Bettie's Death - News Accounts
Vintner
By Us Magazine28 minutes ago
12 Dec 2008
{Story photo: 1950s Pinup Model Bettie Page Dies at 85Bettie Page
photographed in 1955.Us Magazine}
1950s pinup model Bettie Page died Thursday. She was 85.
Page was placed on life support last week after suffering a heart attack in
Los Angeles and never regained consciousness, her agent, Mark Roesler, told
The Associated Press. Before the heart attack, she had been hospitalized for
three weeks with pneumonia.
Page -- who helped set the stage for the 1960s sexual revolution by posing
in skimpy attire or none at all -- "captured the imagination of a generation
of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality," Roesler
said. "She is the embodiment of beauty."
Page mysteriously disappeared from the public eye for decades; she battled
mental illness and became a born-again Christian.
She resurfaced in the 1990s but refused to be photographed.
"I don't want to be photographed in my old age," she said in 1998. "I feel
the same way with old movie stars. ... It makes me sad. We want to remember
them when they were young."
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Associated Press
1950s pinup model Bettie Page dies in LA at 85
By BOB THOMAS Bob Thomas – 58 mins ago
This undated photo provided Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008 by CMG Worldwide shows
AP – This undated photo provided Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008 by CMG Worldwide
shows Bettie Page. Page, the 1950s …
LOS ANGELES – Bettie Page, the 1950s secretary-turned-model whose
controversial photographs in skimpy attire or none at all helped set the
stage for the 1960s sexual revolution, died Thursday. She was 85.
Page was placed on life support last week after suffering a heart attack in
Los Angeles and never regained consciousness, said her agent, Mark Roesler.
He said he and Page's family agreed to remove life support. Before the heart
attack, Page had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia.
"She captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free
spirit and unabashed sensuality," Roesler said. "She is the embodiment of
beauty."
Page, who was also known as Betty, attracted national attention with
magazine photographs of her sensuous figure in bikinis and see-through
lingerie that were quickly tacked up on walls in military barracks, garages
and elsewhere, where they remained for years.
Her photos included a centerfold in the January 1955 issue of then-fledgling
Playboy magazine, as well as controversial sadomasochistic poses.
"I think that she was a remarkable lady, an iconic figure in pop culture who
influenced sexuality, taste in fashion, someone who had a tremendous impact
on our society," Playboy founder Hugh Hefner told The Associated Press on
Thursday. "She was a very dear person."
Page mysteriously disappeared from the public eye for decades, during which
time she battled mental illness and became a born-again Christian.
After resurfacing in the 1990s, she occasionally granted interviews but
refused to allow her picture to be taken.
"I don't want to be photographed in my old age," she told an interviewer in
1998. "I feel the same way with old movie stars. ... It makes me sad. We
want to remember them when they were young."
The 21st century indeed had people remembering her just as she was. She
became the subject of songs, biographies, Web sites, comic books, movies and
documentaries. A new generation of fans bought thousands of copies of her
photos, and some feminists hailed her as a pioneer of women's liberation.
Gretchen Mol portrayed her in 2005's "The Notorious Bettie Page" and Paige
Richards had the role in 2004's "Bettie Page: Dark Angel." Page herself took
part in the 1998 documentary "Betty Page: Pinup Queen."
Hefner said he last saw Page when he held a screening of "The Notorious
Bettie Page" at the Playboy Mansion. He said she objected to the fact that
the film referred to her as "notorious," but "we explained to her that it
referred to the troubled times she had and was a good way to sell a movie."
Page's career began one day in October 1950 when she took a respite from her
job as a secretary in a New York office for a walk along the beach at Coney
Island. An amateur photographer named Jerry Tibbs admired the 27-year-old's
firm, curvy body and asked her to pose.
Looking back on the career that followed, she told Playboy in 1998: "I never
thought it was shameful. I felt normal. It's just that it was much better
than pounding a typewriter eight hours a day, which gets monotonous."
