Yolande Betbeze Fox, Before she was an adorable mainstay of Washington’s watusi-era salons and soirees, Yolande Betbeze Fox was a rebellious, convent-educated, Alabama-born adorableness queen. As Miss America of 1951, she abashed organizers if she banned to clasp into a bathing clothing for amazon photos, about lambasted the celebration for excluding minorities, and picketed for civilian rights.
In a activity as nonconformist as it was glamorous, she was aswell an off-Broadway producer, sped off to Cuba with a rodeo, affiliated a onetime Hollywood “wonder boy,” and was the longtime accompaniment of an Algerian revolutionary-turned-diplomat.
In 1966, if she advised active for Congress in an Alabama commune that included her home boondocks of Mobile, her then-paramour, the artist Edward Durell Stone, empiric that she would badly beforehand her affairs if she abandoned her associates in the NAACP.
Mrs. Fox, whose independent-mindedness in that era was conceivably best authentic by her badinage “I’m a Southern girl, but I’m a cerebration girl,” died Feb. 22 at an assisted-living home in Washington. She was 87 and the could cause was lung cancer, said her daughter, Dolly Fox.
Raven-haired and statuesque, she aboriginal began axis active as Yolande Betbeze (pronounced Yo-lond Bet-bees). While accessory an Alabama Jesuit college, she won the campus appellation of “Miss Torch.” She was aswell a coloratura soprano, was able-bodied apprehend in philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and David Hume, and was bent to accouter her accuracy and adorableness to beforehand her opportunities.
“I entered the Miss Alabama challenge because it was still a via aperta,” she already told The Washington Post, “and because it was one accessible way to get out of the South. I knew that I was absolutely a actual acceptable accompanist and that I could do austere opera even admitting my braces fabricated me sing German lieder with a arresting lisp.”
A Mobile music critic, beguiled by her aptitude and charm, apprenticed her to access the Miss Alabama contest, which she clinched (braces removed) with her performances of works by Schubert and Gershwin. Again it was on to Atlantic City, singing the “Caro nome” aria from Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”
That was if problems began. She didn’t mix able-bodied with the added contestants, whom she begin both intellectually absent and cutthroat. One cacographic the byword “hairy sits here” on her mirror, apropos to her blubbery eyebrows.
After her celebration — as the aboriginal champ from Alabama — she affronted a above sponsor, Catalina bathing suits. She had, conceivably aback at first, alone to assurance the accepted arrangement obligating her to accomplish promotional appearances clay their new band of swimsuits, and again absolute banned to be afraid into it.
“I'm a singer,” she declared at the time, “not a pinup.”
As she after recalled, a man apery Catalina “stood up and fumed. He looked at me and said, ‘I’ll run you off the account pages. I’ll alpha my own contest. You’ll see.’ I said, ‘That’s splendid. Acceptable luck to you.’ . . . Anyway, he did absolutely alpha the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageant. So humans can acknowledge me — or accusation me — for that.”
She acclimated her accessible belvedere to adjudge de facto absolute behavior in some Miss America preliminaries. She aswell stood acuity alfresco New York’s Sing Sing bastille in 1953 to authenticate adjoin the beheading of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been bedevilled of cabal to canyon diminutive bomb secrets to the Soviet Union.
She approved to accomplish the best of amicableness agent roles foisted on her by the Miss America pageant. That already meant babyminding beyond the Atlantic a baby alembic of Hudson River baptize meant to be caked into the Seine “in the name of Franco-American amity,” she told announcer Frank Deford for his book “There She Is: The Activity and Times of Miss America.”
“I anticipate the Celebration agilely believed that I was America’s acknowledgment to Lafayette at last,” she said. “All the abuse baptize ran out of the canteen on the even over, and I had to bushing it with baptize from the faucet in my hotel.”
She rebuffed cine offers but not the 1954 alliance angle of ball controlling Matthew M. Fox, whom she met at a affair in New York.
He was stout and alert her age, but she was fatigued to his amphitheater dancing skills, his active apperception and his drive. A onetime Universal Pictures wunderkind, he ventured presciently but disastrously into a subscription-TV account in the 1950s and absent millions of dollars. He aswell absorbed himself in atramentous bread-and-butter and political ventures in Indonesia, arena a role in engineering its ability from the Dutch and bringing Sukarno to power.
Her alliance to Matty Fox, as he was generally called, brought abounding privileges. They included acreage from Hollywood to Paris, including a Park Avenue accommodation in Manhattan. She formed bound friendships with cine stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor and added grandees of ability and politics, including Clark Clifford, who became asperse to her alone child.
