EDUARDO: Tonight on History Detectives: ♪ The code of the west was black and white... ♪ I'm floored.
EDUARDO: Would you consider this dangerous?
I want to know if this is a lost image of Bettie Page.
ELVIS COSTELLO: ♪ Watchin' the detectives ♪ ♪ I get so angry when the teardrops start ♪ ♪ But he can't be wounded 'cause he's got no heart ♪ ♪ Watchin' the detectives ♪ ♪ It's just like watchin' the detectives ♪ [ Clint Black's "Code of the West" begins ] ♪ The code of the west was black and white ♪ ♪ The good guys and the bad ♪ ♪ You would always know who's wrong or right ♪ ♪ By the color of their hat... ♪ I'm a country singer from Houston, Texas, a songwriter.
About 15 years ago, my wife found this book in an antique store and presented it to me for my birthday.
And inside, there were hundreds of WANTED notices from all over the U.S.
So what I really want to know is what is this book, what was it used for, and whose book was this?
ELYSE: Clint Black's known for his platinum albums and his number one hits.
But I'm in Nashville to learn about another part of his life: collector.
I collect old cognacs dating back to 1800.
1848 flintlock pistols.
- Dueling pistols.
- Yeah.
Oh, these are nice, too.
This is great stuff.
Clint tells me he has a special fascination with stories from the West... and its larger-than-life lawmen.
I think we've all lived fantasies.
The cowboy movies, the Roy Rogers, chasing after the bad guys.
Here's the item you're most interested in.
Wow.
So what's inside are snapshots of crime and law enforcement in the early 1900s from all over the U.S.
There's just so much!
It's a menacing collection of WANTED notices and mug shots.
There's an attitude for you.
"Wanted for murder."
Big as it gets.
Clint has some information about the book, but not much.
He wants to know exactly what it is and who created it.
Well, I was told it belonged to the sheriff of Leavenworth, Kansas.
I know it was newly settled, had newly found peace in the area after all the fighting with the Indians.
To me, it looks like a scrapbook.
Did you ever find any documentation on it?
I've looked for that.
There's really nothing.
This is going to be fun.
It's going to be tough, but it's going to be fun.
- Good luck.
- Thanks.
Whatever it is, the book is incredible.
But it's also extremely fragile.
Paper conservator Christine Young is going to authenticate the book's date and help me search for clues about its owner.
My first impression is that this is an older book with lignified paper, which has made it really brittle.
Uh-huh.
The cover of the book has the date 1909.
The various papers, inks, and formats are consistent with that time period.
This very browned ink, looking like a late iron gall ink, which would be at its very late stages at the time period.
Whoever made this, he was organized and maybe even a little obsessive.
There are hundreds of notices, all placed with razor precision.
Oh, well, look over here, May 22, 1909.
This one says 1908.
You've got prostitution, you've got a lot of stealing.
The criminals run the gamut from counterfeiters to deserters.
Hey, look at this one.
He's all the way from New York City.
"Pinkerton's National Detective Agency," and it's a $1,000 reward.
That means they were all over the country.
Oh, wait, now this is interesting, because this says, "To the Chief of Police."
And look, I'm noticing stamps that say chief of police, and, you know, I keep finding more and more letters to the chief of police.
Clint thinks the book belonged to an Old West sheriff, but a police chief is usually a city job.
I sent images of Clint's book to criminology professor Alex Gerould.
He asked me to meet him at Leavenworth Police headquarters.
What do you think?
I think this is amazing.
It's a real artifact of a lost age.
You know, my first instinct was, "Oh, this is just someone's old scrapbook."
He says it is a scrapbook, but with a purpose.
This book would probably most accurately be called a WANTED scrapbook.
Alex says it was based on what was called the rogues' gallery, a criminal identification tool popularized by New York police at the turn of the century.
This is a gallery or a collection of villains.
It's an early kind of database, and these were people that would already have criminal records, people that were in the system.
Alex explains by the 1900s, advances in transportation meant a criminal could commit a crime in Boston, then jump on a train and be hundreds of miles away just a day later.
It's after the period of the Wild West.
We're in the modern world now.
The WANTED scrapbook was created to consolidate the notices from around the country.
Alex doesn't know who our chief of police was, but he thinks whoever put this book together was no novice lawman.
I think what's interesting on these is the depth of the information that we're starting to see, what's called biometric data.
It shows you where his tooth is, his wrist is broken, tattoos.
So it's a good description.
As an appraiser, I say it's good cataloging, right?
But then I keep seeing this.
It says, "Bertillon - 71, 67..." What are those numbers?
Yeah, a French policeman named Alphonse Bertillon came up with 11 different ways of measuring.
Alex explains that the system measured parts of the body that rarely change in an adult.
The length of your head, the length of your foot, index finger, and of your ear.
What about fingerprints?
