Ms. Clean Slate

In her white stretch pants and oversize red sweater (coordinated flawlessly with red-and-white DKNY sneakers to match), you could almost mistake Vanessa Williams for any of the other suburban moms in this neighborhood pastry shop. Her dazzling green eyes are shielded today behind dark glasses, which do more to protect her from the strong sun at a sidewalk table than to discourage stargazers. If she were concerned with that sort of thing, she wouldn’t be waving and chatting up her neighbors as they pass by on the quaint main street of this Westchester County suburb.

Anyone who still thinks of Williams, 33, as a scandalized beauty queen should get with the program. It may have been her aborted reign as the first African American Miss America and the Penthouse photos that made her a household name. But it’s 12 years later and Williams has moved on. As a mother of three, owner of a Range Rover and proud keeper of a famous carrot cake recipe, Williams fits in with the suburban crowd remarkably well. After all, she’s spent much of the last decade being a mom who just happens to have a chart-topping recording career rather than vice versa.

“I’ve always been kind of a homebody and always loved kids,” Williams says in the clear, sweet voice that sang the Oscar-winning “Pocahontas” song “Colors of the Wind” at the Academy Awards this year. “My husband is 13 years older than me, so I wanted to start quickly while I was young and he was still young. Now I think this next chunk of time is devoted to getting on with my career.”

If all goes according to plan, Williams, the hit-making recording artist (“Save the Best for Last” and “The Sweetest Days”), will soon become a motion picture star. After a critically acclaimed Broadway run in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” in 1994 and small-screen roles in “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Nothing Lasts Forever,” Williams hits the big screen with the big guy next month, starring opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Eraser.”

Acting was always Williams’ goal. It just took a 12-year run as a singer to get her there. Her early celebrity at 21 didn’t help her any. The scandal always preceded her.

“When I first became famous, nobody knew that I was talented,” she says. “At auditions, they thought of me as a scandalized beauty queen who wants to act all of a sudden. It was hard to break out of the image.”

Ramon Hervey, the man who handled the public relations mess surrounding Williams’ dethroning (and later became her manager and husband; last month he handed off the managing duties), suggested a singing career.

“Ramon said if you record you can control what you sing, you can control your image, and use the success of that to open doors,” she says.

The savvy business move (and a heavenly voice) spawned three hit albums, “The Right Stuff” (1988), “The Comfort Zone” (1991) and “The Sweetest Days” (1994), which have sold more than 4 million copies and garnered nine Grammy Award nominations.

“A music career is something I never even thought I would have,” says Williams, whose real dream was to be on Broadway and in the movies. “Which is kind of funny because it’s where I’ve had the most success. You never know.”

She majored in musical theater during the two years she spent at Syracuse University, and before that she starred in musicals right here in her hometown at nearby Horace Greeley High School and the Saw Mill Theater.

Her music teacher parents, Helen and Milton Williams (who still live in the area), saw their daughter’s potential early on.

“Vanessa was always very musical,” Helen says. “She resisted practicing like most kids do, and we had discussions about practice time. We knew she had innate natural ability in music, but she never did very much with it at home. Then we saw her in a middle school production of ‘Little Mary Sunshine’ in seventh grade and she really stood out. Her father and I turned to each other and said, ‘Hey, she can really sing.’ ”

Despite Williams’ success as a recording artist, she’s never toured, and she rarely performs live.

“I feel very uncomfortable being myself and singing my own songs,” says Williams, who has kept her private life private throughout her career. “I used to really fight it. I like acting because you can hide behind--not hide but . . . I like to portray a clear character. I like being directed. Singing my own songs is the most vulnerable thing I could ever do.”

Helen Williams says her daughter was not always so self-protective. “Vanessa was very trusting before the Miss America scandal,” she says. So trusting, in fact, that at 18, Williams, who was working as a makeup artist and secretary for photographer Tom Chiapel, agreed to pose nude. After she became Miss America, he sold those photos to Penthouse, and the rest is history.

“The experience made her realize that everyone who pretends to be your friend is not,” Helen Williams continues. “It was a lesson--not to be so trustful of people. Unfortunately she had to learn that at a very young age.”

Vanessa Williams says she is finally able to look at the fiasco in positive terms. For one thing, she met her own Eraser of sorts, Hervey, who made the scandal go away as much as humanly possible.

“We were just dealing with the aftermath, and I was overwhelmed,” she recalls. “Nobody really knew what to do, and he did an excellent job at telling the truth, doing it concisely and getting it over with. We were working together and then that turned into a romance and then, you know. . . .”

They were married 2 1/2 years later, and Williams had their first child, Melanie, at 24. (Melanie is now 8; the other children are Jillian, 6, and Devon, 3.) “You can say that’s a coincidence, but with every downside there’s an upside--and [Ramon] was the upside.”

Except for the 10-pound metal gown she wore to sing “Colors of the Wind” at the Oscars, she says she felt comfortable with her performance.

