It would have been one thing if Shanna had been polite, with the manners I always expected were part of being a beauty queen, and made suggestions like, “What if we try you hair this way?” But Shanna’s style was blunt, and it came across as mean. She once said, “No one liked your hair at Miss California. It was over 300 colors. We need to change it. I want you BLONDE—like Gwyneth Paltrow!” And she followed this up with pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow, criticizing my hair in comparison. Apparently, being a platinum blond was a prerequisite for winning. Shanna would tell me, “You do not have Miss USA in the bag!” At other times she would get exasperated, saying, “I’m washing my hands of you. I’m going to focus on the 2010 Miss California Pageant.”
Criticizing my hair was one thing, but here I was, an athlete, working out like crazy, and Shanna, and eventually Keith, kept back-biting me about how I needed to work out even more and diet better. It’s one thing for a coach to push a player and demand more in a productive way. But it’s quite another to belittle someone just for the sake of criticizing—and that’s what I felt Shanna and Keith were doing. They were not offering useful advice that would actually advance me to my goal, they were indulging in personal, verbal abuse. Maybe that’s what they meant by “tough,” but they came across as people trying to justify their roles as my “handlers.” Then Shanna would remind me that I needed to be “grateful.” She would take me out shopping on Rodeo Drive, telling me that other title holders didn’t have great directors like her and Keith, and that I should appreciate them taking me shopping at places like Chanel. Frankly, I didn’t see why I should be grateful for those things, when I got so little real support from my directors; I knew good coaches, and I wouldn’t have put Shanna and Keith in that category. I also felt they were pushing me in directions I didn’t want to go—botox, bleach, and boob jobs. I ended up giving in on some points, but I wanted to win as me, as the person God made me, not as the person Shanna and Keith wanted me to be.
I had a nutritionist in whom I would confide, and he was extremely sympathetic. He, unlike Shanna and Keith, knew what I was doing and always gave me great advice. One thing he said, which made a lot of sense to me, was that if I was to keep my competitive edge, I had to stay focused, filter out the negative, and concentrate on the positive. I know it might sound like a cliché, but it’s also easier said than done, and Shanna and Keith weren’t making it easy for me to achieve that necessary focus.
I tried to tell myself that Shanna meant well, that her style was shock and awe, a boot camp for beauty queens. But I frankly doubted some of her judgments; it was hard to tell which of her suggestions were really in my best interest and which were merely her aggressive nature and ego on overdrive. If I had let her get to me, I would have been utterly demoralized.
A magazine which dealt with pageantry, modeling, and fashion did a wonderful article on me, called “Beyond Beauty.” They featured my involvement with the Special Olympics. Before we got all the arrangements nailed down, though, Shanna kept putting them off, telling me that I shouldn’t be focused on magazine articles at this point. I needed to pay attention to my appearance—focusing on my hair, my tan, and my diet. Our priorities were just completely different.
I held my ground on some issues—no Botox for me, thanks just the same. On other issues, though, I just had to give in. To please Shanna, I let them take me to a salon in Beverly Hills and dye my hair platinum blonde. I thanked them, but I just didn’t feel right. I thought, Why am I trying to change my look when I’ve gotten so far just by being who I am?
Foolish me. I had no idea what they would change next.
The Miss California Pageant allowed me to pick out a gown of my choice, which was paid for by a generous sponsor, and willingly took care of my hair (even when I didn’t want them to), and helped me with make-up when I was in Los Angeles. They also had a wonderful, generous jewelry sponsor who decked me out in beautiful diamonds. All that was very nice, and I was very grateful, but you’d be surprised about how much was actually left to me to do on my own. The pageant had no wardrobe sponsor—I had to find one myself and ask if I could wear their clothes to the Miss USA Pageant. They had no travel manager. I had to do that myself. The idea that I would have everything right at my fingertips was utterly wrong. For being in charge of such a big event, it often seemed that the Miss California Pageant officials were disorganized and operating on the cheap and on the fly. Two former Miss Californias encouraged me, saying that being Miss California was all about what you chose to make of it; that it was really up to you to do whatever you wanted. That was fine and good, but it might also have been a polite way of saying, “Don’t expect much support or direction—it’s up to you.”
One former Miss California, Meagan Tandy, was not only a huge help when I needed advice, she was also bluntly honest in her assessment of Keith. She told me flat out, repeatedly, that Keith was an “evil” man. She said when she was Miss California that Keith was always unavailable when she needed him and verbally abusive to her whenever they did connect. For example, he told her angrily that she was representing his brand and could do no appearances if her skin wasn’t perfectly acne-free. Things got so bad that Meagan had her father intervene to protect her. Keith was no longer allowed to call Meagan directly; if he wanted to talk to her, he had to go through her dad. I found her stories pretty scary, but given my own recent experiences, absolutely believable.
When Keith did not provide me with a wardrobe sponsor, I found my own in Los Angeles. The store’s owner graciously offered to let me try on whatever I wanted to wear, run it by the pageant directors, model it for the camera, and return it when I was done. Keith agreed it was a good idea. He joined me at the store. Then to my shock, he actually joined me in the dressing room. I tried to shoo him away, but Keith wouldn’t leave. He stood there, watching me change, even when I stripped down to my underwear, standing before the changing mirror.
