Bettie Page

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Ql

PLAYBOY: You're more popular and fantasized about than ever, even though it's been more than 50 years since you became one of America's most photographed pinup girls. How do you explain the demand for Bettie Page books, websites, feature films, DVDs and other memorabilia? PAGE: My recent popularity began in the 1980s, when Dave Stevens put out that comic-book series The Rocketeer, and I was the leading lady in it. That has never happened to any other model. It's grown since then. I have fan clubs and get letters all the time from young girls, saying that they look up to me, that I helped them lose their inhibitions by posing in the nude and that I helped them be themselves.

Q2

PLAYBOY: Of course men love you too. PAGE: Musicians have even written songs about me. One of those songs is by BR549, from Nashville, where I was born, and it's about what this guy would have done if he had known Bettie Page and all kinds of crazy things like that. I wonder. Why me? People call me an icon. But thank God

for it because I get more money now with my new agent than I've ever had. When I turned my life over to the Lord Jesus, I was ashamed of having posed in the nude, but now most of the money I've got is because I posed in the nude. So I'm not ashamed of it now, but I still don't understand it.

Q3

PLAYBOY: It's easy for us to understand. You have an incredible face and figure and a playful girl-next-door innocence combined with assertive sexuality. PAGE: I never thought I was incredibly attractive. I have large pores, and 1 had to wear a lot of Max Factor pancake makeup to make my skin look good. A lot of people claim they like my smile because I look happy when I'm posing. I was happy posing, especially when I was playing in the water. Nobody knew it, but sometimes I used to imagine the camera was my boyfriend and I was making love to him. I loved to pose anyway, just to see if I could think of different positions. That started in the orphanage.

Q4

PLAYBOY: In the early 1930s, during the Depression, your mother divorced

your father, a mechanic who hit a rocky financial patch and did jail time. Because she couldn't care for all six of her children on her own, she had to put you and your two sisters in an orphanage. PAGE: Yes, I was there when I was 10, 1 1 years old. There were only girls there, and we used to play what we called Program. A bunch of us would sit in little chairs in a circle, and one person would get in the middle and a different girl would say, "I want you to dance the hula" or "I want you to sing." I've been a movie hound since I was 10 years old. I used to cut out pic­tures of movie stars from the front page of the Sunday newspaper in Nashville, and the girls would ask me to mimic the poses of the big stars. That's how 1 started learning to pose, mimicking pic­tures of movie stars. Bunny Yeagcr is a big liar when she claims she taught me to pose. I'd like to get her by the neck if I could get away with it.

Q5

PLAYBOY: Yeager was one of the first pro­fessionals to shoot you in the 1950s and the photographer who did your famous Playmate shot (continued on page 108)

Settle Page

(continued from page 73)

tor the January 1955 issue of playboy. PACE: I was going to blow the whistle on her. Nobody knows the truth about her, and it really ought to be told. In 1954 I would pose for that woman for nothing or for $5 an hour, mostly in the nude out in the ocean or out in the woods. She said, "I will do right by you finan­cially. Bettie, if the pictures sell." One of the first things she did was get me the Miss January 1955 spot in playboy She got quite a bit of money for that. She never gave me a penny. The only thing she ever gave me was a $5 makeup kit with a lid on it, but it didn't have any makeup in it. I didn't have anything in writing, though I signed a release allow­ing her to do what she wanted with the pictures, and she has been selling them all over the world ever since. She called me up one time to tell me she bought her home in North Miami with money she got from books that teach people how to draw nudes she had done of me. Two writers were going to put things right with my life-story book, and they interviewed me a lot. When they asked me to ask Bunny Yeager to please send photos to put in the book, I thought she'd give them to me for free, but she said, "Tell Bettie Page she'll have to pay just like any­one else. It'll cost her $200 a photo." Talk about a cheapskate.

Q6

pi-AYBov Who created those hot bikinis and the Jungle Bettie leopard-skin-patterned outfit you wore in your photo sessions with Yeager? pagf.: Bunny Yeager claims she made my bikinis and that leopard-skin outfit, but she didn't even know what I was going to wear that morning. She never had anything to do with it. She never designed or made any of my bikinis. She used to make the bikinis for some of the other models, but she didn't even bother to hem them or anything. Mine looked like something you would get at a big department store, if I do say so. I made that leopard-skin out­fit—designed it and everything—and I made a lot of my lingerie as well. She shoots like no other photographer. She doesn't wait until you get posed; she just shoots all the time—even if your neck is strained or your arm is not in the right position. She sold every pic­ture she ever took of me, no matter what it looked like. I've got no use for Bunny Yeager whatsoever.

Q7

plavboy: Would you say you have a his­tory of being taken advantage of—by women and men?

pagf.: My father was a sex fiend. That's all he thought about from the time he got up until he went to bed. He started molesting me when I was 13, but I was already menstruating and he was afraid I might get pregnant, so he just rubbed himself on the outside, not in the vagina. I think my sister Goldie was never righi in her head because she was out on the farm with him for one year by herself, with my brother Jimmie. .After what my father did to her she kept to herself, but she walked with her head down and even had some mental problems later. He went to his deathbed lying about it. He said to me, right in front of my step­mother, "You and your sisters are lying about me. I never touched any of my daughters sexually."