Where do they come into play?
Okay, fingerprints, you would start to see the usage of these in America after the year 1900, and so on some of these you'll see right here, fingerprint classification.
Fingerprints were the next wave of technology, soon to overtake Bertillon measurements.
The real legacy of books like this is the modern kind of CSI movement and the national database.
So that means that this police chief was really into the cutting edge of technology at the time.
It certainly seems that way.
So who was this scientific police chief?
Kenneth LaMaster, a local law enforcement historian, meets me at the Leavenworth First City Museum.
LaMASTER: Take a look at this document.
So this is a payroll from 1909.
Yes, ma'am.
That's the same time as our book.
And this says lieutenant, captain, chief.
- That's J.T.
Taylor.
- Yes, ma'am.
Okay, so J.T.
Taylor has to be the guy, right?
Yes, ma'am.
J.T.
Taylor was the first person to be actually appointed to the role of chief of police.
There was a want and a need to move away from the Old West style of policing.
And Leavenworth was far from a newly settled frontier town.
With over 20,000 citizens and multiple train lines coming through, the city had a large population with new faces arriving all the time.
I mean, it just only makes sense that they would send a lot of WANTED posters to Leavenworth, Kansas.
This was the gateway to the West as we would know it at that point in time.
Kenneth says this is why there are so many notices from states far from Kansas, like New York.
Frank Muller was an actual hit man.
Oh, wow.
"American Hebrew, age 27, is a pickpocket, sneak thief, and a free user of firearms."
Back in the day, he was actually hired to kill a gangster in New York.
There was a large Jewish base here in Leavenworth, Kansas, so he could've easily hid out among the group of individuals that lived in this town for a short period of time and still got away farther west.
That was the reason for these books and the reason for the WANTED posters.
The beauty of WANTED posters are when a guy is on the run, he can run to the ends of the earth, but he's never going to escape this WANTED poster.
So these guys could be on the lookout and identify these people immediately and send them back to where they needed to be.
Looking at our book, Kenneth thinks Chief Taylor was a special kind of lawman.
This is the largest book I've ever seen of this type.
That's part of becoming more organized from what used to be the old Wild West type of lawman to a sophisticated police department.
This book would tie into that extremely well.
It would show how he wanted his organization ran, right down to the letter.
I think I have my answer for Clint, but then Kenneth mentions something that surprises me.
Taylor was not only the first police chief in Leavenworth, but also the longest serving of the era.
Everybody else, it looks like, worked two years or three years.
Taylor appears to have had no previous experience as a policeman when he was appointed chief by the mayor.
So who exactly was Taylor?
And what had he done to win this position?
Kenneth suggests that I check in with Mary Anne Brown at the Leavenworth County Historical Society.
This is the history of Leavenworth County, and we have a biography about Taylor.
Seems that J.T.
Taylor was no ordinary policemanor citizen.
"John T. Taylor was the son of William H.H.
and Anna Tuttle Harrison, the youngest daughter of President William Henry Harrison."
Wow, he was the grandson of a president.
Mary Anne also reveals Taylor was the great-grandson of Benjamin Harrison.
Who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Oh, my god, so he had some serious roots in our country.
Yes.
This is his obituary.
He was 85 years old when he died.
"Captain Taylor died last night soldiers' home."
Last surviving officer on the war-time staff of General William T. Sherman.
And a hero of bloody Battle of Shiloh.
Loyal Legion officer."
He was also a Civil War hero?
Yes.
This is like nothing that I ever expected out of this book.
Mary Anne takes me to the cemetery where J.T.
Taylor, police chief and honored Civil War veteran, is buried.
She shares an astonishing letter to Taylor that Clint needs to hear.
This book is really rare.
It's a wonderful archive, and I think it's probably the finest in our country.
I tell Clint the book was an important criminal identification tool, but the real surprise had been learning about the police chief and his extraordinary ancestors.
John T. Taylor: mother was Anna Harrison, daughter of President William Henry Harrison.
His mother?
Which makes him the grandchild of our ninth president.
He was also the great-grandchild of Benjamin Harrison, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
So your chief of police... Was a very well connected... very connected.
So this is what he looks like.
Wow, this was an important person in our history.
But I tell Clint Mary Anne had revealed something else.
It's a letter written to Taylor from a great admirer, a recollection of their time together in the Civil War.
"Dear Taylor, at the very crisis at the Battle of Shiloh, my horse was shot dead under me, and you promptly dismounted and gave me your own horse, trusting to chance for a remount."
"You were then very young, not yet 20, active, intelligent, and most patriotic.
I then esteemed you highly, and now that 27 years have passed, my feelings toward you have never changed.
I wish you and yours all the prosperity and happiness possible on this earth.
Affectionately, William Tecumseh Sherman."
Wow.
Wow.
[ sighs ] Makes me so emotional.