Nudity didn't bother her, she said, explaining: "God approves of nudity.
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they were naked as jaybirds."
In 1951, Page fell under the influence of a photographer and his sister who
specialized in S&M. They cut her hair into the dark bangs that became her
signature and posed her in spiked heels and little else. She was
photographed with a whip in her hand, and in one session she was
spread-eagled between two trees, her feet dangling.
"I thought my arms and legs would come out of their sockets," she said
later.
Moralists denounced the photos as perversion, and Sen. Estes Kefauver of
Tennessee, Page's home state, launched a congressional investigation.
Page quickly retreated from public view, later saying she was hounded by
federal agents who waved her nude photos in her face. She also said she
believed that, at age 34, her days as "the girl with the perfect figure"
were nearly over.
She moved to Florida in 1957 and married a much younger man, as an early
marriage to her high school sweetheart had ended in divorce.
Her second marriage also failed, as did a third, and she suffered a nervous
breakdown.
In 1959, she was lying on a sea wall in Key West when she saw a church with
a white neon cross on top. She walked inside and became a born-again
Christian.
After attending Bible school, she wanted to serve as a missionary but was
turned down because she had been divorced. Instead, she worked full-time for
evangelist Billy Graham's ministry.
A move to Southern California in 1979 brought more troubles.
She was arrested after an altercation with her landlady, and doctors who
examined her determined she had acute schizophrenia. She spent 20 months in
a state mental hospital in San Bernardino.
A fight with another landlord resulted in her arrest, but she was found not
guilty because of insanity. She was placed under state supervision for eight
years.
"She had a very turbulent life," Todd Mueller, a family friend and autograph
seller, told The Associated Press on Thursday. "She had a temper to her."
Mueller said he first met Page after tracking her down in the 1990s and
persuaded her to do an autograph signing event.
He said she was a hit and sold about 3,000 autographs, usually for $200 to
$300 each.
"Eleanor Roosevelt, we got $40 to $50. ... Bettie Page outsells them all,"
he told The AP last week.
Born April 22, 1923, in Nashville, Tenn., Page said she grew up in a family
so poor "we were lucky to get an orange in our Christmas stockings."
The family included three boys and three girls, and Page said her father
molested all of the girls.
After the Pages moved to Houston, her father decided to return to Tennessee
and stole a police car for the trip. He was sent to prison, and for a time
Betty lived in an orphanage.
In her teens she acted in high school plays, going on to study drama in New
York and win a screen test from 20th Century Fox before her modeling career
took off.
___
Associated Press writers Denise Petski and Raquel Maria Dillon contributed
to this report.
----------------------------------------------
Reuters
Bettie Page, 1950s pin-up queen, dies in L.A.
By Dean Goodman Dean Goodman – Fri Dec 12, 1:13 am ET
A woman shows off a Bettie Page tattoo during Olympus Fashion Week at Bryant
Park in this September 11, 2004 file photo, in New York City. (Bowers/Get
Getty – A woman shows off a Bettie Page tattoo during Olympus Fashion Week
at Bryant Park in this September 11, …
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Bettie Page, one of America's most photographed
pin-up girls during the 1950s, died in Los Angeles on Thursday from
pneumonia, her agent said. She was 85.
Page was a ubiquitous sight during the 1950s, propelled to stardom when she
posed for Playboy as Miss January 1955. Soon her image was gracing playing
cards, record albums and bedroom posters across the country.
She stopped modeling in 1957, retreated from the public spotlight and turned
to religion. She enjoyed a renaissance of sorts in the 1980s, as a new
generation of fans became obsessed with her legacy.
Her agent, Mark Roesler, said Page was admitted to a Los Angeles-area
hospital four weeks ago. She never regained consciousness after suffering a
heart attack earlier this month.
With her dark bangs, alluring blue-gray eyes and wide smile, Page cultivated
an innocent girl-next-door persona. The one-time school teacher was nice,
but clearly also naughty. Some of her photos featured spanking and bondage.
