.
Posted on 07/18/2010 6:46:04 AM PDT by Elle Bee
Bettie Page, the iconic 1950s pinup girl known around the world for her bondage photos and fetish films, moved to Key West in 1957 and married a Conch named Armon Walterson.
On a dark New Year's Eve night a few months later, the world-famous vixen found God when she stopped to listen to a preacher in a White Street church that has long disappeared.
Cited as a pivotal moment in the life of a woman who had a big heart but a less-than-savory past, the events of her salvation have heretofore been described only by a Key West pastor, unauthorized biographers and amateur fan websites.
But a transcript from one of Page's last interviews contains details of that little-witnessed conversion as well as other insights by Page herself into her life in Key West. Among the most interesting, perhaps, is her assertion that she was not, in fact, suicidal, as the story had long gone.
Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Mark Mori, who interviewed Page before her death at age 85, released the transcripts of his talk with her to The Citizen this week.
Though Page said she had been arguing with Walterson and gone for a walk about 15 minutes before midnight, she was not interested in killing herself, she said.
"I put on my old gray slacks and a sweater and I decided to walk out White Street and go down to the south beach where I had met [Walterson] and go down there and lie down on the wall and look up at the stars," she said. "That's what I was going to do."
That version of events differs from the tale often told in Key West.
The late Morris Wright, pastor of Key West Baptist Temple on Stock Island, had claimed he was preaching in a White Street church as Page walked by.
"She was on her way to take her life," Wright told The Citizen in January 2008, 50 years after his chance encounter with Page. "As she passed my church, she heard my voice preaching."
The argument
Page and Walterson's six-week-long marriage was not working, she told Mori in 2008. She liked the night life while he liked to stay at home, eating hamburgers instead of dining out.
On the night that changed the course of her life, the two fought over where to spend New Year's Eve, Page told Mori. Walterson wanted to party at another house with friends around whom he felt comfortable drinking. Page didn't like her husband, or any man, to drink.
"I hated [the smell of alcohol] especially if it was with a boyfriend ... with liquor on his breath," she told Mori.
Page told her husband she wanted to go dancing in a Key West nightclub and ring in the new year there.
"He said [me and my friends] always have a big bash on New Year's,'âä" Page told Mori. "He says, 'It's the only time I ever get drunk. We drink beer and we usually drink half the night' and he wanted to go do it.
"Well, I had been in the habit of going dancing and going to a nightclub on New Year's. I had done it ... ever since I had been dating my first boyfriend. And I wanted to go to a nightclub and ring in the [sic] old year in a nightclub with everybody having fun and dancing," she said. "But he didn't want to go. We got into a big argument."
The walk
According to Wright, his chance encounter with Page occurred as he preached a New Year's message a few minutes after Page left her husband's house and started down White Street. Page credits a spiritual power for getting her to the church that night.
"I was going to lie down on the wall and listen to the ocean and look at the stars and think of whether or not that I was going to leave Armon," she said. "And then I started walking down the street with my head down. It was like somebody took me by the hand and guided me across the street and I saw a little church over there with a door open and heard music, singing. It had a white, neon-lit cross over the top of it. It was a little Latin American Baptist temple, I later learned, and I stood in the back and cried while the pastor started giving a salvation message.
"They stopped singing and [Wright] started giving a salvation message on how to be saved," Page told Mori. "I stood back there and cried about all my sins, and I thought God disapproved of me doing nudes, you know. I didn't think anything about the fetish and the bondage ... because I had to do that, but I thought maybe he looked down on me for posing in the nude."
The conversion
While Wright and others said Page accepted Christianity that night, she said she returned to the church two Sundays later and accepted Christ then.
"I could hardly wait until Sunday to go hear him again," she said. "His name, his initials, were M.E. Right [sic] and I always said he really was 'right.' He talked to me after the service."
Page also credited a Sunday school teacher from Akron, Ohio, with helping her.
"She talked to me afterwards about how to be saved. And all three of us got on our knees and knelt up in front of the church after everybody had left and I prayed to receive the Lord Jesus, and she helped me and so did he," she said. "And then I turned my life over to the Lord."
That wasn't the only big decision Page had to make.
