PART THREE

It was the January 1955 issue of PLAYBOY that Bettie Mae Page from Nashville Tennessee would become PLAYBOY CENTREFOLD MISS JANUARY.
Bettie page had officially arrived; Bettie won the title of “Miss Pinup Girl of the World” and was named the “Girl with The Perfect Figure”. Her image flooded more and more magazine and book covers and had now spilled over onto record albums and playing cards.

"I never keep up with fashions. I believe in wearing what I thought I looked good on me."

The new found fame also brought a lot of extra attention from men all over the country, one man in particular who showed a lot more than a slight interest in Page was famous industrialist Howard Hughes. Famous around Hollywood for his philandering, Hughes was known to pick girls out of men’s magazines like a hungry man ordering from a food menu. For most up and coming starlets, when a call came from Howard Hughes, fame would soon follow, usually, only after a visit to the casting couch.

The popular notion is that Bettie turned down a film role offered by a horny Howard Hughes after rejecting his advances and slapping him in the face. But the truth of the matter is Bettie never actually met him. In a letter Bettie sent to Richard Foster, author of The Real Bettie page in 1992, she said:

“Bunny Yeager the Miami photographer, sent me a magazine article with my picture and five other models and actresses, claiming we were girlfriends of Mr. Hughes. (But) my only involvement with him was through his right-hand man who contracted Irving Klaw, advising him that Howard Hughes wanted to meet me. I talked to this man on the phone and told him that I was not interested in meeting Mr. Hughes. They made a screen test of me, but nothing ever came of it.”

The screen test was done at Hughes’ RKO studies in California. While there, Bettie posed for headshots, profile shots and other test photos. Eventually Hughes right hand man told Bettie that Hughes still wanted to meet with her. Knowing exactly what Hughes was really after and not prepared to pay the price, Bettie stuck to her guns and told the assistant that she still wasn’t interested in meeting with him. Bettie returned back to New York, knowing full well RKO would never call her back.

For Bettie, it was just another missed chance of being an actress and more importantly, real Hollywood fame and stardom. Yet little did she know she was going to receive publicity that would blow everything, including her playboy spread, out of the water. The work that she was most well known for would be on the lips of every household conversation piece everywhere. The United States were about to declare war on Irving Klaw and Bettie was in the firing line.

Even though by 1955 American Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt for communists was over, many American lives, reputations and careers had been destroyed, all those blacklisted fell into oblivion and for all those left standing pseudonyms or suicide seem the only alternative. McCarthy’s aim was to weed out communism in America and all those deemed un-American. Yet, the final result of his witch-hunt ended in only one person pleading guilty to un-American activities and so many innocent people blacklisted. The real winner from McCarthy’s marathon was McCarthy himself, as he knew taking on such a political hot potato would not only give him fame, which he sought, it would be a brilliant political career move. So it was no surprise that likeminded American politicians thought there was still enough immoral and un-American “going’s on” to get paranoid about.

There was one politician in particular, Senator Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for vice president as Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1956. He had adopted the McCarthy witch-hunt approach by slowly getting a name for himself by chairing a subcommittee investigating organised crime. Not surprisingly, it was these crime hearings that helped Kefauver defeat besieged president Harry Truman in the 1952 Democratic primary election in New Hampshire. Although Kefauver ultimately lost the nomination for Vice President, he became one of the first politicians who learned to combine paranoid scare tactics and a powerful new tool called television and turn them into votes.

By April 1954, realising the importance and what a boost a media frenzied lynching would do for his career, Kefauver took Joseph McCarthy’s way of thinking and decided to turn his attention to the evils of juvenile delinquency. Kefauver started his war via his Senate subcommittee hearings about violence in comic books. Using known child psychologist Fredric Werthams book “Seduction Of The Innocent” as a guide, Kefauver almost successfully shut down the entire comic book industry. Many childhood superheroes and the companies who created them where wiped out or forced to abide by a new code of standard. Classic Horror titles such as “Tales From The Crypt” and “Vault Of Horror” were hardest hit and basically disappeared from newsstands and drugstores. Like any traditional witch-hunt, comic book bonfires were started in towns across the United States and countless comic book characters played out a Joan Of Arc like end.

Not long after the comic book hearings were over, an insatiable Kefauver and his motley crew of committee members took over New York City in 1955 looking for another cause for juvenile delinquency. He realised that the evils of smut and obscene materials could be a major contributor. It didn’t take long for Kefauver to start the next stage of his crusade by linking Pornography with Juvenile Delinquency. By scheduling nationwide hearings in Texas, Florida and now New York, Kefauver managed to get a head start on his own campaign for the 1956 Democratic nomination for President. Kefauver had Irving Klaw and his most famous pinup model Bettie Page in his sights. Unbeknownst to Bettie, the recent fame caused by the exposure from the Playboy Centrefold Spread would become the pinnacle of her career.

