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Sane and sexy
Why Bettie Page is still the Great American Erotic Dream(boat)
by Charles TaylorBETTIE PAGE: THE LIFE OF A PIN-UP LEGEND, by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson, General Publishing Group, 288 pages, $40.
BETTY PAGE CONFIDENTIAL, photos by Bunny Yeager, introduction by Buck Henry, St. Martin's Press, 128 pages, $13.95.
BETTIE PAGE: QUEEN OF HEARTS, by Jim Silke, Dark Horse Books, 96 pages, $19.95.
BUNNY YEAGER'S BETTIE PAGE and BUNNY YEAGER'S BETTIE PAGE IN BLACK LACE, two sets of 50 trading cards, 21st Century Archives, $14.95 each.
"I found this magazine in my father's closet. It was dirty. Forbidden."It's the eyes that capture you. Peeking, or more often looking out straight and unembarrassed from beneath bangs that front a lustrous cascade of blue-black hair. Those eyes meet your initially furtive gaze, acknowledging why you're looking and telling you it's okay, look, enjoy yourself. There may be no figure in the history of erotica who has done more to erase the line between the pleasure erotica and porn can give and the guilt and shame they induce than Bettie Page. For who could feel guilty looking at her?
"That's not art. It's fetish."
"Well what's art? Those are the strongest feelings I know. Those are the most powerful images I know. That's my art."-- from the movie Heartbreakers (1984)
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From 1950 to 1957, when she disappeared amid the furor of a Senate investigation, Bettie Page was the undisputed queen of American pin-ups. Karen Essex and James L. Swanson, the authors of the shrewd and thoroughly entertaining Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend (written with her cooperation, and the best of several recent books about her), estimate that she may have racked up more magazine appearances than Marilyn Monroe and Cindy Crawford combined. That's not a biographer's exaggeration, though it may startle people who've never heard of Bettie Page. They've seen her, though -- if not Bettie herself, then her image reproduced by one of the photographers or artists or cartoonists or models who've returned to her photos, unable to resist trying to re-create the magic of those often artless shots, and more often than not settling for homage -- as in Ellen von Unwerth's collaboration with Eva Herzigova or in the drawings cartoonist and pin-up aficionado Jim Silke has placed next to photos of Bettie in his Bettie Page: Queen of Hearts.
The pin-up cutie is one of the iconic personas that has never disappeared from America's collective consciousness, an image so familiar it can easily cross over into camp or po-mo archness. Bettie Page was no more the first cheesecake model than Brando was the first leather-jacketed biker or James Dean the first shuffling, sensitive blue-jeans teen. But like Brando in The Wild One or Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Bettie Page embodied the image she projected more strongly than anyone else before or since. When you see a model in black bangs and PVC teddy in the latest George Michael video, or model Kristin McNemeny featured in a bondage layout in a recent issue of the British magazine the Face, you know Bettie's influence is lurking somewhere in the background.
Some of her admirers -- like cartoonist Dave Stevens (who, as a teenager, came across her photo in an old girlie magazine while browsing through a used-book store) in his marvelous tribute to '40s adventure serials, The Rocketeer, or the painter Robert Blue (whose canvases were featured in the terrific Heartbreakers, where Peter Coyote played a character based on Blue) -- working out of what can only be described as ardor have succeeded in capturing "what it is that her face and body seem to promise," in Mikal Gilmore's words. Stevens's "Betty" is the sassy heroine rarely seen in Hollywood after the neutering effect of the Hays Code. Blue covers more obsessive, fetishistic territory. His paintings are hyper-real, fanatically disciplined copies of Page photos. "Banana Leaf" even reproduces the linoleum pattern of the floor in the original shot. But in it and in "Lace," the light reflected in Bettie's hair is like currents of neon coursing through her. For Blue, looking at this woman is like picking up a live wire; he's rapt, transfixed, and helpless to do anything but hold on.
There's no better proof, though, of the strength of the original than the simple observation that almost 40 years after her last pin-up shot, Bettie Page is better known than ever. By all odds, she should have remained sealed in the '50s, like dozens of other women before and since who have taken it off for the cameras and been promptly forgotten. Doing nude modeling -- something still looked at askance -- in the stifling conservatism of the Eisenhower era, Bettie was working outside the mainstream, appearing in dozens of forgotten men's magazines and in postcards literally sold under the counter in newsstands and smoke shops. That's it. She didn't have a career as an actress or singer to make her visible beyond that subterranean realm.
And she was far from the "pulchritudinous" women favored by the men's mags. With her firm, athletic build -- high (not large) breasts, prominent ribcage, long, sturdy (not slim) legs -- she's almost a female version of Johnny Weissmuller, a smooth, natural example of what used to be called "musculature."
