BDSM Icons – Bettie (or Betty) Page

Full name: Bettie Mae Page
Born: April 22, 1923 in Nashville, Tennessee
(clarification: although she was born ‘Bettie’ she later used the spelling ‘Betty’ for some pin-up and glamour work)

Bettie Page With Photographer Bunny Yeager

Back in the 1950’s she started out as just another cute body hustling a living at the seedy end of the ‘adult entertainment’ industry but by the middle of that decade she was probably the most famous pin-up in the USA and also notorious for her fetish images. Then, at the height of her fame, she suddenly vanished! For decades people speculated over what had happened to her, and her status as a cult figure developed. Now, nearly 50 years on, she’s more popular than ever. There are hundreds of Bettie Page websites and a flourishing industry in Bettie books, videos, and memorabilia. High-school teacher or temptress, girl next door or S/M goddess, sweet and sexy Bettie always kept you guessing and even at her most kinky, her cheeky grin tells you she doesn’t take it all too seriously. So say hello to Bettie Page, an unlikely BDSM icon.

The Early Years – Bettie was born on April 22, 1923, in Nashville, TN. When she was ten years old, her parents divorced and Bettie was temporarily placed in an orphanage with her two sisters. In high school, Bettie was editor of the school newspaper as well as a cast member in numerous school plays. She was clearly bitten by the acting bug at an early age, which later drove her to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood and then New York. Bettie attended a teaching school and married her high school sweetheart, but the urge for the bright lights was too much for her. Unfortunately divorcing her husband and moving to Hollywood only led her into a disastrous screen test with Twentieth Century Fox. Page told her photographer, Bunny Yeager, in the July 1993 issue of Interview magazine, why the screen test failed so miserably: “They changed my makeup and my hairdo to make me look like Joan Crawford. I didn’t look good with my hair bunched out on both sides, and with my mouth made up real wide. It didn’t even look like me when I saw the test,” Page said. “They also said I had a very pronounced Southern accent, and they didn’t want to work with that.” Downcast but not defeated, Bettie moved to New York City. Around 1950, she met Jerry Tibbs, a black Brooklyn police officer and weightlifter, who convinced her to pose for pictures and to cut her hair into the bangs she became famous for. Page changed the spelling of her first name “Bettie” to “Betty” for the pin-up work, which was to cause some confusion and many heated arguments amongst betty-buffs in the years to come..
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The Making of a BDSM Icon – The reason we all remember Bettie is for the charm and sass that she brought to the hitherto taboo themes of bondage and S/M. In 1951, the New York photography team of Irving and Paula Klaw began photo sessions with her. Although most of their work was straight-forwards ‘lingerie’ or ‘glamour’ pictures. the Klaws were aware of a strong underground demand for fetish imagery, which they decided to tap into using Bettie as their main model. Ultra high heels and spankings from other domination models became core elements in her image. For the Klaw mail-order movie stills business, Movie Star News, Bettie Page was their most requested model. “She was beautiful,” said Paula Klaw. “She’s much better than the models of today.” The success led the Klaw team to expand into 8 mm film shorts featuring Page in skits with the titles “Betty & Her High Heel Shoes” and “Betty Gets Bound and Kidnapped.” Her most famous skit is as a maid in the cult classic “Teaserama.” With the Klaws, Page was at the height of her career, rejecting possible love affairs with playboy Howard Hughes for prestigious acting lessons at the Herbert Berghof Studio. “Paula and Irving Klaw were instrumental in Bettie’s image as an icon,” said Robert Schultz, founder of the official newsletter of The Bettie Scouts of America, Fond Memories. “Bettie just wasn’t a pin-up star until she worked with the Klaws.” At this time Page did her famous jungle shots with Yeager and later became a Playboy Playmate. She also participated in private photo outings with camera clubs at weekends. Unfortunately, while the Betties career as a ‘pin-up’ in scanty bikinis and lingerie was acceptable to the establishment, anything that hinted at ‘deviant’ sex provoked official outrage and was likely to bring the full force of the law crashing down on the individuals who dared to be different.
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Betty Vanishes – Right at the peak of her modeling career in 1957, she disappeared from the photo clubs of New York City and from the magazines altogether. Some fans suggested that it was due to the increasing pressure the Klaws were facing from Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, one of a long line of American politicians who seek to make a name for themselves by harrassing other adults over their sexual preferences. At the same time in the 1950’s as law enforcement officers in the USA were crucifying the comedian Lenny Bruce, they were also trying to prevent adults seeing pictures of Bettie in boots and bondage in an attempt to stamp out any kind of sexuality they regarded as ‘deviant’ (i.e. different to what they themselves practiced). Obscenity hearings in 1955 and harsh, unremitting pressure on the Klaws and their models made life intolerable. At the height of it all, Bettie simply vanished. Some thought Bettie had been involved in an accident and horribly disfigured. Others thought the Mafia arranged her death for rejecting the love of a mafiosa. The truth was much more mundane, Pressure from the forces of ‘law and order’ had been too much for her. When Bettie finally turned up and agreed to an interview in ‘Interview’, she explained that she had embraced the lord. After fleeing to Florida, and marrying again there, Page had eventually turned to religion after a vision and worked full time for the Billy Graham Crusade.”I was getting old [34] and needed to move on,” she told Yeager, “and I just think Jesus would not want me to model anymore.” And that was the end of Bettie’s brief but intense modelling career. An old lady now, Bettie is still intensely private and shuns the limelight
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Bettie’s Legacy – After Bettie left the modelling scene so dramatically you would have expected her image to fade as new faces took her place, but interest in her was kept alive through artists who were fascinated by her image and reproduced it in comic books (eg the Rocketeer) and paintings. In the late-90s, particularly with the advent of the internet, there was a huge resurgance of interest. Today there are scores of Bettie Page tribute websites, books about her life, and her image still appears in comics, record albums, and French Barbie dolls. Bettie’s look and attitude have left a lasting influence on much of what we see today in film. Tribute fanzines like The Betty Pages and Fond Memories sell out faster than comic book stores can replace them. Rock bands use her photos on album covers. The Bettie Page ‘look’ has been copied so much that people imagine it was the typical 1950s look, not realizing that she made bangs and ultra-high spiked heels popular. For those in the BDSM community the legacy of Bettie is strong. In the scores of bondage, fetish, and spanking pictures taken of her by the Klaws Bettie manages to look sweet and sassy whatever she’s up to. She brings a vivacity and naturaleness to everything she does that most of todays models seem incapable of achieving. For legions of BDSM fans at a time when images of their fetishes were hard to come by and often illegal, Bettie was a bright spark of pleasure and showed it was really fun. Even today, when you look at her pictures, we have to admit that Bettie was the one we’d all love to spank. A BDSM icon.