thought of it again and then it's like how many other things in drawers might I never think of again the world may never know. That's the thing

this is why we delete all of our old tweets. I don't do that but it's good that you do. All right so are you ready for another you're wrong about? I think so. There's not a set of nude photos there are two sets of nude photos. Oh! So we are fast-forwarding to the end of the summer she does not describe in her book how but she just says like I'm back together with Bruce she hasn't told him about the first set of nude pictures because again she doesn't consider it all that like interesting of a story she's just like I did this weird thing with Tom one day. Also it's not necessarily his business. Yes and also that yes so she takes the train from where she's living to Grand Central Station and she's walking out of the station and some random guy

comes up to her and is like hey are you a model? I think this is something that happens regularly to blindingly attractive 19 year olds that people just come up to you and ask if you want to be a model or whatever apparently he has his portfolio with him and he's like no no I'm a legit guy like let me let me show you some photos and so he brings out his portfolio and apparently they're extremely good and they're better than any of the work that Tom Chapel is doing and he's like look I don't want to be pushy here's my number if you want to do a shoot with me anytime just let me know and then a day or two later she gives him a call he invites her to his studio which turns out to be his apartment so immediately Vanessa's like that's not great but it's also

like not that weird for a photographer. Boy she hasn't seen fame. He takes a bunch of photos of her on the street he then takes her inside like do you want to do anything a little bit more artsy a little bit more daring he pulls out some like it's not clear if they're Helmut Newton photographs but they're Helmut Newton-ish they're sort of a bit more like leather industrial fetishy something and he's like look at these aren't these cool looking and she's like yeah those are cool and then he pulls out this like sort of leather harness type contraption. Do you want to try a couple shots with this? And there's this Wendy Williams album covered I love. So here is the photo that they take. Yeah this is very road warrior. Yeah. Okay so yeah it's her kneeling

and she's it's a frontal shot she's looking at the camera and yeah she's wearing this leather harness that is like this is a good look like I what are you trying to get me to buy a leather harness? The last two episodes have been attempts yes because if you are it's working it's it's leather it's like got I don't know the terminology for any of this but it's got like a metal ring that goes right over the pubic area and then it's got two leather straps coming up and out toward the boobs and then two other rings one over each boob yeah and so it's just like kind of a cut out bikini basically and yeah it looks good and she's again she's giving great face I think yeah but they buried the lead which is that she's good at modeling. Yes yes and so

she takes a couple shots with this she says that like as soon as she gets into this outfit as soon as he starts taking photos it just feels wrong to her the way that he's posing her she's like this doesn't feel artsy this feels like lad mag to me. It's hot for teacher. Yes exactly the vibe just totally changes after she puts on this sort of harness type thing and after he takes a couple photos she's like you know what I'm not into this I I'm not cool with this anymore I'm gonna go and so she changes in the bathroom gets back into her normal clothes and just goes home and she waits a couple days because she feels nervous about it but she eventually tells Bruce like just so you know that guy who's studio you dropped me off at the other day he convinced me to sort of

do these sort of bondage picks and I just feel kind of weird about it and what happens is a couple days later her and Bruce go back to this guy's apartment and they're like look we feel weird about what happened we want all of the negatives she wants to have an acting career she wants to have a singing career this could damage her I'm sorry but we just need to take the negatives from you and he pushes back like this is my art you can't do this you signed a release blah blah but eventually they push hard enough and he's like all right fuck it here's the negatives let's never see each other again so this is basically where Vanessa is that there's these two sessions but one of them is with this guy that she trusts and you can't see her face in the photos

anyway and the other one was like maybe went a little bit too far but also like she has the negatives they've been destroyed so there's really nothing to worry about so we are finally at the part of the show where we talk about how Vanessa ended up in the Miss America pageant but before we talk about that I just want to take a little musical interlude I want to show you one of the most demented fucking things I've ever seen this is the opening number for Miss America 1984 which Vanessa will eventually win we're gonna watch a lot of clips of this to preface this we have to put ourselves in 1983 mindset okay I'm always a 1983 mindset Mike I know I can smell your hairspray three two one go

