Yolande Betbeze Fox, a Miss America who rebelled, dies at 87
Yolande Betbeze Fox marches in protest of segregation in front of a Woolworth’s store at 44th Street and Broadway in New York in the summer of 1960. (Neal Boenzi)
Before she was an alluring mainstay of Washington’s watusi-era salons and soirees, Yolande Betbeze Fox was a rebellious, convent-educated, Alabama-born beauty queen. As Miss America of 1951, she alarmed organizers when she refused to squeeze into a bathing suit for cheesecake photos, publicly lambasted the pageant for excluding minorities, and picketed for civil rights.
In a life as nonconformist as it was glamorous, she was also an off-Broadway producer, sped off to Cuba with a rodeo, married a onetime Hollywood “wonder boy,” and was the longtime companion of an Algerian revolutionary-turned-diplomat.
In 1966, when she contemplated running for Congress in an Alabama district that included her home town of Mobile, her then-paramour, the architect Edward Durrell Stone, observed that she would dramatically improve her chances if she renounced her membership in the NAACP.
Mrs. Fox, whose independent-mindedness in that era was perhaps best defined by her quip “I’m a Southern girl, but I’m a thinking girl,” died Feb. 22 at an assisted-living home in Washington. She was 87 and the cause was lung cancer, said her daughter, Dolly Fox.
Raven-haired and statuesque, she first began turning heads as Yolande Betbeze (pronounced Yo-lond Bet-bees). While attending an Alabama Jesuit college, she won the campus title of “Miss Torch.” She was also a coloratura soprano, was well read in philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and David Hume, and was determined to harness her brains and beauty to advance her opportunities.
Yolande Betbeze, sitting, accepts her vestments after winning the title of Miss America for 1951. Behind her is her predecessor, Jacque Mercer. (AP)
“I entered the Miss Alabama contest because it was still a via aperta,” she once told The Washington Post, “and because it was one possible way to get out of the South. I knew that I was really a very good singer and that I could do serious opera even though my braces made me sing German lieder with a pronounced lisp.”
A Mobile music critic, beguiled by her talent and charm, urged her to enter the Miss Alabama contest, which she clinched (braces removed) with her performances of works by Schubert and Gershwin. Then it was on to Atlantic City, singing the “Caro nome” aria from Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/yolande-betbeze-fox-a-miss-america-who-rebelled-dies-at-87/2016/02/25/32374126-dbda-11e5-81ae-7491b9b9e7df_story.html