Las Vegas Weekly

December 8, 2008 · 5:57 PM

Get well greetings for Toni Braxton and Bettie Page

By Robin Leach

Toni Braxton rehearses with Alec Mazo for Dancing With the Stars.

Photo: ABC-TV

When hometown headlining singer Toni Braxton bowed out of the finale of Dancing With the Stars last month, we were led to believe that her old heart-muscle wall problems had resurfaced. However, it turns out that she underwent surgery for a more personal reason when doctors discovered a lump in her breast. Incredibly, she discovered the lump after she’d started dancing on the ABC show, and doctors wanted her to quit instantly.

Instead, she elected to wait until she was eliminated, and then underwent a procedure. We’re thrilled to report that it was benign, and although she didn’t recover sufficiently to appear in the final show of Season 7 won by Brooke Burke, she will be able to go out on tour with the celebrities and professional dancers and is due to make a hometown stop here in The Orleans Arena on Dec. 30. Vegas DeLuxe extends best wishes for Toni’s speedy and continued recovery back to full health.

In the meantime, infamous pin-up princess Bettie Page suffered a heart attack at age 85 last week and is now in a hospital and listed as critically ill. Her magazine photos in suggestive lingerie and bikinis were a worldwide phenomenon and started the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Bettie was a Hugh Hefner favorite in his Playboy magazine, and she even has a fashion store here in Planet Hollywood’s Miracle Mile named in her honor and carrying her sexy stockings and underwear!

Although seen worldwide, she lived in an era in which she never collected royalties on her thousands of photos -- and she wound up in impoverished circumstances. When I started Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous, she’d basically vanished, and it took me three months to track her down to a trailer park where she lived alone anonymously.

At first she said she would only do an interview with me without cameras. She only wanted to be remembered for how she looked as a glamorous, slim, beautiful brunette decades earlier. She told me she’d put on a lot of weight and didn’t want to be seen or remembered that way. We ran the taped conversation over a montage of her photos, and it led not only to a reunion with her long-lost attorney brother, but we also got Bettie thousands of dollars in royalty payments from her pinup image that had been plastered on everything from coffee cups to panties!

It turned out to be enough to change her lifestyle and give her worry-free comfort in her older age. She even went on a diet, and Hefner had his Playboy staff do a follow-up story to our TV interview -- and he even invited her as guest of honor one night at the Mansion along with me.

She is without doubt one of the most iconic women of the 20th century. Parties with Bettie Page look-alikes are still a regular monthly feature of the nightlife world both here in Las Vegas and elsewhere across America.

We wish her well and hope that she has a fast and successful recovery.

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