extreme_master40 said:
Betty Page was in her day like a strip tease artist plus i think she did grade b movies.
Other thought of her as a very loose women.
Betty Page's heyday was a little before my time, but she was still a star and a legend when I was growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s. I considered her a major turn-on in those days--as did many others.
Betty Page was originally from The South, Tennessee, I believe, and grew up with a fairly strict religious background. Like more than a few young girls in her time, she left home and went out to So.Cal. in hopes of getting into movies or modeling. And, while she didn't get her foot in the door with any of the Hollywood studios, she was able to get some modeling assignments--not as a "high-fashion model" but in magazines, etc.
Believe it or not, Betty Page was one of the first Playboy centerfolds, along with Marilyn Monroe, when the magazine first came out. I don't know if she was the very first or in the third issue of Playboy (one of those two women was the centerfold for the third issue), but she definitely appeared in one of the issues that came out in Playboy's first year. At that stage of her career, Betty Page was well on her way to being one of the top "pin-up" models.
Somewhere along the line, she hooked up with Irving Klaw, a photographer whose sexy nude and semi-nude s/m and fetish photos have made him famous. For the era and in the genre, Klaw was an excellent photographer and Betty Page was perhaps his most photogenic subject. If I recall correctly, initially, Page was just supposed to do a series of "cheese-cake" (garters-and-heels type, suggestive, but only slightly revealing, non-nude) shots with Klaw, but she hit it off with him and his wife (who did a lot of modeling for her husband in fetish and s/m gear) and it wasn't long before she agreed to let Klaw photograph her semi-nude (in those days, taking photos that showed a woman's vagina could get not just the woman, but the photographer and anyone else present arrested--oftentimes on a ************ rap--so a lot of the photographers of the day tried to work around that by shooting "cheese-cake" and other kinds of suggestive, non-nude photos and pictures with spanking, s/m and bondage themes and dress) and in a series of bondage pics. The bondage and fetish photos that Klaw shot of Betty Page were considered so hot for that era that they instantly became incredibly popular and widely circulated on the underground adult market. If Betty Page was not the America's first porn star (up until then and even for many years later, the people who appeared in XXX-rated porn didn't use their names or even admit that they had anything to do with porn because they could get arrested and the same was true with most models and strippers--but Betty Page was known as a model before the Klaw photos began to circulate, so, like the stripper Candy Samples, she was known)--she certainly became the best known and most popular of her era. But, she had become so well-known in not just the adult underground, but in the magazine, modeling and publishing industry, that she was no longer getting any "straight" modeling work. Still, she was so popular in the underground adult world that she could have had a successful career posing for the growing number of "men's magazines" of that era.
Instead, suddenly, she just disappeared. And, no one seemed to know why or where she was.
By the time I first saw her in some of the Irving Klaw photos in the mid-to-late 1960s, Betty Page had already become a myth. There were dozens of stories circulating about what happened to her, where she had gone and why she had disappeared. But, no one really seemed to know what was truth and what was fiction.
Then, somewhere between 1980 and 1990 (forgive an old man for having a bad memory :lol
, there was a Betty Page revival--magazines and stories about her began to appear and a lot of the old photos began to resurface again. Which, of course, raised all of the old questions about what had happened to her. I'm not sure if it was Playboy, Penthouse or Hustler, but one of those magazines--and, would you believe, 60 Minutes!--sent out a reporter to try to find out what really happened to Betty Page. Eventually, the reporter succeeded.
According to the story that I read, the reporter found Betty Page living on a farm under her married name somewhere in the South/Southwest (the location was deliberately not disclosed). An old lady and grandmother at the time, Page was not too happy about having a reporter show up at her door and only agreed to answer questions if her identity and location were not revealed by the reporter. As I recall the story, Page told the reporter that, while she felt there was nothing wrong with the photos that she had modeled for and felt no guilt about having posed for them, she decided to quit modeling and leave So. Cal. when she did because, after the Klaw photos started to circulate, she felt she no longer had any chance of having a successful career in "straight" modeling and, for religious reasons, she was uncomfortable with the kinds of things that those who were willing to hire her as a model wanted her to do. She told the reporter that, since she didn't see herself as being that important or well-known or in demand, she didn't feel that she needed to tell anyone that she worked with about her decision to quit modeling and leave Southern California. She simply left and went back home. Ultimately, according to the story I read, she met a man that she married, moved to where she lives now and had a family.
At the time the story came out, Betty Page was a very religious, old woman, living in quiet anonymity in a rural community with her family, having quite happily returned to her roots when she decided to quit modeling and leave So. Cal., ******* of all of the myths that had grown up around her "disappearance" and the fact that she had become something of an icon, if not a legend.
As for whether she had gotten pregnant and got an abortion, etc., there was no indication in the story that any of that happened, although, given the life that she had gone on to lead, it is doubtful that Betty Page would have told the reporter any of that had it in fact occurred. Still, her version of things, as reported in the story, was so mundane that, sadly, it had the ring of truth to it.
But, no matter what the truth is, thanks to those photos that she posed for, Betty Page will continue to be an a beautiful, young, exciting turn-on regardless....