PLAYBOY: How do you see your career? Was it glamorous?
PAGE: I did it mainly because I could make more money in two hours as a model than in 40 hours as a secretary. People say my one desire in life was to be a movie actress, that my modeling was a stepping-stone toward that. Hogwash! I never really pursued acting. I once had an option for a contract at Twentieth Century Fox, but it fell through. I studied in New York with Herbert Berghof, Uta Hagen's husband, but never auditioned for anything on Broadway. Mr. Berghof wanted me to try out for Moonbeam McSwine in Li'l Abner when it was first produced, but I wouldn't go. Julie Newmar got the part.

PLAYBOY:Why didn't you audition?
PAGE: I was 34. I thought I was too old.

PLAYBOY: You still looked 24 in those days.
PAGE: I did look younger than my age. In the seven years I was posing, I felt my looks never aged a year. But whoever heard of a 34-year-old actress just starting out? I had done a couple off-Broadway parts and several TV shows. I did The Jackie Gleason Show. But by the time I studied acting and became convinced I could act, I was 34. It was too late.

PLAYBOY: How did you get your start in modeling?
PAGE: Well, my father stole a police car. We were poor. He stole a car in Texas to get my mother, me, my two brothers and my three sisters back home to Nashville. It happened to be a detective's car. My father got two years in the Atlanta penitentiary. Mama couldn't take care of all six of us, so my sisters and I were put in an orphanage. I was ten years old. I would dance and sing for the other girls in the orphanage and mimic the poses of the actresses we saw in movie magazines. We did the hula; I liked to watch the girls with their hips moving. I'd do the hula and pose for everyone. That was the start.

PLAYBOY: What else do you recall about the orphanage?
PAGE: Supper was always a cup of milk and a piece of cake. Plain white cake with no icing on it. Mama finally got us out of there.

PLAYBOY: You were 19 when you left Nashville.
PAGE: My husband Billy Neal got drafted into the Navy. He was stationed in Marysville, California. Two weeks after I graduated from Peabody College in Nashville I moved to San Francisco. Then he was shipped to the Mariana Islands to fight the Japanese.

PLAYBOY: Neal was kept under 24-hour guard before the ship departed. He had gone AWOL to be with you. Once he even escaped the stockade to spend the night with you.
PAGE: As a wife, I was always a good lover.

PLAYBOY: Soon you split with Billy Neal.
PAGE: I got a job, secretary to the sales manager at Enterprise Engine and Foundry. They made diesel engines for PT boats. The pay was $40 a week.

PLAYBOY: What about your dream of being a model or movie star?
PAGE: I took a modeling course at night. It cost $100. That was $100 wasted. All I learned was how to put on too much makeup and walk with a book on my head. But I met a man in the window-washing business, Art Grasso, who said that he had done some directing in silent movies. Art Grayson, he called himself, but his name was Grasso. He was one of the first men to ask me to pose for him. He took my picture and sent it to Twentieth Century Fox. Then one day he came running into the office with a telegram in his hand: "Twentieth Century Fox wants you for a screen test!" The next day we went to the airport to fly to Hollywood, but Grayson's wife was so jealous of me that she followed us in her car. She was sure we were having an affair. She grabbed him by the coattails. He was jumping over the turnstile to get to the airplane while she held on to his jacket. I said, over and over, "He never even made a pass at me!"

PLAYBOY: And what happened in Hollywood?
PAGE: I had a screen test with John Russell, who later had the title role in The Lawman on TV. I had to kiss him. It was awful. They made me up to look like Joan Crawford, with my hair bunched out on the sides, my eyebrows shaved off and penciled in and a great big wide lipstick mouth. I was disgusted. The studio people sat around a table saying the screen test was a flop, and I said, "Why can't I do my makeup? Isn't that what you liked in the first place?" And they didn't like that at Twentieth Century Fox, my speaking up.

