As Aurora, the movie goddess who inhabits the fantasies of Molina, a gay window dresser doing time in a hellhole Latin American prison, Williams gets to sing, dance, act and be gorgeous in a parade of lavish costumes. Where Rivera’s Aurora was a dance-driven performance, Williams’s singing is the strongest part of her arsenal. Where Rivera’s goddess was witchy and bitchy, Williams makes a surprisingly wholesome siren. Even when Aurora becomes the lethal Spider Woman, any sensible fly would want to scuttle to the center of her web and cuddle up.
Williams, 31, has been received so well critically and at the box office that her run has been extended to Dec. 31. And she’s happy that she’s drawing a more racially integrated audience for the show, especially young people. It all adds up to a nifty American story of a young woman who herself had to battle back from the spider clutch of sleaze and prejudice to claim her own best self. “I’m here because of my guts and talents,” says the former musical-theater major at Syracuse University. “It’s been a long 10 years since I resigned as Miss America. But I knew when everything was going berserk that one day when the dust settled people would see what I could do.”
Her ordeal started before the scandal, when she was crowned Miss America. “Growing up in a predominantly white environment, I thought I was just like everyone else,” she says. “When I won Miss America, that’s when reality set in. I got hate mail from white-supremacist groups and also from blacks who didn’t feel I was black enough. I didn’t know who I was: she’s black, she’s not black enough, she’s not white so we hate her. That was my wake-up.” When the Penthouse pictures came out, “a lot of people realized that I was a teenager who made a stupid mistake that some people profited from.” It still hurts her to recall that black leaders like Roy Innis of CORE and TV commentator Tony Jones spoke harshly about her.
She was turned down by a co-op apartment board in New York as an “inappropriate person.” Director Tommy Tune liked her when she auditioned to go into the musical “My One and Only,” but, says Williams, Ira Gershwin’s wife, Lee, vetoed her: “She said I’d bring the wrong type of audience into the theater.” Meanwhile, her recording career was flourishing under the direction of her husband, Ramon Hervey, whom she had met when he handled her public relations during the Miss America madness. They have three children, ages 7, 5 and 1. Back when the executive director of Miss America made Williams give up her crown, he said she should resign in the name of “traditional American virtues.” Well, Williams has Dan Quayle credentials as a working mother, following the example of her music-teacher parents.
“She is strong, clear-eyed and smart, with not an ounce of phoniness,” says “Spider Woman” director Harold Prince. “She’s a director’s dream who can change an interpretation in two minutes. And she’s got that combination of innocence and sly innuendo that Mary Martin had. Chita is a quintessential Broadway star. Along comes someone many years younger who seems to be a star. She’s capable of great diversity.”
Williams knows she needs to create her own roles. She’d love to do the story of Dorothy Dandridge, the tragic black star of “Carmen Jones,” who died of an antidepressant overdose in 1965. Another project is Sally Hemings, the slave who some scholars believe was the mistress of Thomas Jefferson, a theme so controversial that Williams says “probably only a European director would have the guts to do it.” A third album is due in October, followed by her first international tour. The final irony: at the 1993 Miss America pageant, they played one of Williams’s songs. It’s called “Save the Best for Last.”
