Yolande Fox

Yolande Margaret Betbeze Fox (November 28, 1928 – February 22, 2016) was an American singer, feminist activist, and beauty pageant titleholder who was crowned Miss America 1951.

Early life Betbeze was born on November 28, 1928, in Mobile, Alabama, to William, a butcher, and Ethel Betbeze. Betbeze was raised in a Catholic family of French Basque descent, and she attended convent schools.

Career

She captured her first crown in 1949 when she won Mobile's "Miss Torch" pageant. As Miss Alabama, she traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to compete in the Miss America 1951 pageant. Having been educated in a convent school, she was reluctant to pose in a swimsuit and refused to do so after she won Miss America. That led the swimsuit company, Catalina, to withdraw their sponsorship of Miss America and eventually brought about the creation of the rival Miss USA pageant. They had one daughter, Yolande "Dolly" Fox Campbell.

After her husband's death, she moved to Georgetown, Washington, D.C., purchasing the Newton D. Baker House from Michael Whitney Straight and his then wife Nina Gore Auchincloss. The home had previously been the residence of Jacqueline Kennedy after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Fox had a relationship with Cherif Guellal, with whom she raised her grandchild, Yolande Paris Campbell, until Guellal's death in 2009.

In the early 1990s, Yolande Fox was contacted by the writer Philip Roth, who was researching the Miss America beauty pageant for his novel American Pastoral. Roth studied Fox's scrapbooks and interviewed her about the culture surrounding the pageant in the late 1940s; he later said, "She was very smart, very funny....She just opened up whole ideas for me that I couldn't have had on my own."

Fox died on February 22, 2016, in Washington, D.C. of lung cancer.