the Bettie Page Companion

PART ONE

By Brendan Hancock
Edited by Matthew J Schelle

Originally Written for The Australian Rock & Roll Appreciation Society in 2005

PART ONE of EIGHT

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Introduction

Bettie Page has appeared in over 1,000 magazines since 1951. She is the most photographed woman in history, even more so than the likes of Marilyn Monroe & Cindy Crawford combined. Yet in 1957, at the height of her career, she left public life without a trace…

She was one of the most famous pin-up models of the 1940’s and 50’s and she dominated the covers of almost every single mens magazine in the United States, including Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. Bettie Page was much more than just a beautiful pin-up model. Quite simply, she was the best. She had hair that was as dark as midnight and a cute yet dangerous smile that could light up any day. An undisputed legend: even more so today than she was over forty years ago. The world is still in love with Bettie Page, the girl from next door who was both naughty and nice. Who had the ability to look like the normal housewife one minute and the ultimate S&M bondage-loving mistress the next. It was not surprising that all men wanted her and all women wanted to be her.

But by 1957, Bettie Page had given celebrity up. She packed her bags and moved to sunny Florida, where she continued to do low key-modelling assignments for the next three to four years and then… mysteriously vanished… They say she disappeared…

Many of the stories that have appeared throughout the last four decades would make any conspiracy theorist wet with excitement. Some of the theories that have been thrown around have included:

·         Gangsters had threatened Bettie’s life so she had plastic surgery and went to live in Europe.

·         She became a nun and entered a convent, and now preaches the word of the lord.

·         She secretly married a minor film star, or the brother of a film star, or a friend of a film star’s lawyer. Then moved to Canada and became a teacher.

With her “disappearance” from the public spotlight, the Bettie Page legend grew and her fabulously seductive image became ageless. Every aspect of her life has become the subject of documentaries, books, comics and music. This in turn has captured the interest and devotion from thousands of fans from all over the world.

The life and times of Bettie Page have also been a long sought after property in Hollywood. Many big names in the business have spent years and vast amounts of money trying to put Bettie back on the celluloid strip. Before the machines of the film industry contort her life story into a 90-minute melodrama, the following story of Bettie’s journey is intended to act as a testament to her
enduring charm and also to those who wish to see her memory live on.

PART ONE

She was born Betty Mae Page in Kingsport (just outside of Nashville) Tennessee on the 22nd of April 1923. Bettie was the second of Walter Roy Page and Edna Mae Pirtle’s six children. Bettie would quickly learn that she would have to compete for her parent’s attention, as a new baby arrived in the family almost every other year. She would also become accustomed and burdened with responsibilities like changing nappies and caring for the younger children. Bettie’s mother was part Cherokee Indian and her father was part boozer and womaniser. 

At age five, Bettie got her first taste of stardom when she played the angel Gabriel in a church Christmas pageant. She soon realised that she had found a way to get people to notice her. Bettie would then spend the rest of her life trying to recapture the same gratification and satisfaction that she got that night as a little girl when her ears rang with the sound of applause. But until that day of stardom, Bettie had to live in the real world.

During her early childhood years the Page family constantly travelled the country in order to find some kind of economic stability. With the advent of the depression, Roy Page, a decorated world war one veteran and a qualified mechanic, found that work had all but dried up. With no money coming in, the tension within the household was overpowering. Edna and Roy would constantly fight and argue, usually about money but also about sex. Roy’s desires could not be satisfied and in one instant threw an eight month pregnant Edna out of the house in the pouring rain because she refused to have sex with him. But the financial situation just got worse and the still un-employed Roy Page couldn’t meet the rent repayments on the rented house in Tulsa. The family was soon evicted and thrown out on the street with their belongings. The family found themselves miles from home with no money and no friends or family to help them. So Roy came up with the drastic decision to steal a car, loaded his family into it and proceeded to head back to his mothers house in Tennessee. Unfortunately for Roy, his amateur criminal career was short lived when the owner of the stolen car turned out to be the town’s deputy sheriff, who in turn hunted down the desperate Roy Page and arrested him. Bettie and her brothers and sisters stayed with their mother at Roy’s mothers house back in Nashville, while Roy spent the next two years in an Atlanta Prison.

During this time, the separated Page family managed to get by, but barely. It wasn’t uncommon for Bettie to get accustomed to wearing her mother’s hand-me-down clothing specially cut down to her size. Due to the lack of money for toys and other luxuries, Bettie and her siblings found creative ways to keep themselves entertained and Bettie herself became an avid daydreamer. The Page children would splash around in the nearby creeks or made up games like “fighting feathers” where the main aim of the game was to see who could keep a chicken feather in the air the longest by blowing on it profusely.

 

When Roy Page was paroled from prison in 1931, the family scraped together what little savings they had and bought a forty-eight acre farm which was situated thirty miles west of Nashville. Although the family were able to get together enough money for the purchase of the farm, they were still in poverty-stricken hell.

“We were so poor that we were lucky to get an orange in our
Christmas stocking.”

