‘I can’t believe this is actually happening!” Suzette Charles says on a video call. At 63, she is about to release her self-titled debut album 33 years later than she had hoped, and her disbelief is understandable. Crowned the first biracial Miss America in 1984, aged 20, in controversial circumstances, Charles went on to suffer a lifetime of adversity. She faced a distressing tour with Bill Cosby and mistreatment by record labels, and her debut album was shelved when her songwriters Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW) – who had made huge hits for Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley and more – split up. Then came a decades-long marriage that seemed to end her artistic career altogether. “You can’t make this stuff up,” she says.
But Charles has reunited with Mike Stock to finally finish the most emotional of projects, her appropriately self-titled debut. “I love the way the album’s turned out,” Stock says. “I’ve worked with Paul McCartney, Donna Summer, Cliff Richard – as a singer, I’d put Suzette in that bracket.”
Charles was a performing arts school kid from Philadelphia: “I sang everywhere, anywhere,” she says. From the age of nine, she starred in commercials for Colgate and Coca-Cola and appeared on Sesame Street and the Morgan Freeman-starring kids’ TV series The Electric Company. At 15, she sang a song on the soundtrack to the film version of Hair, and narrowly missed out on the role of Coco Hernandez in Fame to Irene Cara. They shared a manager, who allegedly pushed for Cara to have the part. Charles smiles wryly: “That was a taste of showbusiness.”
Her mother encouraged her to compete in Miss America 1984. Others warned Charles against it – “don’t even go near that, that’s going to stigmatise you” – but she competed in the final as Miss New Jersey, her parents’ home state. At the ceremony, amid underhand tactics among some contestants – “they’d try to poke a hole in your gown or ‘accidentally’ spill Coca-Cola on your dress” – Charles sang Barbra Streisand’s Kiss Me in the Rain. She came first runner-up, losing to Vanessa Williams. “I was shocked, because I thought my performance was stellar.”
But 10 months later, Williams – who now has a highly successful music and acting career – was forced to resign her title after Penthouse magazine published a previous naked photoshoot. Charles says that all contestants had signed a contract stating there was nothing in their past that would “embarrass” the organisers, such as having an abortion. “It was considered a Miss Goody Two-Shoes event. Everybody signed it. [Williams] 100% knew she did photos that could come out to haunt her.” But Charles doesn’t think the pageant organisers’ reaction was justifiable, “because it was so many months later”. Charles was subsequently crowned winner: “A bittersweet acceptance,” she says. She agrees with critics who feel the enduring Miss America contest is a relic. “The initial plan was to empower women, but we’re in a different phase. I think it’s probably time to say goodbye.”
The high-profile pageant win, coupled with her performing arts chops, got Charles signed up to sing in a cabaret-style show supporting Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr and Stevie Wonder on tour. The latter would ask her opinion on new songs, once ringing her in the small hours to sing I Just Called to Say I Love You down the phone. Charles told him his future mega-hit was too simplistic: “Stevie, you wrote Songs in the Key of Life!”
Bill Cosby also invited Charles to sing on tour as a supporting act to his standup comedy routines, after she had been offered a role as his daughter in the about-to-be-launched sitcom The Cosby Show. Even back then, decades before he was convicted for aggravated indecent assault, rumours of Cosby’s vile behaviour were rife. “My father called Bill Cosby and said, ‘I understand you have a reputation. I’m Italian – you touch her, you’re going to deal with me.’” With her 6ft 7in cousin in tow as a chaperone, Charles kept her distance during the tour, refusing late-night requests from Cosby to discuss notes on her show alone. Cosby was riled, and started to come out on stage even before she had finished. “He’d say: ‘We had a party last night and I invited Miss America but she didn’t come. Can you believe that? Maybe she’s getting a little too full of herself.’ Embarrassing me in front of the audience. And I’d just play it off and smile.” She says the Cosby Show offer was rescinded.
Charles didn’t see any incriminating behaviour, but heard whispers. “I’d see the hotel staff: ‘You should have seen what happened last night.’ But I didn’t want to engage in it, because he was a very controlling person.” How did she feel when Cosby’s abuse – including sedating and sexually assaulting women – was finally uncovered? “We heard that he could be manipulative, too close. We didn’t hear he’s gonna drug you. It was so upsetting. It was shocking.”
