The Betty Boom

The First Time I saw her was during the mid-Fifties on a balmy fall afternoon in New York. I was standing outside the 14th Street building on whose side was painted the giant sign for Irving Klaw Pinup Photos. A door opened and she came out into the street. Men and women turned to look at the long legs, the white, white skin and the black, black, black hair cut in bangs straight across her forehead. And, of course, the smile. It was the smile that could break your heart.

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The oft-told Betty Page story is peculiar—a morality tale with no discernible moral, not much plot and a leading character who is at best elusive. But that doesn't stop us from trying to glean some insight into her never-flagging popularity or from trying to construct some new theory about why she abandoned us.

The known facts of the story have been reexamined, rehashed and recycled for three decades, mostly by diehard fans (such as myself) who used the memory of her or the images of her or the memory of the images of her to fuel our fantasies. The story itself is banal: She came, she failed utterly to achieve her dream, she split.

And yet. And yet: She was known as the Queen of Curves, Miss Pinup of the World, the Queen of Hearts, the Dark Angel, the Queen of Bondage, etc.

An estimated half a million pictures were taken of her by almost every professional and amateur photographer in New York—including the renowned Weegee, who once climbed into a bathtub with her to get a shot, tried to cop a feel and got smacked.

She left her cheesecake competition in the dust, appearing countless times on the covers and in the pages of every major and minor girlie magazine in the world.

And then there are the 8mm films: Betty dancing (a kind of hula, a sort of hootchy-kootchy, a facsimile of flamenco), Betty wandering around in stiletto heels as steep as a stepladder and sharper than Ginsu knives, Betty modeling her own homemade lingerie, Betty brushing her hair, Betty getting bound and gagged, kidnapped, spanked and ever so slightly abused.

That was then. This is now:

Almost all the artists, writers and publishers turning out this endless stream of material are too young to have known her or even to have subscribed to the magazines or mail-order companies that made her image so ubiquitous.

Who the hell was she?

She was born April 22, 1923, in the Tennessee mountain town of Kingsport, daughter of Roy and Edna Page.

She had at least one brother and at least one sister.

She grew up in Nashville, where, at Hume-Fogg High, she seemed to be involved in every student activity. After graduation, armed with an excellent scholastic record and a DAR scholarship, she attended Nashville's Peabody College, where she earned her B.A. degree and a teaching certificate. For a short time, she taught English at a local high school. It is said that she quit because, in the presence of her great looks, the boys in her class were uncontrollable. I don't think so. I think she quit because, simply, she wanted something else.

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Around 1944 Betty went to Hollywood. She took classes: acting, singing, dancing. She tried to lose her Tennessee drawl. Someone actually gave her a screen test. Mostly, she got propositioned.

She married a man named Billy and moved to Pennsylvania. There are no photographs from this period. The screen test has disappeared—and so has Billy.

The marriage broke up and, in 1948 she arrived in New York. She was 25 years old. She rented an apartment in a converted brownstone on West 46th Street and worked as a typist for a company on Wall Street. She worked out in a gym every day. She didn't smoke. She didn't drink. She carried a brick in her purse to bash any would-be molester.

She was determined to become an actress. Why not? Anything is possible in New York.

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We came to New York by the thousands—starry-eyed kids drunk with ambition and movie-magazine success stories. We carried a suitcase in one hand and a piece of paper with a telephone number—someone's uncle, someone's friend, someone's agent—in the other.

We lived in rent-controlled apartments, waiting for that big break, working in restaurants, driving cabs, moving furniture, hawking Bibles door-to-door, playing chess for money in Washington Square, stealing. We made the rounds, surely the most demeaning, ego-busting, humiliating method of seeking employment ever invented. We lied about our credits, our ages and our heights. We pretended we could tap-dance, speak with a Russian accent, juggle, fence, ride horses bareback. We sucked up to producers, agents, assistants, secretaries, anyone. We smiled at strangers.

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On a summer day in 1952, a photographer saw Betty at Jones Beach, took some (text continued on page 239)Betty Page(continued from page 128) pictures of her, suggested she change her hairstyle to the bangs that became her trademark and introduced her to Irving Klaw, the impresario of mail-order girlie pix.

Yes, her upper lip is a bit thin. Her teeth are not aligned. She is, by today's standards, a touch broad in the hips. Her right eye droops a little. But every man who photographed her or bought a photograph of her fell under her spell. She looked straight into the camera, straight at you, with an expression of real pleasure, of genuine friendliness that promised equal amounts of bliss and playfulness. You could take her home to mother—but watch out for dad.

Within two years Betty Page was a superstar in the strange, hermetic world of girlie pix. The customers of Klaw's Movie Star News and Cartoon and Model Parade demanded more pictures of Betty. The photographers loved her. She would pose all day (at ten dollars an hour), nude or seminude, in dusty studios and dark apartments and outside in lousy weather. She didn't complain. The only problem they had with her was that she had trouble being on time. She was always late; once, it is said, three days late. But they would wait—for that look, for that smile.

