•The Betty Pages, a pocket-sized magazine (three issues for 15 bucks) devoted to photographs of and information about Bettie, is published biannually by Black Cat Books. The Bettie Pages Annual, a glossy, high-quality 168-page book, sells for $14.95.
• Mother Productions markets a series of Bettie Page collector cards, with 40 cards to a deck.
• The Bettie Page 3-D Picture Book comes complete with two pairs of 3-D glasses.
• The Independent Press in Minneapolis, among others, markets Bettie Page postcards that are sold worldwide. I found one in an airport rack in Zimbabwe.
• For the past two years, the Atlanta Comics Expo has conducted a Bettie Page look-alike contest (fill these bangs and win $1000). Some of the beauties are men.
• The Prop Theater in Chicago presented a full-length play: The Bettie Page Story
• Huge paintings of Bettie in her bondage outfits can be seen hanging on the walls of apartments, houses and art galleries in several feature films.
• She is the model for characters in dozens of contemporary comic books, cartoons and advertisements.
• Her likeness is now one of the most popular tattoo-parlor selections in the United States. I know a guy in his early 20s who has Bettie inscribed on his torso from his neck to -- well -- below his belly button.

Almost all the artists, writers and publishers turning out this endless stream of material are too young to have known her or even to have subscribed to the magazines or mail-order companies that made her image so ubiquitous. Who the hell was she?

She was born April 22, 1923, in Kingsport, Tennessee, the daughter of Roy and Edna Page. She had at least one brother and at least one sister.

She grew up in Nashville, where, at Hume-Fogg High School, she seemed to be involved in every student activity. After graduation, armed with an excellent scholastic record and a DAR scholarship, she attended Nashville's Peabody College, where she earned her B.A. degree and a teaching certificate. For a short time, she taught English at a local high school. It is said that she quit because, in the presence of her great looks, the boys in her class were uncontrollable. I don't think so. I think she quit because, simply, she wanted something else.

*

Around 1944 Bettie went to Hollywood. She took classes: acting, singing, dancing. She tried to lose her Tennessee drawl. Someone gave her a screen test. Mostly, she got propositioned. She married a man named Billy and moved to Pennsylvania.

There are no photographs from this period. The screen test has disappeared -- and so has Billy.

The marriage broke up and in 1948 she arrived in New York. She was 25 years old. She rented an apartment in a converted brownstone on West 46th Street and worked as a typist for a company on Wall Street. She worked out in a gym every day. She didn't smoke and didn't drink. She carried a brick in her purse to bash any would-be molester.

She was determined to become an actress. Why not? Anything is possible in New York.

*

We came to New York by the thousands -- particularly after wars -- starry-eyed kids drunk with ambition and movie-magazine success stories. We carried a suitcase in one hand and a piece of paper with a telephone number -- someone's uncle, someone's friend, someone's agent -- in the other.

We lived in rent-controlled apartments, waiting for that big break, working in restaurants, driving cabs, moving furniture, hawking Bibles door-to-door, playing chess for money in Washington Square, even stealing.

We made the rounds, surely the most demeaning, ego-busting, humiliating method of seeking employment ever invented. We lied about our credits, our ages and our heights. We pretended we could tap-dance, speak with a Russian accent, juggle, fence, ride horses bareback. We sucked up to producers, agents, assistants, secretaries, anyone. We smiled at strangers.

*

On a summer day in 1952, a photographer saw Bettie at Jones Beach, took some pictures of her, suggested she change her hairstyle to the bangs that became her trademark and introduced her to Irving Klaw, the impresario of mail-order girlie pix.

Yes, her upper lip is a bit thin. Her teeth are not aligned. She is, by today's standards, a touch broad in the hips. Her right eye droops a little. But every man who photographed her or bought a photograph of her fell under her spell. She looked straight into the camera, straight at you, with an expression of real pleasure, of genuine friendliness that promised equal amounts of bliss and playfulness. You could take her home to mother -- but watch out for dad.

Within two years Bettie Page was a superstar in the strange, hermetic world of girlie pix. The customers of Klaw's Movie Star News and Cartoon and Model Parade demanded more pictures of Bettie. The photographers loved her. She would pose all day (at ten dollars an hour), nude or seminude, in dusty studios and dark apartments and outside in lousy weather. She didn't complain. The only problem they had with her was that she had trouble being on time. She was always late; once, it is said, three days late. But they would wait -- for that look, for that smile.

*

Between 1954, when I got out of the Army, and 1960, I worked in my chosen profession perhaps a dozen times. Just enough to keep hope alive. The most fun I had and the most money I made was in dubbing into English the endless Hercules series shot in Italian and starring the muscles, if not the voice, of Steve Reeves. In the American version, my voice came out of the mouth of young Ulysses, who tagged along with the hero through his many adventures, shrieking things like: "Hercules, Hercules -- wait for me!" and "By Zeus, could those Sirens sing!"

I didn't have a great voice, but I was good at the technique of it. We usually worked all night, when the dubbing studio was cheapest, and by five in the morning, a kind of hysteria would set in as we experimented with more and more grotesque, unscripted obscenities.