The most photographed woman of the 1950’s died yesterday at the age of 85.
It’s been almost ten years since I first became (slightly) obsessed with pinup queen Bettie Page. True, the first time I saw images of her, I was “intrigued,” but I was a high school student (1992) and had plenty of other diversions to keep my starved, perverted brain occupied. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I “rediscovered” Page and began the critical inquiry that became what still stands as my most substantial piece of writing.
In 2001 I was—and I can say this with some certainty—one of (if not the) foremost scholars on Bettie Page. I knew everything there was to know about the pinup queen, and I had lots of educated opinions about her and her work to boot. While conducting my research, however, I became increasingly cynical about the Bettie Page subculture (mania) that began in the eighties and culminated with the release of Mary Harron’s biopic The Notorious Bettie Page. At first, I was happy to drone on about Page and her sordid life. But the more time she spent in the postmodern spotlight, the more I felt myself turning away. I stopped trolling ebay for memorabilia. I stopped searching for articles and news of Bettie’s whereabouts. I even missed the boat when Harron started production on her film.
I did get to see the film on the big screen, though, and I can say that, for an initiate, the film is a excellent place to start. It strikes a nice balance of the defining moments of Bettie’s life, though it does gloss over some of the important bits.
Anyway, all of this is to say that I cherish the time I spent with Bettie (never having met her, sadly), even though the last few years have taken me away from her. I will also say that, in this time of mourning, looking back over my writings, I am still proud of what I’ve done—and I still count Bettie as one of the great women in my life. Much will be written in the next few days, weeks, about the voluptuous, smart but ideologically trapped woman, but I doubt any of it will truly capture the enigma that was the queen of curves.
In remembrance of her passing, I’d like to share with you some excerpts from my masters’ thesis—primarily bits from my concluding chapter. My work, titled “‘The Girl Who Made Good Being Bad’: Bettie Page and American Postwar Ideology,” made a sweeping journey through Bettie’s life and matched it up with prevailing fifties cultural attitudes. I looked at Bettie’s photographs (pinups, cheesecake, and amateur camera club stills) and film loops (dancing and spanking) and connected them with postwar notions of sex and femininity.
You can find out the basics of Bettie’s life elsewhere. Simply Google “Bettie Page” and you’ll find a wealth of information that will be more or less accurate. I’ll also link you to an article by Richard Corliss that I’ve skimmed but not fully read (over on Time magazine’s website) Bondage Babe Bettie Page Dies at 85.
Time also has a nice sampling of images. The one I’ve included here, though, is my favorite. It represents everything that Bettie Page was—as artist Jim Silke has noted: curves, curves, curves…
Where It Began
I first stumbled onto fifties pin-up legend Bettie Page in the December 1992 issue of Playboy magazine. Her image stood out from the other glossy, air-brushed images; she was beautiful, with a voluptuous figure, black hair with sharp bangs and a bright, inviting smile. In the article accompanying the pictures, entitled “The Betty Boom,” comedian Buck Henry claims that Bettie’s smile “could break your heart” (122). But what intrigued me more than her looks was their ability to evoke nostalgia for an era I was born thirty years too late to experience. These images exuded a wholesomeness deeply rooted in a past American culture.
That sense of nostalgia was misleading, though.
Bettie Page was one of the most photographed models of the fifties, posing in everything from bathing suits to lingerie to nothing at all—and even bound, gagged and whipped in bondage photos. As I uncovered a wealth of images and film looks, I became somewhat obsessed with Bettie Page and how it was that 1950s culture, which I had always assumed was ultra-conservative, could produce sexually transgressive material that ranged from funny to bizarre to shocking. As I went searching for the answer to this puzzling question, I became increasingly cognizant of the inherent instabilities of postwar American culture and Bettie Page’s place in it.
