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Bettie Page,
1950′s pinup model,
is dead at 85
International Herald Tribune
December 12th, 2008
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Bettie Page,
the 1950s secretary-turned-model
whose controverisal photographs
in skimpy attire or none at all
helped set the stage for the
1960s sexual revolution,
died Thursday.
She was 85.
.
Page suffered a heart attack
last week in Los Angeles and
never regained consciousness,
her agent Mark Roesler said.
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Before the heart attack,
Page had been hospitalized
for three weeks with pneumonia.
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“She captured the imagination of a
generation of men and women with
her free spirit and unabashed
sensuality,”
Roesler said.
“She is the embodiment of beauty.”
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Page, who was also known as Betty,
attracted national attention with
magazine photographs of her sensuous
figure in bikinis and see-through lingerie
that were quickly tacked up on walls
in military barracks, garages
and elsewhere,
where they remained for years.
___
Her photos included a centerfold
in the January 1955 issue of then-fledgling
Playboy magazine, as well as
controversial sadomasochistic poses.
.
The latter helped contribute to her
mysterious disappearance from
the public eye,
which lasted decades and included
years during which she battled
mental illness and became a
born-again Christian.
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After resurfacing in the 1990s,
she occasionally granted interviews
but refused to allow her
picture to be taken.
.
“I don’t want to be
photographed in my old age,”
she told an interviewer in 1998.
“I feel the same way with old movie stars. …
It makes me sad.
We want to remember them
when they were young.”
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The 21st century indeed had people
remembering her just as she was.
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She became the subject of songs,
biographies, Web sites, comic books,
movies and documentaries.
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A new generation of fans bought
thousands of copies of her photos,
and some feminists hailed her as a
pioneer of women’s liberation.
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Gretchen Mol portrayed her in 2005′s
“The Notorious Bettie Page”
and Paige Richards had the role in 2004′s
“Bettie Page: Dark Angel.”
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Page herself took part in
the 1998 documentary
“Betty Page: Pinup Queen.”
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Her career began one day in October
1950 when she took a respite from her
job as a secretary in a New York office
for a walk along the beach at Coney Island.
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An amateur photographer named
Jerry Tibbs admired the 27-year-old’s firm,
curvy body and asked her to pose.
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Looking back on the career that followed,
she told Playboy in 1998,
“I never thought it was shameful.
I felt normal.
.
It’s just that it was much better than
pounding a typewriter eight hours a day,
which gets monotonous.”
Nudity didn’t bother her,
she said, explaining:
“God approves of nudity.
.
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,
they were naked as jaybirds.”
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In 1951, Page fell under the influence
of a photographer and his sister
who specialized in S&M.
They cut her hair into the dark bangs
that became her signature and posed
her in spiked heels and little else.
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She was photographed with
a whip in her hand,
and in one session she was
spread-eagled between two trees,
her feet dangling.
“I thought my arms and legs
would come out of their sockets,”
she said later.
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Moralists denounced the
photos as perversion,
and Sen. Estes Kefauver
of Tennessee, Page’s home state,
launched a congressional investigation.
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Page quickly retreated from public view,
later saying she was hounded by
federal agents who waved her
nude photos in her face.
She also said she believed that,
at age 34, her days as
“the girl with the perfect figure”
were nearly over.
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She moved to Florida in 1957
and married a much younger man,
as an early marriage to her high
school sweetheart had ended in divorce.
Her second marriage also failed,
as did a third, and she suffered
a nervous breakdown.
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In 1959, she was lying on a sea wall
in Key West when she saw a church
with a white neon cross on top.
She walked inside and became
a born-again Christian.
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After attending Bible school,
she wanted to serve as a missionary
but was turned down because she
had been divorced.
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Instead, she worked full-time
for evangelist Billy Graham’s ministry.
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A move to Southern California in
1979 brought more troubles.
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She was arrested after an altercation
with her landlady, and doctors who
examined her determined she had
acute schizophrenia.
She spent 20 months in a state
mental hospital in San Bernardino.
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A fight with another landlord
resulted in her arrest,
but she was found not guilty
because of insanity.
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She was placed under state
supervision for eight years.
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Born April 22, 1923,
in Nashville, Tenn.,
Page said she grew up in a
family so poor
“we were lucky to get an orange
in our Christmas stockings.”
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The family included three
boys and three girls,
and Page said her father
molested all of the girls.
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After the Pages moved to Houston,
her father decided to return to
Tennessee and stole a police car
for the trip.
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He was sent to prison,
and for a time Betty
lived in an orphanage.
In her teens she acted in
high school plays,
going on to study drama in
New York and win a screen test
from 20th Century Fox before her
modeling career took off.
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