bettie page blog

Rick Klaw is the talented author of Geek Confidential: Echoes from the 21st Century and grandson of Irving Klaw, the man responsible for every bondage-themed and a large portion of the "cheesecake"-themed photos of Bettie Page. Rick kindly consented to an interview, attempting to clear up some nagging questions about his grandfather's dealings with Bettie Page.

Thanks for the interview, Rick. Clearly, you have a love of books and comic books, especially "fantastic" fiction. You are a prolific writer and a person who has a real love and understanding of the cult of fandom... befriending the creators who cater to that fandom and the fans themselves.

Bettie Page exists in just such a space. Given the iconic photos and her decades of "mystery", Bettie is more of a fictional character than a person to most of her fans (unlike, say, Madonna, who's personality and politics, for better or worse, are inseparable from her art).

I agree. Bettie falls more in the iconic status of say Wyatt Earp, where the fiction has become reality and vice versa.

How has your own life, work and passions been shaped by experiencing the "cult" audience of Bettie Page?

The cult of Bettie enabled me to learn more about a part of my family history that I thought lost. I didn't learn about my grandfather's famous history until I was 21 and at the 1992 San Diego ComicCon. I remember the event clearly.

"Are you related to Irving Klaw?"

I stood dumbfounded. I knew the name but never expected to hear it at 21 while attending a comic book convention. Irving Klaw was my grandfather.

Irving died about 16 months before I was born. His death is the stuff of family legend.

The grey-haired man in front of me was Ray Zone. As a comic book and magazine publisher, Zone was single-handedly responsible for the 3-d boom of the late 80's.1

"He was my grandfather. Why?"

Zone proceeded to show me examples of my grandfather's work: Images of Bettie iin black leather and leopard print bathing suits bound in a variety of positions. Some of the pics had Bettie with a whip. In some she was spread in doorways or suspended from a ceiling, bound and gagged. A few even had other women, but none had any nudity at all.

So you could say the "cult of Bettie" changed my life but not in the way most expect. I became curious and over the years and learned as much as I could abut his life and work. It's enabled me to re-establish a relationship with my Uncle Arth. Turns out we have a lot more in common than Irving.

The current understanding is the "Little John" story... a New York lawyer/judge bought out all the women in bondage stills Irving could dig up from B-movie stills. The customer offered to underwrite a photo shoot with bondage themes, in exchange for a set of photos. MSN would own the negatives and the right to sell prints, so Irving and Paula did, through their mail order business. Is this true?

To the best of my knowledge. I have yet to uncover anything that contradicts that story.

Assuming this is true, was Bettie the original model for the original shoot, or was she brought in later?

Klaw's first bondage model was Lili Dawn. She was photographed in midtown studios by various freelance photographers. Eventually, Klaw rented the third floor over Movie Star News and turned it into a photography studio. Around this time, Irving bought new furniture for his home. The old furniture made its way into the bondage shoots.

If Irving's dealings with "Little John" was the birth of Movie Star News shooting their own photos, when did bikini/cheesecake pictures (which, presumably, Little John would not be interested in) enter the "original photos" mix?

Since Irving was already selling cheesecake photos, I'd presume this was a natural progression to shoot their own "good girl" pics. As to when they started shooting them, I have no idea.

When was the last photo session for MSN/Nutrix?

Irving/Paula continue to produce original pictures (but no bondage after the 1955 Kefauver Hearings) into the 1960s. Klaw would publish "adventure" books with the pics and Klaw-written descriptions/dialog under the Nutrix name. He even rented studio space in Florida from David Friedman in the early 1960s. (Irving loved Florida and at the time of his death was making plans to retire and move there.)

Review after review of THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE have reduced Paula and Irving to "nice, normal, unexceptional" people. I'd love to counter that with some context. In interviews I've seen Paula displays a sharp sense of humor. Can you tell us about Irving, Paula and Jack Kramer? What were their personalities like?

From most accounts, the personalities were right on. Remember, I was born some 16 months after Irving's death.

What was the relationship like between them (Irving, Paula and Jack) and Bettie? There are some photos of them socializing, but also quotes suggesting there was little interaction outside of a handful of Saturday shoots.

Irving was a family man (he had no interest in bondage beyond the moneymaking aspects and there are absolutely no reports of inappropriate behavior between him and the models), so beyond the occasional dinners, I doubt he socialized much with Bettie. I do know that Irving use to like to go out with my grandmother Natalie and they favored night clubs with transvestite performers. Starting the mid-60s, my maternal grandparents often accompanied the Klaws on their club visits.

There is a story about a Filipino merchant marine who originally tied the knots for the bondage photos, but that Paula quickly assumed those duties. Likewise, initially, Movie Star News paid photographers, but at some point Paula took over these duties as well. Is this accurate and is there any information you can add?

I can add nothing about knots, but Ira Kramer told me that his mother (Paula) took the pictures because Irving was allergic to the photographic fluids. When I asked Arth about it (who is some 20 years older than Ira), he said he had never heard that. So who knows?

I've read that Paula destroyed 80% of the photos, but, at great peril to herself, Irving and Jack, she kept some of the negatives hidden, including many of the Bettie negatives. Is there any more information you can provide on this matter?

Irving surely didn't know about the surviving negatives. He was a scrupulous man of his word and if said they were all destroyed, he believed so.

And a bit of a correction... the negative destruction had nothing to do with Kefauver.

In 1963, following the suggestion of his lawyer, Irving destroyed his photographs and movies in an effort to placate the courts on yet another obscenity charge. The effort initially failed and Irving was found guilty of conspiracy to send obscene material through the mail, but the verdict was eventually overturned on appeal. Paula saved thousands of those images.