Earlier, in the Miss California pageant during which Keith presided over the crowning of the wrong girl, he had let a camerawoman roam around where girls were undressing, as if we were NFL players in a locker room after a game. He had no sense of boundaries.
There were some other unsettling moments.
A few days after I won Miss California, I was called into a meeting with Keith and Shanna, Roger Neal (the Pageant spokesman), as well as with a trainer and a nutritionist. They asked me to get into my bathing suit, another teeny-weeny bikini. I changed and came out into Shanna’s living room, feeling goose bumps rise on every bare spot of my body. Keith walked around me, looking me up and down appraisingly. He stopped and stared at my butt. For a long time. He touched me on the butt, then ran his hands around my hips, looked at my butt again, touched it again, ran his hands around my hips again, and examined each of my breasts.
I felt heat rising from my face. I didn’t believe that Keith, as a gay man, was doing any of this because he was turned on by it. But I do believe he was telling me something. I got the sense that he was saying that because he was the co-director, he could do whatever he wanted with me. He was saying: You’re mine now, and I’m going to fix you, and shape you and mold you however I want.
And then he said, “Have you ever thought of getting a boob job?”
“Yeah,” I said, “every girl has thought of it, but I’m not sure I want one.”
He told me that he had paid for some of the past Miss Californias to have boob jobs, and that I should seriously consider having the surgery. “I really think you need it,” he said. “I’ll look up some doctors for you, and we’ll get it going.” He told me the pageant would pay for it and made it clear it had to happen soon. He also said he knew a doctor in Los Angeles who could give us a discount.
So I complied with Keith’s request and met with the doctors, and then had the procedure done. Going into surgery was scary, but, thankfully, the recovery was not at all painful—at least physically. It was, however, later used by Keith and others to try to embarrass me.
Aft
er I became politically radioactive, Keith volunteered for the CBS Early Show that breast implants are “not something that we endorse, nor is it something that we suggest. But when we meet with the title-holder when she’s crowned Miss California, we put to her a litany of questions about how she feels about herself, what she feels she needs to work on, what she may need to change, what is good, what is not good.”
Actually, the only thing Keith Lewis put to me were his two big hands and an insistent request, bordering on a demand, that I get breast implants. But Keith figured that in making this false revelation he would hurt my credibility with the public—that he would make me look false and unchristian. It is amazing how little it takes to create a scandal in this country, but Keith’s gamble paid off, in part because after my honest answer to Perez Hilton, I became a political hate figure, and certain talking heads were only too eager to join in the chorus of abuse.
For instance, Keith Olbermann went on a rant on his national television show, ridiculing me for being a “woman who is partially made out of plastic.” Olbermann and others suggested I was somehow a hypocrite, a bad Christian, for changing my body. I don’t regret having had the surgery, even if I did it reluctantly. It was a choice I had to make, and I made it; and as with all my choices, I’m prepared to stick by it. But I do regret allowing myself to be so easily pushed and led around by Keith.
Unfortunately, there would be much more of that to come.
Now that I was Miss California, I expected to be the state’s ambassador at events from the Mexican border to Oregon. I expected to have my hands full with travel, bookings, hotels, plane trips, all to support the causes that benefit people in need of healing or opportunity. My expectations soon began to meet reality. When it came to appearances, I was pretty much on my own. I would receive an email from Lilly in Keith’s office with a list of events going on in Hollywood, along with a note asking me to pick the one that I wanted to attend. I remember seeing on the list a George Lopez event to raise money to combat kidney disease. I always liked George Lopez, so I decided to go.
To my surprise, I had to do all the work of scheduling that event by myself (my Mom helped); and I was completely on my own—no one from Keith’s office went with me; no press agent, no chaperone, no Keith. Event appearances were obviously not a big deal to Keith and his team, and we certainly thought about them differently. I thought being Miss California was about serving, doing community work, and representing the state. When I won, I made a list of things I wanted to do as Miss California. I wanted to visit the troops, work with children in need, go to hospitals, meet the governor—all things I thought a Miss California would normally do. But it soon became apparent to me that this wasn’t Keith’s view of Miss California at all; his view was that Miss California was Miss Hollywood, and it was Hollywood events and Hollywood causes that he wanted me to attend and support, insofar as he cared about events at all. Prior to the Miss USA Pageant, Shanna and Keith would tell me, “It’s not about making appearances, it’s about winning Miss USA.”
When I got back and looked at the list again, I realized that what Lilly had sent me—including all fifty-three possible events—was simply the Hollywood News Calendar. It contained events like Britney Spears’s birthday party, to which I had not actually been invited, where I would have been of no use, and which was not exactly a place where I thought the state of California needed to fly its flag (or me, my sash). Oddly, the few events that seemed appropriate to me and that I was interested in were often, I was told by Keith’s office, at capacity (like the Grammy Awards, to which Shanna said she couldn’t get me tickets), or were not worth my time, or were otherwise bad ideas.
