Billy Neal didn’t want Bettie Page to go to college after she graduated second in her high school class in Nashville, per “Hellions: Pop Culture’s Rebel Women” and the New York Times. But she did anyway, before starting a brief teaching career, which she soon quit. “I couldn’t control my students, especially the boys,” she later recalled. The couple moved to San Francisco, where Page modeled fur coats. After the Navy drafted Neal during World War II, everything changed. When he returned from service he was still recovering from a terrible bout of dysentery he contracted during the war and was bitter and jealous, according to “The Real Bettie Page: The Truth about the Queen of the Pinups.” The marriage began to falter.
They divorced in 1947 and Page moved to New York to pursue an acting career. Neal eventually followed her there in an attempt to get her back, but his penchant for fighting — he beat up one of Page’s male friends — pushed Page away. Even so, she still had feelings for Neal. “Someday, when I decide I really want to be a wife, we’ll probably get married again,” she told her sister Goldie in 1949 (via Bettie Page: The Lost Years: An Intimate Look at the Queen of Pinups.” “I’ve dated oodles of other fellows but somehow can’t get interested in anybody but Billy — it’s a funny thing, but true.”