this is kind of the choreography that they used in newsies where they're like all right we have too many people we got to have them all do a little dance yeah let's just put them all in a bunch of rows and have them do choreography together I am most struck by the fact that so many of these women are wearing sweaters I know and also all the sweaters are like extremely elaborate like they look like carpets yeah or the the print that they have on public transit like on the seats yes I feel like I'm watching a neutrosweet ad look at the sweaters these outfits are intense look how conservative they are it's ankle to sleeve this is like when you would be a hot 22 year old and you would dress like March from the pta and now a man who knows what it takes

to get a star on his dressing room door our master of ceremonies Mary Collins why do they have to speak I know I know how did they do that I cannot overstate how weird it is to watch people force to dance and like finding sweaters and like jackets and skirt suits they look so hot they look like people in like corporate hr training videos yeah so basically they're like okay we have 50 contestants we have to get them all out on stage to do one awkward musical number before we immediately send 40 of them home because if they're taken out of contention before they even know what's happening they'll be like at least I got to dance around in my sweater so yeah what did uh what did you think of the clip uh it was it had um

I'm speechless Mike I am without speech I've watched it so many times I mean okay I'll give you my first impressions I just feel like you you understand watching this that the organization used to have something approaching real power yes there's something that feels very of another time of people being on tv with so little irony yes like just getting out there and like dancing your ass off and no one appearing I'm sure people were thinking this but no one is betraying the fact that they might be thinking am I gonna look really ridiculous yeah it's just like no everyone's gonna look great and yeah the clothes are just like none of these are fabrics that are known for like wicking sweat that's all I'm gonna say no so this is sort of setting the scene for the world

that Vanessa is about to go into so I think honestly my biggest question at this point is what entice her to get involved in miss america this is what's so weird about the story so it is now spring of 1983 Vanessa is six months away from winning the miss america pageant mm-hmm is anything missing from the story so far yes because as we learned in the Paula Barbieri story typically it's unusual even to go in and suddenly sweep a smaller pageant yes and my understanding too is that pageantry is a vocation like people spend years people dedicate their adolescence to this yes it's incredible that for all of her life I mean she doesn't mention anywhere in her book having like interest in the miss america pageant or watching

it as a kid she probably did but it's not a world that she's like wanted to get into or has tried to get into she's never thought about being in one of these beauty pageants her whole life and she basically just like stumbles into it so when she's 20 she's at syracuse university she's in a musical called swinging on a star lovely cameo alert in this production of swinging on a star erin sorkin is one of her co-stars what just very random and I see like Vanessa walk with me yeah I'm gonna make my proposition in three parts the first two will come last and the last will come first so one night she's in this production her friend George comes and he brings his friend bill and bill is on the board of miss greater syracuse oh well bill seems like a big cheese

you know bill's doing it so after the play George is like hey bill what did you think of the play and the first thing bill is saying is that the star of this play Vanessa could be miss america if she wanted to be wow she's beautiful she sings extremely well she's a good actress she dances she is the full package it's almost like a backhanded compliment though it's like saying like you could be economies are and it's like but do I want to be so George mentions this to Vanessa and she's like uh I guess and then she hears that Miss Greater Syracuse and Miss New York and Miss America all of these huge scholarship funds associated with them and she's like okay like free money it's at least an option right yeah if I were 20 years old and super hot in a miss america

kind of a way and I basically knew how to do it already it would it would I think it would seem like a fun adventure it'd be like why not if it works out then that'll be great and if it doesn't then like it's the same I don't care yes exactly so she calls bill bill assigns her to a woman named Vicki who is her pageant coach who sort of teaches her all of the stuff like how to answer these questions she takes her out for dinner at one point to test her table manners do you want to know what the number one rule is like the number one mistake that Vanessa makes about like trying to be a pageant gal yeah wearing a hat indoors no it's her filler words oh so Vicki asked her test questions and then is like you have to count how many times you say um and you know and get all

of those out of your vocabulary oh wow so it's like they're training to be newscasters yes we talk so much about the misogyny inherent in this critique of filler words and like part of being the ideal woman is to speak like a dude and then so it's that clear sort of how much time she spends training to be in the Miss Greater Syracuse pageant she at one point says she's thinking about doing a song from a chorus line but she's like uh it's too much effort i'm just gonna do something easier i'm sure that's part of why she did so well right because if you're going in and your whole ego is on the line it is not really conducive to like placing well in a talent slash looks spectacular i am convinced that this is why she does so well in these pageants is because she doesn't

