My Story the Missing Years

Before she became a legend, Bettie Page was a Tennessee girl strolling the beach at Coney Island, New York. An amateur photographer named Jerry Tibbs spotted the pretty secretary in October 1950. Tibbs asked her to pose for him. Bettie smiled and said yes. Soon she was posing for local camera clubs, and when shutterbugs asked the 27-year-old to pose nude, Bettie smiled and said yes.

In the next seven years the young brunette became an underground icon. Bettie Page was the Queen of Curves, the most photographed woman on the planet. The Dark Angel, some men called her. By 1955 her hearty smile had appeared in such girlie magazines as Stare, Sir!, Titter and Modern Sunbathing. She was Playboy's Playmate for January 1955. Indeed, Bettie was the perfect Playmate, for she was both naughty and nice. That smile suggested forbidden fruit as well as apple pie.

Her allure also had a darker side-- she posed for fetish and bondage photos. This was the secret Bettie, all tied up with a ball gag in her mouth. These Dark Angel photos led countless American men and boys to ponder a new sexual geography, a wet-dream-like land where Miss America meets the Marquis de Sade.

The Eighties and Nineties saw a Bettie Page renaissance. Moviemakers and fashion designers revived her look.

Uma Thurman did a Bettie riff in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Madonna, Demi Moore and other trendsetters appeared in Page-inspired photo shoots. Today her image adorns many of the hottest nightclubs in America. There are Bettie Page fan clubs and look-alike contests. There are more than 100 Bettie Page Web sites. All for a woman who disappeared 40 years ago.

Much of her work, particularly the bondage photos made by Irving and Paula Klaw, incensed the moral guardians of Fifties-era America. Men such as Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver entirely missed the campy frivolity that animated the Klaw sessions, and they scored political points by hunting down "pornographers" and "perverts." In 1955 Bettie became a target of Kefauver's congressional antipornography commission, which ruined Irving Klaw. She was intimidated by federal agents who waved her own nude photos at her, threatening criminal prosecution.

She fled New York in 1957. For four decades, nobody could find her.

What happened? At last we know. Thanks to Bettie herself we know about her descent into poverty and mental illness, as well as her thoughts on her recent revival. We know that the foreword she wrote for her authorized biography, Bettie Page: The Life of a Pinup Legend, by Karen Essex and James Swanson, was partly whitewash, since Bettie omitted what she refers to as "my troubles." According to a new book, The Real Bettie Page: The Truth About the Queen of the Pin-ups, those years included violent outbursts by a Page desperately in need of psychiatric help. Now, for the first time, she discusses the tormented lost decades that followed her glory years.

Late last summer, Bettie Page appeared at Playboy Mansion West, home of her longtime supporter Hugh Hefner. Accompanied by David Stevens, the comic-book artist who immortalized her in The Rocketeer, she spent the day with Playboy Editor-in-Chief Hefner and Contributing Editor Kevin Cook

Playboy: Tell us why you hide from your fans.

Page: I don't want to be photographed. I don't want my fans to see an old, fat--this old face.

Playboy: But everyone gets older.

Page: Isn't it sad? I get very sad seeing how my favorite movie stars look today. I'd rather watch their old movies on cable and think of them that way. That's all I watch on television, old movies.

Playboy: How do you see your career? Was it glamorous?

Page: I did it mainly because I could make more money in two hours as a model than in 40 hours as a secretary. People say my one desire in life was to be a movie actress, that my modeling was a stepping-stone toward that. Hogwash! I never really pursued acting. I once had an option for a contract at Twentieth Century Fox, but it fell through. I studied in New York with Herbert Berghof, Uta Hagen's husband, but never auditioned for anything on Broadway. Mr. Berghof wanted me to try out for Moonbeam McSwine in Li'l Abner when it was first produced, but I wouldn't go. Julie Newmar got the part.

Playboy: Why didn't you audition?

Page: I was 34. I thought I was too old.

Playboy: You still looked 24 in those days.

Page: I did look younger than my age. In the seven years I was posing, I felt my looks never aged a year. But whoever heard of a 34-year-old actress just starting out? I had done a couple off-Broadway parts and several TV shows. I did The Jackie Gleason Show. But by the time I studied acting and became convinced I could act, I was 34. It was too late.

Playboy: How did you get your start in modeling?

