Word: klawing
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...while Bettie played Bettie - or, as it was usually spelled then, Betty - in five-minute, 8 mm epics with titles like Betty's Clown Dance and Dominant Betty Dances With Whip. Garbo, in Hollywood, had Irving Thalberg, the prince of MGM, as her boss and protector. Bettie had Irving Klaw. Calling himself the "King of the Pinups," Irving and his sister Paula ran a seedy Manhattan emporium called Movie Star News, which peddled celebrity glamour shots to the public and specialized photos and loops to a more discriminating clientele. A brunette Betty Grable type who wanted to be Bette Davis...
...sole creator of her myth; she was her own auteur. But her gifts were best appreciated in motion, not in repose. To express and exploit them fully, she needed to be liberated from the pages of Eyeful and Titter and be seen in pictures that moved. Enter Irving Klaw...
...Manhattan's East Village, and my walk took me along 14th Street past a prime grind house, the Metropolitan Theatre - or rather past the hole in the ground where the Metropolitan once stood. There used to be a film stills shop next door: Movie Star News, whose proprietor, Irving Klaw, supplemented his income by making and selling films of bondage princess Bettie Page...
...Klaw's patrons had more elaborate ideas... John Rund, who would represent Bettie in the '90s, told Robert Foster that she recalled these fetishists without judging them: "She said, ?Irving used to get suggestions from his customers as to what kinds of pictures they wanted to see. A lot of Irving's customers liked to see me with a ball gag in my mouth.' Very matter of fact...
...Irving Klaw's misfortune that the FBI and the Post Office thought just that. They hounded him until he decided to burn the negatives of his films. He died in 1966, at 55. Paula, deputized to do the incineration, wisely saved some of Bettie's films from the flames, and gave her star a legacy...