Q8

playboy: By the time you first hit New York, in 1947 at the age of 24, you had earned a bachelor's degree, taught school, been unhappily married to and then divorced from Billy Neal, taken a modeling course and modeled furs in San Francisco and lived in Miami and Haiti. You were soon posing lor amateur photo clubs, appearing on magazine covers and becoming a pinup icon. pagk: I had less sex during those seven years modeling in New York than at any time in the rest of my life put together. I went out with Marvin Greene, a good-looking blond fellow with wavy hair, one of the few blonds I ever dated. But we didn't have any sex at all. I just didn't have any desire to make love to him, and he never bothered me about it either. He was so ashamed of his height—he was about five-foot-four, and I'm about five-foot-five-and-a-half—that when we'd go to the beach at Coney Island he would always lie a foot below or above me on the sand so nobody would see he was shorter than I was. He was a dancer and singer in Okla­homa!, A/v Fair Lady, Carotisel and a lot of those big musicals. We were like brother and sister when we took trips together in his old Chevrolet. Those were the most pleasant experiences in my entire life.

Q9

playboy- Weren't they pleasant enough to marry him despite the lack of sexual attraction?

I'.u.K: It's a shame it had to have a bad ending. In 1957, two weeks before Christmas, I told him I was leaving New York. I thought they had enough pictures of me. I was getting too old to model. I wanted to change. Marvin started crying and said, "Bettie, I want you to marry me. I love you. I'll never love anyone else." I said, "Ifl got mar­ried again, I'd want to have sex. and you know you never appealed to me in that way." When I knew Marvin, he wouldn't drink even a bottle of beer. I wouldn't date a man who drank, smoked, cursed or anything like that, but it seems Marvin started drinking after I left New York. I don't know if he's still alive or not.

Q10

plavboy: After you made such an impact as a model, you were served with a sub­poena to appear before a congressional subcommittee making a big show of investigating the bondage suicide of a Florida Boy Scout. You were never called to testify, but afterward you completely vanished from the scene, and wild tales sprang up, about your being the victim of a Mob hit, your becoming a grand­mother and your finding religion. PAGE: You hear all kinds of lies about me. When I came to California in 1978, I think even my little cousin once said, "Bettie, are you still married to [famed photo agent] Irving Klaw?" 1 said, "What? Irving Klaw was never mar­ried to me. His wife was one of my best friends." 1 never even thought anything like that about him—he was a fat man, bald headed almost. Then there was the story that I was married to some kind of raja over in India somewhere, that I was living in a trailer in Kentucky or that I was dead. All kinds of crazy rumors went around. Do you know anvthing about this movie out on me?

Q11

playboy: The Notorious Bettie Page, star­ring Cretchen Mol? pagk: I thought she was real pretty, with those big eyes. She was good-looking, but the way she would screw up her face and all, I never did that. I didn't think her figure was too good. She was too tall, but she had a pretty face. That movie is full of lies. I was almost raped once by four creeps in a car in Queens, New York, and they had it in the movie that I was raped by five men out in the woods. They didn't rape me. The basic story is true, but the details are a lot of baloney—or most of them are. I saw the movie at Mr. Hefner's house, in his theater, a couple of weeks before it came out, and one of the female producers was sitting right behind me. I mean, they named it The (concluded on page 140)

Settle Pa^e

(continued from (/age 108) Notorious Bettie Page, and the word notori­ous has a bad connotation, but here she was claiming that notorious can have a good connotation. I'd like to knock her on her head. I don't want to hear anything about it. I don't go to the movies nowadays. I think most of them are full of cuss words, filthy talk and sex, and I've hated cursing all my life, and God hates it too. 1 watch my good old movies on TV.

Q12

pi.ayboy: This wasn't your first unhappy experience with Hollywood. Weren't film-studio executives in the 1940s eager to get you on the proverbial cast­ing couch?

page: I resisted it all my life. In New York I got this call from a film producer and went over to his office. He wanted me to star in a Western, and he was tell­ing me all about it. Then he said, "Of course, Bettie, there's one stipulation. You'll have to be nice to me in order to get the part." That's the way they used to put it. I wouldn't do it, but a lot of actresses did. I don't know if it's true or not, but I've heard that even Marilyn Monroe went to bed with one of them at 20th Century Fox in order to get into the movies. If I had wanted to do that, I might have been a movie star in the 1940s, but I didn't care that much about it. For the screen test at Fox, they tried to make me look like Joan Crawford. They didn't like my makeup, and they didn't like my Southern accent. They shaved my eyebrows, put a big wide mouth on me and stuck my hair out on the side. When I saw the screen test I hardly even recognized myself.