Mrs. Fox had a assignment as an off-Broadway producer, putting on works by Aristophanes and Shakespeare at a amphitheater she started over a bagel bakers’ abutment appointment on East Houston Street. She and two added above Miss Americas played the three witches in her 1955 staging of “Macbeth.”
She aswell was a advance with the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.
Outside a Woolworth’s abreast New York’s amphitheater commune in 1960, she was photographed by the New York Times hoisting a placard that airtight the administration store’s segregationist cafeteria adverse policies.
According to Deford’s history of the pageant, her artlessness fabricated her persona non grata with Miss America organizers, who admired their winners to abstain behind viewers.
The Miss America celebration gradually started to cover atramentous and Asian contestants — in 1983, Vanessa Williams became the aboriginal African American champ — and Mrs. Fox was not affected in allotment some of the acclaim to herself. “I batten out adjoin the celebration if it was needed,” she told Humans annual in 2000. “The celebration has changed, acknowledgment to me.”
Yolande Margaret Betbeze was built-in in Mobile on Nov. 28, 1928. Her aboriginal name, she said, acquired from a book about medieval history that her mother was account at the time. Her father, whose ancestors was of Basque heritage, endemic slaughterhouses.
After 12 years of ancestry in a convent, she abounding Spring Hill Academy in Mobile and throughout the 1950s connected her studies of aesthetics at the New School for Social Research in New York.
By the time her bedmate died of a affection advance in 1964, Mrs. Fox was a common company to Washington. She anon acclimatized into a acclaimed home in Georgetown that had already belonged to Jacqueline Kennedy.
Mrs. Fox, who became a Democratic Affair fundraiser, absorbed hostesses and presidents into her orbit. She aswell absorbed abounding able acceptable bachelors, and, she hinted, aswell some who were not so eligible.
But her a lot of constant adapter was to Cherif Guellal, a adventurous Algerian who helped defended his country’s ability from France and served as its aboriginal post-colonial agent to the United States.
As socialite and columnist Barbara Howar already wrote, Mrs. Fox contributed show-business luminaries to Guellal’s agrarian Georgetown parties already abundant with “the keener political minds, acclaimed academicians [and] all-embracing radicals.”
Guellal, whom she advised her apron although they never wed, died in 2009. Besides her daughter, of New York, survivors cover a granddaughter.
Two years ago, Mrs. Fox told an Alabama anchorman that it was her achievement to address a account but was dabbling out of tact. “There’s still too abounding humans who aren’t asleep yet,” she said.
In a activity as nonconformist as it was glamorous, she was aswell an off-Broadway producer, sped off to Cuba with a rodeo, affiliated a onetime Hollywood “wonder boy,” and was the longtime accompaniment of an Algerian revolutionary-turned-diplomat.
In 1966, if she advised active for Congress in an Alabama commune that included her home boondocks of Mobile, her then-paramour, the artist Edward Durell Stone, empiric that she would badly beforehand her affairs if she abandoned her associates in the NAACP.
Mrs. Fox, whose independent-mindedness in that era was conceivably best authentic by her badinage “I’m a Southern girl, but I’m a cerebration girl,” died Feb. 22 at an assisted-living home in Washington. She was 87 and the could cause was lung cancer, said her daughter, Dolly Fox.
Raven-haired and statuesque, she aboriginal began axis active as Yolande Betbeze (pronounced Yo-lond Bet-bees). While accessory an Alabama Jesuit college, she won the campus appellation of “Miss Torch.” She was aswell a coloratura soprano, was able-bodied apprehend in philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and David Hume, and was bent to accouter her accuracy and adorableness to beforehand her opportunities.
“I entered the Miss Alabama challenge because it was still a via aperta,” she already told The Washington Post, “and because it was one accessible way to get out of the South. I knew that I was absolutely a actual acceptable accompanist and that I could do austere opera even admitting my braces fabricated me sing German lieder with a arresting lisp.”
A Mobile music critic, beguiled by her aptitude and charm, apprenticed her to access the Miss Alabama contest, which she clinched (braces removed) with her performances of works by Schubert and Gershwin. Again it was on to Atlantic City, singing the “Caro nome” aria from Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”
That was if problems began. She didn’t mix able-bodied with the added contestants, whom she begin both intellectually absent and cutthroat. One cacographic the byword “hairy sits here” on her mirror, apropos to her blubbery eyebrows.
After her celebration — as the aboriginal champ from Alabama — she affronted a above sponsor, Catalina bathing suits. She had, conceivably aback at first, alone to assurance the accepted arrangement obligating her to accomplish promotional appearances clay their new band of swimsuits, and again absolute banned to be afraid into it.
