Q 1

PLAYBOY: You're more popular and fantasized about than ever, even though it's been more than 50 years since you became one of America's most photographed pinup girls. How do you explain the demand for Bettie Page books, websites, feature films, DVDs and other memorabilia?

Bettie Page: My recent popularity began in the 1980s, when Dave Stevens put out that comic-book series The Rocketeer, and I was the leading lady in it. That has never happened to any other model. It's grown since then. I have fan clubs and get letters all the time from young girls, saying that they look up to me, that I helped them lose their inhibitions by posing in the nude and that I helped them be themselves.

Q 2

PLAYBOY: Of course men love you too.

Bettie Page: Musicians have even written songs about me. One of those songs is by BR549, from Nashville, where I was born, and it's about what this guy would have done if he had known Bettie Page and all kinds of crazy things like that. I wonder, Why me? People call me an icon. But thank God for it because I get more money now with my new agent than I've ever had. When I turned my life over to the Lord Jesus, I was ashamed of having posed in the nude, but now most of the money I've got is because I posed in the nude. So I'm not ashamed of it now, but I still don't understand it.

Q 3

PLAYBOY: It's easy for us to understand. You have an incredible face and figure and a playful girl-next-door innocence combined with assertive sexuality.

Bettie Page: I never thought I was incredibly attractive. I have large pores, and I had to wear a lot of Max Factor pancake makeup to make my skin look good. A lot of people claim they like my smile because I look happy when I'm posing. I was happy posing, especially when I was playing in the water. Nobody knew it, but sometimes I used to imagine the camera was my boyfriend and I was making love to him. I loved to pose anyway, just to see if I could think of different positions. That started in the orphanage.

Q 4

PLAYBOY: In the early 1930s, during the Depression, your mother divorced your father, a mechanic who hit a rocky financial patch and did jail time. Because she couldn't care for all six of her children on her own, she had to put you and your two sisters in an orphanage.

Bettie Page: Yes, I was there when I was 10, 11 years old. There were only girls there, and we used to play what we called Program. A bunch of us would sit in little chairs in a circle, and one person would get in the middle and a different girl would say, "I want you to dance the hula" or "I want you to sing." I've been a movie hound since I was 10 years old. I used to cut out pictures of movie stars from the front page of the Sunday newspaper in Nashville, and the girls would ask me to mimic the poses of the big stars. That's how I started learning to pose, mimicking pictures of movie stars. Bunny Yeager is a big liar when she claims she taught me to pose. I'd like to get her by the neck if I could get away with it.

Q 5

PLAYBOY: Yeager was one of the first professionals to shoot you in the 1950s and the photographer who did your famous Playmate shot for the January 1955 issue of Playboy.

Bettie Page: I was going to blow the whistle on her. Nobody knows the truth about her, and it really ought to be told. In 1954 I would pose for that woman for nothing or for $5 an hour, mostly in the nude out in the ocean or out in the woods. She said, "I will do right by you financially, Bettie, if the pictures sell." One of the first things she did was get me the Miss January 1955 spot in Playboy. She got quite a bit of money for that. She never gave me a penny. The only thing she ever gave me was a $5 makeup kit with a lid on it, but it didn't have any makeup in it. I didn't have anything in writing, though I signed a release allowing her to do what she wanted with the pictures, and she has been selling them all over the world ever since. She called me up one time to tell me she bought her home in North Miami with money she got from books that teach people how to draw nudes she had done of me. Two writers were going to put things right with my life-story book, and they interviewed me a lot. When they asked me to ask Bunny Yeager to please send photos to put in the book, I thought she'd give them to me for free, but she said, "Tell Bettie Page she'll have to pay just like anyone else. It'll cost her $200 a photo." Talk about a cheapskate.