L.A. Times

The original alt-pinup, Bettie Page

LOS ANGELES -- Bettie Page was plunging into the day's work: autographing pinups of herself in various Naughty Girl personas, with kitschy bangs, high heels, mesh hose and tasseled underwear.

Nurse Bettie. Jester Bettie. Substitute Teacher Bettie. Maid Bettie. Voodoo Bettie. Cowgirl Bettie. Jungle Bettie. Wild Orchid Bettie. Banned in Boston Bettie. Crackers in Bed Bettie.

The task ahead was arduous given her many ailments, including diabetes and stabbing pains in her back, legs and hands.

But the 82-year-old Page -- a taboo-breaker who helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s -- is not a quitter.

"I'm about ready to roll," she said in a Southern drawl, freshening her bright red lipstick. "But I'm going to go slow. I won't squiggle if I write slow."

CMG Worldwide, the company that markets her image, had organized the event at its Sunset Boulevard penthouse offices. The idea was to get Page's autograph on as many prints as possible, because demand for anything Page-related is soaring.

Between 1949 and 1957 she was immortalized in thousands of saucy photos. Those images have spawned biographies, comic books, fan clubs and numerous Web sites, as well as commercial products -- playing cards, lunch boxes, beach towels, action figures.

According to her agents at CMG, who control the images of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana, Page's official Web site, www.BettiePage.com, has received 588 million hits over the past five years. That's cult status.

For the past 13 years, she's been living in seclusion in various Southern California communities. Nearly five decades after the last photos of her appeared in magazines such as Chicks and Chuckles, Page is finally earning a respectable income for her work.

"I'm more famous now than I was in the 1950s," she said.

"My land! Is that supposed to be me?" asked Page, surveying a painting of her reclining in a negligee with an ecstatic smile on her face.

Putting pen to canvas and concentrating mightily, she muttered, "I was never that pretty."

But to generations of men, she was.

She was born Bettie Mae Page in Jackson, Tenn., 105 miles southwest of Nashville. She was the oldest girl among Roy and Edna Page's six children. Roy, an auto mechanic, "molested all three of his daughters," Page said.

Edna divorced Roy in 1933 after he got a teenager pregnant, but life didn't get any easier for Bettie.

"All I ever wanted was a mother who paid attention to me," Page recalled. "She didn't want girls. She thought we were trouble. She didn't help with homework or teach me to sew or cook.

"She didn't go to the school plays I was in or go to my high school graduation. When I started menstruating at 13, I thought I was dying because she never taught me anything about that."

L.A. Times

Bettie Page signs autographs recently in California. For the photo above, she would not allow her face to be shown: "I want to be remembered as I was when I was young."

Two weeks before her final exams in high school, her mother's much younger lover "tried to pull me into his car. My mother nearly murdered me over that, then made me live with my father. So I couldn't review my exam notes, which were at home.

"Because of that I got beat out of graduating valedictorian by a quarter of a grade point and lost my dream of getting a scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University," she said. "It was the worst disappointment of my life."

She tried secretarial work and marriage. But by 1948 she was divorced and had moved to New York and enrolled in acting classes. Strolling the beach at Coney Island, Page crossed paths with New York police officer and amateur photographer Jerry Tibbs, who introduced her to shutterbug clubs and suggested she wear bangs to help cover a slightly protruding forehead.

From the start, Page -- whose measurements were 36-24-37 -- preferred the skimpy outfits she designed and sewed at home. "I made all of my bikinis and most of my lingerie," she said.

Almost overnight, she became an underground sensation, attracting the attention of Irving Klaw and his sister, Paula, who operated a mail-order business specializing in cheesecake.

Page soon became the Klaws' busiest pinup and also starred in their peekaboo short films, "Varietease" and "Striporama."

During her brief career, she became the obsession of thousands of men -- a fact that mystifies her to this day: "I have no idea why I'm the only model who has had so much fame so long after quitting work."

Her most acclaimed photographs were taken in 1955 by fashion photographer Bunny Yeager. They included shots of a nude Page lounging with leopards, frolicking in the waves and deep-sea fishing and a January 1955 Playboy centerfold of her winking under a Santa Claus cap while placing a bulb on a Christmas tree.

"Exactly what captures the imagination of people in terms of pop culture is something hard to define," Playboy founder Hugh Hefner said. "But in Bettie's case, I'd say it's a combination of wholesome innocence and fetish-oriented poses that is at once retro and very modern."

In 1955, Page was summoned to Capitol Hill by Sen. Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat who was investigating the pornography business.

Kefauver's committee never compelled Page to testify but the uproar caused the Klaws to close their business. At 35, Page quit modeling and moved to Florida, where she married a much younger man whose passions, she later learned, were watching television and eating hamburgers.

In 1967, she married her third husband. After their divorce 11 years later, Page plunged into a depression marked by violent mood swings. She got into an argument with her landlady and attacked her with a knife. A judge found her not guilty by reason of insanity but sentenced her to 10 years in a California mental institution.

She emerged from San Bernardino's Patton State Hospital in 1992 to find that there was new interest in her story and her old poses.

In the autumn of her life, Page is learning to accept what her modeling meant for her and for American popular culture.

"Young women say I helped them come out of their shells," she said. "And 13 rock groups have written songs about me."

A motion picture, "The Notorious Bettie Page," is scheduled for release in April. Artist Olivia De Berardinis, whose work Page was autographing, expects to publish a book this year featuring her own idealized portraits of Page.

Page had one request for this story -- that her face not be photographed. "I want to be remembered," she said, "as I was when I was young and in my golden times. ... I want to be remembered as a woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form."

But this much can be shared. Her face remains smooth and fresh and one can still see the face of the young woman in the old. Her eyes, bright blue, still sparkle.