VIBE (December 1994)

IN THE COMFORT ZONE

She´s conquered Broadway, Billboard, and bad reputation, but Vanessa Williams is saving the best for last.

By Christan Wright
Photographs by Ruven Afanador

"There's a hot new SpiderWoman on Broadway," proclaim the television commercials. "Vanessa Williams is sensational" But on this early September afternoon, three flights above the dirty sidewalks of West 48th Street-just off Broadway-Vanessa Williams is exhausted. She's been working on her third album, The Sweetest Days; doing eight performances of Kiss of the Spider Woman a week; and commuting home to Westchester County every night. The better part of this day's been spent with Babyface here at Right Track Studios, where she's been voicing his vengefull, Latin-inflected song "Betcha Never." While the tech guys are mixing in the studio and the percussionist adds a few finishing flourishes, Williams is in an outer room, slumped in a black leather sofa watching Oprah.

This is nobody's image of the diva in downtime. Her long, golden brown hair is pulled back into a plain ponytail; her Caribbean blue green eyes are naked and bleary; her legs are splayed beneath an ankle-length black jersey dress. She's wearing sneakers. There's no limousine out front, no minions doing her bidding, no tiptoeing around. In fact, she and Babyface have ordered their own takeout: something with rice.

When she speaks, her voice is deep, but her tone is flat and matter-of-fact. There's barely a trace of the lush, sweetly soultul vocals that made her ballad "Save the Best for Last" No.1 on Billboard's pop charts in 1992 and sent her last album, The Comfort Zone, beyond platinum. Nor is there evidence of the dramatic belt that holds audiences rapt during "Come," one of several showstoppers in her Broadway debut. Which isn't to say that Williams is some kind of shrinking violet, or that in person she's a shadow ofher public persona. She's just improbably regular. As her dresser at the Broadhurst Theater says (and who'd know better than a dresser?), "She's honestly very down-to-earth."

What brought Vanessa Williams down was, of course, what she calls "the first great '80s scandal." In 1983 she won the Miss America pageant, becoming the first black woman ever to be crowned. "We're talking 11 years ago," says Williams. "It still amazes me that there hadn't been a black Miss America before then, which is pretty primitive. In '83 you'd think we were pretty progressive, but I guess we weren´t."

Yet even before the infamous Penthouse spread was published, her title had become a burden. From the black community, she says, "I got a lot of support, initially." Ed Eckstine, president of Mercury Records and Williams's executive producer, remembers his mother watching the pageant and hearing her voice ringing down the hall, "The black girl won! The black girl won!" But there was resentment too. "A lot of people thought I wasn't representative of a true African-American since I didn't have dark eyes and dark hair, and wasn't brown-skinned. So there was a division. It was hurtful to me initially, because this is the way I was born. These are the eyes I was given, and this is the hair color that I was given. I don't enhance it. You know, my son [Devin, now almost two] has the same color. So that was hurtful. That, and the death threats from the KKK."

Death threats?

"I had a whole FBI file of people who said they were going to kill me and kill my parents," says Williams. "They sent pubic hair through the mail and stuff like that. It was a heavy time in my life." She was 20 then. She'd grown up in the sheltered, predominantly white suburb of Millwood, N.Y. and had only entered the pageant because she needed money for her junior year of college. Her scholarship at Syracuse University, where she'd been studying musical theater, had run out. "I never even thought I'd win all the way," she says. "I mean, I knew I had the talent and the intellect to win" (and, of course, the looks). Nevertheless, thanks to whatever combination ofattributes, Williams found herself abruptly transformed into a symbol of an American ideal-one that she had not fully sorted out for hersel£ "All of a sudden," she says, "my political views meant something. At that point, I didn't even know what I felt politically. Two months into it, I said, This is enough, this is ridiculous. I mean, I wasn't running for president."