Page: Well, my father stole a police car. We were poor. He stole a car in Texas to get my mother, me, my two brothers and my three sisters back home to Nashville. It happened to be a detective's car. My father got two years in the Atlanta penitentiary. Mama couldn't take care of all six of us, so my sisters and I were put in an orphanage. I was ten years old. I would dance and sing for the other girls in the orphanage and mimic the poses of the actresses we saw in movie magazines. We did the hula; I liked to watch the girls with their hips moving. I'd do the hula and pose for everyone. That was the start.

Playboy: What else do you recall about the orphanage?

Page: Supper was always a cup of milk and a piece of cake. Plain white cake with no icing on it. Mama finally got us out of there.

Playboy: You were 19 when you left Nashville.

Page: My husband Billy Neal got drafted into the Navy. He was stationed in Marysville, California. Two weeks after I graduated from Peabody College in Nashville I moved to San Francisco. Then he was shipped to the Mariana Islands to fight the Japanese.

Playboy: Neal was kept under 24-hour guard before the ship departed. He had gone AWOL to be with you. Once he even escaped the stockade to spend the night with you.

Page: As a wife, I was always a good lover.

Playboy: Soon you split with Billy Neal.

Page: I got a job, secretary to the sales manager at Enterprise Engine and Foundry. They made diesel engines for PT boats. The pay was $40 a week.

Playboy: What about your dream of being a model or movie star?

Page: I took a modeling course at night. It cost $100. That was $100 wasted. All I learned was how to put on too much makeup and walk with a book on my head. But I met a man in the window-washing business, Art Grasso, who said that he had done some directing in silent movies. Art Grayson, he called himself, but his name was Grasso. He was one of the first men to ask me to pose for him.

He took my picture and sent it to Twentieth Century Fox. Then one day he came running into the office with a telegram in his hand: "Twentieth Century Fox wants you for a screen test!" The next day we went to the airport to fly to Hollywood, but Grayson's wife was so jealous of me that she followed us in her car. She was sure we were having an affair. She grabbed him by the coattails. He was jumping over the turnstile to get to the airplane while she held on to his jacket. I said, over and over, "He never even made a pass at me!"

Playboy: And what happened in Hollywood?

Page: I had a screen test with John Russell, who later had the title role in The Lawman on TV. I had to kiss him. It was awful. They made me up to look like Joan Crawford, with my hair bunched out on the sides, my eyebrows shaved off and penciled in and a great big wide lipstick mouth. I was disgusted. The studio people sat around a table saying the screen test was a flop, and I said, "Why can't I do my makeup? Isn't that what you liked in the first place?" And they didn't like that at Twentieth Century Fox, my speaking up.

Playboy: Was that your only screen test?

Page: I had another chance. One day Mr. Grayson got a wire from Harry Warner at Warner Bros., who wanted me for a screen test. They might have let me do my own makeup; I might have gotten into the movies. But Billy, my husband, was just back from overseas. The war was over. I knew I had to go back to Nashville with him, so I didn't answer the wire. I will be sorry about that until the day I die.

Playboy: Wasn't there one other call from a movie man?

Page: Ten years later, in 1955, Howard Hughes called. He wanted to meet me. He said he wanted to test me, to screen-test me, in his studio downtown. But I had heard that he wouldn't do (continued on page 184) Bettie Page(continued from page 136) anything for you unless you went to bed with him. I wasn't into that. If I'm going to have sex with a man, I want to know and care something about him. I have to love him or at least like him very much. So Howard Hughes kept calling to say he wanted to take my picture, but I never called him.

Playboy: Yet your greatest fame has been in the Eighties and Nineties. Your followers call you "timeless." In the old days your fans were dirty old men; today you're a heroine to their sons and daughters. Why?

Page: I have no idea.

Playboy: Is it thrilling to have millions of new fans?

Page: It's surprising. I have a lot of young women fans, believe it or not. The other day I got a letter from a woman in Alaska, a missionary nurse. I'm still not sure how missionaries in Alaska get hold of my pin-up pictures.

Playboy: You were the wholesome, naughty-but-nice girl in the most stylish dirty pictures of the Fifties. What was your best feature?

Page: I had a very natural smile.

Playboy: Was it genuine? Did you enjoy posing nude, or were you pretending?

Page: I tried to imagine the camera was my boyfriend and I was entertaining him, with poses to please him.

Playboy: How much of that did you do in real life?

Page: None. That's why it's funny when people claim I was some kind of sex icon and innovator. In my seven years of posing in New York I had less sex than at any other time in my life. For three of those years I dated an actor named Marvin Greene. He sang in the chorus in Oklahoma! Marvin was such a sweet fellow, the best companion I ever had. And gorgeous, with a beautiful body. He worked out in the gym; he could knock a baseball farther than the Yankees. But for some reason he did not appeal to me sexually.

