interesting article
newsgroup
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 girl, though with her full breasts, and the womanly
pooch of her slightly convex
tummy, she hardly looked the gamine.
We know all this about Bettie Page not only, or even primarily,
because she was so fervently
admired in her brief heyday. Those first admirers tended to keep
their obsession to themselves.
We know it because she is so fervently admired today, the object of
a cult that has done nothing
to keep its secret to itself. Page is the subject of a two- hour
documentary that aired on the cable
network E! Entertainment Television last spring, and of a
forthcoming HBO movie. On the web,
you can find more than 100 sites dedicated to her. Her photographs
from the '50s fetch good
money at trade shows and at groovy little downtown shops and at
Bettie Page theme nights
hosted by clubs in Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta. Hip models
have been photographed to
look like her (they don't); hip designers claim to have been
influenced by her. There is a fan club,
The Bettie Scouts of America, based in Kansas City, Kansas, and a
magazine, The Bettie Pages,
published in New York by an unusually devoted Bettie buff named
Greg Theakston. And now
there is a handsome, besotted tribute book, Bettie Page: The Life
of a Pin-Up Legend by Karen
Essex and James L. Swanson, a biography of a sort, which has an
anecdote-laden text based on
interviews with the 74-year-old Page.
So, you might reasonably ask, what is it about Bettie Page? Why
does her image still capture the
imagination, while legions of her cohorts in the nudie modeling
trade could barely sell a publicity
still to save their pasties? Bettie's fans tend to answer that
question with the naughty-but-nice
paradox. For Karen Essex and James L. Swanson, Bettie Page
"embodied the stereotypical
wholesomeness of the Fifties and the hidden sexuality straining
beneath the surface.... Her fresh-
faced beauty was the perfect camouflage for what lurked beneath her
veneer--the exotic,
whip-snapping dark angel. In Bettie Page, forbidden longings were
made safe by an ideal
American girl." For Steve Sullivan, the author of a methodically
researched history of the pin-up
called Va Va Voom!, there's a "fascinating duality" in Bettie's
photographs, "which run the gamut
from sunny innocence to sinister darkness." Truth is, though,
that's a gamut run rather often in
pornography. The appeal of the sweet-faced girl with the bod for
sin is as old as the oldest dirty
postcard, and as common as guilt. It is true that Bettie Page may
have been especially gifted at
conveying the naughty- but-nice fantasy. Hers was an era in which
the expectation of female
frigidity was still a widely accepted axiom of sexual lore. When it
came to sex, explained an
article in Life magazine in 1953, the female is "simply by virtue
of her own physiology and through
no coyness or stubbornness of her own, disinterested, unresponsive,
and in fact sometimes
downright frigid.... The average woman ... can certainly take sex
or leave it alone." She
"considers the human body, if anything, rather repulsive." In such
a context, the look of sweet
sexual eagerness- -neither too aloof nor too ravenous--that was
Bettie Page's specialty must have
gone a long way.
Still, it can't entirely explain her popularity, particularly
today. To account for it, we have to go
further afield--into the realm of nostalgia and the yearning for a
vanished sense of the illicit, a
sense of the illicit that was the other side of a sense of the
innocent. We could do worse, though,
than to start with her smile. Bettie Page' s smile--it looks more
and more bemused, especially in
some of the Klaw photographs--is crucial not only to the
naughty-but-nice effect, but also to
something more complex and lasting about her appeal. Above all
else, perhaps, her pictures, and
the expressions that she adopts in them, convey a sensation of joy
in her work--her joy, not the
viewer's. It is the joy of a talent finding an outlet, and it
hardly matters that the talent is not for
painting or policy analysis, but for exhibitionism. These are
images of a woman who will not be
ruined by sex, but made by it. In her nude photos, she holds her
head up high. She wears her
insouciance like a halo. If eroticism is the promise of pleasure,
then these pictures are not, strictly
speaking, erotic. For they promise nothing. They are not images of
desire, they are images of
happiness. And so what they demonstrate, in a way, is the unerotic
character of happiness. If one
tingles at the sight of them, it is almost with envy. In fact, when
it comes to certain cliches of nude
modeling, Bettie Page is clearly inept. She never stares vacantly
into the middle distance, dreamy
and compliant. She can't really smolder, and she doesn't do sultry.
When she acts the part of the
dominatrix in the Klaw photographs, she narrows her eyes and knits
her brow fiercely and mostly
looks silly. When she plays the passive role, tied up by another
Klaw model, her moue of distress
is goggle-eyed, comically exaggerated; she might as well be a
silent movie heroine lashed to a
train track. She's game, she's diligent, but she never seems to
inhabit a role or to let it consume
her. She won't take it seriously. And no woman ever inflamed a man
by giggling.
In Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend, Paula Klaw praises
Bettie as a woman of many
expressions who "could have been an actress." But the truth is that
she always looks the same;
and that is her particular grace. What lifts her photos above the
blankness and the deadness of so
much porn and pseudo-porn is the stubborn, exuberant persistence of
a self, the irreducible core
of a personality shining through. Bettie is never inert; she is
always Bettie; the girl can't help it.
Often her pictures are curiously unarousing, as though the
undeniable presence of a particular
person in all these erotic set-ups (Bettie in pom-poms, Bettie in
heels, Bettie in chains) could only
undermine their purpose. The effect is of objectification without
anonymity; objectification without
abstraction. In this way, the aim of pornography- -to let the
viewer generalize from this body to
other bodies, including his own--is unwittingly thwarted. There is
a wonderful photo in Essex and
Swanson's book, a candid shot taken in Irving Klaw's "studio." Klaw
is in the background,
rumpled and overweight and grinning because he's just put his foot
through a shabby prop
staircase. Bettie is standing in front of him, wearing
black-and-white lace lingerie and vivid
coral-red lipstick. She has her head thrown back and she's cracking
up--laughing, one imagines,
at the whole enterprise of dirty pictures. And what's wonderful
about the photo is that it's not
really so different, in its mood of gentle mockery, from some of
the posed photos taken in the
same setting. It reminds you that in interviews Bettie Page always
described her modeling as a
kick. "I was happy cavorting around stark naked on the beach," she
said. Or, of the Klaw
photos, "The other models and I enjoyed doing these crazy things.
The craziest thing I was asked
to do was pose as a pony, wearing a leather outfit with a lead and
everything. We just died
laughing." Bettie Page represents something unusual: she's the sex
joke who's in on the joke.
Unlike the Judy Holliday type, the sexy ditz who isn't supposed to
know that she is sexy, Bettie
Page is fully aware of the comedy of desire. It was altogether
appropriate that in October 1955
she adorned the cover of a magazine called Chicks and Chuckles.
Of course, remarks such as the ones I've just quoted might suggest
that Bettie Page achieved her
equanimity about her work at the price of a certain lack of
imagination. To this day, she can't
seem to fathom why anyone would have considered Klaw's work
pornographic. By today' s
standards, it wasn't--it contained no nudity, no simulated sex
acts. Still, her disingenuousness can
make her sound a bit thick. About the Kefauver Commission, the
congressional investigation that
targeted Klaw in 1955, Page professes bafflement. "They thought
Irving was doing pornography.
I don't know where they got that idea," she told Essex and Swanson.
"Irving was a very nice
fellow, his models were never naked and there were never any men in
the photographs." And her
own role in the fetish photographs? "It was part of posing and
posing was very natural to me."
Besides, she says, "I was young and open to new experiences."
Anti-porn feminists, among
others, might dismiss such attitudes as evidence of false
consciousness, a numb refusal to
acknowledge a career built on her own abjection. But Page' s
comments remind me of something
else: the attitude of a whole generation of entertainers who came
to Hollywood or New York
from small towns in middle America, propelled by their good looks,
prepared to work hard and
generally modest in their expectations of success. There were
hundreds, maybe thousands, of
such B-movie actors in the '40s and '50s. They never studied the
Method, never thought of what
they did as art, never figured on living like Hollywood royalty.
They called their work show biz,
and felt forever grateful that it was a biz at all, that they could
actually be paid for playacting.
(They tended to be rather dim when it came to managing money.)
There was about performers
like that--and about Bettie Page and some of her peers in the
middlebrow cheesecake line--a
common but sublime sincerity, an ability to laugh at themselves but
not ironically, a disposition
workmanlike and quietly exultant. Call it the dignity of silly
work. It is this sincerity, incidentally,
that makes Bettie Page an unfit subject for an academic field such
as cultural studies, which has
produced so many admiring tomes on the likes of Madonna, Mae West
and Larry Flynt. Some
of the discipline's leading practitioners are certainly drawn to
porn and its above-ground
analogues (Calvin Klein ads, Victoria's Secret catalogs, Spice
Girls videos). There is Laura
Kipnis, an associate professor in the Department of
Radio-Television- Film at Northwestern
University, who lionizes Flynt as a symbol of "Rabelaisian
transgression" in her book Bound and
Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America; and
there is Constance Penley,
who teaches a class on dirty movies at U.C. Santa Barbara and has
written an essay called
"Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn." For Kipnis and
Penley and their ilk,
self-described feminists who argue earnestly for the
"transgressive" and "subversive" qualities of,
say, Hustler magazine, an interest in salacious pictures must
always be justified in (leftish) political
terms. As Kipnis writes, in the introduction to Bound and Gagged,
pornography poses "a number
of philosophical questions ... questions concerning the social
compact and the price of repression
... questions about how sexuality and gender roles are performed,
about class, aesthetics, utopia,
rebellion, power, desire, and commodification.... [Porn] speaks to
its audience because it's
thoroughly astute about who we are underneath the social veneer,
astute about the costs of
cultural conformity and the discontent at the core of routinized
lives and normative sexuality." For
all their assurances that they are really wild women, capable of
slinging obscenities and laughing at
gross-out jokes, there is something priggish about the work of
these professors, and its insistence
that there is far, far more to porn than getting off. They're like
middle-class radicals swilling Pabst
Blue Ribbon not because they like it, but because it's what the
proles drink. Anyway, Bettie Page
is a little too sunny, a little too close to the philistine ideal
of sex, for the cultural studies types.
Unlike Mae West, she's not offering a vision of femininity so
exaggerated that it verges on parody
or transvestism. She's a more regular fantasy. Strictly speaking,
she's not even a fantasy. Who in
his right mind would try to seduce her? And what women tend to like
about her--many of her
fans are women--is her ease in her body, the sense that she conveys
of having made sex her ally.
One reason that Bettie Page may have managed to look as blithe as
she does in so many of her
photographs is that when she posed she was often surrounded by
women. And they weren't just
models, but photographers, too. Indeed, one of the surprising
aspects of the pin-up world in
those days--surprising given what we think we know about sex roles
in the 1950s and what we
think we know about the "male" gaze--is the extent to which it was
populated, even dominated,
by women. Hardworking Paula Klaw not only trussed and tied the
models on bondage shoots,
she also took many of the photographs. There were female
photographers in the camera clubs,
who helped create what Bettie called "the homey atmosphere" on the
shoots. And Bettie worked
frequently with the pin- up photographer Bunny Yeager, who had
herself been a model, and who
considered her empathy with her subjects one of her greatest
assets. (Yeager produced one of
the few genuinely witty pictures of Bettie, and it's kind of a girl
joke: Bettie posing stark naked,
but with the accoutrements of lady-like femininity--elegant
pocketbook, tearoom hat, pursed lips,
finishing school posture.) Ironically, if Bettie Page had seemed
more estranged from her body,
able to speak of it (or at least treat it) as though it were a
commodity, she might be of greater
interest to the cultural studies crowd. Jayne Mansfield, the
creamhorn with the grand tetons,
always knew exactly how much her endowment was worth. And in
talking about it, she
sometimes sounded a note of sophisticated alienation that cultural
studies scholars might find
sufficiently subversive. "I have a ridiculous body. My waist is
practically invisible, and my bust is
floundering around somewhere in the 40s," Mansfield once said. "And
there's no point in
discussing the rest. It's a wild body, and I'm just sick of it for
being so unusual.... The only good
thing about it is that it's a commercial body.... It got me where I
am." But Bettie Page never had
the pontoon-like breasts that, in the age before plastic surgery
created bazongas for the masses,
seemed to grant their owners the status of freakish
high-priestesses in a mammary cult. Pin-up
stars such as June Wilkinson ("The Bosom") or Meg Myles ("Miss
Chest 1957" ) or Jayne
Mansfield (whose studio chair on the Warner Brothers' lot bore the
figures 40-21-351/2 in lieu of
her name) could not escape their breasts. They were their breasts.
The more moderately
endowed Bettie had the possibility--the luxury, you might say--of
seeing her own body whole.
The Bettie Page photographs, like all pin-ups, are incitements, but
not only to sex. They are
incitements also to nostalgia. I look at her pictures and I wonder
what it was like to be a young
woman on one's own in the city, one of those single girls who came
to New York in the 1950s
and early '60s hoping to escape their allotted destinies as young
wives, young mothers and young
suburbanites. In Essex and Swanson's book, there is a scrapbook
photo of Bettie and her sister
Goldie as teenagers that is like a prehistory, in miniature, of
that migration. The year is 1941, and
Bettie and Goldie are in their backyard in Nashville, pretending to
be Ziegfeld girls. Everything in
the background of the picture--the smudgy clouds, the drooping
telephone wires, the clapboard
house, the overgrown garden--seems to suggest Home. And everything
in the girls' stance--the
way they' ve twitched up their floral wrappers to show off their
pretty legs, the expressions
they've adopted, self-consciously sexy and wistful at the same
time--suggests the yearning to
leave Home. In a way, all the pictures that came later, all the
pin-ups of Bettie in torpedo bras,
fishnet stockings, harem-girl outfits, polka-dot bikinis or nothing
at all, are the record of what
happened to that yearning, that electric hankering to be someone
new somewhere else. Bettie
Page' s particular cohort of city girls was mostly working class.
They headed for New York or
Chicago after the war, hoping for a job in the expanding
pink-collar sector--in some glamorous
office tower with wedding cake trim, maybe. Scared girls, sexy
girls, average girls; but a little bit
braver. Girls with names like Gladys and Rita and Thelma. Girls who
listened to Julie London and
Peggy Lee records. Girls who lived in Brooklyn. Girls who went out
with married men and took
themselves to the Automat for Boston cream pie and black coffee.
Girls with hennaed hair and
pallid skin and bitten fingernails. Girls who wore tight skirts and
cinch belts made of patent
leather. Girls who might be played, in the movies, by Gloria
Grahame or Jane Greer or Shelley
Winters. Girls who left small towns where they could hardly breathe
without causing a scandal.
Girls with families that never knew just what to make of them.
Girls who weren't really trying to
carve out a new path to autonomy, just banking on a new rotation of
guys to get loaded with on
Saturday night, or a new view out the window. Girls who never gave
a thought to their rights,
except perhaps their right to fun.
A young woman's decision to transplant herself, alone, to the big
city was a bold one in those
days. She was defying generations of cautionary tales that told her
the metropolis was a girl's
undoing. The last great wave of female migration to the cities--the
factory girls, the telegraph
operators and the "typewriters" of the 1880s and '90s--had produced
a vast storehouse of
anxious reportage by muckraking journalists, urban reformers and
social hygienists. In their
critical account of it, the city was above all a place of
display--of glittering shopwindows, cheap
finery, racy theatrical entertainments. And to this kind of
seduction, the thinking went, young
women were particularly vulnerable. Department stores alone, warned
Zola in Au Bonheur des
Dames, "awakened in [their] flesh new desires," excited "the
madness of fashion" to which
eventually, fatally, they must succumb. "When a girl leaves her
home at eighteen, she does one of
two things," Dreiser wrote in Sister Carrie, which is, among other
things, the apotheosis of these
worries. "Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or
she rapidly assumes the
cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.... The city has
its cunning wiles, no less than
the infinitely smaller and more human tempter." Bettie disappeared
from the city in 1957. She
missed the pay-off. By the mid-1960s, the single girl in the city
had herself become fashionable.
This new cohort had a manifesto (Sex and the Single Girl), an
anthem ("Downtown"), a tony fairy
tale (Breakfast at Tiffany's), and a television show ("That Girl").
It included plenty of college
graduates, shiny-haired Suzy Co-eds. And it had numbers on its
side: thousands of young, single
women were moving to the cities, expecting to meet a husband, yes,
but also to live on their own
for a few years, to support themselves (as secretaries, editorial
assistants, models, stewardesses)
and most scandalously of all, to have sex. After 1960, these
democratic adventuresses even had
the Pill. Magazines and newspapers took notice of single women, and
no longer seemed so
worried about them. In 1961, an article in Look magazine--"Women
without Men"--still
described them as an oddity, but not necessarily a source of social
disruption. There were "signs
everywhere that the unattached woman feels she has the same right
to a sexual life as a married
woman," the author reported, in tones of wonder. Held up for
befuddled scrutiny was a
19-year-old aspiring model from Cincinnati who, even though she was
"extremely pretty," blithely
asserted that "she wasn't ready for a husband yet and maybe never
would be." She worked as an
usher at a theater and, in her spare time, "walked around New York
staring up at the beautiful
buildings and marveling that I'm here." And just five years later
Look was reporting on the single
life--"Young, Single, and a Stranger in New York"-- as a
certifiably groovy phenomenon with
any number of commercial possibilities (singles newspapers, bars,
dating services). "The habitat
of the sophisticated single is the East Side, 50s through 80s, a
vast honeycomb of new
apartments, many of them with just one bedroom." The Village was no
longer chic; buildings with
a lot of stewardesses--"the single female"--were. Singles parties
had a "casual boy-meets-girl
atmosphere ... an extension of informal campus attitudes." Nobody
in this crowd was frenzied, or
frantic--just fun, fun, fun. They were now part of a thriving
singles "scene," which even a
mainstream publication such as Look could portray as an acceptable
antechamber to marriage,
rather than a fundamental threat to the institution. Bettie Page
ran away to New York before the
singles scene was chic. By Dreiserian standards, hers is a story of
dissolution: the innocent girl
with the heart-shaped face loses her soul to the fleshpots of
Manhattan. Her own account of her
life reads rather differently. For one thing, her youth in
Nashville, where she was born in 1923,
was not particularly innocent. Her father, Roy Page, was an
itinerant mechanic and a lout, who
molested Bettie when she was an adolescent, and bullied her mother.
Bettie and her four brothers
and sisters ended up in an orphanage for a year, after her mother
left Roy and couldn't support
the kids. (Bettie used to entertain the other girls by mimicking
the poses of movie stars and
models in the fan magazines.) When she was 19, Bettie married a boy
named Billy Neal, who
had just been drafted into the army. He turned out to be a
possessive type who accused her of
acting "high and mighty" because she had graduated from teacher's
college in Nashville. Yet she
was bright and venturesome, and seemed to thrive as long as she was
on her own. When Billy
was shipped out to the Pacific, she waited for him in San
Francisco, where she modeled fur
coats, won second prize (a $50 war bond) in a beauty contest judged
by sailors, and got
arrested for slugging a landlord who was mean to her sister. She
worked in Nashville for the
Office of Price Administration and in Port-au-Prince for an
American couple who were selling off
their mahogany business. And in 1947, now divorced, she decided to
move to New York and
try her hand at acting. The first job she snagged was as a
secretary at the American Bread
Company, but at least she was making her own way. Besides, it
wasn't long before she had taken
up with a handsome Peruvian student who taught her how to rhumba.
Her pin-up career was
born one afternoon on the beach at Coney Island, where she was
discovered by an amateur
photographer and New York City policeman named Jerry Tibbs. Tibbs
put her in touch with
some of the camera clubs, which were always on the lookout for
young women willing to shed
their clothes and their conventions. Tibbs was black, and many of
the clubs were racially
integrated, which made posing for them--especially if you were a
white Southern woman in
1950--doubly risky. But Bettie Page seems to have been one of those
holy idiots who don't so
much transcend racial boundaries as never quite notice them. =46rom
the beginning, she liked the
work and was good at it. Once, when she was arrested for indecent
exposure during a topless
photo shoot near a highway, she pleaded not guilty, insisting, with
some pride, that she "was not
indecent and that the group was a legitimate camera club from New
York City." She never dated
the photographers, but she did pal around with them, teasing them
about their predilections--"Oh,
you and your lingerie"--that sort of thing. "From the first time I
posed nude I wasn't embarrassed
or anything, " she told Essex and Swanson. And it certainly beat
the clerical grind. "I never had
any trouble getting a job back in those days," she says now. "But I
didn't like sitting at a
typewriter all day." Even the story of her post pin-up life--she
left New York and stopped
modeling in 1957, when she was 34--is not exactly a story of
renunciation, or creeping shame. In
the '80s, as Page's cult status grew, so did the curiosity about
what had ever become of her. Was
she alive? Was she lonely? Was she married? Was she fat? Was she
living in a trailer park or
working at an Arby's? After all, plenty of other performers, some
more gifted than she, had
ended up poor, remorseful, dwelling furtively in the half-light of
a vanished, minor fame, like so
many low-rent Norma Desmonds. (There was, for example, the haute
couture fashion model
Dovima, of the elegant bones and the Givenchy gowns and the Avedon
elephant photograph,
who ended her days a few years ago as a hostess at a Two Guys Pizza
in Florida.) Here and
there, fans would claim that they had seen Bettie at a gun show, or
slinging hash in a Texas diner.
The mystery became her. Like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, she was
a '50s icon who had
disappeared in her prime. But she hadn't died, as far as anyone
knew. She had simply vanished.
When a reporter finally tracked Bettie Page down a few years ago,
it turned out that she had not
fallen into ruin. She had worked as a teacher, married a few times
for love, gotten a Master's
degree in English, traveled around. She had also gone to bible
college and served as a counselor
for the Billy Graham Crusades, but her newfound Christian beliefs
had never convinced her that
she had done anything wrong in her cheesecake years. She does
interviews now, but, to her
credit in these days of epidemic exhibitionism, she won't appear on
camera. She wants to be
remembered as she was. There's nothing especially pathetic about
her. She didn't end up as a
parody of herself. Some of Bettie Page's fans will tell you that
the reason her photographs appeal
to so many people today is that she was a woman more of our time
than of hers, a sexual
liberationist trapped in Ozzie-and-Harriet land. But in truth her
pictures attract us precisely
because they are so much of their time (erotically daring, but only
within the context of the
1950s). Despite ourselves, we are nostalgic for a period that still
retained a notion, and a realm,
of the genuinely illicit- -when sexually revealing photos were
produced in dark corners and traded
shyly, when porn skulked on the fringes, in a shadowland of desire.
Now we have bondage
motifs in our fashion advertising, and sex advice books that chirp
about the dire effects of
repression (and even reticence), and skin magazines that long ago
won the battle to show pubic
hair and are bored with it, and pop stars who do pseudo- serious
picture books about their
sexual fantasies, and chic writers who get big advances for books
about their erotic humiliations,
and regular people who go on talk shows to tell the world that they
are foot fetishists or chronic
masturbators or infantilists, and a computer network that can
summon a pneumatic cyber-babe to
your screen anytime you want her. In such a world, who could deny
the power of a secret? To
look at these pictures, and others like them from the '50s and
earlier, is to remember that there
was a time when taking off your clothes was a potent gesture, when
the mere fact of a naked
woman, no matter how imperfect her body or coy her stance, could be
thrilling. This is why
almost all the old pin-ups have a kind of poignance. Most of them
no longer arouse; the frontiers
of the sexually explicit-- the amount of flesh and of actual or
simulated sex required to turn the
viewer on--are always being pushed further. What was once erotic
may now seem quaint or
dumb. The Orientalist vamps of the 1910s and 1920s--Little Egypt
("See her dance the
Hootchy-Kootchy. Anywhere else but in the ocean breezes of Coney
Island she would be
consumed by her own fire!") or the silent screen star Theda Bara
(advertised as the woman who
"Ruined 50 men, made 150 families suffer!")--look ridiculous now.
Their faces are like masks,
their bodies girded, gilded, unapproachable. Not only are they
gone; so, too is the world in which
they would have been found seductive. And the cycle moves ever more
quickly. In her Gaultier
bra, Madonna seems foolish and passe now. The anatomy never
changes, but the body has a
history. Bettie Page still looks beautiful, and sexy too, but by
today's standards even her bondage
photographs are rather tame. Nobody is naked; nobody is pretending
to have sex (or having it);
there are no crotch shots. If we look closely at these pictures, we
can still, barely, recover the
feeling that they were scandalous. After all, when Irving Klaw was
investigated by the Kefauver
Commission, he was labeled "one of the largest distributors of
obscene, lewd, and fetish
photographs throughout the country by mail," a trafficker in "base
emotions" and a contributor to
juvenile delinquency. In Hardboiled America, his elegant rumination
on the fate of the pulp novel,
Geoffrey O'Brien invokes the contemporary regard for '50s pulp
writers such as Jim Thompson,
who in their own day were commonly dismissed as cheap nihilists.
What would once have been inconceivable was that Jim Thompson
should seem, if not exactly a
voice of reason, then at least a reassuring voice from down home, a
both-feet-on-the-ground
messenger from a time and place where things looked just as cheap
as they were.... If Thompson
was supremely alienated, there had at least been a world for him to
be alienated from. His
industrial wastelands and hellish hotel rooms, his bus stations
steeped in boredom and simmering
disgust, represented some kind of geography, some minimal sense of
location. He may have
evoked it only to destroy it, but it had after all been there for
him to destroy. His books spoke of
a time when it was still unusual to feel the way his heroes felt,
or at least to acknowledge the fact.
It had become in retrospect a heroic period: gratuitous evil and
affectless violence meant
something back then. The same could be said of the Bettie Page
photographs. Finally they are
tinged with pathos, since they are survivals of a time when
fetishism and exhibitionism and
ordinary sexual adventure really meant something, when their
setting was the cheesy chiaroscuro
world of roadside motels with linoleum floors and vinyl furniture,
not the fake expensive world of
fashion magazines and rock videos, a time before pseudo-porn seeped
into advertising and was
made pleasant and normal. These images remind us what it was like
when erotica was mostly
hidden. There are many reasons to oppose repression, but in the
universe of repression, one
learned the twin arts of fantasy and mystery. Bettie Page always
seemed so good when she was
being so bad. It is a paradox made of distinctions that we have
almost completely destroyed.
Poor glutted smirking us. If we cannot be bad, how will we be good?
Kara Mae
seemed smug and went of in tangents, it was well written.
---
Kara Mae
http://www.karamae.com
Chris
Chris.
beckie
Chris <oui...@home.com> wrote in message news:3B7ACC42...@home.com...
Vicki Ogden
At least the writer did alot of research instead of getting high and firing
up the word processor, like the last one!