It didn’t take long for Kefauver to publicly oust Irving Klaw and his bondage and girlie magazines. Yet this wasn’t the first time Irving Klaw and his Movie Star News were put under the microscope. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had come knocking on Klaw’s door back in 1950 when a mother registered a complaint after finding a copy of Cartoon and Model Magazine, which featured Klaw’s bondage images, in her teenage son’s bedroom. The US postal authorities in New York were also investigating Klaw even as far back as 1942 believing that his photographs and the catalogues advertising them were being sent all over the country and were becoming bolder and perhaps pornographic. During the FBI’s initial investigation on Klaw, they secretly bought photos from him waiting for the moment he would slip up and be caught out dealing with explicit material. But being the man that he was and the fact that never ever shot even a bare breast in his photoshoots. The FBI soon realised that Klaw “was too smart to deal with or handle strictly obscene material…[the photos are] all performed with females, and….Klaw has kept males out of the pictures so as to cunningly avoid what may possibly appear to be obscene” and with that, the first round with the FBI and the Cartoon and Model Parade incident were put to rest.

By the time Kefauver and his media lynch mob rolled into New York City in 1955, he not only had the FBI back on Klaw’s case, he also had the FBI director himself, the cross dressing J. Edgar Hoover overseeing the new investigation and personally reviewing reports and correspondence.

One couldn’t help but feel that both the FBI and Kefauver had it in for Klaw, but couldn’t make anything stick because what he was selling wasn’t classified as pornographic, although some of the images of scantly clad women being tied up was a little twisted by 1950’s standards, there wasn’t any hint of nudity, let alone full blown sex.

As it happened, Irving Klaw evaded arrest with this way of thinking on his side. Using a loop-hole for determining obscenity, the offending material “had to arouse or excite the NORMAL person”. Klaw’s material as one FBI agent put it was, “appealing to only certain types of sex perverts”. Though the FBI admitted that the Klaw’s photos and catalogues were not pornography as such, it didn’t stop Kefauver realising that Klaw’s material was the stuff votes where made from.

Kefauver went on his attack sending off subpoenas to Bettie, Irving and Paul Klaw. What then followed was over two weeks worth of unwanted publicity from Kefauver’s public ear bashings and a flood of anti-publicity featured in newspapers such as The New York Times and The New York Mirror. It didn’t take long for the newsreels and church ministers to join the bandwagon to rally together to fight the sinful smut that Irving Klaw and Bettie Page represented. Kefauver was lapping up the limelight like a starving dog, usually bending the truth in order to stir up more trouble for Klaw and his Movie Star News Business.

Kefauver used various dirty tacts and twisted the facts in order to serve his own secret agent. He would let it be known that many little girls were in fact customers of Klaws, yet omit the simple fact that they were only ever buying pinups of their favourite movie stars.

All Kefauver was pushing was the threat that the evil Irving Klaw was promoting filth to underage, impressionable minors.

Kefauver and his crew knew Irving Klaw would be the perfect trophy for their crusade on pornography and its effects on juvenile delinquency and with all the media attention surrounding his investigation, the Kefauver clan would now stop at nothing to bring Klaw down. Just before the court hearings were set to begin, two of Kefauver’s assistants tracked down Bettie and asked her to testify against the Klaw’s and Movie Star News. They wanted her to admit that she was indeed producing pornography, yet Bettie told truthfully that she had never even been shot topless in his studio, let alone anything pornographic.

When the hearings finally started at the United States Courthouse at Foley Square, Senator Kefauver relentlessly tried to link Klaw’s photos with a recent bondage death of seventeen-year old boy scout, Kenneth Grimm in Coral Gables, Florida. No matter how hard he tried to link Klaw’s bondage photos with information and images of how the boy’s body was discovered, it proved unsuccessful. Although the boy may have been engaged in autoerotic strangulation or asphyxiation, there was no proof that Kenneth Grimm had ever seen the Klaw pictures, yet Kefauver went out of his way to outright convict Irving Klaw for his murder.

Using two references from two of klaw’s movies, “Chris Strips for Bed” and “Lounging around in Lingerie”, one of Kefauver sub committee members questioned a notable clinical psychiatrist from Cornell’s University’s school of medicine and asked whether it was a fair statement to say that the senseless killings by teenagers during the past few years “were a direct result of some sort of erotic stimuli that had been given to these teenagers, these children, which resulted in their taking part in gang violence, torture and so on”. By no surprise, the doctor’s reply was: “ yes I expect that entered into a large portion of such killings”. When the subject moved onto Cartoon and Model Parade, the psychiatrist testified that the material was indeed intended to “stimulate people erotically in an abnormal way”.