We used to go camping in New England, Niagara Falls or way up in noman's-land in northeast Canada. Slept together with no sex. I would kiss him, that was all. Marvin was bashful, but I loved to swim in the nude. Have you ever done that? It's a delightful feeling, unencumbered, like you're in another world.

Marvin wanted to marry me. I said, "I don't love you enough. I would make you unhappy."

Playboy: In those three years you had no sex at all?

Page: None. I entertained myself.

Playboy: Did you enjoy sex?

Page: Oh yes. But I had to feel something for the man. With Marvin, there was no desire.

Playboy: Your bondage photos suggest a darker sort of desire.

Page: Irving Klaw was the king of bondage. He would hire four or five models and two or three photographers. We would shoot for about four hours, always on Saturdays, down in the Village near 14th Street. An hour or an hour and a half of that would be bondage. You had to do bondage or you didn't get paid.

Playboy: What were you paid?

Page: Eighty dollars.

Playboy: Was bondage arousing to you?

Page: We laughed about it. Klaw's company was called Movie Star News. Irving and his sister Paula sold movie-star pictures, but their pin-ups, and then the bondage pictures, sold more. Paula did some photographing, but mostly she set up the scenes. She tied us up.

There was one set of poses that frightened me. It was outdoors. They put me between two trees with my feet off the ground. I was spread-eagle, with ropes around my hands and feet and my waist. They were too tight. I thought my arms were coming out of their sockets. I was in agony. It looks like it in the pictures, too. I wasn't putting on an act that time.

Playboy: Who commissioned the Dark Angel photos you made?

Page: Judges, doctors, lawyers. People way up there in the professions. They go for bondage. They liked to see girls spanking each other. I held a whip a lot.

Playboy: Any special requests?

Page: One guy sent me a pony outfit with a black leather hood that looked just like a horse. You couldn't even see me in there. I was down on all fours with my head covered, laughing.

Why do men like bondage? A fellow I knew well liked to be whipped. His wife never knew about it. Of course, I won't mention any names....

Stevens: Discretion, dear.

Page: [Smiling] Well, he deserves no discretion.

Playboy: It was hardly discreet to pose nude in the Fifties. Why did you do it?

Page: God approves of nudity. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they were naked as jaybirds. If they hadn't listened to the devil they could have been nude all their lives and as happy as larks. I always went around my apartment in New York totally nude. I swam in the nude, even considered joining a nudist colony. I do not believe in flaunting it, though.

Playboy: But aren't you famous for flaunting it?

Page: No. My nude poses were mild. I frowned on any sort of pornography. I never did open poses. Except . . . well, there was one night. I went to a party; there were five camera clubs there and several models. They kept giving me drinks. I remember posing for them, doing some nude shots for the camera clubs. After that I must have been drunk, they must have talked me into doing some open poses.

Playboy: The police later threatened you with copies of those photos.

Page: You could get arrested for that in those days.

Playboy: Wasn't there an unwritten rule that camera club photos were for private use only?

Page: The dog who took those pictures sold them for $800. They were sold under the counter, but the police found out and confiscated them. They knocked on my door one morning: "Bettie, we have something to show you." They had open poses. My face dropped, I was so shocked. They had close-ups, too.

Playboy: Do you remember your first nude pose? We hear it happened after Jerry Tibbs introduced you to fellow hobbyists in camera clubs.

Page: That wasn't it. What happened was, I was sitting on a bench in Central Park when a fellow came up and said, "You have a beautiful face and a nice figure." He was a young photographer. He took some pictures. He asked me to pose nude and I didn't mind. I was in good shape back then. I never had qualms about being nude, though I didn't believe pubic hair should be showing in pictures.

Playboy: Did you have any sexual problems?

Page: I wouldn't have intercourse with my first boyfriend until after we were married. Not even on our wedding night. That was because my father molested me as a child; I didn't care for sex for a long time after that.

I got over it. I believe that two people who love each other should make love. Sex is part of love.

Playboy: In 1957, after your Dark Angel period, you dropped off the cultural screen. It would be decades before Dave Stevens with The Rocketeer, Robert Blue with his oversize bondage paintings and other fans would start a Bettie Page revival.

Page: Robert Blue painted my body all right, but not my face. I did not have a little tiny bird mouth and a frown line over my nose.

Stevens: He liked the darker Bettie. What about the banana leaf one, where you're squatting on the ground in a leopard outfit?