"Bettie Page embodied the stereotypical wholesomeness of the Fifties and the
hidden sexuality straining beneath the surface," authors Karen Essex and
James L. Swanson wrote in their 1996 book "Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up
Legend."
Page professed to be mystified by all the attention, saying she never felt
particularly attractive and had to wear a lot of makeup to cover up her
large pores. After she found God, she was initially ashamed of having posed
nude.
"(B)ut now most of the money I've got is because I posed in the nude," she
told Playboy last year. "So I'm not ashamed of it now, but I still don't
understand it."
Bettie Mae Page was born on April 22, 1923, in Nashville, one of six
children. She and two sisters were sent to an orphanage after her father
went to jail and her mother could not cope on her own. Page later described
her father as "a sex fiend" who started sexually molesting her when she was
13.
Page, armed with an arts degree with Peabody College in Nashville, did her
first modeling work in the 1940s after moving to San Francisco with the
first of her three husbands. After they divorced in 1947, she pursued
modeling in New York. Photos from a shoot with Miami photographer Bunny
Yeager ended up in the pages of Playboy.
The layout featured Page winking at the camera wearing only a Santa hat as
she decorated a Christmas tree. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner described it as
"a milestone in the history of the magazine," which he had founded less than
two years earlier.
Later in life, Page was furious that Yeager made a fortune from the photos
and never compensated her.
Some American lawmakers were not as impressed with her modeling abilities.
Page was served with a subpoena to appear before U.S. Senate investigators
trying to discover a link between juvenile delinquency and pornography. Page
never appeared. Soon after, she completely disappeared from the scene.
After two other brief marriages failed, Page battled acute schizophrenia
beginning in the early 1970s. Her comeback gathered momentum with the 1991
movie "The Rocketeer," based on a comic book where the hero's girlfriend was
Page. Fan clubs and websites proliferated, and Page made a good living
signing memorabilia at conventions. On the rare occasions that she gave
interviews, she insisted that she not be photographed.
Page had no children. There was no immediate information about funeral
plans.
(Editing by Eric Walsh)
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E! Online
Pinup Queen Bettie Page Dead at 85
Thu., Dec. 11, 2008 7:29 PM PST by Natalie Finn
Although her body was mortal, Bettie Page's image is forever young and
feisty.
The 1950s-era model, whose saucy poses for publications like Beauty Parade,
Twitter and an upstart rag called Playboy won her a legion of fans and a
cult following long after her pinup days were over, died Thursday night at a
Los Angeles hospital, nine days after suffering a heart attack. She was 85.
According to her agent, Page had been hospitalized for three weeks
beforehand with pneumonia.
Page's trademark jet-black bangs and curvy figure—clad in slinky lingerie,
bondage gear or other thematic costumes, if clad in anything at all—were
fixtures on the pages of men's magazines from 1951 to 1957.
Hugh Hefnerpicked her to be Playboy's Playmate of the Month in January 1955.
In an interview a couple of years ago, Hefner described her MO as "a
combination of wholesome innocence and fetish-oriented poses that is at once
retro and very modern."
Her willingness to go wild in front of the camera also landed her the
starring role in dozens of silent fetish shorts, featuring her as a
dominatrix, with her biggest-selling still photo of all time coming from the
featurette Leopard Bikini Bound. The only time the dancer and aspiring
actress' voice was captured on film was in the feature-length Striporama, in
which she had a small speaking role.
Of course, this was the 1950s, so all that risqué exposure came with a
price.
In 1957, Page was called to testify before Congress during an investigation
into the possible perversity of such photographs. She ultimately never had
to take the stand, but many of the negatives from her gigs as a mail-order
pinup were destroyed during the proceedings.
Page ended up leaving the life—and how—in 1959, when she became a born-again
Christian, not long after suffering a nervous breakdown upon the collapse of
her second marriage.
