Richard Foster - The Real Bettie Page: The Truth about the Queen of the Pinups

The Real Bettie Page

The Truth About the Queen of the Pinups

Richard Foster

CITADEL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

CITADEL PRESS books are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp.
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New York, NY 10018

Copyright 1997 Richard Foster

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

CITADEL PRESS and the Citadel logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Office

ISBN: 978-0-8065-4011-5

eISBN-13: 978-0-8065-4012-2
eISBN-10: 0-8065-4012-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Foster, Richard.

The real Bettie Page : the truth about the queen of the pinups / Richard Foster.

p. cm.

A Citadel Press book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8065-2075-2

1. Page, Bettie. 2. Models (Persons)United StatesBiography. I. Title.

HD6073.M772U5438 1997

97-34620

746.92092dc21

CIP

[B]

Table of Contents

Foreword

The Queen of Guilty Pleasures

Harlan Ellison

G O AHEAD , burn down the farm! Put my barn to the torch, slaughter my brood mares, rape my chickens, and pour salt on my silo! I will speak the truth, having been cursed with a truly anemic tolerance for bullshit; because we all know the time has come to end this duplicity, mendacity and doubletalking. And common sense protect us from the endless parade of forelock-tugging, mealymouthed, tremulous dissemblers who seek to avoid the scorpion sting of the censors with gibberish about her identity as a mythic cultural icon. What the hell is the matter with those people?!? Have they no understanding that nothing can deflect or assuage the self-righteous, stick-up-the-ass bluenoses? Just look at what we seek to honor: a creature of flesh and blood whose turn of ankle and pertness of breast can reduce a man or boy to Silly Putty.

Theres no way on Earth that the direct lineal descendants of Cotton Mather who sniff out turpitude in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Madonna and Playboy centerfolds, could ever be turned away from trying to paint a crimson A on the forehead of anyone foolhardy enough to sigh publicly at a poster of those naked buttocks.

The Queen of Guilty Pleasures by Harlan Ellison. Copyright 1991 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the Author and the Authors agent, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

I refuse to join that legion of dithering apologists.

Ill tell you the simple truth.

I never met her; I have no idea if she was a bright and cheery person or an emptyheaded tart; was she inordinately intelligent or a dumb bunny; was she a virgin till the day she vanished from our ken or did she make her living in shadier ways than merely posing for those naive cheesecake shots? Given my choice of an evening in conversation with her, or Albert Einstein, or even Eleanor Roosevelt ... well, shed come in third.

My most intimate contact with her was in the examination under a magnifying glass of hundreds of sheets of contact prints trying to select half a dozen photos for a layout in Rogue magazine, when I was an editor on that publication in the late Fifties. But like every male Ive ever met who has seen a picture of her, I cannot to this day see a photo of Bettie Page without getting an erection. And that is the simple truth; and that is what its all about.

For all the sweetness of her glances, the innocence of her most exotic poses, the ineffable quality that shines out of every muzzy, scratchy still printed on magazine paper of blotter quality that swallowed clarity and definition ... she was (and reportedly still is) one of the sexiest women who ever lived.

I have no idea if the correct spelling is Betty or Bettie (though it was the latter I first encountered, and the one I chose to use, because its part of the litany for me), and I have no desire to track her down in modern times, to learn to my sadness that she is no longer the ingenue who glows in my memories. It is enough for meand clearly enough for the thousands who buy all those posters and magazinesthat she remains young and smoldering on glossy paper and in a few remaining movie shorts. Bogart is alive and well in Casablanca, Garbo is without wrinkle or shadow as Mata Hari, and W. C. Fields can still shoot one hell of a game of eight-ball with that meandering pool cue. Like a saber-tooth tiger flash-frozen in a block of ice, the wonder of Bettie Page is preserved forever in the photographs taken when she was a young woman.

She turned me on then, when I was a teenager; and she turns me on now, as I caper through my early sixties. Sitting on a plane at 36,000 over the Grand Canyon, on the way back to L.A. from an adult journey to New York, where I had lectured at an institution of higher education, just like a real grown-up, I turned to section D of USA Today (the journalistic equivalent of Pringles) and I found myself looking at Bettie in mesh hose and tassle-festooned panties, and I became a teenager again. There it was, as fresh as this morning: that curtain of dark hair, the erotic bangs that only she and Ella Raines could wear with impunity; the sloe-eyes, that great butt thrust back and out as if she were about to jump your bones; and she posed with one of the two best ways she formed her mouth: the lower lip dropped in something like a half-snarl. And I coulda kissed that photo editor who picked the still for the June 5th 1991 USA Today, because it was obvious that s/he was also a love-slave of Bettie Page. A parvenu wouldve picked one of the lousy poses, where her nose looks lumpy, and her expression is sappy.

That was her magic gift: the ability, almost fifty years down the line, to crank back your puberty clock so youre just a horny, drooling, simpering adolescent, wishing you could melt as one with the tachyons in the time-stream and rush back to a moment when she was in her early twenties and might have given you a tumble. She is simply pure fantasy. A dream girl in all the nicest ways, in that undiluted human passion way that we all shared at some point in our innocence. She is lust in an ice cream cone (two scoops), enthusiasm in the whisper of nylon, postpubescent rambunctiousness in the back seat of a Studebaker Commander. Like maybe only a handful of American women who gave themselves to public adoration, like Fay Wray and Jinx Falkenberg and Barbara Eden and Suzy Parker and Joi Lansing and the usual group of suspects spearheaded by Marilyn (who couldnt compare to Bettie for inciting lust-dreams), Miss Page transcended mere mortal flesh. She was an icon, Venus on the spike-heel, the goddess Astarte come again, smoother and sleeker and possibly available.

She didnt have Dietrichs legs or Marta Torens cheekbones or the young Liz Taylors waist, but whatever congeries of parts and measurements were hers, they were hers alone; and when Madonna and Demi Moore and Sean Young are names as flensed of resonance as Ella Raines, there will still be golden hordes of dopey guys like me who tremble at the sight of Bettie Page jerkily doing her hoochie-koochie on one of Klaws peekaboo films.