-
Yolande “Bebe” Betbeze: Cinderella in Charge
- The University of Alabama Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Yolande “Bebe” Betbeze CINDERELLA IN CHARGE Nearly a half-century after she was crowned Miss America in 1951, Bebe Betbeze welcomed me into her home far to the north of her native south Alabama. Washington, D.C. I n a grand old townhouse in the elegant Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, there lives a woman from Mobile once known as “America’s Own Cinderella.” Ravishing during her youth—with compelling brown eyes, lustrous dark hair, and a smile that ignited the room—Yolande Betbeze Fox, now 71, is lovely still, the gracious elder of the bewitching girl that she was long ago. Over the course of the last fifty years, “Bebe,” as she’s nicknamed, has enjoyed an especially glamorous time for a teen who once pored over school books within the nurturing confines of Mobile’s Visitation Convent. Her life has traced a dramatic arc, from an early marriage to the boss of Universal Pictures , to friendship with actors like Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor, to her activism in politics, reflected, in 1960, in her picture in the New York Times, carrying a civil rights placard. Widowed in her 30s, Bebe became a darling of the gossip columnists, who linked her romantically—and imaginatively, she emphasizes—to Joe DiMaggio and other celebrated men. Some Mobile women still whisper of a friendship with President Kennedy. (“I knew him,” Bebe says crisply, settling into a chair in the living room. 206 DIFFERENT WINDOWS ON DIxIE “Enough said.”) George Wallace, she suspects, may have even had his eye on her as a potential first lady of Alabama. Wallace friend Jimmy Hatcher, as Bebe tells it, had tried to pair them up. This Cinderella’s fairy tale began in 1950 when Bebe, who’d not yet shed her dental braces, was an opera student in Mobile. One night, the arts critic of the Birmingham News, who heard her in a Mobile Opera Guild production, gave her a glowing review, then proposed to Bebe that she enter the Miss Alabama pageant. Yolande Betbeze, Miss America 1951. Photo courtesy of the Mobile Press-Register. [3.141.0.61] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:11 GMT) YOLANDE “BEBE” BETBEZE 207 Bebe, by then, had already captured a local crown—judged Spring Hill College’s Miss Torch of 1949. She insists that she nursed no further ambition to be a beauty queen, preferring to lose herself in Proust and Mozart. But the invitation flattered her, and the city of Birmingham—the pageant’s home—seemed enamored of her. At the time, she recalls, Mobile gave her no backing, “not even a handkerchief,” as she once complained to an interviewer . After performing Schubert songs in the pageant preliminaries, and reaching the finals, she resolved to win, she says. “It was off with the braces and on with the show!” In August of that year, at a theater in Birmingham, she sang “Summertime ” from Porgy and Bess and clinched the crown. Photos astonished her friends back in Mobile. She laughs. “‘That’s Bebe?’ they asked? ‘Where are her books? Her braces? Her braids?’” Atlantic City was next. In the Thursday night swimsuit competition, dressed in Catalina swimwear , Bebe won first place. For the Saturday night finals, in a white taffeta gown, she performed the “Caro Nome” aria from Rigoletto that she’d studied with Madame Rose Palmai-Tenser, founder of the Mobile Opera Guild. As her friends back in Mobile gathered at the Cawthon Hotel to hear the pageant on the radio, Bebe awaited the judges’ decision. . . . Our new Miss America: Miss Alabama! Yolande Betbeze! With a crown atop her head and a cluster of roses in her arms, she started down the famous walk. It was the next morning that her duties as Miss America 1951 were outlined at a breakfast hosted by Catalina. The company, she says, had planned for her to tour the country modeling Catalina swimwear, as had previous Miss Americas. She refused, telling them she was a singer, not a pin-up. Catalina threatened to sue, but she held her ground. When the pageant backed Bebe’s decision, Catalina pulled out as a sponsor , founding Miss America’s chief competing contest—Miss Universe. “I wasn’t born yesterday,” she says of her decision to defy the sponsors. “They were funny old men, and I always knew how to make them march.” As a result of her savvy, her fees as Miss America—for everything from cutting ribbons to promoting products—went up four-fold...