If you bring up Bettie Page, you’ll get different reactions. For generations, her pinup images inspired lust, revulsion, or fear, but also curiosity. Whether you love her, hate her, or simply know little about her, Page’s life impacted the choices of millions.
Page was born Betty Mae Page on April 22, 1923, in Nashville, Tennessee. She was the second of six children that Water Roy Page and Edna Mae Pirtle Page would have. Born not long before the Great Depression, her young life was filled with constant movement as her parents tried to support their family until the couple divorced. For a time, Bettie and her two sisters were wards of the state so that their single mother could try and earn enough money to bring the family back together.
By the time she was a teenager, Page was living back with her mother in Nashville. Community centers provided Page and her sisters opportunities to learn life skills like cooking, sewing, and even places to do homework. While the concept of leisure time became quite popular in the 1920s, even during the Great Depression, federal programs supported the arts and such community centers, giving not just hope but employment and education. Such opportunities as well as personal drive helped Page to maintain high grades, participate in school clubs, and even be voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by her classmates at Hume-Fogg High School in Nashville.
Page went to Peabody College, a division of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee with the aid of a scholarship for being the salutatorian – second ranked member – of her high school class. The Peabody College was an educational school, but as former program director and member of her high school’s dramatics club, Page had dreams of becoming an actress.
After earning her degree, Page moved to San Francisco to live with Billy Neal, whom she married in 1943 while she was still in college. Page got a modeling job at a furrier where she showed off the coats for clients. Page, however, didn’t like to stay in one place and traveled around the country as well as to the Caribbean. By November 1947 Page filed for divorce and turned her attention to traveling whenever she could afford it.
In 1950, while on the Coney Island shore, Page met Jerry Tibbs, a police officer who was also a photographer. It was through him that she met other photographers and filmmakers who would help create her pinup career. Playboy magazine was fairly new, having been founded in 1953, but Page’s cover on their January 1955 cover was important, getting her more national attention.
Page became known not only for her sexy photos but also for risqué films that included bondage for director Irving Klaw from 1951-1957, during which time she cooperated with an FBI investigation into Klaw’s work and the state of pornography in the nation. While these federal cases were part of a larger attack on communism, they focused on pushing morality, targeting sex work of many types as well as sex education.
While Page downplayed the amount of such sex-related work that she did, that work was what made the greatest impact on the public for decades. Page also studied under Herbert Berghof, whom she met at the Sea Cliff Summer Theater in Long Island, and started doing both stage and television appearances, though details about such work indicates it was more as herself. It can be argued that the woman we see in those photos and movies, the one who is a bondage icon and pinup girl of acclaim, was just onea role that she played.
Two years after Page helped the FBI, she went to work for Billy Graham and studied at his Bible colleges in both Los Angeles, California, and Portland, Oregon, though other than being used by evangelical organizations to help them speak out against pornography and then abortion, her divorce prevented her from being accepted as a missionary, but she continued to work with the Graham organization while she floated around between various jobs for decades. All the while she struggled with mental illness and stress, in part caused by her abusive and unstable early childhood as well as biochemical imbalances.
Regardless of how she was portrayed in the photos and the movies or by religious groups, Page herself never expressed shame or guilt about her modelling and acting career. If you see those images and watch those short films, you see someone having fun, someone just enjoying what she was doing. For some feminist and kinky folks today, that was the image they needed to see that has inspired them to speak up for sexual freedom and education today. Even if you bemoan the sexual nature of many female celebrities, some trace that back to Page again, and those celebrities use their sexuality to not only advance their own careers but to support social justice and equal rights.
Page died on December 11, 2008, at the age of 85. It took her years of legal work, but she finally reclaimed the rights to her image from all of those movies and photos. Today, her estate still makes money from selling her face and work, because for many she is still the “Queen of Bondage” and an example of positive sex. The 2016 documentary Bettie Page Reveals All by Mark Mori offers a good insight into Page’s life and includes many interviews with her.