I guess I feel a connection.
There's a reason I loved your show.
I'm floored.
I -- I feel like one of those people on your show who just doesn't know what to say.
We surprised you, right?
Yeah, very much.
I just am amazed, really amazed.
- Thank you.
- Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
What a -- what a legacy.
What a book.
♪ The code of the west was black and white ♪ ♪ The good guys and the bad ♪♪ TUKUFU: Coming up, a mystery with sex, scandal, and the nation's naughtiest pinup girl.
And later, does this man own a piece of a Hollywood icon?
But first... My name's Irv Atkins.
On July 28, 1945, I was living with my family in the Bronx.
On that day, a Saturday, a twin-engine Army bomber crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building.
NEWS REPORTER: We're speaking from the hole in the middle of the 79th floor of the Empire State Building.
We can see 11 bodies.
ATKINS: My father had an office across the street, and when he came to work Monday morning, he found this piece in his office.
And it's been in my family ever since.
I was wondering whether this in fact was a piece of that Army bomber.
I'm Eduardo Pagán.
The Empire State Building looms high above midtown Manhattan.
Raised in the Depression, it was the tallest building in the world during World War II.
Its broad shoulders and soaring Art Deco spire were the pinnacle of engineering know-how and national pride.
The early summer of 1945, Hitler was already dead, and American troops were amassing for an invasion of Japan.
And there stood the Empire State Building, a symbol of America's greatness.
And then in July of 1945, a B-25 bomber tragically flew into its side.
The mighty skyscraper became a deathly inferno.
At first, the city feared the Japanese had attacked and couldn't understand how such a disaster was possible.
I'm meeting Irv at a local coffee shop to discuss his father's possible encounter with history.
So this piece was just sitting there in his office for...
It came through the window or through the ceiling.
Give me a sense about your father.
Was he ever one to embellish stories?
Well, he was a outspoken type of individual.
He was a salesman, after all.
And he could get pretty excited about things.
There's some locking nuts on there as well.
Yeah, that might be of that period that would help identify it.
You know, there's a lot of melting here, too, right?
It was a big explosion.
A lot of gasoline was on the plane.
You mentioned your father worked around the Empire State Building.
It was across the street.
10 West 33rd Street.
Do you remember the name of the business?
Charm Tread Mills, a textile manufacturing company he was a sales representative for.
Okay.
Very recently I decided I wanted to prove that this in fact is a part of that plane.
All right, we'll see if we can nail this thing down.
Appreciate it.
Could this be a fragment from that awful day?
I'll need a little help from the History Detectives researchers.
This is Robin.
Hey, Robin, I wonder if you could verify for me Irv's father's employment in 1945.
He worked at a place called Charm Tread Mills.
And it was at 10 West 33rd Street.
And could you pull some newspaper clippings, investigative reports, any kind of materials surrounding the incident?
Let me see what I can find.
In the meantime, I set up a meeting with a historian, Arthur Wiengarten, who literally wrote the book on the topic.
He's going to meet you at the East 34th Street heliport.
Got it.
Art's book is considered the definitive account of the disaster.
He's offered to help in our investigation.
Have you ever seen anything like this?
No, never.
It's a fascinating piece, but is it real?
I don't know.
I ask Art how such a disaster was possible.
If we took off and followed the flight path of the bomber to the Empire State Building, maybe we could put that into context.
Art tells me the B-25's pilot that day, 27-year-old Lt.
Colonel William Smith, was a West Point graduate with an impressive wartime record.
Smith's flight is a routine mission out of Bedford, Massachusetts, Army airfield, bound for Newark, New Jersey.
But from the start, the weather is foul.
An Atlantic squall is pushing heavy clouds, rain, and fog up and down the coast.
But Smith has had plenty of experience flying in bad weather in wartime Europe.
So it sounds like, given the weather that day, this was the perfect man to be flying on that day.
Absolutely.
He'd flown over 50 missions over France and Germany.
As Smith enters New York airspace, the weather deteriorates.
So this skyline that we're seeing right now, this is all obscured by cloud cover?
All obscured by cloud cover or, at best, tiny tips were poking through as the winds blew.
To make matters worse, Smith is not familiar with New York geography.
He had never been over the city in the air.
As he flies west to Newark, the little bits of buildings and water he sees he believes is Manhattan.
It's not.
He was flying at about 650 feet through dense fog.
And Welfare Island seemed to him to be Manhattan because he could see tall buildings.
So he was totally disoriented at this point.
- Totally disoriented.
- Okay.
Thinking he had cleared Manhattan, Smith starts his descent to Newark Airport, but the concrete canyons of midtown lay directly ahead.
He was flying at approximately 250 miles an hour.
EDUARDO: So, Dave, how fast are we going now in this helicopter?
We're doing about 70 knots, about a third of that.
The air traffic controller issues a warning.
