Thanatos Report This Comment Date: December 12, 2008 04:19AM
LOS ANGELES – Bettie Page, the 1950s secretary-turned-model whose
controverisal photographs in skimpy attire or none at all helped set the stage
for the 1960s sexual revolution, died Thursday. She was 85.
Page suffered a heart attack last week in Los Angeles and never regained
consciousness, her agent Mark Roesler said. 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.
The latter helped contribute to her mysterious disappearance from the public
eye, which lasted decades and included years during which 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."
Her 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.