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Between 1954, when I got out of the Army, and 1960, I worked in my chosen profession perhaps a dozen times. Just enough to keep hope alive. Once I worked in an industrial film. It was shot at a hotel in Atlantic City. I have no idea what industry it was extolling, but it was there, on that job, that I met my girlfriend, Brandy, a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn. Black-haired, dark-eyed, with a lush figure, she, like Betty, had caught the acting bug.

Brandy made her living as a figure model. She posed for camera clubs. She posed in private sessions with amateur photographers. And she posed for Irving Klaw.

I was in the Klaw studio only once. That was the day I first saw Betty Pageon the street outside. Brandy was doing a shoot there. I met Irving Klaw, a cheerful, balding, rotund fellow, and his sister, Paula, a handsome, friendly woman who ran the studio operation and, ultimately, shot most of the 8mm and 16mm classics in the Klaw oeuvre.

These films were five or ten minutes long, silent and almost always in black and white. There was never any nudity and there were no men. The girls posed, danced, modeled bathing suits and lingerie. In the bondage series, girls kidnapped other girls, gagged them, handcuffed them, tied them up and spanked them in the friendliest way. Sometimes they indulged in merciless tickling.

Brandy and another girl, dressed in what appeared to be two-piece leather bathing suits, wrestled on a rug while Paula operated the camera and made suggestions. Now and then, other girls wandered in and out of the dressing room in various stages of undress, watched the scene and commented on the degree of difficulty of the unorthodox wrestling holds. I was, of course, playing it cool (as we said then), as though it were nothing special for me to spend a Saturday afternoon watching my girlfriend getting her head squeezed between another girl's powerful thighs.

In truth, I was somewhat confused. The atmosphere was a peculiar mixtureof prurience and innocence, rather like a whorehouse sequence filmed by Steven Spielberg.

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The second time I saw Betty was at Jim Atkins', a 24-hour restaurant on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. At four in the morning the place would be jammed with the determinably Beat and the desperately hip, crouched on stools at the curving counter, stoking their (usually) marijuana-induced feeding frenzies with jelly doughnuts and double orders of corned-beef hash. Confirmed junkies drank endless cups of coffee into which, for that added lift, they would stir the contents of Benzedrine inhalers.

She came in with some guy whom we all immediately hated, sat down, smiled and ordered something. Oatmeal, I think. Even the severely stoned sat up straight, stopped giggling and watched the spoon going in and out of her mouth.

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By 1955 Betty was the queen of pinups, the undisputed superstar of bondage pix, the main event in the Battling Babes series. She was the biggest hit on the photography-club circuit, the members of which paid a set fee for an afternoon field trip to some deserted meadow, park or farm in New Jersey or Connecticut.

Even some publisher named—let's see—Helkner or Hemler, something like that, selected her as his magazine's January 1955 centerfold. It's a picture shot by Bunny Yeager, the great cheesecake-and-glamour model turned great cheesecake-and-glamour photographer. In the photo, Betty, dressed in an abbreviated Santa Claus outfit, is kneeling by a Christmas tree, winking at the camera and holding ornaments.

Betty's legitimate acting credits are less memorable. She performed in several showcase productions and in a Long Island theater, playing the part of the sultry Gypsy dancer, Esmeralda, in Tennessee Williams' Camino Réal. She appeared in three exploitation burlesque films: Strip-o-Rama; Varietease, starring Lili St. Cyr; and Teaserama ("In Beautiful Eastman Color"), starring Tempest Storm and featuring "Saucy Betty Page." About the nicest thing Variety could find to say in its review was: "Apparently there's a market for this type product."

She also showed up in several TV variety shows, in bit parts, background, dressed as immodestly as standards and practices would allow.

A friend of mine who wrote for the Steve Allen Show remembers her. He says, "She did some bit with a bunch of other girls. There was too much hair spray and too much makeup."

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An advertisement for a burlesque theater in Jersey City proclaimed that BettyPage would be on the bill for a week, performing a "naughty but nice" bathtub routine. Some friends and I sat through several performances, but she never showed up. Although I was severely disappointed, I could hardly blame her. It was a tacky joint, even by grind-house standards, populated in the front rows mostly by middle-aged men with coats, hats or newspapers placed strategically on their laps.

Our evening came to an abrupt end when I leaned over and asked one of the patrons if I could borrow the sports section when he was through with it. I had to assume that he was not amused at my attempt at friendly jocularity when he threatened me with dismemberment.

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Betty's personal life through these years was not one to write home about. She seemed to have had no close female friends. She did have a few lovers, mostly men who photographed her. They are remarkably uninsightful about her. Unless, of course, there's nothing to be insightful about. A couple of them asked her to marry them, but her hoped-for acting career came first.

One of them took a trip with her to Florida and briefly met a sister who, he reported, looked like Betty but not as good. Another said that she was adept at lovemaking. All the men seem to have destroyed whatever private photographs they once had of her so that, apparently, the nature of their relationship with her would not be discovered by a past, present or future wife.