PLAYBOY: Was that your only screen test?
PAGE: I had another chance. One day Mr. Grayson got a wire from Harry Warner at Warner Bros., who wanted me for a screen test. They might have let me do my own makeup; I might have gotten into the movies. But Billy, my husband, was just back from overseas. The war was over. I knew I had to go back to Nashville with him, so I didn't answer the wire. I will be sorry about that until the day I die.

PLAYBOY: Wasn't there one other call from a movie man?
PAGE: Ten years later, in 1955, Howard Hughes called. He wanted to meet me. He said he wanted to test me, to screen-test me, in his studio downtown. But I had heard that he wouldn't do anything for you unless you went to bed with him. I wasn't into that. If I'm going to have sex with a man, I want to know and care something about him. I have to love him or at least like him very much. So Howard Hughes kept calling to say he wanted to take my picture, but I never called him.

PLAYBOY: Yet your greatest fame has been in the Eighties and Nineties. Your followers call you "timeless." In the old days your fans were dirty old men; today you're a heroine to their sons and daughters. Why?
PAGE: I have no idea.

PLAYBOY: Is it thrilling to have millions of new fans?
PAGE: It's surprising. I have a lot of young women fans, believe it or not. The other day I got a letter from a woman in Alaska, a missionary nurse. I'm still not sure how missionaries in Alaska get hold of my pin-up pictures.

PLAYBOY: You were the wholesome, naughty-but-nice girl in the most stylish dirty pictures of the Fifties. What was your best feature?
PAGE: I had a very natural smile.

PLAYBOY: Was it genuine? Did you enjoy posing nude, or were you pretending?
PAGE: I tried to imagine the camera was my boyfriend and I was entertaining him, with poses to please him.

PLAYBOY: How much of that did you do in real life?
PAGE: None. That's why it's funny when people claim I was some kind of sex icon and innovator. In my seven years of posing in New York I had less sex than at any other time in my life. For three of those years I dated an actor named Marvin Greene. He sang in the chorus in Oklahoma! Marvin was such a sweet fellow, the best companion I ever had. And gorgeous, with a beautiful body. He worked out in the gym; he could knock a baseball farther than the Yankees. But for some reason he did not appeal to me sexually. We used to go camping in New England, Niagara Falls or way up in no-man's-land in northeast Canada. Slept together with no sex. I would kiss him, that was all. Marvin was bashful, but I loved to swim in the nude. Have you ever done that? It's a delightful feeling, unencumbered, like you're in another world. Marvin wanted to marry me. I said, "I don't love you enough. I would make you unhappy."

PLAYBOY: In those three years you had no sex at all?
PAGE: None. I entertained myself.

PLAYBOY: Did you enjoy sex?
PAGE: Oh, yes. But I had to feel something for the man. With Marvin, there was no desire.

PLAYBOY: Your bondage photos suggest a darker sort of desire.
PAGE: Irving Klaw was the king of bondage. He would hire four or five models and two or three photographers. We would shoot for about four hours, always on Saturdays, down in the Village near 14th Street. An hour or an hour and a half of that would be bondage. You had to do bondage or you didn't get paid.

PLAYBOY: What were you paid?
PAGE: Eighty dollars.

PLAYBOY: Was bondage arousing to you?
PAGE: We laughed about it. Klaw's company was called Movie Star News. Irving and his sister Paula sold movie-star pictures, but their pin-ups, and then the bondage pictures, sold more. Paula did some photographing, but mostly she set up the scenes. She tied us up. There was one set of poses that frightened me. It was outdoors. They put me between two trees with my feet off the ground. I was spread-eagle, with ropes around my hands and feet and my waist. They were too tight. I thought my arms were coming out of their sockets. I was in agony. It looks like it in the pictures, too. I wasn't putting on an act that time.

PLAYBOY: Who commissioned the Dark Angel photos you made?
PAGE: Judges, doctors, lawyers. People way up there in the professions. They go for bondage. They liked to see girls spanking each other. I held a whip a lot.

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