Bettie Page Interview
From Outré Magazine Volume One Number Three
The three most photographed women of the 20th century are Americans. All were at their peaks of activity in the 1950's. Two of them -- Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield -- died young but remain world famous. The third is still living, yet even at the height of her professional activity she remained largely unknown to the general public. But for sheer volume of photography she probably surpassed both Monroe and Mansfield, and was almost certainly a better pin-up model than either -- more natural than the overly aggressive Jayne, and even more instinctively "right" in her poses and attitudes than Marilyn. She's Bettie Page: Tennessee-bred honor student, aspiring actress, teacher, born-again Christian -- and the greatest girlie model who ever lived.
Bettie rose to the top of her art for reasons other than the obvious ones. Because of a variety of talents and attributes, she became emblematic -- a
Symbol of Woman who was at once, is knowable and abstract. Since her rediscovery in the 1980's, the emblematic nature of her appeal has grown. Her fans, many of whom (like this writer) were children or not yet born during her heyday, adore her but burden her, perhaps unfairly, with all the culturally significant baggage that must be carried by emblems and symbols. To many of us, Bettie is Innocence, she's Charm, she's an America that has gone away. At the very least, she is a time-specific feminine ideal who has become timeless. Her appeal was undiminished by the anorexia that passed for sex appeal in the 1960's, and it easily overshadows the comically affected poutiness offered by the bust- and lip-enhanced super models of the '90's. The arrival of a serious challenger seems unlikely.
As Martha Saxton notes in her splendid 1975 book, "Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties", "women's history, unlike men's, is also the history of sex." Because men and women are sexual creatures, they relate most basically, most urgently, on a sexual level. Men have been sex objects, throughout human history just as surely as women -- the key difference is the male tendency to voyeurism, which leads to more obvious objectification of the female.
It was inevitable, then, that as soon as somebody invented the camera, somebody else was snapping photos of naked women. To that first glamour photographer, it must have seemed a complete no-brainer, on the order of: if I were starving and found a roast beef sandwich, I'd eat it. Likewise: I'm horny, I've got a camera, and I'm photographing Mildred, who has kindly consented to drop her bustle.
Perhaps the most fascinating by product of pin-up photography -- which is what Bettie Page practiced, and which is divorced from the more blatant pleasures of porn photography -- is the record it keeps of the changing "styles" of the female body. For good or ill, the female nude is an aesthetic landmark that has informed nearly every aspect of our lives and cultural history: fashion; painting, statuary, and other fine art; poster art; advertising; cartooning; art and figure photography; pornography in nearly all its aspects; totems and other religious artifacts; motion pictures; television; industrial design -- any art form or creative endeavor that can be experienced with the eyes has celebrated the female body, either in literal or stylized depiction, or in essence (such as the pinch-waisted lipsticks and shapely automobile bodies of the 1950's).
Via pin-up photography, we can easily follow the course of women's bodies, a course that has been largely dictated by men, and that has been willingly followed by many women.
The earliest pin-up photographers took inspiration from illustrator Charles Dana Gibson (whose "elegant "Gibson Girl" appeared in the original Life beginning in 1887 and, later, in Colliers), and from anonymous artists who filled the pages of the National Police Gazette with images of corseted -- and uncorseted -- cuties. Early photographic pin-ups from Europe and America -- many of them featuring vaudevillians or Folies-Bergère chorines -- show zaftig women, typically smallish in the breasts and large in the hips and rear, with fleshy legs and bellies. To modern eyes, these models appear dumpy and comically overstuffed; looking at them, you immediately understand where your grandma got the stout shape you remember.
The "big woman" ideal was perpetuated by the so-called French postcards that took hold in America around 1900. Whether produced in Paris or in Hoboken, these naughty photos were, for countless men, the only opportunity they would have to gaze uninterrupted at a nude woman; even married men fell into this group, given that discreet wives of the time undressed and fulfilled their wifely duties in the dark.
By the 1920's and the development of the first youth cult (a simultaneous development in France and the U.S.), the ideal woman was rail thin instead of tubby; free 'n' easy instead of repressed. John Held and other artists also mocked and elevated this image in cartoons and ad art, while young Joan Crawford helped to affix the image in the public mind via motion pictures.
The Great Depression that began in 1929 stole the high spirits from the "new woman," but the preferred physical attributes remained constant throughout the 1930's. Movie Humor, Film Fun, Movie Pix, and other seminal movie magazines of the Depression era featured saucy photography and illustration that vigorously promoted the slender look. Whether stars at the top of their game (such as Jean Harlow) or starlets struggling in two-reelers (such as June "Miss Crabtree" Marlowe), Depression-era actresses represented the prototypical "long cool woman." High-waisted and almost asexually slim, they perpetuated the thin look of the 1920's, but by now with a justification: people were hungry, and to be over-stuffed was not merely unaesthetic but unseemly.
