There She Is...

With the poise befitting a former Miss America, Elizabeth Ward Gracen sits patiently in her chair, waiting good-naturedly for the Big Question. She has been asked the Big Question a lot recently--hundreds of times, according to her manager's rough estimate--and so far she's avoided giving an answer. But that never stops anyone from asking. "It's been an interesting two or three weeks for me," she admits, showing a gift for understatement. Three weeks earlier, Elizabeth awoke to find herself the subject of a banner headline in a tabloid. Dems' Front-Runner Bill Clinton Cheated with Miss America, announced the Star, quoting from a lawsuit against Clinton filed by a disgruntled state employee. The lawsuit, which alleged that Clinton spent state funds to wine and dine five extramarital partners, was dropped only days after the Star appeared, but Elizabeth's life has been a maelstrom ever since. "It's not just the tabloids approaching me, it's everyone: friends, family. I've had to deal with all these people and that's been difficult," says Elizabeth, who was Miss Arkansas and Miss America in 1982. "What's unfortunate is that a lot of my friends have been put in awkward positions to try to find out information. All the tabloids are in Arkansas waving money in everybody's face. Ten thousand dollars for a phone number, sixty thousand for an address. I told my friends, 'Look, give them my number for ten thousand dollars--I can always change it.'" The tabloids may have her phone number, but they've yet to get anything else, despite cash offers as high as $500,000. "I know Bill Clinton," she admits. "I haven't seen him in years. I know his wife, Hillary. I've met their daughter. I don't know them very well. Arkansas is a small place, and any celebrities from there are going to meet one another at various celebrations and festivals.

"I feel the way Bill Clinton does--it's his personal life. He and Hillary are on the right track. I honestly think there are a lot more important issues in a Presidential campaign than a man's fidelity," she says firmly. And as for the Big Question, this is all she'll say for the moment: "Basically, what the tabloids are asking me is, Have I slept with this person? I don't believe that's anyone's business. I have certain boundaries about what I choose to reveal about myself, and I respect other people's boundaries as well."

Gennifer Flowers, one of the other women named in the lawsuit, apparently did not feel similar constraints. She sold the story of her purported affair with Clinton to the Star and even played tapes of conversations with the governor. "I feel sorry for Gennifer Flowers," says Elizabeth. "I don't know her from Adam. She could be a bad person, for all I know, but from what I saw, she handled that press conference very well. She's in an awkward position."

As Elizabeth would be the first to tell you, just being in the Star is awkward. Since she gave the tabloid no real information, it was forced to rely on its creativity, telling readers that Elizabeth--back in her days as Miss America--had four hobbies: hog calling, woodchopping, auto mechanics and lifting weights. While she'll let the Star say what it wishes about her sex life, Elizabeth wants to set the record straight about those hobbies: "I've never had hogs, I've never chopped wood, I've never fixed a car and I didn't lift weights then, but I do now." That has not stopped her friends from giving her grief. "One brought me a clipping that says, Democratic Hopeful Had Affair with Hog-Calling Beauty Queen. All my friends were yelling 'Sooie! Sooie!' for days on end."

Elizabeth can laugh about hog calling, but she turns serious when talking about the people who attempt to manipulate her into saying things she doesn't want to say. And she's worried that the Clinton rumors will cause her Playboy pictorial to be misinterpreted.

"I agreed to do Playboy last year, but now it looks as if I'm trying to exploit something that did or didn't happen," she says. It's true--her pictorial was shot well before the Clinton scandal broke. "Here I am, the girl they are talking about, and I could say until I'm blue in the face that this isn't the way I planned it, but people are going to believe what they want to believe."

What Elizabeth hoped to accomplish by posing for Playboy was to give her acting career a boost. "I'm usually very busy," she says. "I'm what they call castable--I'm a good type." Since moving to Los Angeles in 1987, she has landed roles in Steven Seagal's movie Marked for Death and the recent video release Lower Level, as well as in TV's Matlock, The Flash, The Death of the Hulk with Bill Bixby and a movie of (text continued on page 147) There she is... (continued from page 76) the week, 83 Hours 'til Dawn, with Peter Strauss. "That's the most interesting part I've done because I played a half-Honduran, half-German sociopathic nymphomaniac who wanted to do it in a coffin," she jokes. But it has been difficult to move up to the next level in her career, and that's why she contacted Playboy. "It's a way of getting attention," she explains. "I know I'm a good actress, but it's just a matter of name recognition. I realize that this is a good business move."

Between the incessant tabloid coverage and her pictorial, Elizabeth is primed for her second shot at the spotlight. "I haven't been in the public eye for a long time, ten years or so," she confesses. But she remembers her first encounter with fame vividly. "When I became Miss America, everyone in Arkansas went wild. I have photographs of the basketball auditorium back in Russellville, where I grew up, overflowing with people. The high school band, the college band, the junior high school band, all playing. The red carpet. It was like royalty visiting."

