Bettie Page Reveals All

Ladies and Gentlemen, here she is now.

Let's get together and meet that very delightful,

that sultry siren of the southland,

the lovely Bettie Page.

Who are you?

I'm an illusion.

You're an illusion?

Then you're not real?

Of course, I'm real.

It is very difficult

to find a parallel for her.

I mean, this combination of...

naughty and nice.

And it is all in the context of innocence.

She expressed sexual liberation.

Bettie is still this subversive,

adventurous, sexual persona

that people are trying to emulate.

I think it's like the confusion

between maybe the real person

and the artwork and the cartoons,

like all of these...

it's sort of confusing even whether she was a real person or not.

People love Bettie Page for her whole being

for the radiance that she exuded,

the sexuality that she showed

without being cheap, ever.

And women gravitated to that concept.

The remarkable thing about her image is

how much it has influenced pop culture

from movies to music to fashion. It's remarkable.

One of the things that I love about her iconography

is that she just portrayed herself as a very strong woman,

even if she was not in the position of power.

She's lasted because she has that rare quality

that's sort of hard to define, it's that sort of ultimate star quality.

I feel like a lot of girls like me

can identify with Bettie

because you can kind of capture the spirit

of that sexy, sensual, timeless look.

She looks fantastic and I think that's what men prefer.

I don't think men prefer the really skinny, bones thin women.

I think Bettie Page is a real woman.

I mean she have form, boobs,

butt, and that's very beautiful.

I gave her a lot of credit because she opened the door for a lot of us.

She's the most important glamour icon

that she really paved the way for all the rest.

And she's beautiful but yet she's approachable,

she's the girl next door.

Bettie Page is the good girl but she's a bad girl.

She's fun, she's playful.

All right, bitch, bring it.

Oh, st... ah!

I mean, she's the reason why we're all here today

in a sense is because of her,

I mean, she's the original pinup girl, she's the original.

We're all going to be dust,

they'll be nothing else anymore,

and there'll always be Bettie Page no matter what.

She had the magic.

She was deeply religious.

She was willing to do all kinds of crazy outrageous things.

There's some rather large skeletons in that woman's closet.

How do you reconcile that behavior

with the image that she projects in these photographs?

She reached the peak of popularity in her profession and disappeared.

Nobody knew what happened to Bettie Page.

Bettie, if you know what's going on,

I want to tell you this is your friend Robert Schuller saying,

"This too is the day that God has made.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it."

We all thought we knew her from different perspectives,

but I'm sure no one will leave this place today

without having had another glimpse

into the private heart of Bettie.

Okay, Bettie, I'll just ask you some questions.

Okay.

You were born in Nashville, right?

I was born in Nashville, Tennessee,

April 22nd, 1923.

We were so poor, we lived on beans,

fried potatoes, and macaroni.

You couldn't talk to Mama,

she didn't want any girls in the first place.

She always wanted only two boys.

My father was a womanizer of the worst sort.

A sex fiend is the way to put it.

I mean sex with anything that he could get his "you know what" into.

Chickens, and sheep, and cows, and anything.

And in order to get 10 cents to go to the movies,

I let him fool around on the outside.

Now, he didn't penetrate me inside like he did my two sisters.

Mama left him and hitchhiked 30 miles to Nashville

with six children,

and she was uneducated, only a third grade education,

she had no trade at all,

and she couldn't take care of all six of us children,

so my two sisters and I were put in a Protestant orphanage for a year.

The orphanage was run by three old maids.

They would talk to us like dogs, they were very mean to us,

and they had me scrubbing floors all the time.

I was only 11 years old then.

We just hated that place.

I was so glad to get out of there.

I learned to pose from movie star pictures

in magazines and newspapers.

And my sisters and I would try to mimic their poses.

We'd even get out in the front yard with our underwear on.

I had several photographers

and amateur photographers

come up and approach me and ask me

if they could take pictures of me, I always said yes.

My dream when I was in high school was to be Valedictorian,

and I studied so hard trying to be Valedictorian

because with it was a four year scholarship to Vanderbilt University.

But I was beat out of Valedictorian

by one-quarter of a point now,

can you imagine, and I had to settle for being Salutatorian.

And all I got was a $100 scholarship

to George Peabody College for Teachers.

After high school, I started dating Billy Neal.

He was a big sports hero around town.

And he taught me to dance,

which I've always loved.

And he taught me everything about sex too,

which I enjoyed.

Well, when the war came on,

he was drafted one day into the army,

and he started bugging me about marrying him.

We got on the bus and went

30 miles to Galliton, Tennessee,

and were married in five minutes.

And when I got on the bus to go back with him,

I said to myself, "What have I done?"

Well, we were in San Francisco, 1944.

And this fella, he took a lot of pictures of me

and sent some of them down to 20th Century Fox.

I had a screen test with John Russell

who later played the lawman on a TV series.

But that test was awful.

They tried to make me up

to look like Joan Crawford.

Didn't even look like me.

While I was at the studio,

this big car pulled up beside me...

and a big fat guy,

very ugly looking fella,

wanted me to go to dinner with him.

I told him no.

And he said, "You'll be sorry."

Well, he was at the head of the table

when I went to learn

the results of the screen test.

That test was awful.

I was so disappointed and unhappy

over the failure of the screen test,

when I got back to San Francisco,

I started eating.

Within two months, I ballooned way up to 162 pounds.

Well, my sister came to visit me,

Goldie, from Nashville.

She said that the landlord, he had cussed her out

and accused her of causing

the sink in the bathroom to fall off the wall.

I went to the door, and boy, he flew in on me,

beating me in the face with his fist, just a mad man.

And Goldie grabbed the milk bottle and cracked him over the head with it.

And he started bleeding down the front of his head,

and he thought he was dying, and we did too.

Because Goldie was underage,

under 21, I'm the one who had to testify,

even though I'm not the one who hit him over the head.

But they gave me a 30-day suspended sentence and I had to pay 10 dollars,

and it was in the paper, a great big picture of me

and a big headline, "Tenant Bashes Landlord".

Well, Billy came back from fighting overseas.

He had battle fatigue, you know, he was in the hospital,

in the army hospital in Guam for about six months.

When he came home, he wasn't the same guy.

He was a jealous maniac.

Accused me of sleeping with every sailor in San Francisco,

and he went off the deep end.

So I tried so hard to make a go of it with him but it was impossible.

We were sitting in the kitchen,

and he had a knife right at my throat,

he was gonna cut me with it if I divorced him.

I went ahead and divorced him anyhow.

When I went to New York, I was getting over

my divorce from Billy Neal and the miserable marriage.

I liked all the lights on Broadway.

And I liked Central Park.

All I paid for my apartment on West 46th Street,

46 dollars and 29 cents a month.

I used to go to the Roseland ballroom.

And then I went dancing so much.

I was a movie fiend in those days.

Didn't cost much of anything, 40 or 50 cents,

something like that, to see a double feature.

One night, I was very lonely,