Exceptions exist to every rule, of course. In the '20's, the most visible one was Clara Bow, who was short, deliciously well rounded, and emphatically sexy. A decade later a frequently photographed (and infrequently cast) Hollywood starlet named Toby Wing embodied a similarly lush sort of sex appeal. Although blonde in clear imitation of Harlow, Wing was neither as slim nor as subtle. Like Bow, she was predictive of a female body type that would not gain full acceptance for another 20 years.
World War II rocked America from its economic doldrums, even as it ruined the economies of most of the world's other nations. From this point, then, the United States became the preeminent producer of pin-up illustration and photography. Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, and others whose figures combined the best of the earlier fleshy and slim ideals set a new standard of female beauty. Even a few strippers, notably Gypsy Rose Lee and Ann Corio, became highly popular, "crossing over" into mainstream endeavors. Young American men, most of them soldiers, growled, "I like a woman with somethin' I can grab onto!", and that's what they got.
Wartime Hollywood-studio photographers including George Hurrell and Scotty Welbourne perfected part of the new pin-up equation in their evocative, black-and-white publicity portraits of female stars. In Esquire magazine, illustrators George Petty and Alberto Vargas brought a witty, tangerine-dream quality to the new sexuality.
However, it was left up to photographers who operated on the fringes of polite society to complete the mix, and they did so in figure-study publications such as Artist and Models and Art Inspirations, and nudist magazines like Sunshine and Health, Modern Sunbathing, and Sunbathing and Hygiene. These thinly disguised vehicles for voyeurism were more widely disseminated than anyone imagined -- the reader "pass-on" rate was astonishing -- and certainly helped spur anincreasingly liberal social climate.
At the mass-market level, newsstands and Mom 'n' Pop stores sustained a multitude of low-brow men's magazines, many of which were published by a New Yorker named Robert Harrison. Although best-known for his Confidential magazine that flourished in the 1950's, Harrison made his most important contribution to American culture in the late 1940's with Wink, Eyeful, Titter, and others, which offered the semi-clad female ideal to ex-GI's who had money, leisure time, and a cocky self-image. Paper shortages eased in 1945 and federal restrictions on paper use were lifted altogether in 1950, so Harrison and his numberless imitators were free to produce magazines by the millions.
Bettie Page appeared in Harrison magazines, often in fumetti-style photo comic strips that put her in abbreviated maid outfits and similarly contrived garb. This "early" Bettie of the 1951-52 period was more often a sexy jokester (complete with wide eyes and a mouth frozen in an "O" of perpetual surprise) than smoky seducer. Bettie would not begin to make her real mark for another year or two.
By 1953, sexual mores had loosened to the point that a young Chicago editor named Hugh Hefner was able to parlay a $600 investment into Playboy magazine and, ultimately, a publishing empire. When he put a stock photo of Marilyn Monroe, the reigning sex goddess of the period, on the cover of his first issue, Hefner cemented the acceptance of the curvy, busty feminine ideal that defines the period as sharply as the Cold War, tail fins, and rock'n'roll.
In response, hundreds of starlets, photographic models, and would-be models stripped and stepped forward to fill the pages of Playboy and its many knock offs.
Because Playboy set a self-consciously high standard that was difficult for other magazines to match (Sir, Rogue, and Modern Man - which actually preceded Playboy by two years -- came the closest), most of Hefner's competition took the low road, many with a frankly exploitative style that freely juxtaposed nudity and semi-nudity with tales of scandal, crime, and corruption. The titles of these magazines- Pose, Peep Show, He, Dare -- suggest their markedly unsubtle approach. (In Great Britain, publisher/photographer George Harrison Marks offered a somewhat tamer interpretation via his Kamera, Girls, and Solo.)
Pin-up models freely moved between girlie and exploitation magazines, masquerading as girls next door or trollops as the clients demanded. Male buyers quickly became familiar with the faces and bodies of the most active models of the day: Jayne Mansfield, Sandra Giles, Lili Christine, Jeanne Carmen [see Carmen profile and interview in our sister publication Filmfax #51], Arline Hunter (remarkable in her resemblance to Marilyn Monroe), Irish McCalla, Joi Lansing, Blaze Starr, Anita Ekberg, June Wilkinson, Lili St. Cyr, and the very popular Diane Webber (who began her career using her real name, Marguerite Empey).
The pin-up business of the 1950's tossed its female participants into a brutally competitive arena that demanded youth as well as beauty. The top models were stupendous physical specimens barely into their 20's. The overwhelming preponderance of them were blonde. In this scenario, two things about Bettie Page stand out in stark relief. First, her hair was the color of ebony instead of honey. Second, and most significantly, Bettie was about ten years older than most of her competitors. By the time she reached the peak of her activity in 1954, she was already 31 years old.
Bettie did not find her niche (or rather, one of her many niches) until 1952, when she went to work for a portly New Yorker named Irving Klaw. With his sister Paula, Klaw operated Movie Star News, a walk-in and mail-order business that initially specialized in Hollywood-movie stills. Following the war, increasing numbers of male customers asked for specific sorts of Hollywood photos: bathtub scenes, actresses in bare feet, "cat fights," starlets being spanked or tied up. This was the freest expression yet of America's sexual underground, and from this point the movement burgeoned.