The tower said to him, "Well, I cannot see the top of the Empire State Building from here.
I wish you would turn around."
Art says that Smith is confident to the point of arrogance.
He said, "Thank you very much, tower," and he snapped off.
[ indistinct male voice ] A dictation machine inside a nearby building captures the sound of Smith approaching.
[ loud roaring noise ] Then an explosion.
[ flames crackling ] [ sirens blaring ] Newsreels show the awful aftermath: 14 dead and a gaping 20-foot hole on the north side of the 78th and 79th floors, destruction created by over 6,000 gallons of explosive aviation fuel.
Back on the ground, Art explains how, on that fateful day, he had been tagging along with his father, a New York City fire marshal who responded to the scene.
I was right there, 10 years old, sitting in a squad car, a police squad car, watching the entire thing.
And people were screaming and running here.
A woman ran past holding her head with blood coming out.
In an eerie echo of the World Trade Center disaster, New York firemen carried heavy equipment up 79 floors to fight the inferno and rescue survivors.
The crash commanded headlines for days.
Then, on August 6, the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Americans turned their attention elsewhere.
The building was repaired within three months.
Looking now, it's hard to imagine the carnage that was.
All right, so this is the north side of the building, and this is the side that the airplane hit.
Yes.
Well, our contributor, his father worked right there on West 33rd Street, maybe a couple buildings in there.
When the bomber hit the building, he went straight into the 79th floor, traveled right through the width of the building, blasted a hole in the 33rd Street side.
So it's entirely possible that if this piece came from that B-25 bomber, that's where it would've landed, right over there.
It would've landed there.
Right over there, 10 West 33rd.
That's it.
But Art tells me much more than plane debris fell to the ground that day.
Parts of desks, radiators, beams: it all rained down.
NEWS ANNOUNCER: Many fixtures have been melted down.
All the paint has been melted down.
Metal has been melted down.
Plastic handles of files are melted.
This piece of metal in theory could've come from anywhere.
Could've come from anywhere.
Within a very short time, the Air Force sent people to clean up the area.
According to them, they picked up all the pieces.
So is there a chance that this was missed?
Yes.
Is there a chance that, if they had seen a piece that large looking this way, they would've picked it up?
- Absolutely.
- Okay.
They were looking for things like this.
They were.
Researcher Robin Hutchins has been running down some of Art's story.
Okay, so where are we?
Well, after they collected the debris, they took it to Newark Airport, and then everything just seemed to have been discarded.
Even the Army report has gone missing.
"Unfortunately, we cannot locate the accident report."
I did find one thing I wasn't expecting.
I've set up a meeting for you.
I'm about 2,700 miles away from Manhattan in the middle of the California desert in a location that I've been asked not to disclose.
But it's there that I'm hoping to find some answers to our mystery.
- You Carl?
- I am.
- And you are Eduardo.
- I'm Eduardo.
- Very nice to meet you.
- My pleasure.
This is a great spot you've got here.
We're out in the middle of the boonies, that's for sure.
Miles away from civilization, 15 acres of land are filled with every part, piece, and parcel of B-25s.
Are these all B-25s right here?
These are all B-25s.
These two came out of Alaska.
This one came out of Venezuela a number of years ago.
Each piece of twisted metal in Carl's graveyard tells a story.
Will we be able to confirm the origin of ours?
Let me show you this piece that I've been telling you about.
I imagine this is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
There's so many different parts to an airplane.
Well, I mean, it's certainly aircraft.
Just the basic structure and the fasteners, these are called nut plates.
Okay, so that's pretty exclusive to aircraft?
- Pretty much so.
- Okay.
Carl says if it is from a B-25, it would be aluminum.
You know, this is something that caught my eye here.
It looks like the metal was melting here.
If you want me to show you how we can do that, I've got some aluminum over here on the work bench that we could put the torch on.
I could show you quick it melts.
24ST aluminum.
What's 24ST?
A special alloy they came up with during World War II era.
All right, let's torch this thing.
Carl says B-25s were made from this 24ST aluminum, which starts to melt between 600 and 800 degrees.
You can see where it starts to form globules.
- See how that...?
- Yeah, yeah.
I'm sitting here thinking about when that B-25 crashed into the Empire State Building, the hell that it was.
Everything was on fire.
Well, I mean, he had a lot of fuel in it.
I mean, obviously enough to cause an explosion.
And it ripped things to parts.
It doesn't take much to destroy aluminum.
Carl thinks our piece is a fragment of a World War II-era aluminum aircraft.
But does it come from the B-25 that hit the Empire State Building?
Between the molten metal and the bolt pattern, Carl thinks he knows the answer.
Tell me what we're looking at right here.
All right, so we're looking at the belly of the airplane.
Why don't you let me take a look at that piece and see if we can't come up with a little better idea of where this came from.