The Problem With Revival
The Bettie Page revival can loosely be shuffled into the period between the early 1980s and mid- to late 1990s—over twenty years after Bettie Page disappeared, never to be photographed again. The “Betty Boom” culminated with the publication of several biographies, authorized and unauthorized, memoirs, and the recovery and reprinting of Bettie Page artifacts in The Betty Pages and Private Peeks. Her image, and subsequent style, infiltrated the pop scene not only through comics, art and written texts, but through fashion design as well. And her new fan base was not only decades younger than Miss Page, but included both men and women. Fashion photographer Ellen von Unwerth claims that Bettie’s photos are “so charming that everybody—women and men—likes them” (Essex and Swanson 270).
The revival, which was sparked first by artists like Robert Blue and Olivia, exploded with the emergence of Dave Stevens’s comic book, The Rocketeer. The comic book was a combination of “all his boyhood fantasies: nostalgia for a lost era, heroes, adventure, a man with a rocket who could fly—and a raven-haired girl named Bettie” (Essex and Swanson 249).
Stevens’s was one of the new admirers of Bettie Page—a group of loyal fans who were not old enough to remember the heyday of the model, who were either too young to purchase the men’s magazines that specialized in ‘cheesecake,’ or were not even born yet. Like all her new fans, Stevens did find something intriguing about Miss Page. In her authorized biography, Stevens’s claims that “there’s a timeless quality about her that gives her images a real currency even though they were shot some forty years ago” (250).
Stevens ordered some of Bettie’s film loops in the late seventies and began holding impromptu parties for his friends, showing his collection of loops with “a Cab Calloway soundtrack—the perfect jazz accompaniment to Bettie’s ‘wiggling.’” (249). The comic book artist’s obsession culminated with the production of a comic book devoted to Bettie Page: Bettie Page Comics. And in 1992, when Miss Page resurfaced after disappearing from the modeling scene in 1957, Stevens was one of the select few allowed into the aged queen’s presence (250-51).
Although her images have caused a certain amount of liberated dialogue about the variety of sex and redefinitions of deviance, Bettie Page was not a sexual pioneer. In fact, her appeal now is as dichotomous as it was in the fifties. On one side are men and women like Shalom Harlow, who are attracted to Bettie as a powerful, sexual liberator and dominatrix. Jim Silke suggests that “Bettie’s story is not the tale of an exploited woman. She was no victim. What you’re looking at is a proud, independent woman who went against the grain of her time, ignored the mockery and degrading rejection of polite society and remained true to herself” (51).
Or as Essex and Swanson conclude, “Bettie’s authenticity allowed her to transcend her time and make the transition from postwar pin-up girl to a modern symbol of female sexual independence. Modeling in the era of tease, she was solely an object of male desire. Her fans were exclusively men in search of a sexual fantasy—a forbidden sexual fantasy at that.” But, they further add, “today she is embraced by women as well as men” and Bettie “has become an enduring symbol of female independence and genuineness” (285). This praise of Bettie’s independence is typical of an anachronistic mindset and with the weight of my arguments here, seems if not dangerous, particularly limiting.
The other side of Bettie Page’s current appeal is far more dangerous, however.
If modern women and men find Bettie’s images liberating, neglecting the peculiar circumstances of postwar ideology, then I cannot claim that this is a bad thing. In fact, I applaud any attempts to reconstitute sexualized women in a positive, non-objectified way. But unfortunately, this is not the typical case.
The other faction of modern Bettie devotees—and I would imagine, the larger grouping—are drawn to her images in search of a nostalgic, throwback to a passive or contained femininity. Journalist Willie Morris claims that Bettie’s “body was of the Fifties, my fifties, full and opulent as the replenishing epoch itself, not the taut, slender, athletic silhouette of the Nineties models nor of today’s high-ballasted strippers with the silicone aspect” (68). Bettie Page’s voluptuous curves and wholesome smile are equated with the idyllic, wholesome quality of fifties media that David Halberstam notes (in The Fifties) as a reason for feelings of nostalgia. Bettie’s smile and curves are seductive in an era marked by post-feminist backlash. This backlash is frightening because it points to a cyclical repeating of history. Betty Friedan attributed the invention of the feminine mystique to a fear of ‘masculine’ women, women who posed a threat to puritanical views of women and their subservience to men. That fear manifested in placing a greater emphasis on female biology and sexuality—which, in turn, confined the definition of femininity and allowed for sexual objectification and the commodification of women as sex objects. Nostalgia, then, betrays similar fears and desires to return to this definition of femininity.
