Beauty pageant winner recounts ugliness of addiction

To all the girls who think life would be beautiful if only they were, Tara Conner is here to say: “Not necessarily.”

She’ll be in Lynchburg, telling her story next Tuesday night at 7 p.m. in the ballroom of the Holiday Inn Select, part of a “Celebration and Recovery” program to benefit the local Substance Abuse and Addiction Recovery Alliance chapter. The evening will feature music by the Paddy Dougherty trio, a more mellow jazz/blues turn by the former lead singer of the popular Lynchburg band Mainstreet. Tickets are $30.

The product of a broken home in Russell Springs, Ky., Tara Conner used both beauty pageants and drugs to ease the pain caused by her parents’ separation. It began at 14, and continued for years.

“Pageants were my mask,” she said. “That’s how I received validation.”

Lots of validation — first as Miss Kentucky Teen, then runner up for Miss Teen USA, then Miss Kentucky USA, Miss USA in 2006 and a fourth place finish in the Miss Universe pageant.

“Whenever things got bad, I could look at my newspaper clippings,” she said Wednesday from Los Angeles, where she works as an emissary for the Caron Treatment Center. “They told me how wonderful I was.”

The problem was she didn’t believe it.

And when her reign as Miss USA began, her story turned from “Small Town Girl Makes Good” to a twisted version of “Beauty and the Beast.” The Beast was an addiction Conner wasn’t prepared to grapple with, her title an example of “Be careful what you wish for.”

“I really wasn’t equipped for the job of being Miss USA,” she said. “People think as soon as you put that crown on your head that it’s all fun, but you’re kept busy constantly and you have to be ‘up’ all the time. Some days, I just couldn’t pull that off.”

For awhile, she successfully faked it. She was on Larry King Live. She went overseas to talk to soldiers. She rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange and served as a judge for “Project Runway.”

Then, in December of 2006, the New York Daily News ran a story saying Conner — then Big Apple-based and living in Trump Towers — had become more of a party animal than a role model.

In a way, Conner had come full circle. Growing up in Russell Springs, she chafed under the scrutiny of seemingly everybody. As a celebrity, it was as if everyone was watching her all over again.

As a Don Henley song once put it: “People love it when you lose.”

Conner almost lost her crown, but ultimately was given a second chance. Her real second chance, she said, came when she entered rehab to deal with her drug and alcohol demons.

“I had always been worried about what people thought about me,” she said, “and here I was, proving them right. The funny thing is, that was very liberating. An alcoholic’s biggest downfall is trying to control everything, and I was able to let it go.”

Once again, Conner is back on the road — not to perpetuate an image, but to send a message. Having an addiction, she tells groups across the country, doesn’t have to be the end of the world.

“It just takes patience,” she said. “I call it ‘Slowbriety,’ because I know I can always relapse. I’ve had a number of friends in Los Angeles who relapsed just one time, and it killed them.”

Whether she likes it or not, Tara Conner is a real role model now.

“Nobody is happy all the time,” she said. “It’s not like that. But what I’ve found is that when the bad days come along, I can handle them.”