Now, these doors seal the fuel compartment.
This bolt line is covered up by this fairing right here.
I think this edge is this edge along there.
And he spots another clue.
- You see that line?
- Yeah.
The curious faded line on Irv's part points to a verdict in our case.
I meet Irv back in New York City.
It's been a pleasure to investigate this piece and to really tell this part of American history that so many people have forgotten about.
We confirm that the plane debris did land on his father's office building.
The melted metal suggested an inferno and the presence of high-octane aviation fuel.
But it was the faded line on the part that had convinced Carl of what Irv's father had picked up.
I think that's the chafe line where this fairing was rubbing on there.
The metal was from a fuel tank door on the underside of the plane that had hit the building first and hardest.
I'm positive it is.
All right, if you're positive, then I'm positive then.
Okay.
Let me show you the picture.
Right here in black is where he was able to identify exactly where this comes from, and this is the right underside of the airplane, and that's the fuel door right there.
Another facet to the whole story that I've been living with all these years, and now it's something a little different but more amazing.
While the Empire State Building bears little evidence of the tragic events of 1945, the crash had a large impact on federal law.
In 1946, Congress passed legislation granting citizens the right to sue the federal government for actions committed by individuals acting on behalf of the government.
The law still stands today.
My name is Claire Sharp.
I live in Severna Park, Maryland, and I collect suitcases.
My husband won this at an auction.
It cost 20 bucks.
I had it for about five years before I actually looked in it.
My son was using it as a high chair.
It contains slides, like 1950s-style safety slides.
And all the way in the back, I found a negative.
So I had this print made.
I knew who it was right away.
Bettie Page to me is an American icon.
There's something about her that has innocence and sexuality melded together in just the right way.
So I did a little research, found out that there was a court case in the '50s about pornographic images.
A lot of these images were burned, and a lot of them were Bettie Page images.
So I want to know if this is a lost image of Bettie Page.
GWEN: If Claire's negative did somehow escape a pornography crackdown, it might be something special.
With her black bangs and naughty-but-nice gaze, Bettie Page is instantly recognizable today as a style icon and pre-feminist sexual heroine.
But in the 1950s she was simply queen of the pinups, a type of photograph made popular by GIs in World War II.
The military encouraged them to have pinups on their lockers and even to paint pictures of sexy girls on the airplanes or on some of the weapons.
It's where we got the expression "bombshell."
In post-war America, pinups were a booming market in mail order and magazines.
Arriving in New York in 1947, Bettie would become the center of that world.
But in 1955, Bettie and Irving Klaw, the owner of one of the photography studios she worked for, became the target of a crusading Senator Estes Kefauver.
To avoid prison, Klaw destroyed his Bettie Page images.
Is Claire's negative an Irving Klaw shot that somehow escaped?
One person who might know is filmmaker Mark Mori.
He's spent the past five years researching Bettie Page and her relationship with Irving Klaw for his documentary Bettie Page Reveals All.
Do you know how many pictures Irving Klaw took of Bettie Page?
Bettie told me that Irving told her that he had 1,500 photographs of her.
The cheesecake photographs were published widely, and you couldn't walk past a newsstand in New York without seeing Bettie Page.
Mark says Klaw sold the images in his store and through a thriving mail-order business.
The object I'm investigating is not really the picture itself, but it's this negative, which is in a slide mount.
Do you know how Irving Klaw produced his pictures?
Irving Klaw generally did not shoot in color, just because it was more expensive and getting it developed was more of a problem.
And I haven't really seen a negative in a slide mounting.
So maybe this wasn't produced by Klaw, but rather by another photographer.
If so, Mark says it might be hard to trace.
Bettie Page was a prized subject for many photo shoots.
They had what they called camera clubs.
Guys would get together on the weekend.
They'd each pay five bucks.
There might be as many as 30 or 40 guys with cameras, three or four models.
Bettie became by far the most popular model in the New York camera clubs.
Even by Bettie's standards, Mark says our negative is rather tame.
Much of her camera club work was nude.
While publishing nude photos was illegal, shooting them was not.
But camera clubs did occasionally brush with the law.
In fact, Bettie was arrested one time for taking nude photographs on a farm in upstate New York.
All of a sudden these cops jump out of the bushes and arrest everybody.
This was in 1952, and Bettie became very indignant because they charged her with indecent exposure, and she says, "I am not indecent.
I will not accept that."
So this is a clue to part of who Bettie is.
In contrast to the camera clubs, which tried to avoid obscenity laws by claiming the nude photos weren't for sale, businessman Irving Klaw came up with a different work-around.
No nudity, no men.
It was considered pornography to have men in the photographs.
But portraying these wild or fetish scenarios, which were looked down upon and controversial, but difficult to prosecute as pornography.
Well, it's fascinating that the definition of what's pornographic of course changes constantly by time and by place.
