.jpg?1305035296)
The famous Jungle Bettie / Bunny Yeager shoot. Bettie Page made the leopard print costume herself.
If you are of the gender that gravitates to the Three Stooges and gets sympathy pains for John Wayne Bobbitt, chances are you know who Bettie Page is. Bettie was the Henry Ford of the pinup world.
Bettie Page: Not just another roadside attraction
Now this is not a veiled attempt to describe the lovely Ms. Paige’s attributes using such auto related euphemisms as “chassis” and “headlights”, but rather a commentary on how, while she may not have been the first pinup model in the entertainment world, she did it better than everyone else. For over a decade, this woman did more to excite the male libido then Obsession perfume and “Hot Pants” combined. Her career as a pinup peaked in 1955 as Playboy's Miss January, beating out Jayne Mansfield who came next at Miss February. Then in 1957, after a career that included nude photography, fetish/bondage photos, and a congressional investigation on obscenity, she turned her life around and simply disappeared from the public eye for over forty years.
Bettie Page: The early years were very much in the public eye
So what happened between 1957 and her death in 2008?
Unlike most models over the age of 30, Bettie didn’t try to put a death grip on her celebrity. Aging models often hang on to the limelight for dear life until (after a succession of bad, desperation fueled, career choices) they are eventually chewed up and spat out by the porn industry.
None of this happened to Bettie Page. Instead Ms. Paige managed to successfully (if occasionally painfully) transition into her post model years by shifting her attention from the physical plane to the spiritual realm. While her early years were marked by selling her modeling skills to anyone with a camera and a few bucks in their pocket, Bettie’s middle and later years were spent in an effort to give back.
1957 was about as comfortable as passing a kidney stone
1957 marked the start her post model years. This year of transition was about as comfortable for her as passing a kidney stone the size and shape of Lisa Simpson’s head would be for most normal people. During this year she added a new husband and a new career. Both would be short lived. At the same time Bettie began and ended a career as a grade school teacher. She worked at Key West’s Harris School. One would think that most of the problems that a former fetish model would have teaching school would be the sort of issues that would make her a candidate for Debra LeFave’s Christmas card list. In truth her problems were twofold. According to the cousin of her ex-husband, Paulie Walterson, it was Bettie’s looks that got in the way.
"They didn't want her to teach there," Paulie Walterson told The Key West Citizen in January 2009. "She was too beautiful. They pushed together to get her out. They didn't see how a woman like that could teach third grade."
There is probably a lot of truth to this, and the topic of how she was treated by her co-workers was most likely an issue during family gatherings. Yet according to Bettie, she left teaching because of an experience with an unruly student.
“I decided to teach and I taught fifth grade in Key West at Harris Elementary School for a year, but I had a bad experience teaching. There was one, big-old boy in my class of fifth-graders. He was 13 years old and all the others were about 10 years old ", she said when interviewed for the documentary, "Bettie Page Reveals All”.
"He had been left behind for three years; he was a son of a naval officer at the Naval Air Station. And he gave me a hard time all the time. Talking back to me, disturbing the class in every way, and you weren't allowed to spank them or anything down there. I would like to have clobbered him."
By the end of 1957 her marriage to Armon Walterson was falling apart. On New Year’s Eve, they argued about how they were going to spend the evening. She wanted to go out dancing and ring in 1958 with her husband at a nightclub. He wanted to go get drunk with his friends. It is unclear whether or not the phrase “bros before hos” was part of the argument. Regardless, the evening ended with Bettie storming out and going for a walk in the streets of Key West.
Just a closer walk with Thee
It is this walk that became the defining moment of her life. The events of this walk have also been the subject of some misplaced mythology. According to Bettie-lore, she was walking aimlessly, despondent and suicidal, when she passed by the Key West Baptist Temple. She heard the voice of Reverend Morris Wright rising from the church and was drawn in by the power of his words. She accepted Christ that evening and began a lifelong spiritual journey that included an education at three different bible colleges and a full time job with the Evangelist Billy Graham. While most of this is true, the good Reverend Wright (not to be confused with the guy in Chicago who contributed to Obama’s spiritual education and screams things like “God Damn America!”) and Bettie have both disputed whether or not she was suicidal on that fateful evening.
As recently as 2008, Reverend Wright was standing by the suicide version of the story.
"She was on her way to take her life," Wright told The Key West Citizen in January 2008. "As she passed my church, she heard my voice preaching."
Bettie’s version is a little different.
"I was going to lie down on the wall and listen to the ocean and look at the stars and think of whether or not that I was going to leave Armon," she said in an interview with documentary filmmaker Mark Mori. "And then I started walking down the street with my head down. It was like somebody took me by the hand and guided me across the street and I saw a little church over there with a door open and heard music, singing. It had a white, neon-lit cross over the top of it. It was a little Latin American Baptist temple, I later learned, and I stood in the back and cried while the pastor started giving a salvation message.
