#Bettie page later life movie

She moved to New York City, where she hoped to find work as an actress. In November 1947, back in the United States, she filed for divorce.īettie Page is tied and spanked in an image from Bizarre.įollowing her divorce, Page worked briefly in San Francisco, and in Haiti. For the next few years, she moved from San Francisco to Nashville to Miami and to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she felt a special affinity with the country and its culture. In 1943, she married high school classmate Billy Neal in a simple courthouse ceremony shortly before he was drafted into the Navy for World War II. Page graduated from Peabody with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1944. At the same time, she got her first job, typing for author Alfred Leland Crab.

#Bettie page later life movie

However, the next fall she began studying acting, hoping to become a movie star. She enrolled at George Peabody College, with the intention of becoming a teacher. On June 6, 1940, Page graduated as the salutatorian of her high school class with a scholarship. Ī good student and debate team member at Hume-Fogg High School, she was voted 'Most Likely to Succeed'. During her early years, the Page family traveled around the country in search of economic stability. These skills proved useful years later for her pin-up photography when Page did her own makeup and hair and made her own bikinis and costumes. During this time, Page's mother worked two jobs, one as a hairdresser during the day and washing laundry at night.Īs a teenager, Page and her sisters tried different makeup styles and hairdos imitating their favorite movie stars. After her father, whom Page would accuse of molesting her starting at age 13, was imprisoned, Page and her two sisters lived in an orphanage for a year. Her parents divorced when she was 10 years old. At a young age, Page had to face the responsibilities of caring for her younger siblings. © 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc.Page was born Betty Mae Page in Nashville, Tennessee, the second child of Walter Roy Page and Edna Mae Pirtle. In one of Hugh Hefner’s least creepy moments ever, he describes how they became friends later in life with his help, she finally obtained the legal rights to her rampantly used image. “Bettie Page Reveals All” includes pretty dark times, too, from childhood sexual abuse and an assault by several men in her early New York days, to later struggles with mental illness, which would leave her institutionalized for a decade.īut Page, who became a born-again Christian, still sounds delighted and surprised that so many people love her - and they really do. She says she got a kick out of the bondage photos and 16mm films she made, a sentiment echoed by former lovers and fans alike: She just always seemed to be having such a good time. Her black-banged image is so ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget how risqué Page’s career was at a time when “obscenity” was both vaguely defined and illegal, she never minded posing nude, and also sewed her own teensy bikinis for shoots long before the swimsuits became popular. The cult of ’50s pinup girl Bettie Page is hardly underexamined, but this documentary has the advantage of voice-over narration by the reclusive Page herself, from interviews with director Mark Mori before she died, at age 85, in 2008.

At City Cinemas Village East, Second Avenue at 12th Street.