Always Comfortable in Her Own Skin

The art critic John Berger once wrote: “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself.” I’m pretty certain he never met Bettie Page, naked, nude or otherwise.

In the 1950s Ms. Page, who died on Thursday, was Queen of the Pinups, appearing in thousands of photographs and numerous short films in states of jubilant undress. Whether entirely bare or decked out in garters, stockings and heels, a ball gag tucked in her mouth, she always appeared to be having a swell time. With her encouraging smile, she didn’t just look as if she enjoyed being photographed; she looked as if she enjoyed your looking at her too. That smile and the ease of her poses — the way she seemed comfortable even when trussed up in rope so intricately knotted that it would have made an Eagle Scout gasp or take up new habits — were invitations to a party that I suspect most of her admirers were too fainthearted to attend.

Paula Klaw/Movie Star News

Bettie Page in one of a number of movies she made for the photographer Irving Klaw around the 1950s. More Photos »

She was for a long period a great mystery and a cult obsession. I first encountered her in the 1980s in an East Village store that sold movie and music zines with a few curiosities tossed in. Many of the zines were blurrily mimeographed, held together with staples and bile, which may be why I gravitated to the colorful glossy covers of a new little magazine, about the size of Reader’s Digest, called The Betty Pages. (The correct spelling of her name didn’t emerge until later.) Published and edited by a comic-book illustrator named Greg Theakston, the magazine was my introduction to all things Bettie and something of a time machine, harking back to a long ago when men’s magazines were called Titter and Flirt.

Bettie Page, Queen of Pinups, Dies at 85 (December 12, 2008)

The Betty Pages was filled with essays, interviews, reproductions of pinup photographs, and movie and still advertisements that detailed the nature of the work for which its star attraction became famous. One typical advertisement trumpeted:

“Our latest High Heel movie featuring beautiful model Betty Page WAS MADE SPECIALLY TO PLEASE YOU. We know you will want to see more of this popular model. Betty wears black bra, panties and black stockings. Several close-ups of her walking in high heels.”

Yowza! The advertisement was for a short titled “Teaser Girl in High Heels,” distributed by a New Yorker named Irving Klaw, who, with his sister, Paula, sold movie star photographs and very special specialty items through their downtown store and mail-order service. In the late 1940s the Klaws began shooting and selling their own bondage and fetish material, catering to the tastes of a loyal clientele: “Corset and Stocking,” “Girls in Extreme High Heels,” “Battling Girls.” There was no nudity, just a lot of rope and kink. In 1952 Ms. Page started working for the Klaws and quickly became their most popular model. “She could do looks of real horror or happy shots with ease,” Ms. Klaw said of the seminude cutie. “She was a natural.”

It was, more than anything, that sense of naturalness that made Ms. Page a star in this shadowy 1950s world and later a favorite of the likes of Dave Stevens, who featured a Page character in his comic “The Rocketeer” (the basis for a drab 1991 movie with a luscious Jennifer Connelly). Born in Tennessee in 1923, Ms. Page moved to New York in the late 1940s after going nowhere in Hollywood. She posed for a variety of publications, as well as for camera clubs, where groups of men took their own private snaps. Some of the loveliest images of her were actually taken by a woman, the photographer Bunny Yeager, who shot her in a leopard-skin swimsuit and nothing at all, and sometimes in the company of two cheetahs.

Ms. Yeager’s photographs are more in the style of classic cheesecake than the images Ms. Page produced with the Klaws, which were made hastily, often at the rate of hundreds of photos a day. Ms. Yeager took a shot of Ms. Page wearing a wink and a Santa hat (that landed in Playboy), along with some embarrassing images of the model with a black man in face paint with a (ahem) spear. But she also took a series of vibrant beachfront shots of Ms. Page, including a candid image of her on a boat in nothing but a small smile, her profile to the camera. She’s entirely naked and so seemingly at ease in her own bare skin that the shot seems less like a professional opportunity and more like a private message.

To look at these photographs is to enter another world. I don’t think for a minute it was a more innocent world, but it was one in which sexualized images of women, even trussed up in rope, seemed somehow, well, charming. I’m sure there are plenty of women and some men who would disagree, saying that one generation’s erotica is another’s pornographic exploitation. But the sheer volume of images that wash over us now have blunted our sensibilities, I think, and made us less alive to the beauty, the poetry and the mysteries of the naked body. We are surrounded by visuals that are far more explicit than any Bettie Page pinup, images of oiled and sculptured flesh that promise the universe and deliver so little.

December 13, 2008
An Appraisal
Always Comfortable in Her Own Skin
By MANOHLA DARGIS