But she didn't quit. She carried on with her Miss America duties-tedious events at which she kissed babies and signed autographs-until Penthouse ran some nude photos of her that, as the New York Times reported, "simulate sexual relations with another woman. After her freshman year at Syracuse, Williams had taken a summer job as a "receptionist/makeup artist" for a photographer in Westchester. He'd pestered her all season to pose for some pictures, which he assured her no one would ever see. A little over a year later, she was crowned Miss America, and he sold the photos behind her back. "So I got burned by somebody who I thought was cool," she says now, with a curious detachment. Uncooler still was the pageant's executive director, who demanded that she resign in the name of "traditional American values."

VANESSA IN BIKINI AND FEATHERS IS WORTH THE PRICE OF ADMISSION. BUT BARE GAMS ALONE DON´T EXPLAIN HER SUCCESS.

The irony is that today Vanessa Williams is one of the few Miss Americas anyone can name. And her life is the very embodiment of traditional American values. The defrocked beauty queen might have turned up years later, hawking skin cream on some cheesy late-night infomercial. Instead, she's married to Ramon Hervey (whom she hired as her publicist during the chaos ofher Miss America dethroning), has three children (Melanie, seven; Jillian, five; and Devin), bakes cakes, and drives a Range Rover to Brownie meetings. And then, of course, there's her brilliant career.

Hers is a story of redemption-if not revenge-topped, perhaps, only by the recent, stunning comeback of Marion Barry. Granted, he's overcome a crack conviction and a disastrous last term as the mayor of Washington, D.C.; she only had to distance herself from a mistake of late adolescence and the humiliation of a tamished tiara. But it's no news that women are held to a different standard in America. She was supposed to make her Broadway debut in 1984, replacing Twiggy in the Gershwin musical My One and Only with Tommy Tune, but Ira Gershwin's wife, Lee, nixed the idea, fearing Williams would attract the wrong sort of audience.

That same year, she began pursuing a recording career in earnest. Plenty of industry people agreed to see her but only, she says, so they could say they'd met the scandal of the month. She'd been talking to Prince and doing some work with George Clinton, but nothing much seemed to be happening. Finally, in 1986, Hervey introduced Williams to his good friend Ed Eckstine, who at the time was starting up a new label, Wing, at PolyGram. Eckstine had heard Williams sing on the George Clinton hit "Do Fries Go With That Shake?" He was intrigued enough to meet her over dinner.

"I was surprised she was as musical as she was," says Eckstine. "But she was raised in New York, listening to black radio. She knew everything from seminal hip hop to Angela Bofill, to funk, to the stuff Shep Pettibone used to play on 'BLS. I said, 'It feels like we're on a track here."' Eckstine decided to risk signing her, but before they could release her first album, she became pregnant. "We had a year's incubation period," says Eckstine, "both literally and figuratively."

When it finally came to putting together The Right Stuff they knew more about what they didn't want than what they did. "We didn't want to be disposably dancey or 'Here She Is, Miss America'-the exploitation of all that," he says. They were also having trouble finding good material. "For the first record," says Williams, "we virtually had no songs given to us. So we had to beg, borrow, and steal to get any kind of material." Nevertheless, The Right Stuff (released in 1988; featuring two songs from Rex Salas, who's now Janet Jackson's musical director) was ultimately embraced by black radio and went gold, earning Williams some street credibility and three Grammy nominations. Pop radio, on the other hand, was still introducing her as Vanessa the Undressa.

Three years and another child later, The Comfort Zone would shut the morning-zoo animals up. It had everything: "a dancey vibe, a jazz vibe, a ballady vibe," as Eckstine puts it. It also showcased her singing voice-soulful and seductive in a 1940s lounge-singer kind of way-better than the less sophisticated material on The Right Stuff. The first single, "Running Back to You," hit No.1 on the R&B and dance charts. "Save the Best for Last" luxuriated at the top of Billboard's pop, R&B, and Adult Contemporary charts for five weeks. All the while, Williams was busy expanding her resume'. As an actress, she appeared in Another You with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, and in Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man with Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson. Both bombed at the box office, but she'd been cast. She also starred in the TV movie Stompin'at the Savoy as Pauline, a depression-era black domestic whom she's described as "very black, very down...asurvivor."