ultimately give that much of a shit and this is not a world that she wants to fit into that makes it feel much better to me because i'm like because i you know i remember it as like she you know broke this barrier and achieved this dream and then they took it all away from her and it's like i'm sure the way it went down was awful in all kinds of ways because these stories always are but like the fact that the thing that she let go of wasn't the thing that she had been working towards for her whole life is that's good to know i also love this is such an afterthought to her that she doesn't even ask her parents to attend she's like yeah i'm in the most greater Syracuse but like i don't bother driving over here like it just doesn't matter to her at

all whatever and then she spends one paragraph describing the way that she became miss new york she just like fast forwards through the whole thing she's like i won most greater Syracuse and like then i was in this other pageant then i won it yeah and you're like any details venessa like she does not give a shit if you don't really understand why you're winning you can't go into it that deeply yeah yeah it turns out i'm gonna pageants who knew yeah and so she loves the fact that she gets some you know she gets some scholarship money for this and her summer job so the previous summer her summer job had been this receptionist for this modeling quote unquote agency and this summer her summer job is being miss new york so she like goes around and does like ribbon

cuttings and stuff i think she has to do a lot of dairy stuff yes and it just like it's just a summer job for her and she's like well great this gives me more scholarship money and it's gonna make it easier for me to do my semester in london because then i can like have more money for plane tickets and stuff yeah i imagine that being a confidence booster oh yeah especially if you come in with no prior experience and just sweep things she also spends this summer preparing for miss america and now we're gonna rewind and talk about the miss america pageants yay the miss america pageant is like fascinating and there's a reason why like 200 000 phd dissertations are written about it because it's always fascinating to see you know the mainstream corporate tv station approved

version of like the ideal woman like in the lyrics you know the infamous uh there she is miss america song yes the lyrics are there she is your ideal the dream of a million girls who are more than pretty can come true in atlantic city before she may turn out to be the queen of femininity like that's what they're doing here it's a good thing they don't have this pageant in like we hawk and or something because that's a hard name to rhyme stuff with you can go back as far as you want but the idea of a beauty pageant has been around for like hundreds of years that smaller towns would do this of you know who is the most attractive woman in our town like this is a human thing judging women on their attractiveness which humans enjoy judging others and sort of

determining somebody's suitability for marriage it was very explicit in the early miss america pageants that we are here to pick a woman who's going to be the perfect wife really that was not subtext that was text because if you're a wife you need to wear a bathing suit wear an evening gown do q&a and have a talent yes you need to be hot you need to be able to sort of display intelligence but not like threatening intelligence yeah you need to be really well trained like a dog doing an agility course it also has a lot of basis in like weird eugenics stuff in the early 1900s there used to be things that state fairs where they'd be family contests for who had the best breeding like this idea of sort of hereditary superiority was becoming more central to american

life so it's just like when you go to the the state fair and they have the 4h kids showing their sheep or their calves but it's just like you show yourself literally so the early miss america pageants when they introduced the contestants they would have a whole thing about her breeding like her father is from switzerland and his father is germanic and his father is scandinavian like this was an explicit part of the show right because she's a mayor they're selling mares yes america's really creepy like i know what i say that every week but it continues to surprise me also double creepy the first miss america was 16 yeah she won her sort of qualifying beauty event it was a beauty contest run by a local newspaper when she was 15 and then these editors are like

that's the hottest 15 year old around like uh as long as none of the girls kiss each other i think it's all fine but so you probably already know this but the first miss america pageant atlantic city wanted to extend the summer tourist season so in 1921 they invented something called the fall frolic on the second weekend of september so the same as now you go to gamble and have like a like tiny vegas of the east experience yes and also i mean i think it was like very openly controlled by the mob at the time you know prohibition was going on but this is one of the reasons why miss america has persisted so long is because it's a way for atlantic city to market itself as not the city of graft and vice because there's nothing less creepy than a beauty pageant and nothing less

suggestive of graft or vice i mean i think the most important thing to know about sort of the entire history of the miss america pageant is that it has always been a vehicle to promote retrograde beauty standards so in 1921 the first miss america pageant there was a huge debate at the time about the bob haircut the emerging fashion trends for women having short hair not wearing these long frilly skirts with all of this extra fabric they were wearing clothes that were much more functional and they could do things like drive ride horses walk around by themselves and the bob not having long hair was a symbol of women actually having some independence in their lives and also i assume that it's to some degree a symbol of being a viable member of the workforce because if you're