Thanks for your time and insight, Rick!

Rick Klaw is the author of Geek Confidential: Echoes from the 21st Century
NOW AVAILABLE from MonkeyBrain, Inc.

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Read more Rick Klaw at the Dark Forces Book Group blog and SF site.

For more on Rick's life as a professional geek and more insight on Irving Klaw, read his interview over at Enter the Octopus.

Rick Klaw is a Renaissance man, who has experienced nearly every angle of the business of publishing. He has been a fiction and non-fiction author, a journalist, a book "buyer", a prodigious reviewer of books, comics and film, an editor and a publisher. Does he sleep?

Mr. Klaw also has a somewhat "infamous" last name. That's right, the same name as a Fantastic Four foe (as Rick often jokes). While that is true, here at the Bettie Page Blog, Rick's last name evokes his paternal grandfather, Movie Star News proprietor Irving Klaw.

Rick has kindly given the BPB permission to post his article about his grandfather:

As a child all I knew of my grandfather was that he was a pornographer, albeit a very tame one. My mother's exact words were, “They show worse things on Cinemax.”

I first learned more about him while attending the 1989 San Diego ComicCon when publisher/artist Ray Zone first told me of my family legacy. Initially my grandfather Irving Klaw ran a mail-order business that sold pin-ups of Hollywood stars. He later expanded into pictures and films of attractive women in bondage and other fetishistic poses. Klaw pioneered both the movie star image and adult entertainment industries. His best known model, Bettie Page, was one of the most photographed women of the 1950s, appearing on more magazine covers than anyone else in the decade.

Inspired by the success of Jerald Intrator's 1952 burlesque film Striporama, my grandfather produced and directed Varietease (1954), Teaserama (1955), and Buxom Beautease (1956). The films featured burlesque acts with stripteases, comedy acts, and musicians with famed beauties Page, Lili St. Cyr, and Tempest Storm.

Also during this period, Klaw produced thousands of feet of black and white film loops featuring striptease and fetish acts. These shorts featured only women, either by themselves or sometimes in pairs, in a variety of situations often involving bondage and spanking. The models-- most famously Page-- never appeared terrified and seemed to be enjoying themselves in a non-sexual, no-threatening way. As with his photos, these movies contained only the suggestion of nudity. My grandfather often required the models to wear two pairs of panties so no pubic hair could be seen. Not a pornographer, Klaw was all about the tease.

Thanks largely to his fetish business, Klaw testified before the 1955 United States Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. The subcommittee, one year before, had famously forced the comic book industry to adopt a code to stop the publication of "inappropriate" comic book material. Now they were investigating my grandfather. The New York City press plastered the sensationalistic episode throughout the city, where Klaw became known as the "Smut King."

My grandfather's legal problems persisted for nearly ten years. Federal authorities intercepted his mail and bugged his phones. As late as 1964, Klaw was brought before a federal court on charges of conspiracy to send obscene material through the mail.

With the shifting political and social climate, Irving returned to filmmaking in 1963, producing two "lost" films: Larry Wolk's Intimate Diary of an Artist's Model and Nature's Sweethearts, co-directing the latter. Unlike, his previous films, both pictures featured a lot of topless women.

The legal and cultural ramifications of his twenty year career ushered America from the sexually conservative 1950s to the sexually charged 1960s. His impact on the exploitation films of the 1960s was profound influencing everything from Barbarella to Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!. In his book Sinema, Douglas Brode argues that Klaw's pictures of Bettie Page and "friends" inspired lesbian chic-- the notion of women as "bisexually sensuous"-- in both film and television. Rachel Schteir in the excellent Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (Oxford, 2005) asserts that "[Klaw's] movies did more to spread striptease across the country in this era [the 1950's] than any one burlesque short. [...] What they did was spread striptease, drag strips, and burlesque comedy to a provincial audience. In essence, they were giving these audiences what they might see in Miami, Las Vegas, or some other cosmopolitan city." The contemporary popularity of his movies inspired the current neo-burlesque revival in major American cities.

In late 1955, legendary exploitation filmmakers David Friedman and Dan Sonney acquired the rights to both Teaserama and Varietease for $5,000. Sonney owned burlesque theaters on Main Street in L.A. and earned back the initial investment within a year. During the 1980's, Something Weird Video introduced the movies to a new generation. Both Teaserama and Varietease are currently available on DVD.

At the time of his death in 1966-- sixteen months before I was born-- my grandfather lived in relative obscurity. Few imagined that nearly forty years later, his movies would be considered softcore classics and major precursors to the sixties "nudie-cuties" and the later hardcore porn films. Or that two features (The Notorious Bettie Page [2006] and Bettie Page: Dark Angel [2004]) would be made about Bettie Page with my grandfather as major character and that DVD compilations of Klaw's films are bestsellers. Klaw's work influenced a generation of filmmakers, photographers, and entertainers including Russ Meyer, John Waters, Madonna, Missy Suicide, and others. Ironically, without my grandfather there would have been no Cinemax.

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Thanks for the great article, Rick! We look forward to hearing more from Rick Klaw in the near future.

In the meantime, consider reading two more of Rick's pieces which touched on his grandfather, both found in the Austin Chronicle:

Little Underground Worlds"

"The Notorious Irving Klaw"

Discover Rick Klaw's Writing:

RevolutionSF

Blackbird Press

Mojo Press

The graphic novel, Weird Business

Geeks With Books

Geek Confidential: Echoes from the 21st Century

Austin Chronicle