The iconic pin-up model Bettie Page has died at age 85, after reportedly slipping into a coma following a heart attack. As an aspiring actress living in New York in the 1950s, Page attracted the eye of an amateur shutterbug and off-duty cop named Jerry Tibbs, who compiled the shots that made up her first modeling portfolio. She soon became a popular subject at "camera clubs" and in the pages of low-rent cheesecake magazines. She became best-known for the photo sessions and short films she did for Irving Klaw, a photographer who might have been named by Charles Dickens who ran a mail-order business peddling pin-up material that was largely pitched to the underground fetish market, including bondage enthusiasts. Page's most memorable work was probably shot by the model turned photographer Bunny Yeager, who photographed Page, looking tanned and happy, on the beaches of Boca Raton and, at a Florida wildlife park, wearing the leopard skin bikini that was to become to Page's image what black tie and tails was to Fred Astaire's. It was Yeager who brought Page to the attention of Hugh Hefner, resulting in her appearing as Playboy's centerfold for the issue of January 1955. She also made a few TV appearances and performed in some off-Broadway plays before abandoning New York, modeling, and show business in the late 1950s. She was in her mid-thirties, still beautiful but a ripening age for a pin-up girl, and reportedly felt moved to start a new life in the wake of a religious conversion.
Her break with her past coincided with the Senate hearings, led by Estes Kefauver, one of the leading busybodies of his day, that scared the bejesus out of the smut business and effectively shut down Irving Klaw's operation. Much of the material that Page appeared in for Klaw was destroyed at that time, but enough of it survived that a Page revival began to develop, in fits and starts, some twenty years later. Starting in 1978, Belier Press, a sort of nostalgia house for old school pervs, began publishing a series of magazine-size collections of Page's photos from the camera clubs and Klaw's bondage sessions. In 1982, the late cartoonist Dave Stevens published the first installment of his glossy-looking, kitsch-drenched Rocketeer adventure comics, whose sweet-sultry heroine was named Betty and drawn as a replica of Page. And in 1987, Greg Theakson began publishing his digest-sized fanzine The Betty Pages. By the late 1980s, Page had taken on a second life as a full-blown cult heroine, a status reinforced by her popularity as a recurring image in the panels drawn by alternative comics artists such as Paul Mavrides and Spain Rodriguez.
By the 1990s, it wasn't unusual to come across semi-scholarly articles by academics and women's studies specialists, pondering the mystery of Page's continuing appeal. Actually, as mysteries go, this was never one fit to keep Encyclopedia Brown up at night. With her rounded, womanly body and Doublemint gum smile, Page wasn't just lovely and photogenic but sunny and sweet-looking; unlike most of the pictures taken by Klaw and his kind, images of sullen women in antique-looking underwear which gave off a whiff of moldy basements and looked as if they should bear the legend "Her Last Known Photograph", they seemed to hold the promise of fun and good times. Page's evident enjoyment at being the center of the camera's attention disinfected her fetish shots of any hint of shame; many feminist writers even celebrated her as a heroic example of a non-anorexic woman who radiated confidence and pleasure in her own body.
Page herself was in her late sixties and living in a group home when she started finding out that the relics of her misspent youth had made her famous, and were busily making money for other people. She began to collect royalties on her image after signing with the Curtis Management Group in the mid-1990s. (She was also sought out and befriended by Dave Stevens.) During her late-life brush with living fame, she preferred not to be photographed, saying that she wanted her fans to remember her as she was in her delectable prime. In recent years, her surviving films for Klaw have been collected on a string of DVDs, as have such artifacts as the 1953 Striporama, in which Page appears as one of several burlesque performers. More recently, her life has served as the subject of several documentaries and Mary Harron's 2006 biopic The Notorious Bettie Page, in which Page was played by Gretchen Mol.
Related Stories: Dave Stevens: 1955-2008