It's Bettie's persona, though, that has kept its hold on the erotic imagination. It's a cliché to say she combines the familiar with the forbidden, but had the mainstream in the '50s been exposed to her image -- a dark, exceptionally beautiful version of the all-American look, unabashedly sexual, joyous, and unashamed -- I'm convinced people would have been confused and upset the same way they were when they heard Elvis Presley sing "Peace in the Valley" and couldn't reconcile his religious impulse with his aggressive sexuality. Just by being herself, Bettie Page confounded the simplistic notions of what separated good girls from bad ones. In the past few years, the Gilligan's Island school of feminism has claimed that little boys prefer Mary Ann and are scared of Ginger. True. But what's left out is the secret wish of little boys: that, in bed, Mary Ann would act like Ginger.
Bettie Page is blithely unaware of that division. The nude shots of her taken by pin-up photographer Bunny Yeager on Florida beaches (collected in Betty Page Confidential and several trading-card sets) radiate freedom and pleasure. There's one shot in particular of her standing on the prow of a speedboat -- her eyes closed and her head tossed back, her right leg arched and her hands running through her thick hair -- that exults in the feel of the sun and wind on her flesh, in her own gorgeousness, and invites us to exult too.
The photos of Bettie that don't work are the gag shots, like the bikini-clad ones she did for magazines like Wink, Titter, and Eyeful, where she adopts pop-eyed boop-boop-be-doo expressions. Although that sense of fun is what saves the bondage shots and movie loops she did for Irving Klaw at New York's Movie Star News, where Bettie, in garters, stockings, and impossibly high heels, tries so hard to look the dark dominatrix that the shots seem lighthearted even to those of us who find bondage a turnoff. Occasionally a darker side does come through. Every once in a while her lip curls and a sneer crosses her face, a look that's as much a challenge as a come-on. This is where her gentle tease brushes the nastier, stomach-fluttering, breath-quickening excitement of porn.
What Bettie is incapable of is guilt. That must have been, and probably still is, a revelation to the men who've been told that the desire to look at naked women is depraved, corrupting, dangerous. Even riffling through something as mild as Playboy on the newsstand is enough to get dirty looks shot your way. When I get those looks, I wonder what I'm supposed to do. Protest that I'm a happily married man? Explain that it doesn't bother me that my wife takes obvious delight in looking at Fred Ward or Nicolas Cage? I'm tempted to ask the people staring whether they're naive enough to believe that people in happy relationships no longer have sexual fantasies about anyone other than their partner.
Men like to look. A friend of mine recently told me that her four-year-old son pointed to a picture of Sharon Stone, giggled, and kissed it. When she asked him what he was doing, he explained, "I wanted to kiss that pretty lady." And I'm convinced that men who treat women like dirt would do so whether they looked at nudie pix or not. I'm also convinced that some of the most ardent pin-up devotees worship women. Reading the letters sent into the fanzine the Betty Pages or seeing the amateur shots taken by the New York City "camera clubs" Bettie posed for (chaperoned outings where participants would pay a flat fee to travel to the country or seashore and photograph a model for a couple of hours), what comes through is how much these men adore Bettie. Art Amsie, one of the camera-club members quoted in Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend, says, "I should have married her. I still want to." Amsie stayed truer to that wish than he realizes. Behind the camera, he's a man who thinks his girlfriend is the most beautiful woman in the world, and he loves, honors, and cherishes her with every shot. Bettie responds with the loveliest, most natural poses she ever did.
Amsie's photographs are a revelation. But what really recommends Karen Essex and James Swanson's book, despite the occasional Reader's Digest-style prose, is the authors' smarts. Swanson, a lawyer who managed to get Bettie (who's alive and well in Southern California and had been eking out a living on Social Security) a percentage of the profits earned from the sale of her image, and Essex, a writer who had written about Bettie for L.A. Weekly, acknowledge her sexual abuse by her father and her unhappy marriages, but they don't fall for the cheap psychology of blaming her career on that. They have the brains to look at what's in front of them and see the joy that Bettie radiates.
"I was happy as a lark stark naked," she tells them.
If the life they chronicle hasn't always been a happy one, it's certainly been a free one. The surprise of the book is that it suggests the freedom that the anonymity of big American cities afforded an ordinary young woman afflicted with wanderlust who, without meaning to, chose a life outside the mainstream because it pleased her. She could be one of the women in the rented rooms and coffee shops of Edward Hopper's paintings, but without the fugitive loneliness that overwhelms Hopper's figures. After modeling, Bettie's life consisted of Bible college and work with the Billy Graham crusades. Today, she regards the devotion she inspires with disbelieving gratitude and still has no shame or regrets. Just as she once invited us to share her pleasure, she seems now to be extending her own sense of contentment.
Those of us who love her remain passionate about her because, in a country still more puritan than it wants to believe, her image promises a refuge not just of sensuality but of sanity, too.
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