Bettie Page Reveals All Page #7

as long as they're not

hurting anybody else.

I still feel that way.

There was a lot of

people in America

that would have considered

what you were doing

to be nasty back in those days.

I never thought I was

doing anything wrong.

I never even thought there was

anything wrong about the bondage.

The only thing I regret in all

of my modeling experience,

one time three camera

clubs got together.

And they got me to drinking

blackberry brandy,

it's very tasty, you know.

And I must have gotten drunk, the

only time in my life I was drunk.

But I don't remember what happened,

I remember starting

to pose for them

in my regular poses

but never open poses.

And there were four or five shots.

And I was so disappointed in it.

That's one of the reasons

I left New York,

was because of those pornographic

pictures being sold on me.

I was 34 in 1957,

and I thought I was

getting too old to model.

And that there were so many

pictures of me around,

I thought the photographers

were tired of shooting me.

And then too I'd had all that unhappy

experience with the Kefauver committee.

So I just left everything.

She just disappeared and there

was much mystique about her.

Nobody knew beyond that,

that their was a fascinating

story about this woman,

who reached the peak of popularity

in her profession and disappeared.

Over my years of research,

I heard a lot of crazy rumors.

That she was slinging

hash in Texas,

that she had married Lash LaRue,

that she had moved to

England and married a duke.

That the mob had rubbed her out

because of a photo shoot gone bad.

That she had passed out literature

in the Chicago O'Hare

airport for Billy Graham.

That was the only

one that was true.

The whole Bettie Page phenomenon,

which is separate

from the human being,

developed while she was

simply off the scene,

and she was not really aware of it.

It still amazes me

after 40 years,

as popular as my pictures are now,

especially with young people.

Most of the boys say

they learned about me

from their fathers' girly magazines

that they found in the attic,

or prowling through their fathers'

dresser drawers and things like that.

And they claim that I opened

up the sexual revolution.

The first time that I

ever saw Bettie Page

in any of this material, I mean,

I immediately recognized her

as someone that had

the visual power

to provoke something inside.

I was thinking that I

was doing something

that was part of the modernist

movement of painting

and that was to take

a taboo photograph,

blow it up bigger than life-size

in a beautiful oil painting,

and put it in a high-end gallery.

Bettie Page really set the stage

for the vogue photographers

that came in the '70s and the '80s.

There's never been

anyone like Bettie before.

Monroe had Harlow and Dietrich,

she had all those blond bombshells,

but Bettie, there was

nothing like Bettie.

She's the first icon of her nature.

And feminism has changed,

so women are actually

using sexuality

in a different way, they're

more accepting of it.

I would paint a few pictures

and then I would see them

appear in front of me.

And the girls would start

showing up dressed like her.

Either they had purple hair,

but they'd have the Bettie Page

bangs, they'd be tattooed.

It'd be a form of

Bettie, but different.

Bettie meant something to them.

So I kept painting Bettie for them.

The fetishistic outfits

that she wore,

I mean, those are dreams to paint.

You know, the seam

stockings, the garter belts,

the snub-nosed stilettos,

and that hair.

It's a lot of fun to

paint those things.

Her attitude, her eyes, the

steam that rises from them.

That's the most

important thing to me.

She makes it accessible that

anybody can be having this fun,

you're not going to

go to hell for it.

When AIDS came out

as the huge plague,

and anybody who had sex could get

it and die this horrible death,

I think that people really

identify with Bettie as fantasy

instead of the actual sex act,

so it was just a

matter of survival.

I could see that Bettie

was getting more popular

in so many other directions.

And Dave Stevens' the

Rocketeer happened.

I came across a full

page photograph

of her standing in water

in a little bikini that she made

and just was knocked out, totally.

I remember thinking, this has

got to be the most attractive,

she just exuded health

and joy and everything else

that's like so appealing.

Dave's foundation certainly

led to the Betty Pages.

At the time, nobody had reprinted

a picture of Bettie Page

in two or three decades.

The first issue of the Betty

Pages sold out in two weeks.

But word filtered back immediately.

Can you do a reprint of this?

It sold out instantly on the

newsstands, I had no idea.

And when I say newsstands,

I mean comic book stores,

that was my only distribution

outlet at the time.

But there was an audience waiting.

Thank you, Dave Stevens.

The readers already

knew who she was.

Then Bettie really became bigger

In the fashion world:

Gaultier, Muggler,

the S&M world, through Madonna.

You held me down and

tried to make me break

Express yourself,

don't repress yourself

Did I say something true?

Oops, I didn't know

I couldn't talk about sex.

You just couldn't get around her,

she was a force to

be reckoned with.

She just became part

of the culture.

Bob Shultz and I started this club,

the "Bettie Scouts"...

tongue and cheek title,

kind of line Boy Scouts of America,

but Bettie Scouts of America...

'cause we spent a lot of time

going around the country

scouting for Bettie Page.

And when we started it,

we did not know if

Bettie was still alive.

My gut feeling was she had

probably passed away,

'cause I couldn't understand how

somebody could be under the radar

that many years, when people

were actively looking for her.

I got a call from a reporter

in Nashville, Tennessee

named Thomas Goldsmith.

I would give him credit

with finding Bettie Page.

And he said, "Do you

know where Bettie's at?"

And I said, "No, I'm

just like all the rest

in the people in the country

trying to figure out

what happened to Bettie Page."

He said, "Bettie Page is alive.

And I'm gonna give you a big clue.

She has a living

brother in Nashville."

Within minutes, I called Jack Page.

I said, "If I write

a letter to Bettie,

would you forward it to her?"

And I wrote the letter,

I believe it was, April...

April, May, 1992.

I didn't hear anything

'til December of 1992.

And I could remember that,

that was one of the most

excited days of my life.

I went to the mailbox

and here's a letter,

and it says in the

corner, "Bettie Page."

She used to write everything

in this turquoise ink.

Very identifiable ink.

It's like her trademark.

And she was so flattered

to have a fan club,

she couldn't believe that people

had any interest in her

after all these years.

For about a year, we did

this little relay of letters.

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