working in a factory if you're a wager and are like probably your hair is going to get in your way in a lot of fields exactly and also you know women were wearing makeup and that was also a sign of independence so who wins the first miss america pageant it's somebody who wears no makeup and has really long hair so it's like no matter when they're doing it they're trying to get back to earlier and in 1921 they're like back in the good old days of 1911 girls for girls exactly so it's you know it's always enforcing the beauty and personality standards of 30 40 years ago there's also a fascinating thing you mentioned that venessa williams is probably the most famous miss america which i think she is too the sort of the disposability of miss america has really always been part of

the pageant because they were picking somebody to be like this perfect wife essentially in the early years you know the first couple decades they just expected you to win miss america and then just disappear and then like go get married to somebody they weren't selling it as a launch pad to anything it was like this is your last fling as a free elf exactly and so margo mifflin in her book looking for miss america which is excellent she talks about how the first winner of the miss america pageant margaret gorman shows up as an audience member just like buys a ticket and attends a couple years after she wins and nobody recognizes her like when charlie chaplin lost a charlie chaplin lookalike contest that seems wrapped up in the idea of femininity to me too yeah we want

them to be around as long as they're young and pretty and then we want them to disappear right just like with wives you know and the idea that the ideal wife on top of everything else is disposable because why they get killed so often i know there's also a really interesting thing that the primary architect of the miss america pageant as we know it today is a woman and her name is serena joy no i know you're gonna giggle at this her name is linora slaughter i'm surprised actually that her first name isn't lambs to the i knew you would have something thank you so in 1935 there's this huge scandal when it comes out that the current miss america posed for a nude statue this brings all this extra scrutiny to the pageant and the pageant organizers are freaking out and so they

bring on this woman linora slaughter to run the pageant and she takes it over for the next 32 years and anytime a girl breaks a leg she's the one who has to kill her before linora slaughter arrived the women you know now it's like miss oklahoma and miss iowa it's very sort of regimented who gets into the pageant but before then because there weren't state pageants it would just be like like miss pittsburgh one one year it would be like miss florida panhandle it was just these random regions it was just a free-for-all yeah and a lot of them were like super janky there's a point where linora slaughter has to kick out a swedish woman who's pretending to be miss alaska and she's never been to alaska or she's been there for like a couple days and they nailed her on the

salmon questions so basically linora slaughter's entire project over decades is just to like de jankify the entire process of bringing women in she brings in the talent competition she brings in miscongeniality as a thing she's the one who develops all the eligibility criteria which are to this day you have to be unmarried and childless because you know if you're married then you've probably had sex well exactly another thing that linora slaughter brings in which i think is so fascinating is she brings in this idea that when you win you get a scholarship i assume it's because we just don't want women to have money like ever and this was especially back then like women just weren't supposed to have money right and women couldn't have credit cards until the 70s or

something like that and yeah and if you take away all of the frills and dance numbers and everything then what you do have is people being paid for walking around in a bathing suit yes our eternal fear of like women having power and one of the surest roots to some form of power in america is just having cash in your hand because money in your hand yeah she also infamously one of the eligibility criteria this is word for word contestant must be in good health and of the white race so we know that this rule was implemented by linora at some point in the 1940s and she got rid of it at some point in the 1950s but we don't know exactly when i think this is just like a lesson to keep in mind for stuff like this that we have linora slaughter who literally includes

must be of the white race in the eligibility criteria but also has always insisted that this is not racist so in 1948 when she is pressed on this she says we have eliminated the negro from this contest due to the fact that it is absolutely impossible to judge fairly the beauty of the negro race in comparison with the white race so we're not being racist even though we're literally barring anyone who's not white no no it's that we couldn't possibly judge different people on different beauty standards but the thing is that all all members of the white race can be judged against each other according to an objective standard of course also the idea that you're selecting the best and brightest of like eligible women of the white race perhaps because