But Bettie kept her chin up. The constant moving, mixed with the responsibilities of caring for her younger siblings, as well as helping her mother with ongoing house chores, made it hard for the young Bettie to develop solid friendships with children her own age.  About the only other semi-constant thing in her life besides poverty and household chores was her education. The Page children did attend school and every week Bettie and her siblings would make the long walk to the local school usually without shoes on their feet. Perhaps seen as an escape from the tension back at home, but in any case, Bettie Page spent what spare time she had developing this education.

“I was very studious, I studied all the time, while others were out playing. I got the reputation, if nobody knew the answer, Bettie Page did.”

Whereas she could bury her head into a book when times got tough at home, no amount of reading or studying could stop the arguments between both her parents. The fighting all came to a head when in 1933, womanising Roy Page, went back to his old ways. It seemed that the good ole’ farm life was just too darn quite, so Roy jumped straight into a more carnal pursuit which ultimately resulted in Roy literally getting caught rolling in the hay with a fifteen year old neighbour girl named Rosie. The girl ended up pregnant and when her father found out began looking for Roy with a shotgun. But Edna Page got to him first and proceeded to smash every dish in the house over him as he ran. It was this that ultimately led to Roy and Edna’s divorced.

Now with the mother as the head of the family, the divorce only made the family’s financial situation worse. Edna Page started working as a hairdresser during the day and washing laundry at night.  But even the extra work wasn’t enough, and soon Edna was forced to put the 10 year-old Bettie and her younger sisters Goldie and Joyce into a church run orphanage while she worked and tried to save money for her family. Bettie’s older brother Billy and younger brothers Jimmy and Jack stayed with Edna to help with chores. These were definitely hard times and drastic measures to match, but none-the-less, Bettie would never forget the feeling of abandonment.

Yet once again, Bettie found refuge in her textbooks and continued to focus on her education. As a teenager, Bettie started attending local community centres where she found enough peace from the stress around her so she could focus on her homework and study. It was also at these community centres where she developed her cooking and sewing skills and with the company of her sisters, began experimenting with makeup and hairdos whilst also trying to imitate their favourite movie stars of the time.

It was education rather than boys that was the main focus of young Bettie Mae page. She maintained an A average that kept her at the top of her class.

It was this sheer determination as a student during her high school years at Nashville’s Hume-Fogg that lead her to not only be the program director of the Dramatics club, secretary treasurer of the student council, co-editor of the schools newspaper and yearbook, but also got her voted “Most Likely To Succeed”.

Although Bettie had no time to look for boys, it seems they came looking for her. Just one month before her high school graduation a footballer-come-basketball player from East High School by the name of Billy Neal, was captivated by the young Page’s beauty. Neal, who was two years older than Bettie, started hanging around Hume-Fogg High School in the hopes of seeing her again. Eventually his persistence paid off and Neal was able to persuade the seventeen year-old Page to go on what would become her first date, even though she knew her mother wouldn’t allow it.

Schoolwork was still Bettie’s priority. Her determination to succeed was driven by the simple fact that she wanted the scholarship that was on offer to the prestigious Vanderbilt University. But as chance would have it, it wasn’t meant to be.

“I was trying to be valedictorian in high school, because the valedictorian would win a four year scholarship to Vanderbilt University. I was beat out by one quarter of a point – all I got was a $100 scholarship to George Peabody school in Nashville.”

 At George Peabody College for Teachers, Bettie studied education, but still had her hopes pinned on becoming an actress.

 

“ I did go to George Peabody and worked for Dr. Leland Crab – he is a well known civil war historian in the South. When others were out dating and gallivanting – I had to work for Dr. Crab to pay my way through Peabody. “

By the time 1941 came around and brought with it the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese, Billy Neal was starting to get worried on many accounts. Not only was he in the firing line to get drafted, Neal was also worried about his relationship with Bettie and more importantly what would happen if he had to go to war. Bettie was already getting her fair share of attention from the college boys on campus, which in turn left Neal filled with a constant jealousy. He soon came up with the notion that marriage would be the answer and his persistence of asking Bettie to do so would follow. But first, Bettie had a degree to complete.

Bettie eventually left the college with her B.A degree, but her future as a teacher would be short lived…

“I was going to be a teacher and wanted to- but when I had to do 6 months of practice teaching, the boys in the class were about as old as I was. With all the catcalls, I didn’t want to teach. Although I did teach after leaving New York City in the 50’s in Miami and Key West 5-6 grade. I remember one boy who had been demoted and always disrupted the class – I said I never wanted to teach again after having to deal with him.”

On a Saturday morning shortly after Valentines Day in 1943, Billy Neal got his wish and married his high school sweetheart Bettie Page. The wedding application was filled out at a courthouse in the town of Gallatin, which was thirty miles north of Nashville. The marriage was rushed and obviously Billy had planned it that way. The town of Gallatin was a popular place for quickie weddings, as there was no waiting and little chance of problems from family or friends. Only a few months into 1944, Billy got his draft notice and found himself fighting over in the Pacific. Bettie moved to San Francisco where her sister lived. It was in sunny San Francisco that Bettie got her first modelling job at a local fur stockist where Bettie modelled fur coats for potential clients.