In the wake of feminism, American men in the late twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, have turned away from the supposed danger posed by redefining gender—a reaction that mirrors the creation of the feminine mystique. Turned off by militant feminism, career women, and even seemingly androgynous images of models, these men have found solace in postwar pinups like Bettie Page. But with a note of concern and warning, I must point to Friedan’s ironic insistence that men in the fifties got what they asked for and were not happy with it once they had it. By denying women the right to become individuals and locking them up in the home, the feminine mystique created mass sexual dysfunction. By denying the positive effects of feminism, and swimming in nostalgia, modern men are opening themselves to a similar outcome.
It is because of this repetition of history that I reserve particularly harsh criticism for Playboy. Under the guise of sexual revolution, Playboy made it possible to continue selling postwar femininity well into the latter half of the twentieth century. By using Marilyn Monroe to define the Playboy female aesthetic, Hugh Hefner solidified the type, the girl next door, and neatly packaged and set the standard for a legitimate female sex object. And in the decades that followed—with the rise of Playboy—women became subjected to that standard, even to the point of continued dysfunction. It would be impossible to count the number of women who have flipped through the pages of Hefner’s magazine—like postwar women who subscribed to the ideals in women’s magazines—and have been seduced by those images. The abundance of breast implants and plastic surgery, the scores of women searching for identity through the use of their bodies, the wannabe starlets, simply reinforce a continued preoccupation with the role of female sex object.
And while Hefner certainly did not invent the sex object, he capitalized on and successfully commodified female sex objects and helped confine women to the objectified, ‘female role’ that he proposed to destroy.
In the end, the difference between Bettie Page and the models that pack modern men’s magazines—Playboy included—is the very authenticity or ‘genuineness’ that Essex and Swanson claim is what makes her image enduring. Again, men disenchanted by the androgynous, post-feminist woman, or the overtly constructed, highly sexualized Playboy model or porn star, find a ‘genuineness’ in Bettie Page’s images that they perceive unavailable for purchase in America’s sex market. Bettie’s breasts are real, her curves are real, and her wholesome smile—abundantly documented in countless accounts—is real. While to some Bettie Page stands out as a ‘proud and independent woman,’ a beacon for powerful sexuality, to others she is a lost, true model of femininity that desperately needs to be recovered.
Both views, however, neglect to fully see Bettie Page, projecting their own needs and desires onto images that are decades old. Bettie Page was not liberated by her modeling, she was contained by it. And as a product of fifties femininity, her images do not represent a ‘true’ model of femininity, but rather the female role as defined by the feminine mystique.
The countless surviving images of Bettie Page continue to offer conflicting sexual discourse, but the real Bettie Page is gone.
And with that, I’ll end: I hope Bettie has found the peace she truly deserves.
She will be missed but not forgotten.
SOURCES
Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI Publishing, 1998.
Essex, Karen and James L. Swanson. Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend. Los Angeles: General Publishing Group, 1998.
Foster, Richard. The Real Bettie Page: The Truth About The Queen of the Pinups. Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1999.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Laurel, 1983.
Friedman, David F. A Youth in Babylon : Confessions of a Trash-Film King. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1990.
Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993.
Henry, Buck. “The Betty Boom.” Playboy December 1992: 122+.
Morris, Willie. “Women We Love: The Wild One.” Esquire August 1994: 68-9.
Schaefer, Eric. “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Silke, Jim. Bettie Page: Queen of Hearts. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books, 1995.
Steinem, Gloria. Marilyn. New York: MJF Books, 1986.
Weyr, Thomas. Reaching for Paradise: The Playboy Vision of America. New York: Times Books, 1978.
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