Before she became a legend, Bettie Page was a Tennessee girl strolling the beach at Coney Island, New York. An amateur photographer named Jerry Tibbs spotted the pretty secretary in October 1950. Tibbs asked her to pose for him. Bettie smiled and said yes. Soon she was posing for local camera clubs, and when shutterbugs asked the 27-year-old to pose nude, Bettie smiled and said yes.

In the next seven years the young brunette became an underground icon. Bettie Page was the Queen of Curves, the most photographed woman on the planet. The Dark Angel, some men called her. By 1955 her hearty smile had appeared in such girlie magazines as Stare, Sir!, Titter and Modern Sunbathing. She was Playboy's Playmate for January 1955. Indeed, Bettie was the perfect Playmate, for she was both naughty and nice. That smile suggested forbidden fruit as well as apple pie.

Her allure also had a darker side -- she posed for fetish and bondage photos. This was the secret Bettie, all tied up with a ball gag in her mouth. These Dark Angel photos led countless American men and boys to ponder a new sexual geography, a wet-dream-like land where Miss America meets the Marquis de Sade.

The Eighties and Nineties saw a Bettie Page renaissance. Moviemakers and fashion designers revived her look.

Uma Thurman did a Bettie riff in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Madonna, Demi Moore and other trendsetters appeared in Page-inspired photo shoots. Today her image adorns many of the hottest nightclubs in America. There are Bettie Page fan clubs and look-alike contests. There are more than 100 Bettie Page Web sites. All for a woman who disappeared 40 years ago.

Much of her work, particularly the bondage photos made by Irving and Paula Klaw, incensed the moral guardians of Fifties-era America. Men such as Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver entirely missed the campy frivolity that animated the Klaw sessions, and they scored political points by hunting down "pornographers" and "perverts." In 1955 Bettie became a target of Kefauver's congressional antipornography commission, which ruined Irving Klaw. She was intimidated by federal agents who waved her own nude photos at her, threatening criminal prosecution.

She fled New York in 1957. For four decades, nobody could find her.

What happened? At last we know. Thanks to Bettie herself we know about her descent into poverty and mental illness, as well as her thoughts on her recent revival. We know that the foreword she wrote for her authorized biography, Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-up Legend, by Karen Essex and James Swanson, was partly whitewash, since Bettie omitted what she refers to as "my troubles." According to a new book, The Real Bettie Page: The Truth About the Queen of the Pin-ups, those years included violent outbursts by a Page desperately in need of psychiatric help. Now, for the first time, she discusses the tormented lost decades that followed her glory years.

Late in the summer of 1997, Bettie Page appeared at Playboy Mansion West, home of her longtime supporter Hugh Hefner. Accompanied by David Stevens, the comic-book artist who immortalized her in The Rocketeer, she spent the day with Playboy Editor-in-Chief Hefner and Contributing Editor Kevin Cook.

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