In spite of her admirable scholastic record, no one can remember her reading a book. No one recalls going with her to a play or a movie, though some think she had a particular fondness for Jimmy Dean, Gregory Peck and Bette Davis. No one remembers ever seeing her in any of her theatrical efforts. No one can remember her ever cooking a meal. She was polite, friendly, a good girl, a sweet girl, a trusting girl. She didn't gossip or complain or take the good Lord's name in vain.

Someone remembers an uncharacteristic flash of anger. The police descended on a photography club's field trip and cited everybody for indecency—which, in those years, meant any behavior that couldn't be found in the text of a Dick and Jane book. At the moment of the bust, Betty was relieving herself behind some bushes. Afterward, in the car going home, Betty was in a silent rage. The photographers assured her that the penalty would be only a small fine. That wasn't the point, she said. "That man—that policeman—he saw me go!"

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Then the Kefauver Committee came to town. Senator Estes Kefauver—Democrat from Tennessee—was, because of his affection for Davy Crockett headgear, referred to by some as the dork in the coonskin cap. Desperately trying to attract attention to himself after a failed presidential bid, Kefauver chaired a congressional committee investigating obscenity.

It was an era of investigation. And this one got everybody's attention because it dealt, after all, with material that was dtity. Dirty books were everywhere. Dirty comics (look for the female organs craftily disguised in the folds of the garment worn by Sheena, Queen of the Jungle) drove our nation's youth into a sexual frenzy. Not unlike the splenetic Senator Orrin Hatch, who searched grimly through contemporary literature for the mysterious pubic hair during the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill bout, Kefauver hurled half-witted accusations in all directions.

The committee focused on Irving Klaw's operation. There was the claim that the body of a murdered Florida man who was found in full bondage gear looked suspiciously like something out of a Klaw catalog. Expert witnesses attested to the links between pornography and juvenile delinquency, organized crime, madness, suicide, blindness, spotty complexions, un-Americanism, you name it.

The charges didn't quite stick because the law said that to make the case, the material must arouse or excite the normal person. And since the committee members were, after all, normal persons, would they admit to becoming aroused or excited themselves by photographs of girls being tied up and gagged? Gracious sakes, no.

But in the process of their investigation, they effectively broke Irving Klaw. He made a deal to destroy thousands of photographs. Deeply hurt by the accusations, Klaw slowly withdrew from the business and, a few years later, fell ill and died.

In the meantime, Betty got subpoenaed. Although no one remembers being there when she testified, she appeared before the committee and was lectured by Kefauver.

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Betty had been knocking at all those doors for almost ten years. She'd been lying about her age and it was beginning to show. She still got a lot of criticism for the accent she had never been able to get rid of. The big break seemed as remote as ever. The investigators were still trying to put someone in jail. And the owners of the building she lived in were threatening to tear it down. It was all too much.

So, in 1957 she packed it in. She went to Florida, modeled for three or four years and then disappeared. Utterly.

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What became of her? Here is a selection of the rumors that I have heardover the years:

After gangsters threatened her life, she had plastic surgery and went to live in Europe.

She entered a convent.

She secretly married a minor film star, or the brother of a minor film star, or a friend of a minor film star's lawyer, and lives with him in Canada.

What happened, of course, is much less colorful. Probably, as most of those who were close to her believe, she went back to Tennessee, got married, had kids and settled down to a decent stable Baptist life. By now, if she's still alive, she's pushing 70.

There's a man in California who claims to be her brother. He's not talking. There are others, Bunny Yeager among them, who undoubtedly know where she is, but they are keeping her secret. A tidy sum of money was recently offered to her through intermediaries if she'd surface and tell her story. The response, if indeed it was an authentic one, seemed to have something to do with "the Lord's work."

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The Betty Page that we know ceased to exist some time ago. She never got to play those glamourous, exciting parts on stage or in the movies that she dreamed about. But the part she did play, however inadvertently, was unique. That Betty Page will never grow old. She will never be hounded by crazed fans. Paparazzi will not track her down and humiliate her. The tabloids will not draw comparisons between what they say she has become and what we know she is.

One hopes she has cashed in on at least a fraction of the happiness she gave to others. Maybe she has a daughter or, by now, a granddaughter who has black hair and a slightly droopy eye.

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The third and last time I saw her was on a camera-club shoot. We all met on a weekend afternoon at an abandoned farm someplace in the New Jersey countryside: Betty, Brandy, one other model, a dozen or so photographers and I. The guys clicked away for four or five hours as the girls lounged against barn doors and leaned out of windows, hugged trees, draped themselves against boulders and rolled around in the grass. Mostly, the men followed Betty from place to place, as did I. They asked her to turn this way and that way, bend over a little more, even more, look back, back here, back here at the camera, at the lens, smile now, big smile, one more time, right at the lens, please....

She smiled for all of them. Even though 1 didn't have a camera, she smiled one time, I think, at me.

© Bunny Yeager/From the Collection of Eric Kroll, N.Y.C.

"She was always late; once, it is said, three days late. But they would wait—for that look, for that smile."