WHET Suzette Charles?

This video explains what happened to the unreleased pop material she did with Stock Aitken Waterman.

She not only sounds a lot like Vanessa Williams, especially on this track, which reminds me a lot of Vanessa's "Save The Best For Last". Really beautiful.

Remember how she announced she'd be joining the Cosby Show as the oldest daughter........but then....What happened?

Yeah, R3, she announced that on the Miss America Pageant when she was waiting to crown her replacement. The interview video above shows only how the recording project with Stock, Aitken, Waterman fell apart. Perhaps she lost her desire, got disenchanted with show business and stopped pursuing projects. She married and had kids. She's certainly a very, very talented singer. I can't find any evidence that she's singing today, cabarets, small venues etc. It's a shame, I love her voice.

I followed her on Twitter and she followed back!

Fabulous singer but didn’t have the star quality Vanessa Williams has. Also by 1993 SAW were out of style in the US. She’s been a bit involved in the pageant in more recent years but is among the former Miss Americas who are persona non grata because she was among the former Miss America’s who wanted Gretchen Carlson ousted from running the pageant.

She’s stretching the truth a little about her time in pageants though. She had done kiddie pageants and it took her two tries before she won Miss New Jersey in 1983.

She was never in serious contention for the Cosby show. Sabrina Le Beauf had already filmed her first episodes as sondra huxtable. It came down to her and Whitney Houston for the part and Cosby chose Sabrina because of her Yale school of drama background.

She also was up for the role of oldest daughter Sondra Huxtable on the most popular show at the time = Cosby Show. Unfortunately she prematurely gave an interview saying she had gotten the role. (whoops)......Fun TV Trivia = When the Cosby show debuted the Huxtables had four children and added the oldest daughter months later.

I think she would’ve known at that point she wasn’t going to be on the Cosby show. I mean she crowned her successor in September 1984, and Sabrina already had shows in the can. Her first episode was November, 1984.

One of the things that pissed Suzette off about taking the title was that she was promised all these opportunities to make high profile appearances and was under the impression she would get big money for taking the crown. The reality was that Vanessa Williams only had about 2 weeks left of actual Miss America duties when she resigned and those were largely sponsor oriented and Suzette was given an addition $10k to match the $25k Vanessa won. After the two weeks, Vanessa had 2 weeks off then would’ve gone back to Atlantic City for rehearsals for the telecast.

Thanks for filling in details R's 5-8. Perhaps she didn't have the star quality Williams had, and still has. Charles was also lacking something else: the enormous notoriety that the scandal gave to Vanessa. What was too salacious for the Miss America organization was in fact the thing that fueled her subsequent success. Vanessa Williams must be the most famous Miss America in the last fifty years, right?

I still wish Miss Charles has continued to pursue a career, even if she never became a big star. I'd go see her sing at Jones's Pub.

Charles was a child actress and had a tough time there too.

She was supposed to sing Frank Mills in the film Hair (or so she says) and somehow that got cut as did her whole role. (Annie Golden sings it on the album but I don't know if it was ever filmed with her. Anyone know?)

Now that we know more about Cosby, there could be another reason she didn't get 'cast'. Although if that were the case, hopefully she would've come forward a couple years ago...

Williams had tremendous publicity surrounding her even before the scandal hit. It was an incredibly big deal back then to have a black woman win. The pageant was declining in popularity and most of the winners never even did much high profile stuff during their reign.

Williams was on every show, variety talk etc. She even played herself on The Love Boat which was quite popular back then.

The pageant really wanted a black winner that year to combat its racist accusations and also for a little publicity (as Miss Crawford would say.)

Hence Williams and Charles finished first and second. Each had scored high in the preliminaries and Williams has said she was pretty sure either she or Charles would win on the final night.

Williams unlike Charles was not a pageant person and had been recruited after someone saw her in a college show or something and thought she had potential.

Whitney would have made more sense as a Huxtable kid from a visual perspective. Sabrina LaBeouf didn't really fit and Sondra never felt like part of the family to me. Her character was dry and humorless too. Whitney would have added more warmth with sass. Granted Whitney was prettier than Sabrina, so Cosby probably would have been a dirty dog towards her.

Love this song

R1 That was good. She’s very pleasant and a bit wistful. Sounds like her mother was the ultimate stage mother…she mentions her mom more than herself. As far as the 1979/80 Fame casting story, I cannot imagine low key Suzette creating the stir as Coco that twitchy Irene Cara did, but who knows? I agree with r6 that she was lacking that energy/star quality and relentless drive to push her forward toward great success.

And her management throughout her career sucked…hence the story about her reaching out to PWL herself. Maybe they had different goals for her. She wanted to be a recording artist while her management (Wm Morris) likely had hoped to get her on television—where her warmth would have made an impact on audiences—hence the Cosby swirl.

Ten years prior and she would likely have been a frequent guest on the then-ubiquitous television variety shows. As far as PWL & SAW, they were waning in the early 90s, as stated by r6 earlier. This documentary is a fun romp through the PWL era.