I learned late last night that the iconic pinup and bondage model of the '50s' Bettie Page had suffered a massive heart attack on tuesday and is critically ill and in a coma in Los Angeles.
As much as any other single icon of that time, Bettie stood out as the only true representation of the sexuality of that decade. Sure there was Marilyn Monroe but she was just Hollywood hype. Bettie was the raw real stuff that you could get your fist around and rub one out.
I have to admit that when I was a kid I was drawn to some of the kinkier images and bondage held a strange fascination for my pubescent id. I was talking just the other day to my friend and Hustler editor Bruce David about those great pulp magazines of the fifties and their sexy covers that usually had something like a woman hung up, her bodice ripped revealing just enough of a large round firm breast to make you want more and a hovering nazi officer with a whip in hand menacing her. Now that was art!
Waltzing into this verboten sexuality came Bettie Page. When you see photos of her in the next few days they are sure to be like the one above but her really important work was with a long forgotten sexually creative hero named John Willy.
It was with Willy that Bettie did her great bondage stuff. In later life she would say that this was the part she most regretted and that she vastly preferred the pin-up pics. They both worked for a middle aged nebbish named Irving Klaw who with his sister Paula ran "Movie Star News" out of a store front on 14th street in New York City. It was here that Klaw became known as the "pinup king". When he first started the store sold magazines but Klaw noticed that teenage boys were coming in, looking at the pinup mags of the day and ripping out pages when no one was looking. So he said "fuck the magazines, I'll sell the photos".
But I digress. This is about Bettie and that more than perfect body and whose pageboy haircut started my lifelong passion for brunettes. I never liked blondes. They were too goody-goody. The brunette however was nasty, wanton, slightly mean and always presented an air of mystery. Most of all they always looked like they could throw a good fuck. That impression, firmly implanted in my brain stem for life was from Bettie who while projecting all these qualities also had a slight hint of innocence and fun.
It's funny, but while growing up in the '50's I didn't even know who she was, I just kept seeing her pictures and it wasn't until the '70's that I could actually put a name to her.
She retired after a few years. A woman who even through her career maintained a backwoods innocence about it all. The she got religion and disappeared. Even in professing her love of God she never recanted anything she did. To her the naked body was God's work and there was nothing wrong with putting it on display.
No one has seen Bettie since then although she has resurfaced in recent years but only in audio interviews. There is one fuzzy photo shot when she was 80 and surprisingly she looked great. But Bettie was well aware that this late in life people would be disappointed by what they would see. She wanted the Bettie image to remain intact and not to be compromised by what time does to us all.
So now the mother of my sexuality lies in a Los Angeles hospital clinging to life and brings to mind one major question. My God am I getting that fucking old?????
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