Friday, December 12, 2008
Breaking News Requiem for a Pulp Goddess: Nashville Native Bettie Page Dead at 85
Posted by Jim Ridley on Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 1:17 AM
A few years ago, I wrote this appreciation of the late Bettie Page, the Nashville-born pin-up and fetish-magazine model, who died last night at a Los Angeles hospital of complications from a heart attack and pneumonia. She was 85. This tribute comes from a review of The Notorious Bettie Page, the 2005 biopic that follows her from her Nashville years up to the end of her magazine career:
If you can tell a society by its smut, America in the 1950s couldn't have been just a Frigidaire of repressive hysteria. Hidden somewhere in the closets of Pleasantville and Peyton Place, after all, was a stack of fetish mags bearing the face and hourglass figure of Bettie Page, and all the mysteries they contain. Here was a brunette Amazon in a sea of soft and curvy blondes -- an anti-Marilyn, dominant and demanding where Monroe was compliant -- who deflected the ravenous gaze of strokebook buyers with a look of defiant self-possession.
At the same time, the kinkier the scenario--be it girl-girl slap-and-tickle or a little night music for gag and rope harness--the more she looked like a giggly teen at a pajama party. By the 1980s, when Page reemerged as a pulp icon, her combination of severe bangs, growled come-hithers, and strapping poses served as camp, nostalgia, an emblem of postfeminist subversion, and a fantasy figure for tops as well as bottoms. In her photos and one-reelers, she has the ingredient perhaps most crucial for obsession: an image capable of reflecting anything a viewer projects onto it.
Comments (5)
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Betty Page an intense part of my boyhood that makes me understand what seduction is. I'll remember you forever. R. I. P.
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Little known fact in the Bettie Page mythology: For years, Bettie Page was assumed dead. Until the early '90s, when a Tennessean reporter (and later city editor) named Tommy Goldsmith discovered she was alive and well in California. His reporting touched off the modern Page obsession (and capitalism). I think Tommy's now at the Raleigh News & Observer.
I had no idea Bettie Page was still alive. I was always disappointed that the 150-year anniversary celebration at Hume Fogg conspicuously left her out, even though she's one of the school's most famous alumni.
I guess my fancy Top 50 alma matter doesn't want its students to become pin-up models. There's a shocker for you.
