American Beauty Queen and model, the pan ultimate pin-up babe. The daughter of an auto mechanic and a housewife, she was the second of six kids. In high school she was the co-editor of the school paper and voted “The girl most likely to succeed.”
Bettie Page started her career in the summer of 1950, first in cheesecake publications, then as Queen of Bondage, in naughty-but-nice shots and films, mainly between 1953-1954. She “posed” the kinky scenes, for they were not nearly as explicit as today’s hard porn. Among her photographic modeling, quite sexy for her day, she did some lesbian-erotic photo shoots. She had a coy come-hither smile, perky posturing and signature jet black bangs. Her saucy visage regularly peered out from the covers of publications such as Titter, Wink and Flirt.
There was never hardcore action with Page. Her success was a mixture of next-doorliness with vamp seduction; her eyes were beautiful. She was awarded 6th place in “Glamour Girls”, a book by Steve Sullivan with the selection of the 1000 sexiest ladies of the century. She was topped only by Marilyn, Raquel Welch, Jayne Mansfield, Brigitte Bardot and Rita Hayworth.
Then, sometime during 1957, Bettie hung up her bikini and ball-gag for good and totally disappeared from public view. Depending on who you wanted to believe, the cult cutie had either found God, committed suicide or, according to one particularly sensational scenario, was rubbed out by the mob for knowing too much. Dead or alive, her whereabouts were such a mystery that Richard Lamparski, author of the of the “Whatever Happened to . ?” series, called Page as the most-asked-about quarry who had ever eluded his stellar dragnet.
As the mysterious model’s legacy grew in recent years, bits of her bio surfaced. In 1992, reporter Richard Foster struck up a pen pal relationship with Bettie and began to uncover her “lost” years.
The one-time “Tennessee Tease” had found a Hell on earth. Slipping into madness later diagnosed as a form of schizophrenia, the former dream queen heard voices, attempted self-mutilation with a hanger and spent the better part of a decade in mental institution bondage. Foster also unearthed what’s believed to be the last published photo of Bettie: a haunting 1972 police mug shot taken when the 49-year-old blousy beauty was arrested for stabbing her landlord and his wife. Sadly, this wouldn’t be Bettie’s last police station photo shoot. Ten years later, the sex kitten-turned-serial psycho would face cop cameras again after stabbing another landlady.
In November 2008 she was hospitalized with pneumonia. A few weeks later, still hospitalized she suffered a heart attack and was in a coma until her death on December 11, 2008, age 85, in Los Angeles, CA.
Link to Wikipedia biography