With this moral endorsement, Kefauver began to paint Klaw as a pornographic kingpin. Firstly he stated that Klaw was making well over $500,000 a year, which was (at the time) an outrageous unrealistic estimate. Kefauver went out of his way to give the impression he made this type of money by dealing in fetish, bondage whipping, torture and other miscellaneous filth exclusively. While they did make him a fair amount of money, his primary source of business was what made him the money in the first place, pictures and pinups of movie stars, sports stars and other well known personalities.

Using every trick in the book and knowing how to put on a show, Kefauver’s twisted logic maintained that FBI rulings found that Klaw’s photos were indeed obscene by stating in a subcommittee report that “It’s rather difficult, unless one has an understanding of the particular perversion involved, for the average person to completely understand and notice the pornographic nature of Klaw’s material,”

A classic story to come out of the Kefauver hearings was that Bettie was asked to testify in front of the sub committee and when asked by Kefauver what she thought of the bondage photos she simply replied “Why, Senator honey, I think they’re cute”. Yet in truth, Bettie arrived early to attend the hearing at 9:00am on a Saturday and then anxiously waited an entire sixteen hours with no food, toilet facilities or water in a witness room, waiting for a chance to testify in support of her friends the Klaws, something that she never got to do.

The committee had nothing to gain from getting Bettie page to testify, it could be seen more as a scare to show some power and authority over who Bettie Page was and what she represented. Its effects not only left her scared, but made her realise it might be a good idea to leave New York.

On the advice of his attorneys, Irving Klaw pleaded the fifth wherever he could. A furious Kefauver kept the grilling coming yet always getting pushed back by Klaw’s adamant refusal to answer any question except those that didn’t deal with the issues of pornography and hired teenage models. Kefauver also asked whether or not any of his models posed for pornographers and if so, who? Klaw didn’t crack. No obscenity charges were brought against Klaw but he almost got slapped with contempt.

Although Klaw was successful, the media attention and the spotlight on himself and his MOVIE STAR NEWS shop brought about some unwanted heat for all those who associated. Klaw’s associates, both professional and private, started getting problems of their own caused by their association with Klaw. Companies such as the Photo Lab that printed Klaw’s pictures also had the Walt Disney Company as one of their major customers, who weren’t all too happy to be dealing with someone who was involved with Klaw’s enterprises. Disney told them to end their dealings with Klaw or face to lose their lucrative and prestigious account.

Soon after the hearings and as an attempt to escape further trouble, Irving Klaw closed his New York based Nutrix novelty mail order business which was distributing most of the bondage photos. With his sister Paula, they re-opened in Jersey City under the new name IKAY productions. But the Klaw’s were now a known commodity and within weeks of opening the new store, local Jersey police stormed the warehouse seizing stock and laying charges.

It didn’t take long for another court case to start up because of the charges and while the case was tied up and lingered on for another year and a half, the United States congress instituted change in the postage laws. The changes in the laws made it difficult for Klaw to distribute his catalogues and photos. Just when things couldn’t get any worse for Irving Klaw, in July 1956 the postal authorities confiscated all of his orders. Klaw tried to appeal his case to the U.S Supreme Court but they saw no reason to even consider over-turning the new laws.

By 1957, Klaw had stopped shooting any new photos, as he was worried that federal prosecutors would pursue his photographers or models, this included his friend Bettie Page, who he contacted to apologise for the lack of work. In 1960 he began releasing compilation books of his bondage and pinup photos like Bettie Page in Bondage via his Jersey City Mail Order Warehouse. It didn’t take long for the Feds, (with the blessing of U.S Attorney General Robert Kennedy in true Kefauver style) on the smut warpath, to show up and add some unwanted heat. The Feds busted into the warehouse seizing cartoons and photos which resulted in both Inrving Klaw and co-worker Jack Kramer being arrested on the charge of conspiracy to distribute obscene material through the U.S mail.

Facing a whopping five-year sentence, Irving Klaw offered to destroy his bondage and pinup negatives in a bid to gain his freedom. His desperate plea was granted and Klaw walked free on $10,000 bail. Despite getting his freedom and escaping a prison sentence, Klaw’s livelihood and career was badly damaged. Many of his money star news photographs and negatives were shredded, never to be seen again.

By the mid 1960’s, tired of constantly fighting the government, a bruised and battered Irving Klaw turned over control of Movie Star News to his sister Paula and decided to move to Florida. Unfortunately a burst appendix at the age of 59 stoped him and he died in New York in 1966. Luckily for Bettie, she got out before it was too late…

Shortly before Christmas 1957, at the age of 34, Bettie Page left New York City never to return to modelling or acting again in the big city.

“ I wanted to try something else” – Bettie Page

PART THREE of EIGHT

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