So in the early '50s, this was not illegal pornography.
It was not illegal, but it was not considered acceptable in the mainstream.
What were her attitudes about the bondage pictures?
Well, her attitudes about the bondage pictures were it was just a job, it was no big deal.
Bettie in no way saw herself as taking a stance for freedom, even though that's what she did.
You know, some people like this stuff.
Didn't matter to her.
But, Mark says, it did matter to others.
Although Klaw had many models, it was his Bettie images that caught the eye of a crusading senator from Tennessee.
NEWS ANNOUNCER: In Washington, Senator Estes Kefauver makes the long-expected announcement that he will be a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1956.
He ran for president, and he decided to go after juvenile delinquency and pornography, to kind of ride that political horse, and it ended up with Bettie Page in his sights.
Irving Klaw was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate hearings in New York in 1955.
He took the fifth amendment.
Bettie was subpoenaed.
She was grilled behind closed doors.
Before the hearing, she said she was not going to testify against Irving Klaw.
She considered none of this pornography.
And she did not view herself as being exploited.
The Kefauver hearings eventually brought an end to Klaw's mail-order business for erotic images.
Bettie's last photo shoot at Klaw's studio was in 1957.
But the Justice Department continued to come after Klaw.
In 1963, he finally struck a deal.
After he was persecuted for these things, a judge said, "I will take away your five-year prison sentence if you destroy all the photographs."
He destroyed his negatives and avoided prison, and Bettie had traded her bikini for a Bible.
She thought she heard the voice of God calling her to come into this church that she happened to be walking by.
She came in and she started crying and said, "I think maybe God doesn't like the fact that I was posing nude."
But by the time I talked to her later in life, she was not ashamed of the nudity.
I think that was an episode where she had a crisis of conscience about it.
Looking closely at several images, we spot a clue.
Here's a Klaw photograph that could be similar to what you have.
The red wall is similar, and it might be the same lamp, but it's something else that catches my attention.
She wears those shoes, those 18-inch high -- Klaw had a specially made pair of 7-inch heels for her.
So those were made especially for her?
Yeah.
So if this is an original Klaw negative, how is it still around today?
Mark thinks if anyone would know, it would be Rick Klaw, Irving's grandson.
Welcome to Movie Star News.
This is a fabulous place.
Since 1939, Movie Star News has been selling Hollywood publicity stills and posters.
Today the store has over 2 million images under its roof.
Now, you have a lot of Irving Klaw pictures here, too, right?
Well, yes and no.
Irving Klaw didn't take any of these pictures.
First of all, he wasn't a photographer.
It's a popular misconception.
He hired photographers to take the pictures.
It was more of like a studio system.
Paula, his sister, took a lot of the pictures.
Rick thinks Paula might have taken our picture.
She's not around to ask, but her son Ira is.
Hi, Ira, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, too.
Have you ever seen this picture before?
Well, I haven't seen it, but it's one of ours.
How do you know it's one of yours?
That duvet is definitely a Klaw duvet.
You know this furniture?
That furniture was from my house.
After we would get a new one, new chair or new lamp, we would bring the old stuff into the studio.
Do you think Paula Klaw took this one?
Oh, I'm positive she took it.
But Ira has another twist for me.
Not all Klaw negatives of Bettie Page were destroyed.
Irving was told to destroy them and he told my mother to destroy them.
And because it was her work and her artistry, she didn't want to kill everything, so she saved some of it.
And it's because she saved some of it that people can see these today.
Ira spots a clue.
We used to sell -- you'd put them in a stereo viewer.
So you could either look at a mountain scene or you could look at Bettie Page in 3D.
Exactly.
Ira thinks that was the original purpose for our image.
But a few details convince him that Claire's negative is a copy someone made of one of the 3D slides.
So somebody probably had that and made a copy negative, or an internegative, from that viewer.
It's not an original lost negative, but Ira does think it's something special.
Well, Claire, I learned a lot about Bettie Page.
I tell Claire that her negative was not a Klaw original.
It was, however, an image that had originally been shot in the Klaw studios by his sister, Paula.
Oh, okay.
He doesn't have the original, but he did have something really fascinating.
Really?
This was taken from the same shoot.
It's a little sharper.
As far as Ira knows, Claire's negative is the only other image that exists from this photo shoot.
It would have been one of the last Klaw shoots, certainly, and we don't have it.
And I've never seen it before.
The original does not exist as far as I know.
It's destroyed.
What makes this so special is that I have never seen this picture, and I have been working here full-time since 1976.
So what you have here is a piece of the Klaw legacy.
And he said this shoot was probably one of the last ones she did before she quit modeling in 1957.
It's kind of like an end of a legacy.
Ira also showed me something truly surprising.
This is Irving's suitcase.
It still has his address from when he lived in Brooklyn, Homecrest Avenue.
