BETTIE PAGE

    The 1950's Queen of Pinups worked as a model for less than a decade and appeared in just a handful of films with no dialogue. Still, with her short black bangs and pale skin, Bettie Page etched an image into America's memory that’s as iconic as Marilyn Monroe.

Born Betty Mae Page in Nashville, Tennessee, she began spelling her name ending with “ie” at a very young age. By 1948, she moved to New York and tried to start a career in acting. While in New York, she hooked up with an amateur photographer that changed her life. Jerry Tibbs is credited with being the first to notice Bettie's potential and was the inspiration for her “Bettie bangs” hairstyle. Bettie went on to model at camera clubs and later appeared in magazines such as Eyeful, Titter and Wink. She also began posing in bondage photographs for Irving Klaw, who at the time was known as the King of Pinups. Klaw had a family-run business named the Movie Star News and Bettie soon became the first famous bondage model. Bettie also appeared in two of Klaw's feature length burlesque films - “Varietease” and “Teaserama.” The only other cinematic credits by the Queen of Curves were Jerald Intrator’s “Striporama” and a number of 8mm and 16mm peep show reels.

In 1954, Bettie began working with former model turned photographer Bunny Yeager. It was Yeager who photographed Bettie's most famous images in leopard print. Yeager also later submitted photographs to Hugh Hefner and Bettie was featured as the Playboy centerfold and Playmate of the Month for January 1955. “She had a saucy innocence that is both contemporary and provocative, and also nostalgic,” Hugh Hefner was once quoted as saying. Page continued to model until 1957. Burnt out, she withdrew from the spotlight at the age of 35.

Her bio on her official site states “the transcendent beauty and playful yet dangerous personality of Bettie Page trumps all else and continues to inspire documentary films, designers’ fashions, artists’ fetishes, and fans’ fantasies.” Her influences can be seen everywhere from gothic, punk and rockabilly cultures, to comic books, the artwork of Olivia de Berardinis, movies like “Pulp Fiction,” “House of 1,000 Corpses,” “The Doom Generation” and “The Crying Game,” cigarette ads to burlesque artists like Dita Von Teese and modern day pinups like the Suicide Girls.

Over the past five years, Bettie Page's website has gotten over 588 million hits. Currently 82-years-old and living in Southern California, Page now makes more money off of her work than she ever has. A born-again Christian, Bettie shuns the public and recently told the Los Angeles Times she rarely leaves her house and refuses to be photographed. “I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times,” Bettie told the newspaper. “I want to be remembered as a woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form.”

From the foreword of the book “Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend,” Page writes of herself, “I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer. I wasn't trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn't think of myself as liberated, and I don't believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn't know any other way to be, or any other way to live.” She shows us that not only can we forget about what anyone else thinks and just be ourselves, but that in doing so, it could possibly influence those around us now and for years to come.

-- CCF, March 2006

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