“I'm a singer,” she declared at the time, “not a pinup.”
As she after recalled, a man apery Catalina “stood up and fumed. He looked at me and said, ‘I’ll run you off the account pages. I’ll alpha my own contest. You’ll see.’ I said, ‘That’s splendid. Acceptable luck to you.’ . . . Anyway, he did absolutely alpha the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageant. So humans can acknowledge me — or accusation me — for that.”
She acclimated her accessible belvedere to adjudge de facto absolute behavior in some Miss America preliminaries. She aswell stood acuity alfresco New York’s Sing Sing bastille in 1953 to authenticate adjoin the beheading of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been bedevilled of cabal to canyon diminutive bomb secrets to the Soviet Union.
She approved to accomplish the best of amicableness agent roles foisted on her by the Miss America pageant. That already meant babyminding beyond the Atlantic a baby alembic of Hudson River baptize meant to be caked into the Seine “in the name of Franco-American amity,” she told announcer Frank Deford for his book “There She Is: The Activity and Times of Miss America.”
“I anticipate the Celebration agilely believed that I was America’s acknowledgment to Lafayette at last,” she said. “All the abuse baptize ran out of the canteen on the even over, and I had to bushing it with baptize from the faucet in my hotel.”
She rebuffed cine offers but not the 1954 alliance angle of ball controlling Matthew M. Fox, whom she met at a affair in New York.
He was stout and alert her age, but she was fatigued to his amphitheater dancing skills, his active apperception and his drive. A onetime Universal Pictures wunderkind, he ventured presciently but disastrously into a subscription-TV account in the 1950s and absent millions of dollars. He aswell absorbed himself in atramentous bread-and-butter and political ventures in Indonesia, arena a role in engineering its ability from the Dutch and bringing Sukarno to power.
Her alliance to Matty Fox, as he was generally called, brought abounding privileges. They included acreage from Hollywood to Paris, including a Park Avenue accommodation in Manhattan. She formed bound friendships with cine stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor and added grandees of ability and politics, including Clark Clifford, who became asperse to her alone child.
Mrs. Fox had a assignment as an off-Broadway producer, putting on works by Aristophanes and Shakespeare at a amphitheater she started over a bagel bakers’ abutment appointment on East Houston Street. She and two added above Miss Americas played the three witches in her 1955 staging of “Macbeth.”
She aswell was a advance with the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.
Outside a Woolworth’s abreast New York’s amphitheater commune in 1960, she was photographed by the New York Times hoisting a placard that airtight the administration store’s segregationist cafeteria adverse policies.
According to Deford’s history of the pageant, her artlessness fabricated her persona non grata with Miss America organizers, who admired their winners to abstain behind viewers.
The Miss America celebration gradually started to cover atramentous and Asian contestants — in 1983, Vanessa Williams became the aboriginal African American champ — and Mrs. Fox was not affected in allotment some of the acclaim to herself. “I batten out adjoin the celebration if it was needed,” she told Humans annual in 2000. “The celebration has changed, acknowledgment to me.”
Yolande Margaret Betbeze was built-in in Mobile on Nov. 28, 1928. Her aboriginal name, she said, acquired from a book about medieval history that her mother was account at the time. Her father, whose ancestors was of Basque heritage, endemic slaughterhouses.
After 12 years of ancestry in a convent, she abounding Spring Hill Academy in Mobile and throughout the 1950s connected her studies of aesthetics at the New School for Social Research in New York.
By the time her bedmate died of a affection advance in 1964, Mrs. Fox was a common company to Washington. She anon acclimatized into a acclaimed home in Georgetown that had already belonged to Jacqueline Kennedy.
Mrs. Fox, who became a Democratic Affair fundraiser, absorbed hostesses and presidents into her orbit. She aswell absorbed abounding able acceptable bachelors, and, she hinted, aswell some who were not so eligible.
But her a lot of constant adapter was to Cherif Guellal, a adventurous Algerian who helped defended his country’s ability from France and served as its aboriginal post-colonial agent to the United States.
As socialite and columnist Barbara Howar already wrote, Mrs. Fox contributed show-business luminaries to Guellal’s agrarian Georgetown parties already abundant with “the keener political minds, acclaimed academicians [and] all-embracing radicals.”
Guellal, whom she advised her apron although they never wed, died in 2009. Besides her daughter, of New York, survivors cover a granddaughter.
Two years ago, Mrs. Fox told an Alabama anchorman that it was her achievement to address a account but was dabbling out of tact. “There’s still too abounding humans who aren’t asleep yet,” she said.
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