Page: Yeah, that's not bad.

Stevens: And the one where you're spanking the girl on the couch--

Page: That looks like me. That's a nice profile of me.

Playboy: Were you ever ashamed of your work?

Page: I never thought it was shameful. I felt normal. It's just that it was much better than pounding a typewriter eight hours a day, which gets monotonous. I got tired of sitting at a desk all day.

Playboy: Are you a feminist?

Page: Women should have equal employment rights. A woman who does the same job as a man should get the same money. As for women who don't want men to be courteous, to give a girl their seat on a bus, I don't go in for that. I think women should enjoy those niceties and courtesies from men.

Playboy: Take us back to the gala Beaux Arts Ball at the Waldorf Astoria in 1951. You made headlines.

Page: Robert Harrison published girlie books, Wink and Flirt and Beauty Parade. That man had a fetish about cleavage. Every model, no matter how big her boobies were, had to tape them together. He wanted that big line down the middle. For the Beaux Arts Ball he dreamed up a telephone outfit for me. I wore my black fishnet stockings and two little telephone dials over my boobies. And I had a suggestion box in the most strategic area, a little black box with a hole in it. I would never repeat some of the suggestions I got.

Playboy: You were chosen Queen of the Ball. Your picture was in all the papers.

Page: I won a wonderful set of Revere Ware kitchenware. Seven hundred dollars' worth! Now it's almost 50 years later and I still use it.

Playboy: Did you get dialed a lot?

Page: Some of the men tested the dials. Those phone dials on my breasts really worked.

Playboy: It's been said you have the most-photographed breasts of all time.

Page: I never knew another girl with breasts like mine. Every month about a week before my period, my bust lost about two inches. My breasts got soft and flabby. Then a few days before my period and during it, they came back up and looked a lot better. It still bothers me that my breasts were down in my Playboy centerfold.

Stevens: You protest too much.

Page: If Bunny Yeager [the photographer] had to send my picture to Playboy, she could have done it when my breasts looked better.

Stevens: They looked fine.

Page: There's only one breast showing in the centerfold and it looks terrible. Do you know who followed me as Miss February? Jayne Mansfield. I was in high company.

Playboy: Did you try to look enticing?

Page: Yes, of course. As a pin-up, that's what you do. I did it in a few movies, too.

Playboy: You appeared in low-budget burlesque films with Lili St. Cyr and Tempest Storm.

Page: Tempest Storm was beautiful with her long, curly red hair. I played her maid in Teaserama. Or was it Varietease? Those wiggle movies were the same thing over and over. I just wiggled and mugged at the camera; I was no professional dancer. I was a good ballroom dancer, though.

Playboy: With what partners?

Page: Men who asked me. I used to go to the Roseland Ballroom. It was full of beautiful colored lights. I would go alone; men would come over and ask me to dance.

Playboy: Men have always wanted things from you.

Page: That's part of why I had a nervous breakdown.

Playboy: Is it true that you were abducted on your first trip to New York?

Page: I was walking on Seventh Avenue, window-shopping, when a tall, nice-looking fellow asked me, "Do you dance?" I said I loved to dance. He took me to his car and we drove to the Queensborough Bridge. Then two other guys got in the car. Then two more. It dawned on me that we were not going dancing. They parked behind a high school in Queens. One of the creeps got out and ran off with his girlfriend. The others all forced me to perform oral sex on them. They warned me not to go to the police. That night I called Billy Neal in Nashville. We weren't married anymore, but he sent me money for a Greyhound bus ticket home.

Playboy: Your marriage to Billy Neal had fallen apart. Yet you and Billy wed a second time in 1953, only to divorce again. You had two other marriages, two more divorces.

Page: My breakdown came after my divorce from Harry Lear in Florida in 1972. Harry's ex-wife was so jealous of me that it ruined the marriage and my health. Harry and I had a good marriage. He was a wonderful provider and a good lover. But he had one bad fault. He was a Mr. Milquetoast. He wouldn't stand up to his ex-wife, who kept calling at four in the morning to yell at me.

Playboy: Did she know about your past?

Page: Oh, that wasn't it. Harry was a big fan of my nude pictures. He had dresser drawers full of them. No, his ex-wife was calling at four A.M. to tell me I was bad for their children. They had three children and I was trying to be a good stepmother. The woman disapproved of everything I did. Those children threw their clothes all over the house, they wouldn't put them in the hamper no matter how many times I asked them.

Playboy: Your fans would be amazed to hear that Bettie Page had clothes hamper worries.

