
© People Magazine
Former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur Bravely Shares Her Difficult Past. Behind the Facade of a 'Perfect' Family, Her Father Committed An Unspeakable Crime: Incest. "My father was a handsome, intelligent man," recalls Marilyn Van Derbur. "He served as president of the Denver Area Boy Scout Council and helped establish Denver's Cleo Wallace Village for Handicapped Children. But there was another - secret - side to him. From the time I was 5 until I was 18 and moved away to college, my father sexually violated me."
Even in an age when public confessions are commonplace, Marilyn Van Derbur's has the power to shock. The crime is repulsive almost beyond words; the people involved, as in a Greek tragedy, are larger than life. Francis S. Van Derbur, the father, was a millionaire socialite and a pillar of the Denver community; Marilyn, the youngest of his four daughters, was a golden-haired beauty, a straight-A student and an AAU swimming champ. In 1957, when she was 20, her predecessor, Marian Ann McKnight, would crown her Miss America in Atlantic City.
"We had all the trappings of a perfect family, " Marilyn says now. "Wealth, social status, a handsome father and lovely mother."
So perfect was the illusion, in fact, that Marilyn completely repressed any knowledge of sexual violation by her father until she was 24, when D.D. Harvey, former youth minister at her Presbyterian church in Denver, broke down her guard. She shared her painful secret with her husband-to-be, attorney Larry Atler, now 56, and with her
eldest sister, Gwen, 59, who revealed that she too had been victimized. (Sisters Nancy, 55, and Valerie, 57, have not commented.) Still, Marilyn's experience continued to haunt her, causing her
emotionally rooted bouts of lethargy, physical paralysis and finally an anxiety so crushing that in 1984 her career as a motivational speaker came to a complete halt.
Since then, with the help of a number of therapists, she has found the courage to talk with her mother, Gwendolyn, about the incest and, more recently, with the world. On May 8, after two years of working with Denver's Kempe National Center for Prevention and Treatment for Child Abuse and Neglect, Marilyn told an audience of 35 the grimly inspiring story of what she calls "the greatest accomplishment of my life - surviving incest." Her address was frequently interrupted by applause. At her luxurious Denver ranch-style house, she talked to correspondent Vickie Bane about her struggle to survive.
Comment: "People don't really care what they're doing - just as long as they are doing something"...No wonder our world is in such a dire state.
The main obstacle to progress, according to Gurdjieff, was the mechanical nature of contemporary man, and his inability to carry anything through. From In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by P. D. Ouspensky: