> Bettie Page and the fate of pleasure in America
> by Margaret Talbot
> 09-08-1997 in The New Republic

> Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend
> by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson
> (General Publishing Group, 288 pp., $40)

> Poor glutted smirking us. We live in an age when pop culture is our
> history and history is our flea market. Kitsch never dies; it lacks the
> gravity to die; it just circles back, with a new price tag and a hopeful
> air. It turns out that no junk is junky enough to be consigned to the
> obsolescence for which it was intended--not fake fur or Formica, not
> Russ Meyer or Ed Wood, not Esquivel or Abba. We do not lament the
> passing of things that were meant to last; we lament the passing of
> things that were meant not to last. We refuse to be robbed of a past by
> a culture of transience. It is our lot, therefore, to be overrun, or to
> overrun ourselves, with the schlock not only of today, but of two,
> three, four decades past. Oblivion, it seems, is worse than vulgarity.
> And so we claim ephemera for posterity. There are technological
> explanations for this phenomenon, and economic ones, too. The Internet,
> with its capacity for linking up thousands of otherwise furtive fans and
> collectors, for bringing everybody and everything in from the periphery
> to the center, for infinitely replicating shards and shards of trivia,
> has accelerated the redemption of kitsch. So has the CD, for which it
> seems that there never was a minor composer or a justly neglected
> performance or a girl group too obscure or a lounge act too goofy.
> Consider only the Capitol CD series with such self-consciously retro
> titles as "Bongo Land," "Ultra- Lounge" and "Bossanovaville," risibly
> awful music brought proudly and brilliantly back. The shorter the
> history, the more relentless the recycling. (It was American popular
> music that invented the concept of "instant gold.") Or consider
> Nick-at-Nite-type cable TV, with its endless appetite for content as
> familiar and as soothing as the wallpaper in our childhood bedrooms. But
> behind these material facts is a sensibility, an attitude toward the
> past, and toward collecting, that might be described as ironic
> preservationism. Ironic preservationism differs from its straight
> counterpart--the world of genealogy and heritage movements and lovingly
> restored country houses--in that it resurrects     objects not for their
> beauty or their craftsmanship or the lasting superiority of their forms
> or  materials, but for the very inverse of these qualities: their
> cheesiness, their triviality, their banality, their disposability. It
> differs, too, from earlier preservationist movements in that the appeal
> of an object does not lie in the way that time has made it recondite.
> For the ironic preservationist, mystery holds no attraction. The more
> crudely legible an artifact, the better. An original poster for Reefer
> Madness, or Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill, is a great find partly because
> it is so undemanding of the mind or the sensibility, so unashamedly
> garish, so naked of pretension.

>      The ironic preservationist is ironic because he is preserving what
> was made to be forgotten. The
>      danger for such a collector is that he begins to see the past as a
> congeries of gags, a grab bag of
>      "novelty items" (a term of art, in the world of American kitsch,
> like the term "collectibles"), a freak
>      show. He believes in regress, but he is not what you would call
> conservative; he is trying instead
>      to recapture the impermanence of yesteryear. Of course, this is
> impossible, and so the precious
>      artifacts are merely fetishized. In the tackiness of the B-movies
> and the third-rate torch songs of
>      the '50s and '60s, he finds innocence. (Nobody in the '50s and '60s
> did.)

>      The ironic preservationist is not indifferent to history so much as
> addled by it. In part his attitude
>      is a rejection of the discontinuities of consumer culture, the
> swift passing of the latest thing. By
>      honoring all this negligible stuff, he asserts his mastery over the
> acceleration of the past. The "new
>      and improved" are a joke to him. (He will enjoy them later.) The
> more fads and entertainments
>      the culture produces, the more stubbornly he clings to those of
> earlier decades for stability. The
>      usual explanation for historic preservation movements is that, in a
> throwaway society, people will
>      hunger for something that lasts, for an object made with some care
> and to some kind of serious
>      accepted aesthetic standard, and intended for some kind of
> posterity. But what if you determine
>      to make the throwaway itself endure? To make it outlive the use-by
> date that capitalism stamps in
>      ghostly ink on every pop cultural creation? Now that is a victory!
> As the British historian Raphael
>      Samuel writes, describing the more mainstream phenomenon of
> retro-chic, the idea is not to
>      "deceive anyone into a hallucinatory sense of oneness with the
> past, but on the contrary [to
>      cultivate] an air of ironic detachment and distance. Retrochic ...
> involves not an obsession with
>      past but an indifference to it: only when history has ceased to
> matter can it be treated as a sport."
>      There is some truth to this argument, but it is a little unfair.
> The motives of the ironic
>      preservationist are complicated. There is tenderness in his
> inanity. He wants access to a kind of
>      purity: the purity of pure schlock. Like Frank O'Hara, he longs to
> be "at least as alive as the
>      vulgar." He is often more sentimental than cool. Sometimes the
> ironic preservationist exalts the
>      kitsch of the past--his Yma Sumac records, his velvet paintings,
> his pulp novels--because it is
>      bizarre or amusing, sometimes because it reminds him, humbly, of
> something that's missing from
>      the time in which he must live now. And so it is with the
> lubricious dreamworld of Bettie Page.
>      =46rom 1950 to 1957, Bettie Page was America' s underground pin-up
> queen, the secret crush
>      of thousands of men who married young and wondered what they had
> missed. Her career as an
>      erotic icon took her from moderately saucy beach blanket shots (the
> stuff of calendars hung
>      discreetly in the garage) to mail-order stag films with
> sadomasochistic themes and titles such as
>      Captive Jungle Girl (the stuff of congressional investigations). It
> took her from a time in porn
>      history when nearly nude pictures of nearly pretty girls in static
> cheesecake poses were still
>      scandalous enough to pack an erotic charge to a time in which
> psychosexual motifs such as
>      fetishism and domination were increasingly mass-marketed and porn
> was supposed to tell a story
>      (with a beginning, a middle and a climax). She started out posing
> nude or in homemade bikinis,
>      frolicking in the Long Island surf for the benefit of amateur
> "camera clubs"--hobbyists,
>      shutterbugs and geeks who took pictures for their personal use and
> so were not bound by the
>      obscenity laws that limited nudity in men's publications of the
> day. From there, she did cheerful
>      photo spreads for magazines such as Wink and Tattler and Eyeful;
> Dare and Bold and Peek; Art
>      Photography and Modern Sunbathing. And finally, in what Bettie
> Page's fans call her "Dark
>      Angel" period, she did a noirish series of photos and silent film
> loops shot in New York by a
>      genially sleazy stag photographer named Irving Klaw and his devoted
> sister Paula. Bettie and the
>      other Klaw models, all women, usually wore the distinctive, thickly
> armatured underwear of the
>      '50s--appropriately called foundation garments--and high, high
> heels as black and glistening as
>      wet asphalt. Sometimes they performed burlesque shimmies, sometimes
> they donned leather
>      corsets and gloves and brandished whips and hairbrushes, sometimes
> they trussed one another
>      up. As in all s&m, props played a vital role and were lavished with
> beady-eyed attention. The
>      settings were always delightfully low-rent; the action slow,
> deliberate, exaggerated. Since no men
>      appear in the films--to include men would have been to guarantee an
> obscenity conviction--these
>      short films sometimes suggest a sort of lesbian theme park, an
> underground network of tacky
>      motels where you could always find tough babes playing cards in
> their underwear, smoking
>      cigarettes in their underwear, menacing one another with
> hairbrushes in their underwear, rolling
>      around on shag rugs in their underwear. In each of these guises,
> Bettie Page looked much the
>      same. She always wore her dark hair long and loose, with pageboy
> bangs, which gave her a
>      modern, intelligent look. In almost any decade, this particular
> hairstyle--straight hair and bangs,
>      the bob or a variation on it-- seems to grant its wearers a
> purchase on modernity. (Think of how
>      contemporary Louise Brooks appears next to other stars of the
> 1920s.) Partly by virtue of its
>      association with the flapper, the straight- hair-and-bangs style
> has long signified free-thinking,
>      self-possession and a crisp, unromantic Bohemianism. Bettie Page
> was nearly always well-toned
>      and smooth-skinned, with a flattering all-over tan. But she had a
> body that was unusual among
>      sex goddesses then and now in that it was lovely in a plausible
> way--neither as impossibly sinewy
>      as a contemporary fashion model's nor as busty as Mansfield's or
> Monroe' s. It was, above all, a
>      body in which she always managed to look supremely at ease. She
> seemed as comfortable as a
>      pre-adolescent

> newsgroup wrote:

> > Bettie Page and the fate of pleasure in America
> > by Margaret Talbot
> > 09-08-1997 in The New Republic

> > Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend
> > by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson
> > (General Publishing Group, 288 pp., $40)

> > Poor glutted smirking us. We live in an age when pop culture is our
> > history and history is our flea market. Kitsch never dies; it lacks the
> > gravity to die; it just circles back, with a new price tag and a hopeful
> > air. It turns out that no junk is junky enough to be consigned to the
> > obsolescence for which it was intended--not fake fur or Formica, not
> > Russ Meyer or Ed Wood, not Esquivel or Abba. We do not lament the
> > passing of things that were meant to last; we lament the passing of
> > things that were meant not to last. We refuse to be robbed of a past by
> > a culture of transience. It is our lot, therefore, to be overrun, or to
> > overrun ourselves, with the schlock not only of today, but of two,
> > three, four decades past. Oblivion, it seems, is worse than vulgarity.
> > And so we claim ephemera for posterity. There are technological
> > explanations for this phenomenon, and economic ones, too. The Internet,
> > with its capacity for linking up thousands of otherwise furtive fans and
> > collectors, for bringing everybody and everything in from the periphery
> > to the center, for infinitely replicating shards and shards of trivia,
> > has accelerated the redemption of kitsch. So has the CD, for which it
> > seems that there never was a minor composer or a justly neglected
> > performance or a girl group too obscure or a lounge act too goofy.
> > Consider only the Capitol CD series with such self-consciously retro
> > titles as "Bongo Land," "Ultra- Lounge" and "Bossanovaville," risibly
> > awful music brought proudly and brilliantly back. The shorter the
> > history, the more relentless the recycling. (It was American popular
> > music that invented the concept of "instant gold.") Or consider
> > Nick-at-Nite-type cable TV, with its endless appetite for content as
> > familiar and as soothing as the wallpaper in our childhood bedrooms. But
> > behind these material facts is a sensibility, an attitude toward the
> > past, and toward collecting, that might be described as ironic
> > preservationism. Ironic preservationism differs from its straight
> > counterpart--the world of genealogy and heritage movements and lovingly
> > restored country houses--in that it resurrects     objects not for their
> > beauty or their craftsmanship or the lasting superiority of their forms
> > or  materials, but for the very inverse of these qualities: their
> > cheesiness, their triviality, their banality, their disposability. It
> > differs, too, from earlier preservationist movements in that the appeal
> > of an object does not lie in the way that time has made it recondite.
> > For the ironic preservationist, mystery holds no attraction. The more
> > crudely legible an artifact, the better. An original poster for Reefer
> > Madness, or Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill, is a great find partly because
> > it is so undemanding of the mind or the sensibility, so unashamedly
> > garish, so naked of pretension.

> >      The ironic preservationist is ironic because he is preserving what
> > was made to be forgotten. The
> >      danger for such a collector is that he begins to see the past as a
> > congeries of gags, a grab bag of
> >      "novelty items" (a term of art, in the world of American kitsch,
> > like the term "collectibles"), a freak
> >      show. He believes in regress, but he is not what you would call
> > conservative; he is trying instead
> >      to recapture the impermanence of yesteryear. Of course, this is
> > impossible, and so the precious
> >      artifacts are merely fetishized. In the tackiness of the B-movies
> > and the third-rate torch songs of
> >      the '50s and '60s, he finds innocence. (Nobody in the '50s and '60s
> > did.)

> >      The ironic preservationist is not indifferent to history so much as
> > addled by it. In part his attitude
> >      is a rejection of the discontinuities of consumer culture, the
> > swift passing of the latest thing. By
> >      honoring all this negligible stuff, he asserts his mastery over the
> > acceleration of the past. The "new
> >      and improved" are a joke to him. (He will enjoy them later.) The
> > more fads and entertainments
> >      the culture produces, the more stubbornly he clings to those of
> > earlier decades for stability. The
> >      usual explanation for historic preservation movements is that, in a
> > throwaway society, people will
> >      hunger for something that lasts, for an object made with some care
> > and to some kind of serious
> >      accepted aesthetic standard, and intended for some kind of
> > posterity. But what if you determine
> >      to make the throwaway itself endure? To make it outlive the use-by
> > date that capitalism stamps in
> >      ghostly ink on every pop cultural creation? Now that is a victory!
> > As the British historian Raphael
> >      Samuel writes, describing the more mainstream phenomenon of
> > retro-chic, the idea is not to
> >      "deceive anyone into a hallucinatory sense of oneness with the
> > past, but on the contrary [to
> >      cultivate] an air of ironic detachment and distance. Retrochic ...
> > involves not an obsession with
> >      past but an indifference to it: only when history has ceased to
> > matter can it be treated as a sport."
> >      There is some truth to this argument, but it is a little unfair.
> > The motives of the ironic
> >      preservationist are complicated. There is tenderness in his
> > inanity. He wants access to a kind of
> >      purity: the purity of pure schlock. Like Frank O'Hara, he longs to
> > be "at least as alive as the
> >      vulgar." He is often more sentimental than cool. Sometimes the
> > ironic preservationist exalts the
> >      kitsch of the past--his Yma Sumac records, his velvet paintings,
> > his pulp novels--because it is
> >      bizarre or amusing, sometimes because it reminds him, humbly, of
> > something that's missing from
> >      the time in which he must live now. And so it is with the
> > lubricious dreamworld of Bettie Page.
> >      =46rom 1950 to 1957, Bettie Page was America' s underground pin-up
> > queen, the secret crush
> >      of thousands of men who married young and wondered what they had
> > missed. Her career as an
> >      erotic icon took her from moderately saucy beach blanket shots (the
> > stuff of calendars hung
> >      discreetly in the garage) to mail-order stag films with
> > sadomasochistic themes and titles such as
> >      Captive Jungle Girl (the stuff of congressional investigations). It
> > took her from a time in porn
> >      history when nearly nude pictures of nearly pretty girls in static
> > cheesecake poses were still
> >      scandalous enough to pack an erotic charge to a time in which
> > psychosexual motifs such as
> >      fetishism and domination were increasingly mass-marketed and porn
> > was supposed to tell a story
> >      (with a beginning, a middle and a climax). She started out posing
> > nude or in homemade bikinis,
> >      frolicking in the Long Island surf for the benefit of amateur
> > "camera clubs"--hobbyists,
> >      shutterbugs and geeks who took pictures for their personal use and
> > so were not bound by the
> >      obscenity laws that limited nudity in men's publications of the
> > day. From there, she did cheerful
> >      photo spreads for magazines such as Wink and Tattler and Eyeful;
> > Dare and Bold and Peek; Art
> >      Photography and Modern Sunbathing. And finally, in what Bettie
> > Page's fans call her "Dark
> >      Angel" period, she did a noirish series of photos and silent film
> > loops shot in New York by a
> >      genially sleazy stag photographer named Irving Klaw and his devoted
> > sister Paula. Bettie and the
> >      other Klaw models, all women, usually wore the distinctive, thickly
> > armatured underwear of the
> >      '50s--appropriately called foundation garments--and high, high
> > heels as black and glistening as
> >      wet asphalt. Sometimes they performed burlesque shimmies, sometimes
> > they donned leather
> >      corsets and gloves and brandished whips and hairbrushes, sometimes
> > they trussed one another
> >      up. As in all s&m, props played a vital role and were lavished with
> > beady-eyed attention. The
> >      settings were always delightfully low-rent; the action slow,
> > deliberate, exaggerated. Since no men
> >      appear in the films--to include men would have been to guarantee an
> > obscenity conviction--these
> >      short films sometimes suggest a sort of lesbian theme park, an
> > underground network of tacky
> >      motels where you could always find tough babes playing cards in
> > their underwear, smoking
> >      cigarettes in their underwear, menacing one another with
> > hairbrushes in their underwear, rolling
> >      around on shag rugs in their underwear. In each of these guises,
> > Bettie Page looked much the
> >      same. She always wore her dark hair long and loose, with pageboy
> > bangs, which gave her a
> >      modern, intelligent look. In almost any decade, this particular
> > hairstyle--straight hair and bangs,
> >      the bob or a variation on it-- seems to grant its wearers a
> > purchase on modernity. (Think of how
> >      contemporary Louise Brooks appears next to other stars of the
> > 1920s.) Partly by virtue of its
> >      association with the flapper, the straight- hair-and-bangs style
> > has long signified free-thinking,
> >      self-possession and a crisp, unromantic

> Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend
> by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson
> (General Publishing Group, 288 pp., $40)

> Poor glutted smirking us. We live in an age when pop culture is our
> history and history is our flea market. Kitsch never dies; it lacks the
> gravity to die; it just circles back, with a new price tag and a hopeful
> air. It turns out that no junk is junky enough to be consigned to the
> obsolescence for which it was intended--not fake fur or Formica, not
> Russ Meyer or Ed Wood, not Esquivel or Abba. We do not lament the
> passing of things that were meant to last; we lament the passing of
> things that were meant not to last. We refuse to be robbed of a past by
> a culture of transience. It is our lot, therefore, to be overrun, or to
> overrun ourselves, with the schlock not only of today, but of two,
> three, four decades past. Oblivion, it seems, is worse than vulgarity.
> And so we claim ephemera for posterity. There are technological
> explanations for this phenomenon, and economic ones, too. The Internet,
> with its capacity for linking up thousands of otherwise furtive fans and
> collectors, for bringing everybody and everything in from the periphery
> to the center, for infinitely replicating shards and shards of trivia,
> has accelerated the redemption of kitsch. So has the CD, for which it
> seems that there never was a minor composer or a justly neglected
> performance or a girl group too obscure or a lounge act too goofy.
> Consider only the Capitol CD series with such self-consciously retro
> titles as "Bongo Land," "Ultra- Lounge" and "Bossanovaville," risibly
> awful music brought proudly and brilliantly back. The shorter the
> history, the more relentless the recycling. (It was American popular
> music that invented the concept of "instant gold.") Or consider
> Nick-at-Nite-type cable TV, with its endless appetite for content as
> familiar and as soothing as the wallpaper in our childhood bedrooms. But
> behind these material facts is a sensibility, an attitude toward the
> past, and toward collecting, that might be described as ironic
> preservationism. Ironic preservationism differs from its straight
> counterpart--the world of genealogy and heritage movements and lovingly
> restored country houses--in that it resurrects     objects not for their
> beauty or their craftsmanship or the lasting superiority of their forms
> or  materials, but for the very inverse of these qualities: their
> cheesiness, their triviality, their banality, their disposability. It
> differs, too, from earlier preservationist movements in that the appeal
> of an object does not lie in the way that time has made it recondite.
> For the ironic preservationist, mystery holds no attraction. The more
> crudely legible an artifact, the better. An original poster for Reefer
> Madness, or Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill, is a great find partly because
> it is so undemanding of the mind or the sensibility, so unashamedly
> garish, so naked of pretension.

>      The ironic preservationist is ironic because he is preserving what
> was made to be forgotten. The
>      danger for such a collector is that he begins to see the past as a
> congeries of gags, a grab bag of
>      "novelty items" (a term of art, in the world of American kitsch,
> like the term "collectibles"), a freak
>      show. He believes in regress, but he is not what you would call
> conservative; he is trying instead
>      to recapture the impermanence of yesteryear. Of course, this is
> impossible, and so the precious
>      artifacts are merely fetishized. In the tackiness of the B-movies
> and the third-rate torch songs of
>      the '50s and '60s, he finds innocence. (Nobody in the '50s and '60s
> did.)

>      The ironic preservationist is not indifferent to history so much as
> addled by it. In part his attitude
>      is a rejection of the discontinuities of consumer culture, the
> swift passing of the latest thing. By
>      honoring all this negligible stuff, he asserts his mastery over the
> acceleration of the past. The "new
>      and improved" are a joke to him. (He will enjoy them later.) The
> more fads and entertainments
>      the culture produces, the more stubbornly he clings to those of
> earlier decades for stability. The
>      usual explanation for historic preservation movements is that, in a
> throwaway society, people will
>      hunger for something that lasts, for an object made with some care
> and to some kind of serious
>      accepted aesthetic standard, and intended for some kind of
> posterity. But what if you determine
>      to make the throwaway itself endure? To make it outlive the use-by
> date that capitalism stamps in
>      ghostly ink on every pop cultural creation? Now that is a victory!
> As the British historian Raphael
>      Samuel writes, describing the more mainstream phenomenon of
> retro-chic, the idea is not to
>      "deceive anyone into a hallucinatory sense of oneness with the
> past, but on the contrary [to
>      cultivate] an air of ironic detachment and distance. Retrochic ...
> involves not an obsession with
>      past but an indifference to it: only when history has ceased to
> matter can it be treated as a sport."
>      There is some truth to this argument, but it is a little unfair.
> The motives of the ironic
>      preservationist are complicated. There is tenderness in his
> inanity. He wants access to a kind of
>      purity: the purity of pure schlock. Like Frank O'Hara, he longs to
> be "at least as alive as the
>      vulgar." He is often more sentimental than cool. Sometimes the
> ironic preservationist exalts the
>      kitsch of the past--his Yma Sumac records, his velvet paintings,
> his pulp novels--because it is
>      bizarre or amusing, sometimes because it reminds him, humbly, of
> something that's missing from
>      the time in which he must live now. And so it is with the
> lubricious dreamworld of Bettie Page.
>      =46rom 1950 to 1957, Bettie Page was America' s underground pin-up
> queen, the secret crush
>      of thousands of men who married young and wondered what they had
> missed. Her career as an
>      erotic icon took her from moderately saucy beach blanket shots (the
> stuff of calendars hung
>      discreetly in the garage) to mail-order stag films with
> sadomasochistic themes and titles such as
>      Captive Jungle Girl (the stuff of congressional investigations). It
> took her from a time in porn
>      history when nearly nude pictures of nearly pretty girls in static
> cheesecake poses were still
>      scandalous enough to pack an erotic charge to a time in which
> psychosexual motifs such as
>      fetishism and domination were increasingly mass-marketed and porn
> was supposed to tell a story
>      (with a beginning, a middle and a climax). She started out posing
> nude or in homemade bikinis,
>      frolicking in the Long Island surf for the benefit of amateur
> "camera clubs"--hobbyists,
>      shutterbugs and geeks who took pictures for their personal use and
> so were not bound by the
>      obscenity laws that limited nudity in men's publications of the
> day. From there, she did cheerful
>      photo spreads for magazines such as Wink and Tattler and Eyeful;
> Dare and Bold and Peek; Art
>      Photography and Modern Sunbathing. And finally, in what Bettie
> Page's fans call her "Dark
>      Angel" period, she did a noirish series of photos and silent film
> loops shot in New York by a
>      genially sleazy stag photographer named Irving Klaw and his devoted
> sister Paula. Bettie and the
>      other Klaw models, all women, usually wore the distinctive, thickly
> armatured underwear of the
>      '50s--appropriately called foundation garments--and high, high
> heels as black and glistening as
>      wet asphalt. Sometimes they performed burlesque shimmies, sometimes
> they donned leather
>      corsets and gloves and brandished whips and hairbrushes, sometimes
> they trussed one another
>      up. As in all s&m, props played a vital role and were lavished with
> beady-eyed attention. The
>      settings were always delightfully low-rent; the action slow,
> deliberate, exaggerated. Since no men
>      appear in the films--to include men would have been to guarantee an
> obscenity conviction--these
>      short films sometimes suggest a sort of lesbian theme park, an
> underground network of tacky
>      motels where you could always find tough babes playing cards in
> their underwear, smoking
>      cigarettes in their underwear, menacing one another with
> hairbrushes in their underwear, rolling
>      around on shag rugs in their underwear. In each of these guises,
> Bettie Page looked much the
>      same. She always wore her dark hair long and loose, with pageboy
> bangs, which gave her a
>      modern, intelligent look. In almost any decade, this particular
> hairstyle--straight hair and bangs,
>      the bob or a variation on it-- seems to grant its wearers a
> purchase on modernity. (Think of how
>      contemporary Louise Brooks appears next to other stars of the
> 1920s.) Partly by virtue of its
>      association with the flapper, the straight- hair-and-bangs style
> has long signified free-thinking,
>      self-possession and a crisp, unromantic Bohemianism. Bettie Page
> was nearly always well-toned
>      and smooth-skinned, with a flattering all-over tan. But she had a
> body that was unusual among
>      sex goddesses then and now in that it was lovely in a plausible
> way--neither as impossibly sinewy
>      as a contemporary fashion model's nor as busty as Mansfield's or
> Monroe' s. It was, above all, a
>      body in which she