Page: But that woman ruined my life. Harry never stood up to her. That's what led to our divorce. And that led to my troubles.

Playboy: In his book The Real Bettie Page, Virginia journalist Richard Foster tells some lurid stories about you.

Page: Richard Foster is the devil posing as a human. A monster. He wants to make money, and he doesn't care what he does to my reputation.

Playboy: Foster writes that you stabbed three people before being committed to a mental hospital.

Page: That book was full of lies.

Playboy: Foster writes that you once held a knife to Harry Lear and his three children and forced them to pray. He says you threatened to "cut their guts out."

Page: That is absurd. I wouldn't do something like that. [Editor's note: Contacted by phone, Harry Lear corroborated Foster's account. Lear voiced doubts about other charges in the book, however. "I don't like that guy Foster. He told me he would do almost anything for money," Lear said.]

Playboy: Bettie, Harry Lear tells us the story is true. He says you made him and the children pray to a painting of Jesus, a painting by an artist named Sallman.

Page: We did have a picture like that. I don't know, maybe I was out of my head. I don't remember doing it.

Playboy: Harry called the police on you that night. You spent four months in a Florida hospital.

Page: Harry didn't know what to do. He fixed me something to eat, then he said something I didn't like and I threw a plate at him. That's when he called the police. He knew it was hopeless; I was having a nervous breakdown. I was sent to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where I had to take Thorazine. Terrible stuff. You feel dizzy and frightened. You feel like your head is going to come off.

Playboy: How did your breakdown start?

Page: I heard voices. I heard God and the angels talking to me, talking about fighting the demons in me. They talked out loud with my voice. That scared poor Harry. Of course, in the state I was in, I thought it was perfectly normal to talk to angels.

Playboy: Were you religious?

Page: I was born again on New Year's Eve, 1959. By then I was married to Armond Walterson of Key West. The one before Harry. That was stupid on my part. I met him when I was 30 and he was 18, and all he cared for was sex, movies and hamburgers. The man was a hamburger fiend.

Playboy: Was he born again?

Page: No, he was out drinking with the boys. I got restless and went for a walk. And it was as if someone had taken me by the hand and led me to a little church on White Street with a white neon cross on top. The door was open. I could hear singing. I went in and heard the preacher's salvation message. I stood there and cried because of my sins.

Playboy: What sins?

Page: Because I had a lot of sex in my life. I even shoplifted a couple times at Peabody College in Nashville. The cadets on campus admired my looks; they dubbed me the Duchess and they would cross their swords over my head when I went to class. I was ashamed I didn't have anything pretty to wear, so I swiped two dresses from Harvey's Department Store.

But it was more than shoplifting. When I gave my life to the Lord I began to think he disapproved of all those nude pictures of me.

Playboy: What did your husband think of your conversion?

Page: Armond didn't want to be led to the Lord. All he wanted was hamburgers and sex. And I had to teach him about sex. I don't think he'd ever had sex with a woman before me.

Playboy: Were you a good teacher?

Page: I remember our first kiss. We were at a drive-in movie. Armond kissed me, but he really didn't know how. He barely touched his lips to mine. After that I showed him the ropes. He became a good lover.

Playboy: Did religion change your life?

Page: I put my other life behind me. I threw all my bikinis in the garbage can. I threw out all my stockings and lingerie and panties and lace bras. And I went to Bible school. First the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, then the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and the Multnomah School of the Bible in Oregon. Did street witnessing and visited jails. I helped with church services at a home for teenage mothers, poor little 13-year-old girls with great big bellies. I led a few of them to the Lord.

Playboy: Did you ever want children of your own?

Page: I couldn't have any. I always wanted to, but I couldn't get pregnant. Doctors said I had a hormone imbalance.

Playboy: Tell us about Bible Town, where you studied in Florida.

Page: I had a breakdown there. I was in the auditorium when God seemed to talk to me. I guess I was cursing out loud, cursing Christians for not witnessing. Someone called the police.

This new book by Foster says Bettie Page threatened people with a .22 at Bible Town. That is a lie. I did have a .22 for protection, but whatever Foster has heard from the police, it never left my dresser drawer.

Playboy: You had other run-ins with police.

Page: The worst ones had to do with two long-nosed busybodies, my good-for-nothing landladies.

I left Florida on October 9, 1978 and went to live in a little cottage in Lawndale, California. It's a nothing town, but I had a nice little place, painted white. Unfortunately, my landlady got it into her mind that I had a man in there. She would cup her hands over her eyes and peek through my window. I'd be walking around naked or in my panties, and I'd feel somebody watching me. I would look around and see her face against the window.