The Nashville native applied to be a missionary in Africa but was rejected
because she had been divorced. She later ended up working for the Rev. Billy
Graham's ministry. Depression and other mental issues clouded some of her
later years
But while Page may have turned her back on her past, her fans didn't. The
1976 book A Nostalgic Look at Bettie Page won her a small but devoted
following, and the photo reissues, film collections and reimagined accounts
of her life and infamous career have been pouring forth ever since,
including in 2005 when Gretchen Mol starred in The Notorious Bettie Page for
HBO.
Page began giving interviews again in the 1990s, but wouldn't allow
reporters to take her picture, figuring fans would prefer to remember the
sultry sexpot she once was, or, as she told the Los Angeles Times in 2006:
"I want to be remembered as the woman who changed people's perspectives
concerning nudity in its natural form."
----------------------------------------------------------
BBC News
50s pin-up queen Bettie Page dies
Page was one of the most photographed women of her time
Bettie Page, one of the most famous US pin-up models of the 1950s, has died
in Los Angeles, aged 85.
Her provocative poses - often in bikinis - made her a cult figure and she
was one of the first models to appear in Playboy magazine.
Bettie Page was credited with helping to pave the way for the sexual
revolution of the 1960s.
Some pictures of her showing bondage and spanking generated controversy and
attracted a congressional subpoena.
The secretary-turned-model was admitted to hospital last month, suffering
from pneumonia. She had a heart attack last week and never regained
consciousness.
'Iconic figure'
"With deep personal sadness I must announce that my dear friend and client
Bettie Page passed away at 1841 this evening (0241 GMT Friday) in a Los
Angeles hospital," her agent Mark Roesler said.
"She captured the imagination of a generation with her free spirit and
unabashed sensuality", he said. "She is the embodiment of beauty".
Bettie Page in the 1954 film Varietease
I never thought it was shameful. I felt it was normal
Bettie Page
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner called her a "very dear person", AP reported.
"I think that she was a remarkable lady, an iconic figure in pop culture who
influenced sexuality, taste in fashion, someone who had a tremendous impact
on our society," Hefner was quoted as saying.
Bettie Mae Page was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1923. Her career took
off after an amateur photographer in New York asked her to pose for pictures
in 1950.
She featured in posters and photographs, including one of the early
centrefolds of Playboy magazine.
However not everyone was happy with the pictures. Some US lawmakers were
concerned they amounted to pornography and subpoenaed Page to testify at a
congressional hearing, although in the end she never had to appear.
Looking back on her career, she told Playboy in 1998: "I never thought it
was shameful. I felt normal. It's just that it was much better than pounding
a typewriter eight hours a day, which gets monotonous."
She was married three times but had no children.
She disappeared from public view in the late 1950s, turning to religion and
battling mental illness. However, decades later, she became the subject of
renewed interest.
------------------------------------------------------
New York Times
Bettie Page, Queen of Pinups, Dies at 85
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Published: December 11, 2008
Bettie Page, a legendary pinup girl whose photographs in the nude, in
bondage and in naughty-but-nice poses appeared in men’s magazines and
private stashes across America in the 1950s and set the stage for the sexual
revolution of the rebellious ’60s, died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 85.
Her death was reported by her agent, Mark Roesler, on Ms. Page’s Web site,
bettiepage.com.
Ms. Page, whose popularity underwent a cult-like revival in the last 20
years, had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia and was about to
be released Dec. 2 when she suffered a heart attack, said Mr. Roesler, of
CMG Worldwide. She was transferred in a coma to Kindred Hospital, where she
died.
In her trademark raven bangs, spike heels and killer curves, Ms. Page was
the most famous pinup girl of the post-World War II era, a centerfold on a
million locker doors and garage walls. She was also a major influence in the
fashion industry and a target of Senator Estes Kefauver’s anti-pornography
investigators.
But in 1957, at the height of her fame, she disappeared, and for three
decades her private life — two failed marriages, a fight against poverty and
mental illness, resurrection as a born-again Christian, years of seclusion
in Southern California — was a mystery to all but a few close friends.