Q13

playboy: But you attracted the interest of other Hollywood studios, right? PACE: I went back to San Francisco, and I got a telegram from Warner Bros, ask­ing me to come down for a screen test. They had seen the test from 20th Cen­tury Fox and told my agent, "Tell Bettie we'll leave her makeup as it was and we'll get rid of her Southern accent." But you know why I didn't go? It was around the time World War II was ending, and my husband Billy Neal was coming home from fighting the Japanese overseas, and I had to go back to Nashville with him. I didn't even answer the telegram from Warner Bros.

Q14

playboy: It's interesting to speculate about how differently things might have turned out if both you and Marilyn Mon­roe had been stars at 20th Century Fox. Did your paths ever cross? PACK: No, never, though she was studying at the Actors Studio in New York at the

time I was studying acting with Herbert Berghof just a few streets away. I wasn't trying to be an actress then; I just wanted to prove to myself whether or not I could really act. I used to love to watch Marilyn. I thought she was as cute as a bug's ear, espe­cially in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and she was delightful in The Seven Year Itch. I don't think she killed herself at all. I think it was some of the henchmen of old Kennedy.

Q15

PLAYBOY: So many men over the years have gone crazy for you and still do. Have you ever gone crazy for anyone? PACE: The love of my life was Carlos Gar­cia Arrese, from Lima. I met him the sec­ond time I went to New York, in 1948. We started dating, and I fell in love with him. He taught me Latin dancing—the rhumba, samba and mambo—and 1 had done only American dancing, like the foxtrot and the waltz. When I met him and we went to Club El Chico in Green­wich Village, a little nightclub he liked, he showed me a picture in his wallet of this pretty blonde and a little boy about a year old. He said they were his sister and her little boy. He had an apartment about 10 blocks from mine, and we started making love. One night, after I had been dating him for about four or five months, all of a sudden somebody knocked on the door. This voice said, "Open up, Carlos. I know she's in there." That wasn't his sister and his sister's little boy at all in the picture; it turned out to be his wife, and she was calling me a home wrecker. I felt like two cents as I was going down the steps, and I said, "He told me that was his sister and his sister's little boy in the picture he has in his wallet." She wasn't even listening to me, and she was about ready to beat me up. I suspect I loved him more than any other man, because I would never have sex with a man without being married to him. But I did with Carlos, and it took me years to get over him. I think I loved him more than the guys I married.

Q16

playboy: Did you two ever see each other again after that night? pu;k I saw him a couple of times, but I didn't feel the same toward him, because he had lied to me. His wife had been up in Albany with her parents and the little boy, and he'd been going up there on weekends. But when he started dating me, he didn't go up there. One night she heard him calling, "Bettina," in his sleep—that's my name in Spanish, you know—and she got suspicious.

Q17

playboy: As an object of desire for so many, have you had a satisfying sex life? PACK: Right now my love life is nil. N-i-l. I was married before I even saw a man's penis. I didn't even care about sex for a long time, I think, because of what my

father had done to me and my sisters. I've had an orgasm during intercourse only three times in my life. I used to put on a big act, pretending 1 was having an orgasm in order to make the man feel good. I didn't have them with Carlos, but I had orgasms with my third husband. Harry Lear, and with a man I had sex with when I went to Haiti in 1947. He was a good-looking guy who worked for Westinghouse. 1 really fell in love with him. This one time 1 had sex with him sitting on the floor with my legs spread, and I had an orgasm. I found out later he was married and his wife was getting ready to have a baby.

Q18

playbov: From the late 1970s to the early 1990s you suffered mental distress and underwent psychiatric treatment and hos-pitalization for acute schizophrenia after you had been accused of several stabbings. How are you doing these days? f.v.t: I had a nervous breakdown over Harry Lear's ex-wife and their three children, whom I was taking care of. She didn't want me to have them. I was taking tranquilizers back then, but that was some time ago. I think talking to the psychia­trist about all my problems helped a lot.

Q19

playboy: What are some of the bigger regrets of your life?

page: My biggest regret is that I didn't answer that telegram to be a movie star at Warner Bros. My next-biggest regret is that I got talked into marrying my first husband, Billy Neal, in 1943. See, most Southern girls wanted to get married in a long white dress in a church wedding, and that's what 1 wanted. But on a Saturday morning—this tells you how much I really didn't want to marry him—I put on a black jersey dress, and you know what they say: "Marry in black, wish you were back." We got on the bus and went to a courthouse 30 miles away, and it was all over in five min­utes. I sat there on that bus. thinking. What have I done? I think the devil was coming into my mind. I wasn't a horn-again Chris­tian then, hadn't received Christ as my savior way back dien. I believed that Jesus had died on the cross and everything, but I didn't know you had to receive him per­sonally as your savior in order to have your sins forgiven. That wedding day was the worst experience of my life.

Q20

pi.aybov: Do you have anything to say to the men and women all over the world who write you letters, emulate you and buy Beltie Page books and memorabilia? pack. I just don't understand why they look up to me. But I'm very grateful.

Read the 21st Question at playboy.com.

/ had less sex during those seven years modeling in Neiv York than at any time in the rest of my life.