Miss America using Williams' return to push interest

ATLANTIC CITY - In the spray-tan, Vaseline-on-the-teeth, gel-manicure world of Miss America, the spectacle has often appeared to be more reality TV show than scholarship pageant, with 52 young women vying tooth and nail for the crown.

But never as much as it has been this week, going by the organizers' promotional efforts.

First, it was announced on Good Morning America on Tuesday that the entertainer Vanessa Williams, who was forced to relinquish her crown in 1984 after nude photos of her emerged, would return to the pageant this year as head judge.

Then came a bombastic announcement that there would be a "shocking twist" involving Williams in the first five minutes of the pageant broadcast that will "change pageant history."

ABC is to broadcast the pageant live at 9 p.m. Sunday.

Williams first made pageant history in September 1983, when she became the first African American Miss America. Then she made more history by becoming the first to be disqualified. She has since gone on to a successful career as a singer and actress.

In tweets and Facebook posts, Williams has noted that while she was stripped of her title, she retained her actual Miss America crown.

So the big mystery - until Sunday night - is whether she will be reinstated as Miss America 1984, and if so, what happens to Suzette Charles, the runner-up from Mays Landing, who was declared the winner when Williams resigned.

"I think that is the entire point of bringing Vanessa Williams back," said Amanda Bower, a professor of advertising communications at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., and an expert in integrated marketing who has written extensively about high-profile events such as the Super Bowl.

"Can it pull people in to watch? Maybe. But can it keep them past the first five minutes? That is harder to say. But reality TV is an easier sell these days."

The Williams saga, however it turns out when viewers tune in, even made top story on TMZ, the celebrity news website and television show, on Friday.

TMZ said "production sources" associated with the event were claiming the pageant was in "crisis mode" over a dispute with the dethroned beauty queen over who should apologize to whom during the broadcast for the 31-year-old debacle. The piece noted that Williams, 52, and the pageant were at an "impasse" Thursday night.

Neither Williams' publicist nor pageant officials on Friday would discuss the issue. The pageant referred only to a three-day-old statement in which pageant officials called Williams "one of the most respected and multifaceted performers" in entertainment.

"We recognize that Vanessa's return to Miss America . . . is a special cultural and television moment," said Mike Mahan, president of Dick Clark Productions, which is producing the show.

Since her debut release of The Right Stuff in 1988, Williams has sold more than seven million albums and has scored a number of hit records on various Billboard charts. She has appeared in television shows, movies, and Broadway productions.

Despite Williams' success - earning Grammy, Emmy, and Tony nominations - she has been little more than an asterisked footnote on lists of Miss Americas, since she forfeited the crown because she had violated a moral-turpitude clause in her contract.

At a modeling shoot long before she became involved with pageants, Williams said, she allowed herself to be photographed in the nude, believing she was being depicted only in silhouette. She said at the time that she had not authorized the release of the photos.

A spokeswoman for the pageant, Chelsea Mineur, on Friday said Miss America Organization officials would make no further comment about Williams' return beyond the three-day-old statement, noting that anyone interested in finding out more about what happens with the former beauty queen will "have to tune in Sunday for the show."

In the earlier statement, pageant executive chairman and CEO Sam Haskell said bringing Williams back was a way for the organization to "move forward and put the past behind us."

And in more of a blast from the past than a forward-looking move, Haskell announced during a preliminary competition Thursday night that the pageant was bringing back the iconic voice of Bert Parks, on a recording of "There She Is, Miss America," as the newly crowned Miss sashays down the runway Sunday night. For the last several years, it had stopped using the song because of a copyright dispute.

Parks, the longtime TV host who died in 1992, and the song remain such an integral part of pageant history that a statue of him outside an Atlantic City hotel plays the tune whenever someone walks past it.