There was once a third-grade teacher at Harris School on Southard Street who wasn't making a good impression on her fellow schoolteachers. The tall, raven-haired beauty loved her students and did her job well, but her colleagues wanted her out.

The 32-year-old teacher had graduated as salutatorian of her high school in Nashville, Tenn., earned a scholarship to George Peabody College and graduated from there with a bachelor of arts degree. Now she was in Key West, teaching the children of the Southernmost City.

Did her beauty make her Harris School colleagues uncomfortable?

"She couldn't help it; though she never wore makeup, she was totally gorgeous," said Key West resident Paulie Walterson, whose cousin, Armond, was married to the teacher. "She taught very well and took teaching very serious."

There was something else about Bettie Walterson that bothered her fellow teachers: her past. Walterson's job as a Monroe County teacher was more than just a living. It also represented a clean break from her past.

Bettie Walterson was Bettie Page, the "Dark Angel," Playboy's Miss January 1955, a former pinup model known around the world for her bondage photos and fetish films cut on black-and-white 8 mm hobby cameras from New York to Miami and places between.

Rise to stardom

Page was more than a beautiful model willing to pose in titillating photos. From the 1950s until today, generations of young men and women -- actors, film directors, painters, sculptors, furniture designers, tattoo artists, hair stylists, rock 'n' roll singers, etc. -- have adopted her makeup, hairstyles, leopard-print teddies and other sexy accoutrements she wore in her photographs of the early 1950s. Bettie Page images -- 8-by-10-inch prints mailed in brown paper to avoid detection by mail handlers, next-door neighbors and others policing America's morals -- were in great demand before Playboy Magazine had overtaken men's magazines with names like "Titter," "Eyefull," "Wink" and "Beauty Parade."

As a secretary in New York City, Page would pose for underground photographers in the days when risqué images of young women in bondage, flailing whips or hugging bearskin rugs were produced by "camera clubs," thus named to circumvent legal restrictions on the production of nude photos. Page never posed for graphic sex acts that pass as pornography these days. She and her contemporaries in New York, Los Angeles and small-town America often posed as cowgirls, teachers, factory girls, secretaries and dominatrixes wearing little or no clothing. With the advent of mass-produced 8 mm cameras, Page and others would act out those roles for viewing at stag parties, bachelor parties and downtown "skin" theaters.

A few years before her death, Page discussed her life before she moved to Key West. Recordings of the interview are posted on SoundBoard.com.

"This guy sent a white pony outfit with a hood looking just like a horse's head," Page laughed. "He wanted me to get down on all fours and put that on and Paula put it on me; we died laughing about it. I said, 'You're going to cover my face up with that horse's head?" [Paula said,] 'Yes, that's what he wants.' I said, 'How would he even know who it is under there?'ââ"

Page's beauty and presence apparently outshone her contemporaries in bondage photos and films and she became known for her ease in front of a camera. She did her own makeup, sewed her own clothes and costumes, and worked her raven locks into hairstyles that she and her sister had created as bored little girls back in her hometown of Nashville. Page often would direct the directors and photographers that hired her for a shoot. She made stars of the underground photographers and directors, names now long-famous in the underground but unknown to few outside that world.

"Sometimes I would imagine the camera was my boyfriend, and I would play to my boyfriend," she said in the interview on SoundBoard.com. "I could think of a thousand different poses that came naturally to me."

Her fame went national when she posed wearing only a Santa hat as Playboy's Miss January 1955, two years after the magazine was launched and three years before she became a teacher at Harris School. She appeared on The United States Steel Hour and The Jackie Gleason Show on national television. Her off-Broadway productions included "Time is a Thief" and "Sunday Costs Five Pesos." She also had bit parts in commercial-length Hollywood films.

Page was so many things to so many people. She influenced generations of starlets -- think Uma Thurman in "Pulp Fiction," with her blunt-cut bangs and red lipstick.

Hiding out here

Then there was the private Bettie Page that Key West got to know.

She made her way to Key West in 1957 after years of escaping to Miami to avoid New York City's brutal winters.

After avoiding testifying before a congressional committee investigating her nude photos and their distribution, Page called it quits. Key West seemed the right place to start anew and make a life with Key West's community of families, with its warm weather and clear beaches.