“It was perfect because I had 30 dancers around me. I had a maze to work through, and it was like being in a show--this is your first mark, this is your second mark. That’s how I like to work, as opposed to standing behind the mike and having the feeling that everybody’s just watching everything that I do.”

The night proved to be a thrill, “a dream come true,” she says. She sat with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise: “Just parents talking at the Academy Awards.”

For the last eight months, Williams has done less of the homework sessions, music recitals and general parenting than usual. Though she flew home from Los Angeles every weekend during the filming of “Eraser,” she missed the daily routines.

“My parents live in the next town over, so I’ve got a great network to help me out,” she says, adding that a friend of hers from high school has been a nanny to her kids for the last six years. “I still feel guilty. That will never go away. As long as you’re a mother, you’ll always feel guilty.”

In the action movie, whose costs reportedly have rocketed to at least $100 million, Williams plays Lee Cullen, who blows the whistle on her co-workers at a major defense contractor for selling government weapons secrets. After the risky move, she enters the witness protection program. Enter the Eraser, played by Schwarzenegger, who wipes out her history and protects her from an array of villains, including some in the government office designed to protect her.

“Lee would love to be able to handle it by herself. She’s a ‘90s woman, but she also needs the protection of a guy,” says Williams, whose first action movie, “Under the Gun” (1988), went straight to video. “She’s not a victim at all. In fact, there are a couple of times when I get a chance to lash back and assault the bad guy. I shoot a gun, I smash this guy across the face with a coffeepot, I kick him. I get revenge.”

Director Chuck Russell, who came close to casting Williams opposite Jim Carrey in “The Mask,” was impressed with her fearlessness in “Eraser.” In one scene, Williams slides off a huge metal shipping container during a fight scene. “She just treated it like a kid on a slide,” Russell says. “She was ready to rock.

“I’m usually overprotective of actors--especially when they don’t have any action experience,” Russell adds. “But it became clear I was wasting my time. She is very strong--I imagine it has to do with all that singing and dancing in her Broadway background. She had more fun doing the physical stuff than I’d imagined.”

To prepare for the role, Williams lost 10 pounds she says she put on during the filming of ABC’s “Bye Bye Birdie,” in which she starred with Jason Alexander. She worked out with a trainer to the stars, Radu, and with the help of L.A. herbalist Sally Kravitch, she modified her diet to get the desired effect. “She just looks into your eyes and she can see exactly the history of your body,” says Williams, looking svelte and healthy, with her hair pulled back into a low bun. “It sounds very cosmic, but the results have been amazing.”

She also learned how to handle a gun.

“It was quite thrilling, actually,” Williams says of her practice sessions in a makeshift shooting range on a back lot. “I didn’t want Lee to be so ridiculously inept--for the gun to be so foreign to her that she looked like an idiot. I can’t stand when women are holding the gun going, ‘Oh, what do I do with it?’ ” she says in a mock-helpless girl voice.

Williams has never been one who didn’t know how to cope. She did everything in her power to nab the part, though she’d only had a few minor roles in features, including “The Pick-Up Artist,” “Another You” and “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.”

In fact, producer Arnold Kopelson had no intention of hiring her for the part.

“I was not considering Vanessa--it just didn’t occur to me,” says Kopelson, who had a long list of potential leading ladies to chose from. “She’s not mainstream; she’s a singer. And we weren’t thinking about going black. When she was mentioned, truthfully I didn’t even react.”

He even refused to fly her to Los Angeles after she called to request a meeting about the part.

“The next thing I heard,” he says, “she was flying to L.A. on her own and wanted to meet with us. She has a lot of spunk, that girl.”

It was that meeting with Russell and Schwarzenegger that persuaded the filmmakers to include Williams in a screen test with two other actresses.

“Vanessa simply captivated us. She is staggeringly beautiful, and she exuded this charm and warmth,” Kopelson says. “And on screen, her relation to Arnold was so extraordinary, there was no question she was the actress for the role. Even though this isn’t a romantic movie, you need that chemistry between the actors, and she just blended with Arnold.”

Once on the set, however, it took the self-protective Williams a long time to warm up to her colleagues.

“In the beginning she was shy,” Kopelson says. “When she finished scenes, she immediately went to her trailer. She didn’t talk too much at first. Before she was comfortable with everyone, she’d say hello and smile, but everyone thought she was a little cold. By the end of the shoot, she was warm and lovable.”

As she embarks on her film career, Williams has no intention of letting down her music fans. She puts it all together, singing “Where Do We Go From Here,” the title song on “Eraser,” which will be the first single on her new album, due out in September.

Two more TV musicals will follow this year, though her real dream is to star in a musical feature along the lines of “The Wizard of Oz.” But for now, she’s content to spend time with her family while she waits to see what comes of her summer blockbuster.

“It’s a great time in my life,” she says. “I haven’t arrived, but I feel like I’m getting there finally.”