By the late 80s, Charles was vying to become a recording artist: Capitol made her make “techno-type music” while RCA wanted to brand her as an R&B artist in the “sultry Sade style”, ignoring her wish to make pop. It seemed she had no control over her artistry. “Yes, that’s right, and my image,” she says. “It was frustrating. I consider myself a multicultural person. RCA wanted to pigeonhole me in a particular style and persona that wasn’t really me.” She wanted to make music with the same ‘pop, R&B, bluesy, soul-y’ feel as Rick Astley and Lisa Stansfield, and felt her suggestions, such as working with labelmate and pop-R&B singer Freddie Jackson, were ignored. “They were only interested in ticking off boxes.”
SAW’s Stock says such attitudes were prevalent throughout the industry at the time. “A lot of artists’ careers have been destroyed by that. You had to play the game they wanted you to play.” SAW was different, he claims. “We always went against the grain with the industry, and we took a lot of flak for it. We’d do everything to service the singer and the song. I like to find out about the person, then write something appropriate to their life. That’s a fair way of doing it rather than just giving them something off the shelf.”
Charles took bold action to get out of her RCA situation. She flew to London in 1993 and turned up unannounced at SAW’s office. After verifying her story, Stock tested her credentials by making her sing You Are My Sunshine. Impressed, he quickly set about writing six songs for her. “I got something from her that she felt chained up a little bit, that she’d been a victim of the music industry,” he says. Stock “immediately understood me”, says Charles.
One song, Free to Love Again, was released, reaching No 58 in the UK. It proved to be her last. RCA dropped Charles, unhappy that she’d gone to London, but then SAW split up after falling out. It left Charles in limbo: “I had no idea what happened. It was great. And then all of a sudden, crickets, nothing.”
“She was caught in the crossfire,” says Stock, who found it too painful to continue work on SAW projects. “The whole episode was very traumatic. I needed to fill up my mind with doing something else.”
Charles moved on, too: after returning to the US, she took a call from record producer David Foster, who had just enjoyed huge success with Céline Dion and Whitney Houston: “I nearly fell off my chair!” In 1994, Charles recorded an album’s worth of material for Foster’s imprint 143 Records, a sub-label of Atlantic, but it remains unreleased. “I have no idea why,” she says.
Fatefully, Charles then married a doctor who, she says, was reluctant for her to pursue her career. “I raised two children, secretly dreaming: gosh, what happened to my career? It just went away like a balloon that kept flying away in the air. It bothered me that I worked so hard and I’m so talented.” She felt unable to talk about her past in the house. “It was some hush-hush thing, as if I had anything to be ashamed of.”
Her absence didn’t go unnoticed: People magazine was one of several publications that ran a where-is-she-now story. But she remained confined to the domestic realm. “I felt very sad. And unfortunately, a lot of women feel this: I don’t want to split up a family, but what about me?”
When her daughter left for college, Charles thought: “I have to start living for me.” She divorced, went back to studying and began dating again. One first date, an attorney called Paul Kaplan, knew that Charles had worked with Stock. “He said, ‘What are you doing studying? You should get in touch with him again.’” Her mother, present at the original session, also encouraged her.
But Charles was unsure. “I thought: I’m so damn old, he’s not going to answer my email.” Stock did reply, although he didn’t mention a plan to work together, but in 2015 they reunited at his studio. And after listening to the old songs – “surreal, I remembered exactly what I felt singing them” – Charles convinced him to finish the album.
“On every rational level, why would you do it?” Stock says. “But she’s such a nice person, you can’t turn her down. Nobody [in the music industry] wants to cater to women of a certain age. But they have a right to music as well.”
In 2024, they began rerecording old tracks alongside five new Stock compositions about “being in a relationship that’s held you back”, Charles says. Again, she felt understood. “We have a creative connection. I don’t know his personality, but he knows me inside, somehow.”
The result is a classically Stock record of disco-pop bangers and occasional epic ballads. Old songs found new meanings, particularly Free to Love Again: “I’m free, baby!” she says. Charles is now married again, to Kaplan. “I spent years with this other person that wanted to put me in the closet. Now I have someone supportive who really sees me.”
It’s an ending she never thought possible. Touring with Sammy Davis Jr, Charles used to perform his song I’ve Gotta Be Me. “And I didn’t even know what the hell that meant,” she says. She starts welling up and wipes away tears. “I understand what it means now. It’s me living my best life.”