After meeting Armond Walterson at Smathers Beach in 1957, Page married him and became a member of the longtime Conch family that made its living by fishing and other maritime professions. Page asked her relatives not to cooperate with reporters or others who came looking for her.

"She was married to my cousin," said Paulie Walterson, a member of Bubba System, a local band that performs around Key West. "When she was teaching school, she would sit in our kitchen and talk with my mother. In case people would come by wanting to write stuff about [Page], my mother promised her that she'd never say anything [about her past]."

Sam Walterson, owner of Searstown Barbershop, and his wife, Elisa, were good friends with Page. Tame photos of Page adorned the barbershop's walls until they were taken down to avoid damage during hurricane season. The couple now live outside Key West.

Bettie Page loved Key West, Paulie Walterson said.

"I tell people that she wished that she could have stayed in Key West; she really liked it here. She liked the easy lifestyle of Key West."

She often went to the beach on the south side of Key West, wearing bikinis and wowing the local men with her looks and charm. As a young boy, Key West resident Armando Para remembers seeing Page at the beach.

"All the young boys would look at her; the little bikinis, sunning herself on the boulders at the beach at the south end of Simonton Street. We were awestruck," he said.

The teachers at Harris School may have been one of the reasons life became difficult for Page in Key West. "They didn't want her to teach there; she was too beautiful. They pushed together to get her out. They didn't see how a woman like that could teach third grade," Walterson said.

Try as Page might, her past was still her present. Page didn't put her modeling entirely behind her; at one point, she posed in a bikini atop a sea turtle in front of Turtle Kraals.

Page and the preacher

Putting the events of Page's life in Key West in their proper order is difficult today, but her decision to try to swallow seawater and drown herself off White Street Pier put her life on a new trajectory.

"I was pastor of what was then called Latin American Baptist Temple on White Street," said the Rev. Morris Wright. "It was New Year's Eve, Dec. 31, 1959, a Saturday night, and I was preaching. We had the doors open and my voice went out on White Street."

According to Wright, a sad Bettie Page, deeply troubled under a clear, star-filled night, walked past the church on her way to the White Street Pier to commit suicide.

"She was on her way to take her life," Wright said. "As she passed my church, she heard my voice preaching. She came in and sat down in the front row. I preached for another 20 minutes and she came up to me. She says, 'Have you got some time that you can spend with me? I realize it's late, I need to talk.' It was 12:15 a.m. I told her, 'I got all the time you want.'ââ"

Wright remembered her saying, "The first thing I want is what you talked about. You talked about being saved. I want to be saved; can I be? You show me how to become a Christian."

"We prayed," Wright said. "She asked the Lord to become her savior."

Wright said instead of taking a right to the pier, she took a left and went home.

" 'I was on my way to kill myself, most definitely,' " Wright said Page told him. "If that door hadn't been open, and I hadn't heard your voice, my mind was made up."

Wright still considers much of their discussion private, though he volunteered that, "Bettie regretted the early part of her life."

Wright, now the pastor of Temple Baptist Church on Stock Island, said NBC and ABC networks have asked him about that night in the years since she lived here.

It's virtually impossible to independently verify the three-hour talk between Wright and Page, but Page soon left Key West for California, where she worked with the Billy Graham Evangelical Association for a dozen years. She also traveled to Angola as a Christian missionary and attended several Bible colleges around the United States. She had indeed dedicated her life to a power greater than herself, Wright said.

"She did a lot of good stuff, religious things, with other people," Wright said. "Bettie regretted her life early on."

In Key West, she remains a local girl, a person who found a new family and a place to live well until life took her to new places, including years out of the spotlight in Southern California. Page still resounds with Key West's art community. The Art Bar on Saturday held a tribute show about Page at the Caroline Street bar, including a Bettie Page look-alike contest, videos of her performances and music of the era.

"She's a very big icon for what she represents to Key West," said Marky Pierson, Key West Burlesque's marketing director. "People recognize that she's the icon of all things."

Her photos and images launched a second wave of notoriety, this time less judgmental, in the 1980s.

In the years before she died in December, she was able to collect royalties on the use of her image and photographs and lived comfortably on her earnings.

She's remembered with fondness as a caring person who was approachable by those who knew her.

"We used to cross the street so we could be on the same side of the street as her," Paulie Walterson remembered.

jguerra@keysnews.com