The getaway
Page lied to Walterson to make a clean getaway from Key West, she told Mori.
"I told him, 'I'm going to see my mother in Nashville.' I didn't tell him I was leaving for good; I didn't want to hurt his feelings. A couple of weeks later he showed up in Nashville at momma's house and drove all the way up there. He had never been out of Key West. But I had already gone to California to my brother Jimmy's. I wasn't even there [in Nashville] and he drove all the way up to Nashville and momma said he was crying and standing at the door when she told him. She said, 'Bettie has already gone to California.' "
At the time she became "born again," Page was trying to make a clean break from the world of private photo shoots and her role as queen of underground naughty magazines. She thought Key West was the town to make that happen, but her failing marriage and newfound religion led her to seek peace elsewhere.
What happened next is either ironic or justice, depending how one looks at it.
Though she embraced religion and a life in the church after her walk on White Street, the churches to which she applied to become a member rejected her as surely as she had rejected Walterson.
"I turned my life over to the Lord and went to Bible schools for three years," she said. "And I was going to be a missionary, believe it not. That's what I had all the Bible training for. But do you know they would not take me; no fundamental evangelical mission board would take me -- and those were the kind of Bible schools I had attended -- because I had been divorced. Get that now! To some Christians, especially the fundamentalists, being divorced is worse than having committed murder."
Teacher in the rough
Page's interview also clears the mystery of her life as a teacher at Harris School on Southard Street in 1957. It seems an unruly student drove her to quit. Walterson's cousin remembered that Page was not liked by her colleagues at the school.
"They didn't want her to teach there," Paulie Walterson told The Citizen in January 2009. "She was too beautiful. They pushed together to get her out. They didn't see how a woman like that could teach third grade."
According to Page, she simply found teaching difficult.
I decided to teach and I taught fifth grade in Key West at Harris Elementary School for a year," she told Mori. "But I had a bad experience teaching. There was one, big-old boy in my class of fifth-graders. He was 13 years old and all the others were about 10 years old.
"He had been left behind for three years; he was a son of a naval officer at the Naval Air Station. And he gave me a hard time all the time. Talking back to me, disturbing the class in every way, and you weren't allowed to spank them or anything down there and I would like to have clobbered him."
Page said she did not want to teach anymore after that.
"That and my six months of practice teaching, teaching 11th grade English is all the teaching I ever did."
Island in documentary
Mori, whose documentary "Bettie Page Reveals All" is slated for release later this year, said it is difficult to document the free-spirited artist's private life. Her interview was a rare glimpse into those details, he said.
"Bettie Page was a loner, so secretive about her private life that her story has been fogged with mysteries, legends and contradictions," Mori said.
After she left modeling, moved to Key West, found God and pursued a life of religious service, Page hoped she'd left her bondage life and sexually expressive images in the dust. Not so, Mori said.
The former Key West resident, who liked to swim at Higgs Beach, re-emerged during an unexpected revival of her image and work.
"Beginning in the 1980s and continuing now, there was a meteoric rise in her popularity, as entirely new fan bases emerged," Mori said. "Bettie [is] an iconic figure in the evolution of America's sexual mores. She is seen as a symbol of an independent woman in the repressive 1950s, which helped inspire the sexual revolution of the 1960s."
As she sought to marry and live a new life in Key West, Page didn't know it at the time, but she mirrored the struggle in the hearts of many modern women: Am I a devoted partner or an independent, roaming spirit?
Every tattooed freak chick in America with that haircut thinks she’s Bettie Page, but Page was much more than just her looks.
She had a sweetness and innocenct that rose to the surface...that is rare in a model...
I remember lookin’ in my Dad’s “photo magazines” when I was a kid, back in the Fifties, Seeing Bettie, and thinkin’ “HMMMMMM! Girls! Yeah!”
When I see a photo or video of Betty, my impression is that she truly understood she was delighting viewers and that she had a heart of gold. A spirit of giving emanates as she celebrated her own God given beauty and charm.
That, to me, was the secret of her iconic achievement.
I guess doing bondage films brings that out in a girl... :)
Bettie Page...mmm...mmm...mmm!
Reading this interview, I guess that was exactly how she wanted it. Some people just want to stay private!
Big time Bettie fan!!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.