Williams could just as easily be describing herself. "There's not a lot of people who can do the same things that I do," she says while lighting a scented candle in her small, rose-strewn dressing room at the Broadhurst Theater. "Because of my training, my background, and who I am, you know? I danced all my life, I can carry a Broadway show, I have a Broadway future. I can also put out an album and be successful at it and go out on the road."

Such bluster might sound like conceit, but Williams has always been an unabashed overachiever. It started when she was one of very few black kids in her public school in Chappaqua, N.Y. She danced, she played French horn in the school orchestra, she was a Girl Scout, she went out for every production (her bio in Playbill informs us that "she has had a great passion for the theater since her first starring role as Elektra in a fourth grade production of The Trojan Horse"). Her parents, both music teachers, pushed her. "They said, 'As a black student in this school system, you re gonna have to do better than anyone else just to be considered equal.' Which was true." It's a lasting legacy that has left her with a steely determination that falls just short ofarrogance. You can see it in her impossibly erect posture, her disarming stare-she is completely without self-doubt.

"Do I amaze myself?" she says with a sudden laugh. "Well, the fact that I'm 31 years old and starring in a Broadway show with my name at the top ofthe marquee is pretty incredible." When she took over the starring role in Kiss of the Spider Woman from the Tony Award-winning Chita Rivera in June 1994, her run was supposed to last until the end of the summer. It's since been extended until the end of January 1995. The sight of Vanessa strutting around in a bikinilike yellow-harness-and-feathers affair must be worth the price of admission. But bare gams alone don't explain her success.

When she sings, her voice fills the theater, ringing with tender sympathy or booming with sexy menace. As Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, "Her stage manner is both playful and aloof. She's not a performer who holds back. She's throwing everything she has into this performance.... In the way the role worked for the incomparable Chita Rivera, Aurora [the Spider Woman] is now rewarding the gorgeous Vanessa Williams." She's also boosted ticket sales, according to Spider Woman producer Garth Drabinsky, by as much as $100,000 a week, or 20 percent of potential. "She has her own following," Drabinsky noted in September. "Obviously, she's appealing to a younger audience than Chita did and to a black audience. Somewhere around a third of the audience now is black; the percentage was negligible before."

COME AS YOU ARE
"This is the way I was born," says Vanessa Williams.
"These are the eyes I was given, and this is the hair color that I was given. I don´t enhance it."

But The SweetestDays - from the electric-guitar-driven "Higher Ground" to "Love Is," which also appears on the Beverly Hills, 90210 soundtrack-is hardly a traditional "black" R&B album (whatever that is). "The point of entry is obviously on the R&B side," says Eckstine. "But as she matured, we knew the dancey stuff would take a backseat. Her tastes would be more reflected. This is more jazzy, not as much clutter." In fact, "Sister Moon" (written by Sting, who also sings backup on the track), with Williams's smoky voice against horns and an upright bass, is practically a lounge number. Babyface, who wrote and produced two of the cuts, was inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, especially by what Williams calls "the cigarette-holding songs."

"I saw that she was taking a left turn," says Babyface, who is now managed by Ramon Hervey. "She's in a place where she can experiment. She doesn't have to deliver the up-tempo R&B. So I wrote one, 'Betcha Never,' that is very Spanish [Williams calls it 'Senorita with an attitude'], and the other, 'You Can't Run,' is kind of tropical. They both feel ethnic, but not southern-grits ethnic."

Vanessa Williams can't be troubled by such categories anymore; she has crossed too many boundaries for that. Her musical competition is now less the pop soul of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey than, perhaps, the stage-inflected pop theatrics of Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. Heady company, particularly for a woman who once seemed destined to become merely the answer to a pop culture trivia question.

"It's easier now," she says over a cup of tea just before her 8:00 curtain. "The avenues have been opened." But there's something more to her success: More than just blowing up or realizing her dreams, she's tasted sweet redemption. At long last, Vanessa Williams the Jest has been eclipsed by Vanessa Williams the Best.