French porn magazine. Miss France 1985 Isabelle Chaudieu in Hallo Paris no.4, 1986.
Who wants to be Miss France anyway? Not Isabelle Chaudieu. She's glad she went nude.
'It was not at all to my liking,' 18-year-old Isabelle says of her abbreviated stint as France's reigning beauty.
'Being Miss France was not what I expected. I didn't like the job or the people. And I didn't get paid as much as I did before I won.'
A month after she was crowned Miss France, Isabelle was stripped of the title for appearing nude in the soft-porn French magazine, Lui.
'I knew nothing about those pictures being published. But I was very lucky that they were. They provided a perfect excuse to resign as Miss France,' the brown-eyed brunette said, pausing for an interview from her job modeling white lace and silk at a lingerie trade show.
Michel Leparmentier, spokesman for Star Productions which organized the Miss France contest -- one of three rival national beauty contests - confirmed that the parting was amicable.
'She volunteered to step down because it was obvious she could not go on to any other contests such as Miss World because of their restrictions against appearing naked.
'She had nothing to do with the pictures,' he said. 'They were taken a long time ago and published without her knowledge or consent. She didn't even get any money for being the cover story of Lui.'
It's all part of the racy world that caught up with Vanessa Williams, the first black to win the Miss America title. Williams also lost her crown after pictures were published in Penthouse magazine last July.
Ex-Miss France denies her episode was not, as critics have charged, an effort to drum up the publicity that put Williams in a glaring world spotlight.
Isabelle Chaudieu is a 35-23-35, 5-foot-9 brunette who began modelling when she was 13. She left school at 16 to take up a full-time modeling career.
The way she tells it, the beauty contest circuit began as a lark last autumn when some girlfriends entered her name in the Miss Cote d'Azur contest. To her great surprise, she won.
The Miss France competition was next. 'My agent said I had nothing to lose by trying it. I could get lots of exposure, so I entered.'
She won that too. 'Honestly, there were 80 girls, some of them extremely pretty. I never expected to win,' she explained, batting her enormous dark lashes.
But she says she became desperately unhappy at a title that brought nothing but late nights with 'superficial' people, presenting flowers at boring functions and being a pretty face at official dinners.
'And it paid practically nothing. I made a lot more as a model.'
Lui magazine came to the rescue. Its January issue featured Isabelle on the cover in her pink bathing suit and Miss France sash.
Inside were six steamy pages of Isabelle, leaving nothing of her svelte bronzed body to the imagination. Lui said the pictures were snapped last fall. Isabelle said they were taken two years ago when she was filming on the Mediterranean coast.
'I knew nothing about them being published until they appeared,' she said, smiling. 'But they were rather gentle, don't you think. Hardly pornographic.
'This was definitely not a premeditated effort to get publicity. I would never have taken that risk.'
So she stepped down and runner-up Carole Tredille became Miss France -- or one of the Miss Frances. There are actually three titles handed out every year and neither the public nor the courts has quite figured out which is the real Miss France.
Isabelle is back to modeling. She has had cameo appearances in two B-rate movies, but she candidly admits she has little chance for a cinema career with no training and no immediate plans to acquire any. She is 18 and not worried about the future.
'Up to now, I have had a charmed life. I believe in luck and I have had some.'
With that, lean and languid Isabelle returned to mincing around an underwear manufacturer's stand wearing a white lace corset, changing later to a navy blue camisole and silk panties. Up to 4,000 daily buyers at the lingerie trade show looked over the wares.
'My job is to be beautiful. It's my only job,' she said.
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