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Bettie Page

According to PLAYBOY magazine, Bettie Page is "the Queen of Pin-ups. The model of the century, yet she remains one of its best kept secrets."

The iconic girl with the trademark black bangs, fabulous killer curves, and sweet smile, grew up loving movies, and dreamed of a film career. Instead, whilst in New York, she drifted innocently into modelling, posing for camera clubs.

Bettie found that her provocative cheesecake photographs during the period of 1950 through 1957 violated all manner of existing cultural sexual taboos and finally invoked a United States Senate Committee investigation.

Born Betty Mae Page[6] in Nashville, Tennessee on April 22, 1923, Bettie suffered a difficult childhood to an indifferent mother and a sexually abusive father. She and her sisters would mimic the hair and make-up of their favourite movie stars. She also taught herself to sew, and these skills proved useful years later for her pin-up photography when Page did her own styling and made her own bikinis and costumes.

After relocating to New York, Bettie met Jerry Tibbs, a police officer with an interest in photography. Bettie was a willing model, and Tibbs took pictures of her and put together her first pinup portfolio in 1950.

In the late 1940s, 'camera clubs' were a popular means of circumventing legal restrictions on the production of nude photos. These clubs existed ostensibly to promote artistic photography, but many were merely fronts for the making of erotica. Page entered the field of glamour photography as a popular camera club model whose lack of inhibitions in posing made a name for her relatively quickly.

From 1952 through 1957, she posed for photographer Irving Klaw for mail-order photographs with pin-up, bondage or sadomasochistic themes, making her the first famous bondage model.

In 1953, Page took acting classes at the renowned Herbert Berghoff Studios, which led to several roles on stage and television. Her film career included feature length burlesque revue films and featured exotic dance routines by Page.

In 1954, during one of her annual pilgrimages to Miami, Florida, Page met photographers Jan Caldwell, H. W. Hannau and Bunny Yeager. At that time, Page was the top pin-up model in New York. Yeager, a former model and aspiring photographer, worked with Page to create one the Jungle shoot and many of the resultant shots are among her most celebrated.

Page went on to be featured in the Playboy January 1955 issue. The famous centerfold shows Page, wearing only a Santa hat, kneeling before a Christmas tree holding an ornament and playfully winking at the camera. Later that year, Bettie won the title "Miss Pinup Girl of the World".

The United States Congress later called Page to testify to explain the photos in which she appeared, when it was reported that a young man died during a bondage session inspired by her. Although she was excused from appearing before the committee, the print negatives of many of her photos were destroyed by court order. For many years after, the negatives that survived were illegal to print.

In 1958, Bettie retreated from the spotlight. In the following years, she became a born-again Christian, who also battled a mental breakdown and acute schizophrenia and married and divorced twice. While living in seclusion, Page was unaware of the revival of her popularity to cult status in the 1980's.

On December 11, 2008, Bettie Page passed away after spending a week on life support following a heart attack earlier in the month.

Bettie Page's spirit transcends traditional feminist ideology, cutting straight past perceived ideas of how women should or shouldn't pander to men's sexual appetites. Her pictures are so elemental, so lacking in guile, that they often seem to be less "about" sex than about a pure state of being -- maybe even a state of grace.

The Secret Language of Fans

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