Then in the late 1980s and early ’90s, she was rediscovered and a Bettie
Page renaissance began. David Stevens, creator of the comic-book and later
movie character the Rocketeer, immortalized her as the Rocketeer’s
girlfriend. Fashion designers revived her look. Uma Thurman, in bangs,
reincarnated Bettie in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” and Demi Moore,
Madonna and others appeared in Page-like photos.
There were Bettie Page playing cards, lunch boxes, action figures, T-shirts
and beach towels. Her saucy images went up in nightclubs. Bettie Page fan
clubs sprang up. Look-alike contests, featuring leather-and-lace and
kitten-with-a-whip Betties, were organized. Hundreds of Web sites appeared,
including her own, which had 588 million hits in five years, CMG Worldwide
said in 2006.
Biographies were published, including her authorized version, “Bettie Page:
The Life of a Pin-Up Legend,” (General Publishing Group) which appeared in
1996. It was written by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson.
A movie, “The Notorious Bettie Page,” starring Gretchen Mol as Bettie and
directed by Mary Harron for Picturehouse and HBO Films, was released in
2006, adapted from “The Real Bettie Page,” by Richard Foster. Bettie May
Page was born in Jackson, Tenn., the eldest girl of Roy and Edna Page’s six
children. The father, an auto mechanic, molested all three of his daughters,
Ms. Page said years later, and was divorced by his wife when Bettie was 10.
She and some of her siblings were placed for a time in an orphanage. She
attended high school in Nashville, and was almost a straight-A student,
graduating second in her class.
She graduated from Peabody College, a part of Vanderbilt University in
Nashville, but a teaching career was brief. “I couldn’t control my students,
especially the boys,” she said. She tried secretarial work, married Billy
Neal in 1943 and moved to San Francisco, where she modeled fur coats for a
few years. She divorced Mr. Neal in 1947, moved to New York and enrolled in
acting classes.
She had a few stage and television appearances, but it was a chance meeting
that changed her life. On the beach at Coney Island in 1950, she met Jerry
Tibbs, a police officer and photographer, who assembled her first pinup
portfolio. By 1951, the brother-sister photographers Irving and Paula Klaw,
who ran a mail-order business in cheesecake, were promoting the Bettie Page
image with spike heels and whips, while Bunny Yeager’s pictures featured her
in jungle shots, with and without leopards skins.
Her pictures were ogled in Wink, Eyeful, Titter, Beauty Parade and other
magazines, and in leather-fetish 8- and 16-millimeter films. Her first name
was often misspelled. Her big break was the Playboy centerfold in January
1955, when she winked in a Santa Claus cap as she put a bulb on a Christmas
tree. Money and offers rolled in, but as she recalled years later, she was
becoming depressed.
In 1955, she received a summons from a Senate committee headed by Senator
Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat, that was investigating pornography. She was
never compelled to testify, but the uproar and other pressures drove her to
quit modeling two years later. She moved to Florida. Subsequent marriages to
Armond Walterson and Harry Lear ended in divorce, and there were no
children. She moved to California in 1978.
For years Ms. Page lived on Social Security benefits. After a nervous
breakdown, she was arrested for an attack on a landlady, but was found not
guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a California mental institution.
She emerged years later as a born-again Christian, immersing herself in
Bible studies and serving as an adviser to the Billy Graham Crusade.
In recent years, she had lived in Southern California on the proceeds of her
revival. Occasionally, she gave interviews in her gentle Southern drawl, but
largely stayed out of the public eye — and steadfastly refused to be
photographed.
“I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times,”
she told The Los Angeles Times in 2006. “I want to be remembered as a woman
who changed people’s perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form.”
-----
RJ the Vintner
retrowavelength
Thank you for assembling & posting these news articles.
--rwl
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KCG
>1950s Pinup Model Bettie Page Dies at 85
Many thanks, Vintner.
>--- KCG