Cosmopolitan (November 1997)

Vanessa Williams

From Dethroned Miss
America to American
Dream Queen

She has a highly acclaimed new album, a new man, a slew of must-see movies, and a house full of happy kids. Here´s how the scandalized beauty battled her way from tabloid hell to Hollywood´s major league.

by Barbara Sgroi

Sure shot: Former beauty queen
Vanessa Williams has Hollywood
in her pocket

Suddenly single supermom Vanessa Williams has finally wound up exactly where she wants to be. It's been a tough, uphill haul, but at 34, her resume' now includes two platinum records, nine Grammy nominations, critical raves for Broadway's Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Hollywood costarring roles with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The former beauty queen's renown as the first African America-and first dethroned-Miss America is finally starting to fade. "I'm simply a survivor," explains Williams.

She has even managed to survive the Hollywood tendency to typecast. Williams played a goddess up to no good in last spring's TV miniseries The Odyssey, an adaptation of the famous Greek epic poem (and fell in love with her current boyfriend, the project's screenwriter, Christopher Solimine, while filming in Turkey). Last summer, she was a good-hearted nurse in love with Harlem gangster Laurence Fishburne in Hoodlum. And currently, she's a ballsy, bitchy, decidedly unglamorous corporate lawyer in the drama Soul Food.

Oh, and she sings. The multitalented superstar has just wrapped up her six-month, United States to Japan concert tour and has happily reverted to being a browniebaking, carpooling, small-town mom to her daughters, Melanie, 10, and Jillian, 8, and son, Devin, 4, at their home about an hour north of New York City.

Now that her career is on a roll and her divorce from Ramon Hervey is in the works, she's dealing with the emotional aftermath of life without the man who was her husband, manager, and mentor. Hervey was the Los Angeles publicist she hired to do damage control when private nude photos of Williams, reigning Miss America, and an other woman turned up in the pages of fu**ing Penthouse magazine back in 1984.

"My goal was to
figure out how
to pick up the
pieces and get
back on track."

"I think he was drawn to my vulnerability-he thought he could help," she says of Hervey, 12 years her senior. "I was only 21 and overwhelmed. All I wanted was someone to take care of me." The scandal cost her the crown, ravaged her reputation, and sent her career into a crash-and-burn tailspin. But on Hervey's advice, Williams doggedly set out to reinvent herself.

"Afterward, I never felt, Oh my God I'm nothing! My goal was to figure out how to pick up the pieces and get back on track. I knew that I had a future."

But when Williams moved from New York City to Los Angeles to establish herself as an actress, "No one would take me seriously because I had so much excess baggage." Down but definitely not out, she switched to Plan B: "Singing was a way of becoming successful without relying on someone to cast me in a part."

Snagging a record deal was easy. It was her image that had been ruined, not her voice, and on radio, that was all that really counted. Her first album, 1988's The Right Stuff went gold and won Williams three Grammy nominations. By the time The Comfort Zone came out in 1991, her style had evolved into a tougher, more confident sound. The single "Save the Best for Last," a built-for-radio love song, sold more than a million copies. Williams had made her comeback-with a megahit and without apologies.

Having mastered music, Williams was determined to steer her career back to her longtime goal: acting. She'd grown up in Millwood, New York, where her music-teacher parents still live, and was studying musical theater at Syracuse University, planning to go to the Yale School of Drama, when she entered the beauty contest.

To land the starring role in Broadway's Kiss of the Spider Woman, in 1994, she worked out twice a week with the help of trainer-to-the-stars Radu. The pace was grueling, but the payoff was worth it. Eight times a week for nine months, she sang, danced, and scaled giant webs onstage before packed audiences.

Erasing the Past
Conquering Broadway gave her acting career a push, but not the shove she needed to get the Hollywood heavyweights to notice. So, when the director of 1996's Eraser refused to consider her for the female lead opposite Schwarzenegger as a woman on the run, she ignored Tinseltown etiquette and flew to L.A. on her own dime to convince him to give her a chance-and a screen test. She ended up getting the part. "I´m a risk-taker," she says with a smile. "My attitude is, go after what you want. If you get it, fine, if not, move on."

Since splitting from her husband, she's done exactly that. The 10-year marriage was rumored to have been a rocky power struggle, and the breakup painfull. "At first, I felt relieved, sad, and lonely," she admits, "then peaceful, settled, strong, and optimistic. I was looking forward to a life that was drama-free, to getting out of the anxiety and hell I was going through. The toughest part was thinking that I'd be viewed as a failure, knowing that it was going to be hard on me and my family. It takes a lot of courage to follow your heart."

Back on Track
Although she doesn't write her own music, she's fanatic about the lyrics she sings. "I know what's me and what's not." "Happiness," the hot single from her latest album, Next, was the result of a songwriter asking her how her life felt. "I said, 'I'm just happy.' Having the freedom to make choices makes me happy. Otherwise, I feel stuck, suffocated, stifled. Now it's all up to me. I'm stronger than I've ever been." As a single mom with three kids piled in the backseat of her Range Rover, this self-described overachiever has reassessed her career-versus-kids priorities. These days, she's up at 7:30A.M. to get them ready for the day, drives them to school, then heads to Manhattan for meetings and rehearsals, returning in time to get dinner ready, homework done, and bedtime stories read.

"You can't do it all," she admits with a sigh. "Fortunately, I have family, friends, and a nanny to fall back on, but there's always guilt involved." While touring, she sometimes brings the children with her, pulling them out of school for a week at most. Or she flies home for weekends during filming. "I want to make sure I'm there for them," she says. "My oldest is heading into the teen years, which are hard enough when both parents are around. But it's tough I travel alot." Occasionally, though, the media star and the mother meet somewhere in the middle. "Recently, my youngest saw my video on MTV and asked me to sing that song for him. He's only now discovering that I'm not just a mom."

Vanessa´s Advice
BEST WAY TO GET YOU WAY: "Pick your
fights carefully. Make sure what you´re
fighting for is worth it. If you´re pushy all
the time, you´ll just end up alienating everyone."

WORD SHE LIVES BY: "Perseverance.
I never aspired to be a role model and
I don´t live my life to be one, but if I am
admired, it´s for my strength and
perseverance-thats what´s most important for me."

BEST POSTBREAKUP ADVICE: "Let go of
the anger. If you brood and hang on to
that, it will never be over."

SINGLE-MOM´S MANDATE: "If my kids told
me that they didn´t like a man I was dating,
I´d probably blow him off. Kids are
extremely perceptive."