Events that had nothing to do with Hollywood simply didn’t interest them. For example, loving sports as I do, I wanted to go to a book-signing event for the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. I thought there was a perfectly clear rationale for it, too: he had represented our flag and country at the Olympics, and I was representing our state as Miss California. The response? Keith’s office replied: “It’s simply a book signing. He’ll [Phelps] be there for one or two hours just signing books. People have to wait in line for a wristband, there’s no pre-confirming or anything like that. The guy said a lot of people are camping out in line. There’s no red carpet. It’s pointless really.” Later, after Michael and I became good friends (though not the torrid romantic partners the gossip sheets tried to make us out to be), we had a big laugh about this. Less funny, though, was my fear that I wasn’t fully doing my job as Miss California because of the reluctance of Keith and his team to book me into appropriate charitable or community events.
This went from a minor worry to a major headache. In Las Vegas, I would later see that Miss Texas, Miss Florida, and other girls from big states had teams that ensured they were smartly scheduled in appropriate appearances; their pageant directors made sure they attended events where they could do some good. In my case, I had a longstanding relationship volunteering for the Special Olympics. This was independent of my pageant life, but there was no reason why it should remain outside of it; as Miss California I thought I could do so much more to bring attention to this incredible cause. The Special Olympics touched me in a special way because it brought together my love of athletics, my Christian values, and my respect for the developmentally disabled. I thought that visiting children’s hospitals and attending events for the Special Olympics were exactly the kinds of things a Miss California should do. But Keith’s office took little interest, or even notice, of something that I thought could be a good work and a public relations bonanza for the Miss California organization.
In December 2008, an event caught my eye: a fundraiser for a prominent children’s hospital was listed in the Hollywood News Calendar. So I phoned the hospital on my own initiative and asked if I could help them with their fundraising. They said they would love to have me.
When I told Keith Lewis about the fundraiser, he never responded. As it was with the crowning of the wrong girl as Miss California in the Christina Silva debacle, I began to see that Keith was very unorganized. Here he was, in Los Angeles right next to all these events, but he couldn’t schedule an appearance or even bother to show up for one. Keith and the pageant officials had told me from the beginning of my reign as Miss California that I would be free to do the events I wanted to do. All they required was that I email them and let them know. I never had to get anything approved, I just needed to use my own good judgment and bring a chaperone with me. That supposed freedom was the tradeoff for the pageant doing so little to support and assist me.
Keith did manage to get me to one event on the same day I was to go to the children’s hospital. It was a red carpet event for a glammy, high-concept clothing store called Imperial Planet.
Here is the email I received from Keith’s office:Plan on meeting at Keith’s tomorrow at 11 a.m. Keith is going to take you to look at some gowns before shopping at Imperial Planet. You can dress casual for shopping, but you may want to wear something that is easy to take off. Maybe bring a pair of high heels and strapless bra.
There is going to be a lot of press at Imperial Planet so you should dress appropriate for Red Carpet (Cocktail attire). If you are unsure of what to wear, it may be a good idea to bring a couple different options, and Keith can help you select an outfit.
DON’T FORGET YOUR SASH!!!
Keith and his people seemed to think about every detail having to do with clothes, hair, and appearances. Only a few things were left out, like the “what” and the “why.” (Soon, I would find out, the “where” could be missing, too.)
So I went. I walked around Imperial Planet, dodging waiters carrying appetizers and people dancing to the live DJ, all this between stacks of denims and button-downs. Keith didn’t go to the event because he had dinner plans with his boyfriend. But there seemed to be no reason for me to be there either. Some girls might think being a beauty pageant winner is about going to trendy Hollywood openings, but that wasn’t what I had in mi
nd at all. I didn’t want to party, I wanted to do things—I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives—as Miss California. I had a horrible sinking feeling, as I stood there watching the cool, the hip, the beautiful people munching appetizers and dancing, that I had made a mistake. If this was what being Miss California was going to mean, I should never have bothered to compete. I had never been looking for a ticket to Hollywood events; I had been looking for a way to serve causes that meant something to me and that could help others.
When my Imperial Planet ordeal was over, I left for the children’s hospital event with an address Keith’s office had finally provided me. Wearing my sash and placing my crown on the passenger seat, I drove my Jetta to the hospital. At one point, I had to fill up my tank at a convenience store in the middle of Los Angeles—and only when I started to pump the gas did I remember to remove my sash. I wonder what people made out of that!
I finally got there only to learn that Keith’s office had given me the wrong address. The actual fundraiser was far off-site, a good two hours away, too far to make it in time. At that moment, I gave into a little self-pity: Why didn’t Keith and his team give me more support? Why was I alone? Why did I have to do all this by myself? It was getting dark, the neighborhood around the hospital was not the best, and, as usual, I had no chaperone that night.
The night managers at the hospital were kind. Knowing I couldn’t make it to the fundraising event, I asked them if there was anything I could do at the hospital—and they told me there surely was. My crown and sash would make a big impression on some little patients.
Still Standing: The Untold Story of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, and Political Attacks Page 5