this is a time when people talked openly about protecting and perpetuating and keeping pure the white race yeah no it's because it's apples and oranges yeah sorry people who do racist shit never think of themselves as racists this is the most racist fucking thing you can do yeah yeah but then what's very interesting is they end up repealing this rule at some point during the 1950s but they don't have a black contestant until 1970 because all of these feeder pageants are like still super fucking racist so at one point in 1955 a woman named Dora Berry wins Miss State University of Iowa which is a thing and instead of recognizing her as the winner the university just cancels all of her events like as if it didn't happen so basically there's no

pipeline for black contestants to get into Miss America because all of these like satellite pageants are just like so janky and like racist as hell i mean this is like Shannon Faulkner getting into the citadel and then being like no no no we didn't mean you yes delete forget it in the 1960s i was not expecting this but we also get the origin of a myth that i have wanted to bust on this show since we began the myth of the bra burning feminist all right let's do it let's dive into this cookie dough chunk did you know about this yeah i knew that that i mean obviously right because the idea the myth i suppose is that when you become a feminist you burn your bra and so of course being a child who like hears jokes on the simpsons and stuff like that yeah when i was like

10 and went i think that halloween as quote a hippie i asked my mom about this and she was like no it wasn't i mean who's gonna burn a bra sarah they're very expensive they're very expensive yeah yeah so it is 1968 feminists have disliked the miss america pageant forever really so there's a group called the new york radical women that organizes a protest in 1968 of the miss america pageant so it's organized by this woman named Florence Kennedy who's a woman of color they put out this list of sort of demands and their number two demand they point out there has never been a porto rican alaskan hawaiian or mexican american winner nor has there ever been a true miss america an american indian and so Florence Kennedy organizes a protest of the miss america pageant it

eventually draws around 200 people that's a small protest too it's amazing how i know like the size of a protest that you might get on a good day at like boden is has gone down in history for 50 plus seriously the main thing that they're pushing is this this idea of sort of the miss america pageant is a cattle auction so they bring a sheep with them and they put a little beauty pageant sash on it i was like you're being treated like sheep see immediately i'm like where did they get the sheep did they have like a farmer friend who is like you can use one of my sheep and um the right wing press points out at the time they're like it's a male sheep it's not even a female sheep and shut up that's not that's not guys everyone relax yeah so they have something as part of

this protest called the freedom trash can into which they are throwing a bunch of symbols of their oppression so in margo mifflin's book she lists women's magazines men's magazines dishwashing detergent floor wax hair curlers false eyelashes stockings girdles and bras so they throw all of this stuff into the freedom trash can and then we get into the debate of whether or not they actually set it on fire was it or was it not a dumpster fire exactly so in margo mifflin's book she says they were planning on setting it on fire but they couldn't get a permit and then the plan to burn it leaked to the press and the press went with the story of feminists are burning bras rather than feminists are planning to burn bras you gotta go with the

story where the feminists are setting things on fire i also love how like the dangerous scary radical feminists are like we couldn't get a permit so although perhaps accounts differ another theory is that there's a new york post journalist there named lindsay van gelder who writes an article about this protest that starts with the sentences men burn draft cards and what next will women burn bras so one theory is that the hypothetical led to this idea that women are burning bras i also feel bad for lindsay van gelder because she says later she writes an article in 1992 where she's like uh i accidentally created this bra burning thing and i went there like with sympathy of being like well men burn their draft cards and that is good

soon women will burn their bras and that is good women can't be you know we can't use rhetoric because you know it's impossible to believe that we're using like you know hypotheticals or poetic license it's just like everything a female writer says is just a bare recitation of the facts because anything else would be beyond her but this might be a debunking of the debunking you always do this to me for his book getting it wrong 10 of the greatest misreported stories in american journalism an author named w joseph cambell went back to the archives and looked for contemporaneous news sources about this protest and he found an article from the local atlantic city newspaper that includes the sentence as the bras girdles falsies curlers and copies of popular women's

magazines burned there were a few hundred people here can we not can our is this not easier to establish so this author cambell also talks to a reporter who was there that day who insists that they did light the trash can on fire but he also speaks to feminists who insist it was never lit on fire so maybe it was maybe it wasn't we don't know i mean to me it's kind of moot because i think the myth of the bra burning feminists like no one was ever like one time some feminist symbolic well exactly on protest it's like the idea is that women across the nation are destroying their bras i think at the sort of most there was one protest where somebody lit a trash can on fire that included a number of items and there may have been bras in there like that's very different from women

