The Notorious Bettie Page

Portrait of an American innocent. In 1955, Bettie Page (1923 - ) waits to testify before a Senate subcommittee investigating the effects of pornographic material on American adolescents and juveniles. In flashbacks, we see her childhood in Tennessee, a brief marriage, a gang rape, and her going to New York City in 1949. There she takes acting lessons, models for photos, and acts in short films for adults, earning the nickname, "The Pin-Up Queen of the Universe." We see her relationship with merchants Irving and Paula Klaw, photographers John Willie and Bunny Yeager, boyfriends, and the public. Through it all, she is wholesome, sporting, and forthright - Eve before the fall.

By the mid-1950's, Bettie Page had become the number one pin up girl in the USA. Despite being abused by her father as a child and gang-raped as a teenager, Bettie had few hang-ups and was actually quite innocent. She worked hard and saw little to be ashamed of in her chosen line of work, whether posing in a bathing suit, semi-nude or in her infamous bondage pictures. It was the latter that created all the fuss in the mid-1950s when a US Senate sub-committee launched an investigation into pornography. Still believing that she had done nothing wrong, Bettie eventually left the industry and found solace in her religious convictions.