And this hasn't been opened since the '80s.
But for some reason, I've taken a liking to you.
We have some of the props that Bettie used.
Oh, my God.
IRA: Let's see what we have, I don't know.
Here's some of the shoes.
The shoes.
He had those custom-made in Italy.
Look at that.
Ira, this is the shoe she's wearing in this picture.
Look at that little scallop on the side.
So how do you like that?
Well, it's a nice piece of history, and a different piece of history.
It's definitely something I'll keep for a long time.
In 1957, just two years after Bettie Page and Irving Klaw testified at the Kefauver hearings, the Supreme Court crafted its first legal definition of obscenity.
Ruling on the erotic journal American Aphrodite in Roth v. the United States, they defined obscenity as content that, "using community standards, appeals to prurient interest and which is utterly without redeeming social importance."
Then, as today, attempts to rule on obscenity remain difficult, as summed up by former justice Potter Stewart in 1964, who wrote, "I know it when I see it."
EDUARDO: And now, our final story.
I'm Chuck Amrhein.
I live in Glendale, California.
Back in 1978, my three sons and I hiked our way up to the Hollywood sign.
I was an engineer.
I was always fascinated by the fact that they could build something like that.
I walked down the hill a little bit, and there was some trash or debris in the ravine there.
I saw this metal piece about two feet long laying there in the dirt.
I grabbed it and pulled it up, and it came up quite easily, but it was six feet tall, not two feet.
And that's when it all hit me.
I realized this could be one of a kind.
I'm wondering, do I really have a piece of the original Hollywood sign here?
I'm Eduardo Pagán, and I've long been fascinated with Los Angeles and spent quite a bit of time researching and writing about the city's social history.
There's probably nothing more distinctive than that Hollywood sign.
Overlooking the American film industry, this L.A. fixture has long symbolized the glamour and fame that entices millions to Hollywood.
Having an original piece would be very cool indeed.
Chuck tells me that when he first hiked up there, the sign was not in the pristine condition that it's in today.
Back in 1978, it was in terrible disarray; it was falling apart.
You're absolutely right.
That is an eyesore.
The second letter of the O, the top had blown off, and it looked like a U.
Surprisingly, there was very little debris on the ground.
But he did find something more than 100 feet beyond the letter D. And laying in the dirt there was this piece of metal.
This is a significant distance away from the sign itself.
Yes, I was looking for a smaller piece, quite honestly.
It's the only piece I could find up there.
Okay.
About two months after we were up there, the sign was demolished and a new sign was built, which means that all those letters in the original sign, now the whole thing is gone.
So this may be a one-of-a-kind piece then.
That's what I'm thinking.
Let me play devil's advocate for just a moment.
How do you know this isn't just some random piece of junk that was just dumped up there?
The short answer is I don't.
Okay.
I've thought about that for 34 years, and if that's the case, I'll probably let go of it.
Okay.
If this were a piece from the face of one of the letters, I would expect it to be flat and thin.
I suppose this could be part of the sign's scaffolding.
But there are these obvious sockets.
There's threading in there.
They certainly look like there could have been light bulbs that were screwed in here at one time.
But I really don't see any kind of serial number or any other kind of machining marks that I might be able to look up to help me figure out who made this thing and for what.
The Hollywood sign behind me originally read "Hollywoodland."
That sign first went up in 1923.
Los Angeles was a boom town, and real estate was at a premium.
Hollywood is synonymous with the movie industry, but it hadn't always been that way.
It was founded in 1887 as a refuge from the sin and vice of Los Angeles.
City ordinances outlawed saloons and gambling houses, pool halls, camping, and even movie theaters.
But by the early 1920s, real estate developers saw mountains of money to be made in Hollywood's open hills.
Harry Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, backed one of these developments, turning a virgin subsection into an exclusive community called Hollywoodland.
Now, the whole idea for the sign came from one of his marketing people, John Roche.
As he drew a sketch of the Hollywoodland development, almost absentmindedly, he simply wrote the words "Hollywoodland" on the hills.
Now, when Chandler saw this, he loved the idea and wanted to see if in fact it was possible to put the big letters of Hollywoodland up on the hills.
It was possible, but cost $21,000, more than a quarter of a million today, to raise thirteen 50-foot-tall letters above the hillside.
And this is interesting.
To ensure it's visible at all hours, Chandler orders the 13 letters be illuminated every night by 4,000 20-watt light bulbs.
Is Chuck's piece a section of this lighting?
So let's see what we've got here.
This is an image from 1923 when the D just went up.
The face of each letter is assembled from flat sheets of roofing tin three feet long and nine feet tall.
I see holes that were punched in the tin to allow wind to pass through, but I don't see any sections that look like regularly spaced light sockets.
I'm going to check the back of the sign as well, but these pipes are much smaller than this very unique piece of metal, and there's certainly nothing that looks like they've got light sockets that are planted into them.
