

She spent 20 months in a state mental hospital in San Bernardino.Ī fight with another landlord resulted in her arrest, but she was found not guilty because of insanity. She was arrested after an altercation with her landlady, and doctors who examined her determined she had acute schizophrenia. Instead, she worked full-time for evangelist Billy Graham’s ministry.Ī move to Southern California in 1979 brought more troubles. She walked inside and became a born-again Christian.Īfter attending Bible school, she wanted to serve as a missionary but was turned down because she had been divorced. In 1959, she was lying on a sea wall in Key West when she saw a church with a white neon cross on top. Her second marriage also failed, as did a third, and she suffered a nervous breakdown. She moved to Florida in 1957 and married a much younger man, as an early marriage to her high school sweetheart had ended in divorce. She also said she believed that, at age 34, her days as “the girl with the perfect figure” were nearly over. Page quickly retreated from public view, later saying she was hounded by federal agents who waved her nude photos in her face. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Page’s home state, launched a congressional investigation. Moralists denounced the photos as perversion, and Sen. “I thought my arms and legs would come out of their sockets,” she said later.

She was photographed with a whip in her hand, and in one session she was spread-eagled between two trees, her feet dangling. They cut her hair into the dark bangs that became her signature and posed her in spiked heels and little else. In 1951, Page fell under the influence of a photographer and his sister who specialized in S&M. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they were naked as jaybirds.” Nudity didn’t bother her, she said, explaining: “God approves of nudity.

It’s just that it was much better than pounding a typewriter eight hours a day, which gets monotonous.” Looking back on the career that followed, she told Playboy in 1998: “I never thought it was shameful. An amateur photographer named Jerry Tibbs admired the 27-year-old’s firm, curvy body and asked her to pose. Page’s career began one day in October 1950 when she took a respite from her job as a secretary in a New York office for a walk along the beach at Coney Island. He said she objected to the fact that the film referred to her as “notorious,” but “we explained to her that it referred to the troubled times she had and was a good way to sell a movie.” Hefner said he last saw Page when he held a screening of “The Notorious Bettie Page” at the Playboy Mansion.

Gretchen Mol portrayed her in 2005’s “The Notorious Bettie Page” and Paige Richards had the role in 2004’s “Bettie Page: Dark Angel.” Page herself took part in the 1998 documentary “Betty Page: Pinup Queen.” A new generation of fans bought thousands of copies of her photos, and some feminists hailed her as a pioneer of women’s liberation. She became the subject of songs, biographies, Web sites, comic books, movies and documentaries. The 21st century indeed had people remembering her just as she was. We want to remember them when they were young.”
#Bettie page later life movie
“I feel the same way with old movie stars. “I don’t want to be photographed in my old age,” she told an interviewer in 1998.
