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Friday, December 12. 2008

Dark Angel

Bettie Page died today in Los Angeles. She suffered a heart attack last week and never regained consciousness. She was 85.

Hard to say if many people know who Bettie Page is and what she means to our society. For men who grew up in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, Bettie had a huge impact, at least for some of us.

She was born dirt poor in Tennessee, April 22, 1923 and died, December 11, 2008, the most famous American sex symbol of all time. Her web site logs 20,000,000 hits per month

Obviously, there is a cult of Bettie fans of all ages, due mainly to a resurgence of her work in the early 1980’s that has carried on until today. Her photos circulate now with ease, thanks to the Internet, and books and DVD’s are best sellers. For the fans, Bettie Page was the embodiment of liberation, feminist, sexual and intellectual.

Hers is a famous story and there’s nothing new to add. She wanted to be an actress and after getting her Bachelor’s Degree in education (Bettie was the Salutatorian of her high school class), she moved to New York City to pursue that career, supporting herself as a secretary. Bettie actually appeared in several plays Off-Broadway and in some feature films, but while walking on the beach at Coney Island in 1950, a policeman and amateur photographer saw her and asked Bettie to pose; she did and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.

The icon, known in the cult and fetish community as the Dark Angel, went on to appear nude and semi-nude in thousands of photographs and movies through the network of somewhat secret “camera clubs” of the 1940’s and ‘50’s that were designed to circumvent the laws against distributing photos considered “obscene.”

Even by today’s standards, some of Bettie’s photos and videos would be considered shocking; she was the first famous bondage and SM model and really brought that fetish out into the public eye, becoming the Queen of Bondage.

No longer a secretary, Bettie Page was in demand as her fame grew in the camera club underground. She had agents of sorts, a photography couple, brother and sister Irving and Paula Claw, who arranged many camera club events.

A camera club, by this mid 20th Century definition, was a group of (usually) men who paid dues to have women model in swimsuits, lingerie and nude. Someone, like the Claws, would make the arrangements to find the model and a home or other location where the club members could take photos and even movies.

The Claws were also into bondage and Bettie took the step into that genre. It was for her bondage photos that Bettie Page came under fire from the federal government, in the form of Tennessee Senator C. Estes Kefauver. In 1955 Kefauver started his hearings into pornography and the magazines and companies that produced it, spurred by a rigid, religious morality that was becoming out of step with modern culture. As the most famous pinup model and bondage model, Bettie was subpoenaed to appear, but in the end did not testify.

For all the controversy, for all her troubles in life — Bettie was sexually abused by her father, was in abusive marriages, kidnapped and gang-raped by neighbors in her hometown, diagnosed as being schizophrenic, institutionalized twice for several years total and even became a born again Christian working with the Billy Graham Ministries — Bettie never apologized for her work nor blamed any of the problems on that occupation. She was in fact proud of it until she died.

In January 1955 she was Playboy’s Playmate of the Month. That’s pretty much how I came to know of her. Bettie was the model for many of Alberto Vargas’s iconic drawings for the magazine, the “Vargas Girl,” often as sexy as the Playmates themselves.
 Hugh M. Hefner said of Bettie, “She became, in time, an American icon, her winning smile and effervescent personality apparent in every pose.”

Inquisitive, I had to know if she was a real model or just a figment of the artist’s imagination. Back then we didn’t have home computers, let alone the Internet, so trying to find out who the woman was took some effort. And luck. When a picture of Bettie surfaced, I immediately put two-and-two together — one never forgets the face and figure of Bettie Page.

In the 1980’s a cult sprung up, started by fans and young people, including many gay men aroused by her campy bondage portfolio, and the effort was on to find out whatever happened to America’s one time favorite pinup girl. Her fame continued to grow and with the help of attorneys she was able to rise out of penniless poverty and begin collecting royalties from all the people making money from her images.

Three years ago a mainstream film about her life were released, The Notorious Bettie Page, directed by Mary Harron and starring Gretchen Moll as Bettie, raising Bettie’s profile further. It was mostly a sympathetic view of Bettie, and that’s really how her fans feel about The Queen of Bondage: sympathetic.

She gave few interviews and even refused to be photographed in older age, wishing instead that everyone remember her when she was Bettie Page: Sex Symbol.

Here’s a film of Bettie Page, found on YouTube.

Posted by Tim Forkes in Celebrity at 02:47 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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