One day I was peeling potatoes when I saw her peeking in. I went to the door, and I guess I was waving the knife, shouting, "Leave me alone or I'll call the police!" Well, her husband came out of the garage and busted me over the head with a hammer. My blood was all over the place. I thought he had killed me.

Then they lied in court. I wasn't allowed to speak. I tried to say they were lying. The judge kept saying he would cite me for contempt of court if I said another word.

Playboy: What did you want to say?

Page: That I had no intention of cutting anybody with a knife. I am a peaceful person. Yes, I was depressed. My money was dwindling. I had tried to get secretarial jobs but was always turned down. I was overqualified. Or too old. I could type 75 words per minute and take shorthand at 120 words per minute, but I was too old. I got depressed and had relapses.

Playboy: You were hospitalized again.

Page: They said I was schizophrenic. Acute schizophrenia.

Playboy: How long were you at Patton State Hospital?

Page: Twenty months. Patton is in San Bernardino, California, you know. It's pretty there. You can see the mountains from your window.

I didn't feel like a prisoner at Patton. The grounds are lovely, full of orange and grapefruit and lemon trees. You were allowed to eat as many as you wanted. I had a job in the hospital offices. I was a secretary again. But one night I was back in the dorm when a big young woman, the girl who sat across from me in the cafeteria, attacked me and tried to choke me to death. It was a case of mistaken identity. She thought I was someone from her life. A guard finally pulled her away.

Playboy: How often did you think about your former life as a pin-up girl?

Page: One night my picture came on the TV in the hospital. I couldn't hear anything, the women were all yakking. But seeing myself on TV--it brought back old times. Happier times.

Playboy: There would soon be more troubles.

Page: Yes. Another relapse. After Patton State I rented a room from a woman who was worse than my other landlady. She would follow me around the house, bust into my room when I was dressing or undressing.

Since I couldn't get a job I depended on Social Security, which was $450 a month. But the government needed verification of my rent, or it would cut off my S.S.I. I needed rent receipts from the landlady, but she wouldn't give them to me. I had no place else to live--I went into her room when she was sleeping and straddled her and threatened her: "Give me my rent receipts." I had a knife in my hand. We fought, and she hit me on the head with an antique telephone.

Playboy: You wound up in court again.

Page: The judge would not let me speak.

I did not assault that woman. I was depressed and angry and I threatened her with a knife, but I wouldn't have done anything. I wasn't that sick. I might have cut her if she hadn't given me the rent receipts, but I would not have killed her. I never had that feeling even when I was mentally sick, but now it's on my record: assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit murder.

The court said I was not guilty by reason of insanity.

Playboy: Was the court right?

Page: I wasn't insane. I had no intention of cutting that woman, for goodness sake, but I was held by the state for eight long years. I was released a few years ago. Now I live in a little house next door to my mental health center. Once a year I go to downtown Los Angeles to see a psychiatrist. That would be a one-hour drive, but it takes three hours on the bus.

My psychiatrist says I'm doing well. She tells me to avoid stress. I don't want to relapse.

Playboy: Do you have financial troubles?

Page: All the attention I have been getting lately helps my morale more than my pocketbook. I had a louse of an agent, James Swanson, who published my life story, Bettie Page: The Life of a Pinup Legend.

Playboy: What about movie rights?

Page: People talk about a movie, but I don't think it will happen. My popularity was only at the cult level. My life isn't interesting enough for a big-time movie.

Playboy: Will you ever appear in public again?

Page: No. I want people to remember me as I was.

Playboy: Do you reminisce?

Page: I think about being young. I never thought I would get old. Then I started seeing gray hairs and lines around my eyes and my mouth. I thought, Oh no, I'm old. I'm 50. Now I think, Oh, to be 50 again! But I have decided to live to be 100. I'm into anti-aging--I take vitamins, minerals and umpteen supplements and have more energy than ever.

Playboy: One critic wrote that your appeal came from low self-esteem. You tried so hard to please the camera, he said.

Page: What's low about that? To please the camera--isn't that a good thing?

Playboy: Do you regret anything?

Page: I am sorry for the trouble I had with Harry Lear and his ex-wife and their children. I'm sorry that this book has come out and that my fans, people who have been admirers of mine for years, have to read about my troubles.

Playboy: Do you have a message for your fans?

Page: Yes. I never got to tell them: Thank you.