are burning their bras like yeah the sort of the bra burning feminist myth that's not what we're talking about like a trash can full of lots of stuff it is patently a myth regardless of what happened in 1968 yes which tends to be how it goes it's like you have a story and you're like well the the details are kind of hard to figure out but really the point is that the thing people pictured never came close to happening exactly if women could afford to burn that many bras at the time they would have had fewer things to protest about frankly but so i mean to me it's like the the whole bra burning thing the protest all this this is kind of the beginning of the end for the miss america pageant the beginning of the decline although it still is like limping along

like dick shaney but yes but like the death of its relevance yes because the whole idea of picking like the ideal american woman just gets like more and more gross over time i think i guess more and more obviously gross as more people who have power within society are women and are like hey yeah this is gross so by the time venessa is in the 1984 pageant the sort of the wheels are starting to come off that you know there's the first black contestant in 1970 and that's coincidentally or not that's the year after pepsi pulls its sponsorship because pepsi's like this just doesn't speak to americans anymore like we're a pluralist society we're the choice of a new generation you guys exactly join the conversation there's little drips of progress so in 1970 there's the first

black contestant in 1976 there's the first black contestant in the top 10 in 1980 there's a black contestant in the top five like we're just sort of ready for this barrier to be broken and that brings us to venessa in the pageant in september of 1983 venessa walking into the creepy forest so i'm gonna show you a clip of the swimsuit competition and this is like i've watched this so many times there's this fascinating thing where as there's more criticism of the swimsuit competition and just the sexism just gets more and more gross one of the things the pageant does to try to tamp down on this a little bit is they do a split screen where they show each contestant on one half of the screen and then on the other half of the screen they have a excerpt

from their interview portion so the idea is they're supposed to be showing these women as intelligent and well-spoken as they're also in a swimming suit but like all it does is heighten the juxtaposition of like why are we doing this to these women so here i'm gonna send you a clip this has a couple of the contestants before we get to venessa how dare you three two one go actually i'm a very energetic person and i love athletics and uh i started the first woman's track team down at Troy Alabama they didn't have a woman's program at the university good for her good for her they always pick weird excerpts this is incredible so

don't be afraid to be a woman don't be afraid to look good even if you do have something to say aw it has to be so awkward to walk around in a bathing suit and heels i know it's like you're on tony montan is plugging her boat miss nebraska christin lee loanberg i enjoy reading but truthfully i have very little time to read novels but i love to read poetry i really do she sounds nice they are picking weird moments like i bet each contestant was like why do they choose that i know miss nebraska swears she reads poetry miss florida kimberley voice it's funny how like the hair and makeup makes them all look porty i know i honestly feel that i have something to do and that is a genuine laugh to laugh and laugh

for the people of this country that i would love to share with these people that seems fine i feel like she would make a good first lady i love that the hair is just totally motionless yeah they all look like audrey in little shop of horrors miss alabama pan battles pan battles in alabama as well as all across the country anybody i believe anybody can do what they want if they sit their mind to it the opportunities there and all they have to do is go for it just work hard you'll be fine with the name pan battle she should be like a mystery thriller heroine pan battles the cartel pan battles the fbi and miss new york vanessa williams i think that it is important for education to be

endowed with a good financial backing i i believe that the more programs that are available for education the better the student will ultimately become she's the only one who they haven't picked a clip of her saying something totally in name vanessa said socialism for our children yeah well it's amazing to me that she has entered this world so recently and is doing this like it is the most natural thing in the world yeah we're ready for the big finish if you are and we'll all go for it with an old-fashioned strut we now present the story of a legend brought to you by mcdonald's mcdonald's ad oh my god okay this is this is very hard to click out i know i'm doing it because it only it's a weird thing that they only have four sponsors so every ad is for the same four

companies and they keep mentioning the companies on the show yes this is like we have a copy of the christmas carol with george c scott that my parents taped off of cbs in 1989 and every single ad is for ibm it's like the alcoa model yeah there's not like that much to say here it's an interesting year in that there's actually four black women competing and two of them end up in the top 10 vanessa of course ends up winning and the runner-up is also black her name's susette charles she's miss new jersey and she's like been a pageant queen for years and she's like song songs on tv and she's like semi-famous in atlantic city so the whole pageant vanessa is thinking well i'm obviously going to lose to susette she also sings she's really good i'll probably come in