While the months at sea piled up for Billy, things were only getting better for Bettie. She took to using her maiden name again and became convinced that her quickie courthouse marriage with Billy was a terrible mistake. She decided to wait until his return in 1945 rather than write a letter to him to let it be known that the marriage was indeed over. Bettie found her own piece of independence and for the next four years began to travel. Usually between San Francisco and back home in Nashville but slowly venturing out to places such as Portau-prince, Haiti, where she soon fell in love with the country and it’s people.

 

During her time in San Francisco, Bettie took up some secretarial jobs in the day and began sewing her own work outfits at night.  It was whilst she was doing secretarial work for the sales manager of the Enterprise and Foundry Company, that a middle aged man would set the wheels in motion for a possible career change for Page. His name was Art Grayson and he was in the offices to strum up possible work for his window washing business.

As soon as Art’s eyes got a glimpse of this black haired beauty behind the desk, he forgot about windows for the time being and focused on what he could do for the girl in front of him.
It just so happened that the enterprising Art Grayson also ran a talent agency and an advertising production business on the side, which fell under the name of Hollywood Commercial Motion Pictures. He soon felt that this star-struck secretary would not only be perfect for the newspaper ads that he was working on, but could be the perfect choice for a project he had heard about at Twentieth Century Fox. It didn’t take much for Art to convince Bettie and within a matter of weeks the twenty-two year old Page had posed for numerous still photos at Grayson’s studio. This then lead to Page receiving a telegram from Twentieth Century Fox asking her to come to Los Angeles for a screen test. Bettie Page had made it to Hollywood.

Grayson and Page boarded a plane to Hollywood. Once at the Fox Studios, Page was quickly escorted to the make-up department where she was made up to look like actress Joan Crawford. Yet, the final result left a lot to be desired.  Her beautiful hair was scrunched up at the sides, her eyebrows magnified to look like Groucho Marx’s long lost sister and lipstick smeared across the corners of her mouth. To top it off she was made to wear a white sailing outfit. Page looked nothing like her normal self, yet she went ahead and did a screen test with John Russell, another actor who would go on to later star in television’s “The Lawman”.

 

A week later, Bettie was asked back to the studio to see the results of the screen test. Bettie was shocked and mortified by the final results. Gone was the innocent girl next door image that had got her noticed in the first place, and now, replaced with a woman caked with makeup that looked nothing short of being a two-bit whore. Her deep southern accent and the fact that she wouldn’t play “slap and tickle” on the casting couch with the studio executives also didn’t help her case any. Although Art Grayson warned Bettie not to date any of the executives, one actually asked Bettie out for dinner and when Bettie turn him down on account that he wasn’t pleasing to the eye, he replied with a simple: “You’ll Be Sorry”.

In the end, Bettie received a collection of negatives taken from the screen test as a souvenir and a well known “Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You” response from Fox.

During the weeks that followed, a broken-hearted Page spent many hours looking over those negatives and sank into a period of dismay. She began eating a lot of junk food. Ice cream, doughnuts and chocolate became her primary diet, and it wasn’t until she gained an extra forty pounds that she decided to do something about it.

She turned her life around, went to the local YWCA and started exercising and eating heath foods. When she finally got back to a comfortable 118 pounds, Bettie enrolled in a modelling course, as her way of thinking was that nobody would be able to hear her strong southern accent in a photograph: she’d let her beautiful curves do the talking.  She entered a few beauty contents and would be very successful. She had a bit of a fling and fell in love with a sailor named Joe but eventually met back up with her husband Billy Neal and tried to make her marriage work. This was brought on by the fact that she fell pregnant by him and felt that she would settle down and do what was right for their baby. But when the pregnancy ended due to a miscarriage, divorce soon followed and Bettie found her escape from the situation by travelling again.

In 1950, she ended up moving to New York where she found her own small apartment and another secretarial job. It was during a leisurely walk along the Coney island shoreline that Bettie met Jerry Tibbs, a police officer who turned out to have more than just a passing interest in photography.

Tibbs pulled out a business card and asked Bettie if she done any modelling before. Bettie lied and said that she had not and that she was an aspiring actress. Tibbs obviously saw the potential in Page and continued his conversation with her, explaining that every model he knew still had photo portfolios to take to auditions and that he would take the photographs of Bettie for free.

His persistence paid off as only a few days later, Bettie met Jerry at his Brooklyn studio where he took numerous images of Bettie in skimpy bikinis and lingerie. Yet no matter how amazingly beautiful, sexy and sultry Page looked, Jerry couldn’t help but feel something was missing. He stuffed her bra with tissues, experimented with makeup and even added lavish eyelashes but yet it still eluded him. He then focused on Bettie’s hair, which at that stage was still parted down the middle and away from her forehead, as he realised it make her face look too large. Then Jerry had an idea.

 “I know”, he said, “Why don’t you brush your bangs down?” and then it happened.

An historic moment in the history of mankind, like the discovery of penicillin or the invention of the wheel, the pin-up legend, the black banged queen of curves… was born.

“From the first time I posed nude, I wasn’t embarrassed”

- Bettie Page

PART ONE of EIGHT

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