You know, I don't think this one is in the files at radio4all.net, and damned if it doesn't richly deserve to be. I transcribed an interview with Bettie that was done right before she surfaced, and I've held onto that audiocassette since 1996 like I was protecting the Grail. Bettie was uneasy with her celebrity, and I vowed that I would protect it until it couldn't hurt her anymore. When she finally passed on, I blew the dust off it and gave it a spin on the show--two episodes worth--to send this earthshaking lady on in style. That was in 2008...
Since then, I saw the biopic THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE--and you know, they stuck pretty close to the real story. In fact, parts of it eerily echoed the version of the Bettie story that I did for the BIG BOOK OF WILD WOMEN, which never got published. But the fact is that this seminal interview was the source of the BETTIE PAGES feature on her, then the Richard Forster bio, and then the film. There were some left- field turns--like the way the screenplay had that invented regular boyfriend character just to have someone whose shock and tight-assery play against Bettie's innocence and cost her something important in the plot. It also skipped over her marriage to Harry, the guy who was apparently so handsome that it gave rise to the rumor in the late '60s that Bettie Page herself had been spotted walking through Times Square arm in arm with Steve Reeves. But the point is that whatever details in the movie differ from the truth, YOU WILL KNOW IT. I was a fly on the wall for this remarkable artifact--the second person to hear that voice come spilling out of the tapedeck. And ever since then, I was itching to share this with the world.
It's time to play it again and put it in the archives where it came swim upstream and spawn. So...the next two BSTF episodes will be BETTIE PAGE SPEAKS.
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