The first time I saw her was during the mid-Fifties on a balmy fall afternoon in New York. I was standing outside the 14th Street building on whose side was painted the giant sign for IRVING KLAW PINUP PHOTOS. A door opened and she came out into the street. Men and women turned to look at the long legs, the white, white skin and the black, black, black hair cut in bangs straight across her forehead. And, of course, the smile. It was the smile that could break your heart.

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The oft-told Bettie Page story is peculiar -- a morality tale with no discernible moral, not much plot and a leading character who is at best elusive. But that doesn't stop us from trying to glean some insight into her never-flagging popularity or from trying to construct some new theory about why she abandoned us.

The known facts of the story have been reexamined, rehashed and recycled for three decades, mostly by diehard fans (such as myself) who used the memory of her or the images of her or the memory of the images of her to fuel our fantasies. The story itself is banal: She came, she failed utterly to achieve her dream, she split.

And yet. And yet: She was known as the Queen of Curves, Miss Pinup of the World, the Queen of Hearts, the Dark Angel, etc.

An estimated half a million pictures were taken of her by almost every professional and amateur photographer in New York -- including the renowned Weegee, who once climbed into a bathtub with her to get a shot, tried to cop a feel and got smacked.

She left her cheesecake competition in the dust, appearing countless times on the covers and in the pages of every major and minor girlie magazine in the world.

And then there are the 8mm films: Bettie dancing (a kind of hula, a sort of hootchy-kootchy, a facsimile of flamenco), Bettie wandering around in stiletto heels as steep as a stepladder and sharper than Ginsu knives, Bettie modeling her own homemade lingerie, Bettie brushing her hair.