Bettie Page, 1923-2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

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

Take Five: HBO

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:45:00 GMT

Sex and the City: The Movie opens everywhere that Cosmopolitans are sold today, and the odds are pretty good that it will make enough money to keep Sarah Jessica Parker in sundresses for the rest of her life. There is little doubt as to whether or not the movie -- based on the inescapable HBO original series -- will be successful; the real question is whether or not it's going to be any good. One thing is for sure: it will at least make more money than the other films that have been made out of HBO's original television programming. They're a pretty dismal set of money-losers and critic-displeasers, ranging from the not good (Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny) to the very bad (the Mr. Show movie, Run Ronnie Run) to the completely awful (the Tales from the Crypt spin-off Bordello of Blood). If the long-rumored Deadwood movie ever gets made, or if the Sopranos movie doesn't turn out to be a disappointment, this may change things, but in the meantime, HBO's television shows have yet to produce a movie worth watching. Less known, however, is that HBO has a production arm that has put out a number of worthwhile films, many of which had theatrical releases prior to their run on the pay cable network; some of them, in fact, were released exclusively for theatrical release through HBO Films or their sister company, Picturehouse FIlms. With their overseeing company, New Line Cinema, dead, the future of HBO Films is uncertain, but given the quality of their past releases, they're sure to find a new home somewhere with parent company Time/Warner. Here's five fine films that were released under the HBO Film distribution banner.

AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003)

The first, and arguably the best, of a rash of terrific film releases by HBO Films in the mid-2000s, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's inventive (and sometimes elusive) documentary about underground comics writer Harvey Pekar stands alongside the remarkable Crumb as a compelling, if sometimes troubling, look at an American original. The comparison is by no means coincidental: legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb is a longtime friend of Pekar's, and the man he first recruited to illustrate his stories of the struggles, victories, humiliations and triumphs of everyday life. If it's a little disengenuous to claim that Pekar is the indestructably normal person he claims to be (and it is -- normal people, after all, do not compulsively and sometimes brilliantly catalog the minutia of their lives in autobiographical comics), there's nothing at all phony about Pekar, his everyday heroism, the skewed attitude and refusal to surrender to the diificultues of an ordinary life, or his irascible and cynical -- if never openly cruel -- sense of humor.

ELEPHANT (2003)

The first of a series of collaborations between HBO Films and director Gus Van Sant, Elephant is the best of the lot -- and may in fact be one of the finest films of the decade. Inspired by the horrific mass murder at Columbine High School, the fragmented, almost dreamlike story of a pair of alienated high school students who go on a shooting rampage is a meditation on violence unlike any other in recent cinematic history. Elephant is a quiet, open, almost meditative film, breaking off to follow one character after another in order to present the day of the shooting as resolutely normal; but its greatest trick is to constantly dangle in front of us tantalizing 'clues' to the motivation of the killers, only to have every one of them lead to an unproductive, uncomfortable dead end. After the final bloodbath, we have an almost tangible need to know the whys and wherefores of the senseless killing, but the movie is wise enough to deny us an easy solution to an impossibly difficult question, and is brave enough to believe in its director's vision and leave us hanging without a quick fi or an easy scapegoat.

DEATH IN GAZA (2004)

One of the least partisan -- and most tragically unbearable -- documentaries about the Israeli-Palestine conflict was the 2004 film Death in Gaza, which concentrated largely on the impact the war had on children in the area. Focusing on a quartet of Palestinian kids, all in their early teens or younger, who take up arms against their occupiers, Death in Gaza neither exculpates the bad behavior of the kids (their anti-Semitism is extremely uncomfortable, especially from children so young) or glosses over why they might be so driven to militancy and violence (we are constantly exposed to the insufferable living conditions into which they are born and raised, and every one of them has a jaw-dropping horror story about the death of a friend or relative). What makes the move especially harrowing is that its 34-year-old British director, James Miller, was himself killed by the Israeli Defense Forces while filming in Gaza at night, a typically stupid, futile, and enraging event that is captured on film and shown matter-of-factly during the course of the documentary. Powerful and sad.

MARIA FULL OF GRACE (2004)

Joshua Marston's feature about a young Colombian teenager who becomes a drug mule in order to raise money for her impoverished family is filmed in such an effective, simple neorealist style -- and manages to so effectively encapsulate one of the most degrading yet banal aspects of the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism -- that it's hard to avoid comparisons to De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. And while it's not even remotely in that film's league, it's still very much a movie worth watching, updating De Sica's themes for a post-socialist age, and it does at least have one advantage over its spiritual forebear: the presense of the heartbreaking, compelling, fascinating lead actress, Catalino Sandino Moreno. The then-17-year-old Moreno turns in one of the most watchable yet tragic performances in recent memory as a headstrong, intelligent girl who has nonetheless begun to move in circles who will shape her into something she cannot control; it's almost impossible to take your eyes off her from the beginning of the movie to the end.

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (2005)

The Notorious Bettie Page, a serviceable if never stunning biography of the legendary 1950s pin-up queen, was brought to us by the writer/director team of Guinevere Turner and Mary Harron. The duo also was responsible for the highly problematic American Psycho, and Harron also directed the truly discomfiting I Shot Andy Warhol. While its problems are different (a lack of depth and a somewhat flat visual style, neither of which were the difficulties with Harron's other movies), it does reflect the curate's egg nature of all three films. Clearly, it wasn't a movie made to do nothing more than titillate, but by the same token, we walk out of the theater knowing precious little more about the notorious Bettie Page than we did when we came in. That said, it shares with the other films a great deal of energy and feeling, and is supported by the sort of tremendous central performance Harron seems to coax so easily out of her stars -- Gretchen Mol is easily the equal of Christian Bale or Lili Taylor, and it's her charm and control in the role that makes this a movie worth watching.

The Screengrab : the notorious bettie page

Bettie Page, 1923-2008

Take Five: HBO