"They stopped singing and Wright started giving a salvation message on how to be saved," Page told Mori. "I stood back there and cried about all my sins, and I thought God disapproved of me doing nudes, you know. I didn't think anything about the fetish and the bondage ... because I had to do that, but I thought maybe he looked down on me for posing in the nude."
While most are probably likely to believe the version that came from Bettie’s lips (one where she wasn’t thinking of killing herself and her conversion came two weeks later instead of that very night) both Page and Wright agree on the part that is most important: Bettie had a life-changing experience that New Year’s Eve, and she was never the same afterward.
Out with the lace bras. In with the Bible.
"I put my other life behind me," she told Playboy in 1998. "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."
Bettie Page in her later life as a devout Christian
Bettie ended her marriage to Armon Walterson and by 1961 was living in Chicago and attending Moody Bible College. This was the second of three institutions of Christian education she would attend. Originally she had attended the Bible Institute of Los Angeles while staying with her brother, after the collapse of her marriage. Eventually she graduated from Multnomah School of the Bible (now called Multnomah University).
All this religious instruction was a means to an end for Page. Since her conversion after New Year’s Eve 1957, she had developed a passion for sharing her faith. Bettie would often stand on street corners, handing out Christian reading material and evangelizing. She wanted to eventually go to Africa as a missionary. It was not her past as a nude/fetish model that prevented her from doing this though--it was her divorces.
"I turned my life over to the Lord and went to Bible schools for three years," she said. "And I was going to be a missionary, believe it not. That's what I had all the Bible training for. But do you know they would not take me; no fundamental evangelical mission board would take me -- and those were the kind of Bible schools I had attended -- because I had been divorced. Get that now! To some Christians, especially the fundamentalists, being divorced is worse than having committed murder." While life as a missionary wasn’t in the cards for Ms. Page, she did end up taking a position with Billy Graham ministries and worked full time for the popular evangelist.
Bettie lived in relative obscurity throughout the sixties. Her divorce from Armon Walterson became final in 1963. In 1967 she gave marital bliss one last shot with a gentleman named Harry Lear. This ended in divorce in 1972.
Some mental cracks began to show in the veneer
As the seventies were coming to a close, some mental and emotional cracks started to show in the former pinup's veneer. A violent altercation with her landlord resulted in trouble for Bettie. Like most bits of her personal life, the events surrounding the fight with her landlord are steeped in mystery and conjecture.
Most accounts agree that a stabbing occurred and that it was Bettie playing the part of Norman Bates while her landlord was the unsuspecting shower victim. Ms. Page was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She spent the next 20 months as a guest of a state mental hospital in California, and the 8 years after that under the observation of the State.
The anti-Marilyn revival
After a decade of fighting her mental issues, she emerged from her time in or supervised by a state institution to a world that had rediscovered her. The late eighties and nineties brought with it a revival of her popularity. For many young people who were seeking an escape from a “New Kids on the Block” and “Winger” dominated pop-culture by embracing such bands as Metallica and Nirvana, Bettie was the anti-Marilyn Monroe. To borrow a slogan, this was not your father’s pin-up girl (well actually, she probably was, but he most likely wouldn’t admit it).
In 1993, while she was living in a California group home, Bettie was interviewed by Robin Leach of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”. She quipped that despite her new popularity she was currently "penniless and infamous." This was a condition she sought to rectify. After going through a few agents, she eventually hired the Curtis Management Group to help her get a piece of the royalties from the proliferation of her image. For years others had profited from her image while she received nothing. Now that she was finally getting the financial rewards from her popularity, she had an income that would provide security in her final years.
In 2005, her life was made into a movie, The Notorious Bettie Page, starring Gretchen Mol.
Betty Mae Page died of a heart attack on December 11, 2008. While many of the facts of her life are the subject of debate, conjecture, and mythology, nobody can deny the impact she has had on the culture. Today her popularity has cemented her position as a cultural icon. Her image is on display everywhere and many other figures in the entertainment world have usurped her look in an effort to stand apart from the crowd.
Unfortunately Bettie Page will mostly be remembered for only a very small window of time in her life. The more important and meaningful aspects of her time on earth will remain mostly hidden from the public.
Of course this may have been the way she wanted things. In later life she consistently declined to be photographed so that people would remember the two-dimensional fantasy of the smiling pinup girl from the fifties instead of the very real woman who lived a three dimensional life; one that, like everyone else, was full of triumph, failure, and heartache. Her main gift to the world was a fantasy, but it wasn't the only one.
