Bettie Page: Dream girl unlaced
She had style. She had nerve. She had the most captivating and poetic of beauties. And she never took a bad picture.
Bettie Mae Page was born in Nashville, in 1923. Like so many girls fate locates in unexceptional surroundings, she imagined a more glamorous life. Hollywood. Though she never realized that dream, Bettie held it tight through adult years.
She had from an early age turned heads, attracting without intent such attentions as nature affords leggy bombshells. Bettie relocated to New York City in 1951, and soon earned favor as a pin up tease. Her potent blending of girl-next-door loveliness with the voluptuous aspects of a bad girl fed the fortunes of such fine girlie newsstand imprints as Eyeful, Bold, and Chicks and Chuckles.
Quite popular with both lensmen and readers, she reached professional acme in the mid-50s. Her saucy 1955 Playboy pull-out, in which she kneels beside a Christmas tree while winking broadly at her anonymous adorers, is now legendary.
In the same moment, Bettie was a favorite among New York's camera clubs. Now mostly forgotten cultural relics, these underground associations often convened in make-shift apartment studios. Amateur shutterbugs (some of whom doubtless hefted filmless cameras, intent only on exploiting the opportunity to ogle fleshly charms unclad) were happy to finance these fun sessions.
To the gratitude of contemporary collectors of all-things-Bettie, myself in that number, many of these scarlet photos have since emerged from private libraries.
Even were these her only resume credits, Bettie would be savored as a singularly stunning lass. But enduring notoriety became hers thanks to Irving Klaw.
While he usually sold silver screen stars' posed shots, Irving did meet another market's needs. Bettie certainly wasn't the only model to endeavor in posing for Klaw's 'specialty' photos, which sold briskly from under newsstand counters and as brown-paper wrapped, mail-ordered b/w treats. But wickedly delicious leathers, rope-and-pulley networks, whips and laced knee boots with 6-inch, spiked heels were entirely outside the polite cultural mainstream.
While these daring wares brought Movie Star News and Bettie abundant fan favor, they also lured governmental bloodhounds.
The year was 1955. Tennessee Democrat Senator Estes Kefauver was an opportunistic political scold that on occasion donned coonskin caps to pretend at commonness. He had previously courted public applause by asserting a causal link between comic books and juvenile delinquency. And he sensed similar headline potential in hearings on 'obscenity.'
Kefauver's silly circus of the straight-laced made a stop in New York City. And on May 24, Irving Klaw was summoned to appear before grim, office-holding inquisitors at the U.S. courthouse on Foley Square.
The deck was stacked to Klaw's disadvantage. Kefauver's subcommittee had already branded the Movie Star News proprietor "one of the largest distributors of obscene, lewd, and fetish photographs throughout the country by mail." Considerable condemnation, for a man who'd never been charged with a crime, much less convicted of one.
Bettie, too, was called to testify. She was, after all, the magnetically marvelous star of many popular Movie Star News photos. And also of that small company's mail-order film loops, as well as of three full-length burlesque films (one of which also featured baggy-pants one-liners from Joe E. Ross, later of Car 54, "Ooh! Ooh!" television fame.)
A pair of subcommittee representatives turned up on Bettie's doorstep one day. They hoped to intimidate her into testifying against her employer. Exuding menace, the two stressed their intention to subpoena her.
A shaken Bettie duly appeared at Foley Square. But accounts differ as to whether she ultimately testified.
After the finger-wagging sideshow, Klaw was legally untouched but damaged professionally. Distributors and film processing labs with whom he'd worked previously were no longer interested in doing business with him.
He destroyed numerous prints and negatives, including ones of Bettie. Paradise lost.
For her part, an embittered Bettie turned her back to New York City. She relocated to Florida, in the hope that the geographical change might reinvigorate her career. Kefauver's stunt hadn't completely killed her professional fortunes, but it did hasten her modeling's third act.
She continued cheesecake posing for another two years. And her photos from this period, taken by erstwhile pin up Bunny Yeager, do number among her finest. Yeager's assorted color and b/w beach, amusement park, and boudoir shots present a fresh and vibrant Bettie in an aspect range including fun-loving and steamily sultry.
And then it ended. Bettie withdrew from pin up celebrity.
Ask most people to name a 1950s cultural benchmark and they'll probably cite the revolutionary birth of Rock'n'Roll. Perhaps the growth of television. Maybe McCarthyism, or the bomb hysteria that led to fallout shelters and second graders ducking under schoolroom walnut desks.
Bettie's photo work and her showdown with clucking moralists, though, also are worth remark. And her impact has effects, still.
Recent decades have seen further appreciation for the statuesque lovely from Tennessee. A new generation of admirers found her a toothsome distraction meriting their full consideration -- something their fathers could have instructed from experience.
Vintage snapshots and 16mm loops, once stashed away from the sunshine, were repackaged in contemporary technologies and rushed to eager customers. Bettie's story was reimagined in books and comics. Fan clubs were initiated.
Her one-of-a-kind looks were reproduced on t-shirts, poster art, and CD cover graphics. Numerous freshly-crafted songs swooned over her. Innumerable Rockabilly gals of contemporary fascination emulate her bangs, naughty kitten attire, and mesmeric style that locked generations of bird-dogs into blissful bondage.
And in 2005, Hollywood produced The Notorious Bettie Page, featuring Gretchen Mol in the titular role.
Bettie Page, the once-taboo, leather-and-lace southern belle in whose sublime aspect light and dark met and became one and were good, offers a time-defying example worthy of modern lovers of retro glamour and wildcat sex appeal.
Besides, who the hell even remembers Estes Kefauver?
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