She was known as Elizabeth Ward then, just a small-town girl--a native of Booneville, Arkansas--with small-town values. (Gracen is a name she invented because there was another Elizabeth Ward in the Screen Actors Guild.) Her mom was a nurse; her dad worked at a factory that made bowling balls and combs. "We had bowling-ball doorstops in our house," she recalls, "and a lot of combs." Her parents divorced when she was young. "It wasn't an ideal childhood. There was lots of drama," she says, reluctant to divulge too many details. Lack of money was one of the problems, and Elizabeth entered the Miss America pageant to try to win a scholarship. "They don't call it a beauty pageant. They call it a scholarship pageant," she points out. "I don't understand why they're intent on stuffing you into a swimsuit and matching high heels if it's a scholarship pageant, but that's their thing."

The pageant itself, of course, is an American institution. Elizabeth bought the Judy at Carnegie Hall album and memorized After You've Gone for her musical number. Bert Parks had been fired two years before, so Ron Ely, who had played Tarzan on TV and to whom Elizabeth drily refers as "Mr. Dimples himself," was the host.

"I guess I was brainwashed to a certain extent to give the right kind of answers," Elizabeth says. "It's very much like being a politician. You say the right things, you don't offend anyone and you're likable--and it paid off. I got scholarship money and the chance to travel a lot. I think I'd been on an airplane only twice before then."

Her travel schedule was a killer. "I was on a plane every other day going someplace, with no rhyme or reason. You have no home. You live out of a suitcase. Maybe I'm a wimp, maybe I think I'm a princess, but it was grueling."

Her tour of duty as Miss America did more than show her the world. It also gave her a unique insight into her own psyche. "You start to lose your identity after a while--just being charming, charming, charming all day long. It took me years to realize that I didn't have to be perfect, that I didn't have to make everyone in the room feel comfortable with me. I had no separation between my private self and my public self, and it took me a long time--and a lot of therapy--to learn that I don't have to cater to other people.

"At that time, I was very, very religious--a born-again Christian. When I look back at everything ten years ago, I'm just a different person now, because I don't really believe anything I believed at that time."

After her reign was over, Elizabeth's religious devotion and telegenic smile quickly made her a rising star in evangelist Pat Robertson's TV empire. "I did a lot of work for Pat Robertson and the 700 Club," she remembers. "They were grooming me for a co-host position at one point. I did this telethon for the 700 Club. It's a fund drive, but you also answer prayer requests over the phone. I was so unqualified--really distraught individuals would call, people who were getting ready to kill themselves, people who were financially ruined. Twenty-two years old--what am I doing with people with real problems?"

Elizabeth took the calls, turned to a special book she had been given that was indexed according to problems and read aloud from the specific Bible verses listed. She followed that with her best sales pitch. "At the end of the conversation, you would have to get them to join the 700 Club for ten dollars a month or whatever."

It was during the last few minutes of the telethon that Elizabeth had what she calls her revelation. As time ran out, Robertson frantically urged the phone workers to keep the prayer requests short and get as much money as quickly as possible so he could show a big tally on the tote board. "A chill just went up my spine," recalls Elizabeth. "I was so freaked out having to do this anyway. All of a sudden I saw what it was. It had nothing to do with God or spirituality. I just realized organized religion was big business. I had been very naive. But when you're a small-town girl, you really don't know."

After that, Elizabeth began to make a series of changes in her life. She divorced her first husband, a born-again Christian who didn't share her newfound skepticism, and began taking acting classes in New York. She returned for a while to Arkansas, where she made a few commercials. Crews for two films came to Arkansas on location, and she got a bit part in each movie. Both directors were encouraging. "What are you doing here?" they asked her. "Why don't you come to Los Angeles?"

Once she made the move to L.A., she found more than acting roles. On location in Utah, she met Brendan Hughes, an actor-writer and, in Elizabeth's words, "a gorgeous Welshman." They fell in love and married shortly thereafter in 1989. "We're both kind of gourmet chefs," she says. "We just spent five hundred dollars on a set of pans."

Now 31, she happily admits she's not the same obedient little girl who served as Miss America and impressed Pat Robertson. "I used to be very trusting of people," she says. "Now I'm not. You get hurt along the way. You reveal too much about yourself and you become very vulnerable. I've had to work on protecting myself from being exposed to the public again. I think a lot of it comes from being Miss America--I was everybody's Miss Perfect for so long. What people say about you and what people think about you isn't necessarily how you feel about yourself. That's what's most important: how you feel about yourself."

And how does Elizabeth Ward Gracen feel about herself?

"Pretty good. I'm on a journey. It's a big journey and I don't pretend to know any answers, but I feel better about myself. I feel happier now than I have in a long time."

"Elizabeth's devotion and telegenic smile quickly made her a rising star in Pat Robertson's TV empire."