I was feeling pretty confident that I had a piece of the sign's lighting rig.
I'm on my way to the actual Hollywood sign.
I've been told to come prepared for an arduous 30-minute hike up a steep incline.
Almost since its creation, the public's fascination with the sign has made it a magnet for sightseers, vandals, and for occasional tragedy.
In 1932, a young actress, Peg Entwistle, reportedly leapt to her death from the sign.
Today, the sign is protected by a multi-camera CCTV surveillance system, microwave-triggered motion detectors, and a bilingual audio warning system.
This is a high-security area, and it's restricted access.
So I'm going to meet Chris Baumgart.
Chris is the chairman of the sign's board of trustees.
I want to run Chuck's story by him.
Welcome to the security cage for the Hollywood sign.
There you go, Hollywood.
This is an amazing view.
Basically, if you look where I'm pointing, that was Hollywoodland.
Those are the lots they were trying to sell.
That is awfully steep land over there.
I just can't imagine -- How they got up here?
Yeah, how they built it into the side.
There was no road up here, so what they had to do is come up this razorback the hard way with laborers and carry everything up.
For 60 days, mule teams lugged telephone poles up the hillside and mostly Mexican workers labored on the steep terrain.
Can we actually get down by the sign?
Let me take you down to the H. How likely is it that old pieces would have been lying about?
Oh, absolutely possible.
Chris explains that the sign was only built to last about a year, and 23 years later, it was little more than an eyesore.
1949 was the critical moment in the sign's life.
Residents were screaming, "Hey, city, it's just trash.
It's a real estate billboard.
It's all done and over with long ago.
Get it off the hill."
But Chris says that, like the sign itself, by the late 1940s, the film industry was also in decline.
Movies were facing stiff competition from the upstart TV business.
Gah.
With film jobs disappearing, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce saw a way for the sign to help reassure the local film industry.
The sign served its job selling real estate.
Now let's have it being a beacon of the entertainment industry.
And they dropped off the last four letters, L-A-N-D.
So now it says Hollywood, and the message was, hey, film industry, your jobs are safe, we love you, please don't leave.
If the sign was fixed in 1949, could Chuck really have found a piece of the original almost 30 years later?
Chris says it's possible because the '49 work was just a repair, not a reconstruction, and old and new debris littered the site.
The sign continued to suffer from weather, earthquake, whatever.
And so you get into 1960, it's falling apart.
It wasn't until 1978 when they said, "Look, just tear it down, start over again, do it right, and you won't have to be back here every year trying to fix it."
"Well, if we're going to replace it, that's going to be a lot of money.
How are we going to do that?"
So Hugh Hefner stepped in and said, "Party at the Playboy Mansion."
Hef threw a fundraising party, auctioning off each letter for nearly $28,000.
So you had a group of celebrities who went in there and said, I'll buy, in essence, a letter.
Gene Autry sponsored the second L. Andy Williams took the W. Rocker Alice Cooper dedicated the first O in "wood" to Groucho Marx.
And Hef reserved the Y for himself.
In August 1978, the sign was torn down and rebuilt from scratch.
Chris suggested the reason I couldn't see any lighting rig in construction photos of the first sign might be because lights were among the last pieces added.
They'd gotten to the point where the L and the A in Hollywoodland was just getting completed and the workers started carrying up pieces to go along the outside perimeter of each letter.
These would later flash, Holly...wood...land.
If I show this to you, do you think you'd be able to take a look at it and tell me one way or the other whether it's legitimate or not?
Oh, absolutely.
In certain pieces of the sign, it's real clear whether it was from the 1923 construction or not.
Well, Chris, this was the piece of artifact that I was telling you about.
This is very intriguing.
I think I have something that'll help complete the circle for you.
Okay, great.
- Hang on one minute.
- Okay.
Well, Chuck, I've got to tell you, it has been one fascinating journey.
I tell him how I struggled to find photos showing anything like his piece of metal.
There is just really nothing that matches up with this particular artifact, no matter where you looked on it.
I see, appreciate the try.
But I found something else that I think you'll find interesting.
That looks very familiar.
Well, Eduardo, these are not quite as pretty as yours, but these are authenticated pieces of the front of the original 1923 Hollywood sign.
What do you think?
These light sockets were eight inches apart.
Guess how long these are?
- Eight inches.
- Eight inches, right.
You know what, I think we've got a match.
I think you do.
So I would say what you have here is a piece of the truly original 1923 Hollywood sign.
[ chuckling ] All these years, and my suspicion's confirmed.
That's right.
So, are you glad you carried it down the hill?
Oh, absolutely.
This is a very personal thing to me, and this is great.
This is great.
ELVIS COSTELLO: ♪ Watching' the detectives ♪ ♪ It's just like watchin' the detectives ♪