Armed with new awareness, Klaw remained in the movie-still business and also set himself up as a photographer and filmmaker -- with a twist. He understood that what many of his customers wanted was fetishistic in nature, and he obliged them by shooting, and selling thousands upon thousands of black-and-white photos of models tied up and in mock distress: pinioned to chairs, posts, or revolving gimbals; suspended by ornate constructions of two by fours and pulleys; sheathed in leather, cries stifled by a rubber ball in the mouth; manacled, handcuffed, hogtied. Additionally, Klaw produced hundreds of 8- and 16-millimeter "loops" that gave his fetishistic imagery depth and movement. It was all fake, of course, and thus harmless, kinky fun.
Klaw used many models in his stills and loops, notably Joan Rydell, Honey Baer, Trudy Wayne, and flame-haired stripper Tempest Storm. But he used none more frequently than Bettie Page; a typical Klaw photo catalog of the period was comprised of a sample image of each of his models, with the girl's name and the number of shots that were available. Barbara Pauline, the copy would say, 65 poses; Joan Rydell, 180 poses; Bettie Page, 1500 poses.
A number like the last is astonishing, suggesting that Bettie spent every waking moment in front of Klaw's camera eye. And yet she couldn't, for she also posed for legit photographers who sold her image to dozens of girlie and exploitation magazines (including Playboy, which purchased a stock image of Bettie in a Santa's cap -- and nothing else -- for its January 1955 center spread). Bettie's face and body showed up in advertising, on the sleeves of record albums, and on calendars. She found a few jobs as good-looking scenery on television, and posed for amateur "camera clubs," where her work ran the gamut from innocuous swimsuit cheesecake to overtly sexual beaver poses. In addition, she found time to take acting lessons, work out, do an unsuccessful Hollywood screen test, and labor as a secretary.
Vacationing in Florida in 1954, Bettie met a woman who would become her most congenial collaborator -- Bunny Yeager, a beautiful ex-model turned glamour photographer, whose skill with a camera placed her in the era's front rank, alongside Peter Gowland and Russ Meyer.
Yeager favored sunlit outdoor settings that encouraged and enhanced Bettie's natural charm and exuberance. The large catalog Bettie and Bunny produced together comprises a high point of pin-up photography, and has lately been reissued in quality prints and in a variety of books.
By the time Bettie abandoned modeling and left New York for good in 1957, she had worked so often and with such marvelous results that she left behind an enormous cult of admirers.
Why did this initial cult develop? The prolific nature of Bettie's career surely was a factor, but other prolific models of the '50's, such as Maria Stinger, Betty Bronson, and the aforementioned Diane Webber, though extremely popular, never approached the adulation enjoyed by Bettie. Yes, Bettie was unusually pretty and had a gorgeous body but, clearly, there is more to her appeal than what meets the eye; what it meets, in fact, is the heart.
Is the most vital ingredient of effective pin-up photography a flawless body? No: not necessary. A face by Renoir? Not needed. The crucial ingredient is eye contact. The model who can capture and hold the gaze of the viewer is the one who has the guy in her pocket (or would, if she were wearing clothes that had pockets). The unspoken communication that arises from effective eye contact is crucial and powerful; silent messages of love, desire, and longing fly between model and viewer, coruscating like heat lightning.
The fact that this sort of emotional connection is lacking in much of today's girlie photography, in which models' eyes are often closed in faux-orgasmic ecstasy, or in which the photographer lavishes obsessive attention on a specific body part, is one reason why today's photos are less engaging than the far less explicit ones from 40 years ago. The essential human element is missing.
Bettie Page understood the value of the pointed gaze as well as any model who ever lived. She also understood humor. Or perhaps it's just that she was born with so much of it that it shone from her face like a beacon. She had an innate ability to express the wit of posture and expression that calendar artists like Gil Elvgren and Pearl Frush labored mightily to fabricate in pastels and watercolor. She was the ultimate fantasy, not merely because she was flesh instead of paint, but because she seemed sweet and approachable.
To look at Bettie is to look at the highest sort of good humor. Her gamin's face -- a delightful concoction of sloe eyes, pert nose, and inviting mouth -- never failed to express wit and a sense of fun. Her trademark black bangs, cut high on her forehead, added to the friendly, accessible nature of her appeal. I feel the same way now as when I first saw her images more than 30 years ago: that if I could have called to her on a New York street, she would have quickly turned to greet me, her fabulous face framed by a sweep of ebony hair, her eyes wide, her smile heart-breakingly fresh and sincere. "Why, hello!" she'd exclaim, and I'd know she was happy to see me.
And that is the ultimate appeal of this woman, this iconic symbol of sex in America, this Bettie Page:
She inspires happiness.
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