second or third or whatever and i'll still get some scholarship money and i'll go to london and like this little adventure will be over so the whole time she's just kind of like rehearsing what she's gonna do when susette wins all right we're gonna now we're gonna watch uh vanessa winning okay oh i love it when they all hold hands together there should be more holding hands in miss america three two one go the first runner-up and winner of a 15 000 scholarship is susette charles miss new jersey susette and then it's like oh fuck if sue that's not winning she has had like a very successful career she was on like soap operas she sings like she's done very well out of this yay she seems nice yay susette six of the brightest and loveliest young women in america

are standing on our stage one of them will be the new miss america and the winner of a 25 000 scholarship and our new miss america is vanessa leah i like seeing her smiling and she's smiling really big she looks really happy they put a crown on her and handed her a scepter and flowers i love who it's like it means nothing it means nothing at all but it's very exciting when it's like here's your new ruler they do say go out and meet your subjects whoever wins the one that you'll adore and it's like are they gonna see her ever again like i know that miss america works her ass off during her tenure but i feel like this is the first and the last we will see of her until she shows up as a withered husk to place her crown on the new miss america

next year and then disappear in a puff of dust vanessa is also heavily criticized for being one of the only miss americas ever not to cry oh my god i know i know i know just just as a preview of next episode i really thought you were gonna say vanessa is criticized for stapling a lufa to her dress what like does she have to cry like she has to force herself to cry to show sufficient gratitude this is like when hillary swank won an Oscar without thanking her stupid husband that was lovely to watch and i'm curious about what that was like for her i mean in her book she says that first of all her first thought is i guess i'm not going to london now so like she's already kind of like oh god i had this whole planned out paying your plans london next year

and also i don't think you can really tell in the footage because she's a pro but like this is not her at all it's weird to win something that's a huge deal to other people and is not a big deal to you yes but like i'm not a pageant person i have not dreamed about this moment it's just a lot of emotions at once yeah and just and then the inevitable tension that comes from you winning something that you are good at and winning it because you're good at it and you have a lot of the skills but then where implicitly like you owe everyone a show of like ecstasy and gratitude and crying now so what she says in her book is up until that moment i was just going through the motions i hadn't thought about what it meant i was miss america the first black miss america i'd made

history it was thrilling it was unbelievable it was crazy it was also scary but i didn't know that yet and that's where we're gonna stop ah we're gonna leave we're gonna leave venessa on the podium holding her flowers i feel like i've introduced you to the concept of two parters i don't i regret that you're just like i learned by watching you so what are we gonna talk about next time so we're gonna talk about what it's like to be miss america which i think is actually fascinating like that's one of the most interesting chapters of her book it is fascinating because we never talk about it it's and it seems like backbreaking work like anything where you're like getting up early running around like making a bunch of appearances basically acting like you're on a political campaign yeah

and you have to be in an apparently great mood and looking good the entire time like oh my god and very importantly because she is the first black miss america this makes news in a way winning the miss america pageant doesn't typically and it invites a lot of questions yeah so they're not asking her about sort of like what do you eat for breakfast and these like easy miss america questions yeah they're asking her like how do you solve inner city poverty and she's like i am 20 i do not know i am a theater student from syracuse like get your shit together america so immediately she is nothing like all of the other miss americas that have gone before her like the expectations of her are completely different i know i feel like it's like it might have seemed to

her like an easier a much easier job that ended up being but it turns out that when the embodiment of the spirit of miss america is black she gets to become a policies are exactly so we're going to talk about her reign as policies are and we are going to learn the end of vanessa's story there's a downfall and then a rise and we're going to do it with a special guest i'm so excited about that so in the research for this episode i came across a really interesting writer and podcaster who has done a bunch of work on this and she's going to be better at walking us through it than i will be so we're going to have her on and she's going to tell us the rest of vanessa's story and we're going to watch vanessa rise like a phoenix out of arizona so that's it what did we what did we

learn what do we think about vanessa vanessa is great and i learned that you shouldn't underestimate yourself because you might accidentally end up succeeding more than you anticipated and it could get weird also if you dated somebody really hot when you were 16 it's okay to talk about that forever