Bettie Page Reveals All Page #3

I was very happy posing.

And I never had any problem

thinking of what to

do with my body.

I could think of a thousand different

poses that just came natural to me.

Sometimes I would imagine

the camera was my boyfriend.

And I would play to my boyfriend.

All I do know is that when

Bettie Page was announced

as being the feature model

of next Sunday's shoot,

there was a big crowd.

Did the guys in the camera clubs

ask you out for dates a lot?

No.

Now I wouldn't date anybody

who drank or smoke.

I just don't like the taste

of cigarettes on your breath,

and I hate alcohol.

One of the most interesting

characters in this entire story

was Richard Arbib,

one of her ex-boyfriends.

He was a top designer of the '50s.

Designed cars, watches,

extremely well known designer.

Richard had split up with his wife,

and met Bettie,

and they had a red hot romance,

they were deeply in love.

He took her in his two

seater down to Florida.

Well, we just decided we'd take off

and go to Florida for three weeks.

She wanted to have sex with

me in the car and I said,

"If you're going to do that, I've got

to stop 'cause I'll go off the road."

So she's going away at me,

and all of a sudden there's

a flashlight in the door,

it was raining cats and dogs,

there's a state trooper there.

And I thought he was going to arrest

us for having sex in the car.

All he said was, "You all know

you've got one tail light out."

Bettie had a very normal sex life.

She wasn't inhibited, she wasn't

hung up in any way at all.

She liked sex and she

was very good at it.

Arbib told me he designed

a watch for Bettie.

It was a custom made

piece for Bettie Page.

He was renowned for his watches.

This was a unique one

of a kind piece.

He presented it to her

and she wore it proudly.

And for some reason,

Richard decided that

he was going to give it one

more shot with his wife,

and it didn't work

out with his wife,

and when he came back,

Bettie was gone.

And that was the

regret of his life.

All of the guys that I

knew that met this woman,

had this, "The one that got

away" ennui about them.

She wasn't just a pretty face with

nothing behind it, she was not a facade.

She had a high IQ.

And had a great range of

things that interested her.

I used to make a lot of my clothes.

I made all my bikinis,

most of my lingerie.

I enjoyed making them.

Bettie used to design stuff.

She could have made a fortune.

'Cause she had an eye for

it, she knew what was sexy.

Bikinis were never heard of on

the beaches in this country.

Don't know what the

wild waves are saying,

but the gals are talking about the

latest thing in swimming attire.

A suit with a built in girdle.

I made them real skimpy.

It was considered very risqu.

One of the jobs I had in New York

was with a couple down

in Greenwich Village.

Well, they had me bring

every one of my costumes,

especially all my bikinis.

And I wondered why they had me

change costumes so many times.

And then they had taken my designs

from the pictures they'd took of me

and had them manufactured

under my name

and selling them as "Bettie

Page's Bikinis" now.

I should have sued them or something,

but I didn't do anything about it.

The first bona fide

commercial work I did

was for Robert

Harrison's magazines.

You know, he had five

or six girly books.

Wink, Titter, Flirt, Beauty Parade.

They had four or five

writers in the back room

that made up all kinds of crazy

things we had to act out.

But one thing I didn't like and

none of the other girls did either,

Robert Harrison insisted

that our breasts be taped.

He was a nut about the cleavage.

I'd have to hold my

breasts together,

and they put a great big

thick two-inches wide tape,

all the way across.

I hated that.

Mr. Harrison said, "Bettie,

I want you to represent

my magazines at the artists ball."

They have a contest

for the best costume.

And guess what I was wearing?

Just two telephone dials, one

over this breast, one over this,

and a suggestion box,

and black net stockings

up to the waist,

and that was it, and

I won it that year,

and I got a whole set

of Revere kitchen ware.

Estes Kefauver of the Senate

crime investigation fame

brings the Democratic

political pot to boil

by announcing his candidacy for

the presidential nomination.

Senator Estes Kefauver.

He's from my home state, you know.

He was trying to drum up votes,

and get the public on his side,

by going after juvenile

delinquency and pornography.

What I expected, having

served in World War II,

which I thought was a fight

for democracy and liberation,

what I expected after

World War II was

something like what I perceived

as the "Roaring '20s" was like

after World War I,

a huge celebration.

And what we actually

got was repression.

Repression on several fronts,

it was social and

sexual and political.

Are you now or have you ever been

a member of the Communist Party?

The thing that the

American people can do

is to be vigilant, day and night.

To make sure they

don't have communists

teaching the sons and

daughters of America.

We have an image of the fifties as

a time when everything was placid

and everybody lived in a sort

of Ozzie and Harriet life,

but going on at the same

time in the culture

was an enormous amount of fear

of infiltration of new things

that were going to undermine

and infect the culture,

and make the youth of

America delinquents,

as the term that had been invented.

And a lot of it focused

on pornography.

The peddling of obscene books,

a furtive and despicable occupation

has become a lucrative sideline

for unscrupulous shopkeepers in

some high school neighborhoods.

People basically,

I think, felt that anything

that got people sexually

excited was a bad thing.

I mean, even to talk about sex

in the 1950s was a taboo.

The Postmaster General had

a very visible campaign

of trying to suppress

the use of the mails

to deliver sexually

explicit materials.

Postal inspectors

could open your mail,

they could confiscate it,

they could come and do

raids on your premises

to keep you from mailing

material at another time.

Of course they could turn you

over to the prosecution.

So they had a great deal of

power at their disposal.

Anything that would be

perceived as being lewd,

a term pretty broad,

could be treated as a crime

if you circulated it

through the mail.

And certainly nudity alone was

considered enough to be obscene

by the standards of the

authorities at the time.

I don't even believe God

disapproves of nudity,

after all, he put Adam and Eve

in the Garden of Eden

naked as jaybirds.

As a part of posing

for the camera club,

most of it was in bikinis,

but sometimes there would be

a few shots topless.

Bettie Page was very sexual,

but in a very free and

innocent kind of way.

She's gorgeous

and she makes you feel good.

She makes direct eye

contact with you,

and it's engaging.

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