Rassegna stampa di Bettie Page

Bettie Page is a legendary pinup girl whose photographs in the nude, in bondage and in naughty-but-nice poses appeared in men's magazines and private stashes across America in the 1950s and set the stage for the sexual revolution of the rebellious '60s
Ms. Page, whose popularity underwent a cult-like revival in the last 20 years, had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia and was about to be released Dec. 2 when she suffered a heart attack, said Mr. Roesler, of CMG Worldwide. She was transferred in a coma to Kindred Hospital, where she died.
In her trademark raven bangs, spike heels and killer curves, Ms. Page was the most famous pinup girl of the post-World War II era, a centerfold on a million locker doors and garage walls. She was also a major influence in the fashion industry and a target of Senator Estes Kefauver's anti-pornography investigators.
But in 1957, at the height of her fame, she disappeared, and for three decades her private life — two failed marriages, a fight against poverty and mental illness, resurrection as a born-again Christian, years of seclusion in Southern California — was a mystery to all but a few close friends.

Then in the late 1980s and early '90s, she was rediscovered and a Bettie Page renaissance began. David Stevens, creator of the comic-book and later movie character the Rocketeer, immortalized her as the Rocketeer's girlfriend. Fashion designers revived her look. Uma Thurman, in bangs, reincarnated Bettie in Quentin Tarantino's “Pulp Fiction,” and Demi Moore, Madonna and others appeared in Page-like photos.
There were Bettie Page playing cards, lunch boxes, action figures, T-shirts and beach towels. Her saucy images went up in nightclubs. Bettie Page fan clubs sprang up. Look-alike contests, featuring leather-and-lace and kitten-with-a-whip Betties, were organized. Hundreds of Web sites appeared, including her own, which had 588 million hits in five years, CMG Worldwide said in 2006.
Biographies were published, including her authorized version, “Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend,” (General Publishing Group) which appeared in 1996. It was written by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson.
A movie, “The Notorious Bettie Page,” starring Gretchen Mol as Bettie and directed by Mary Harron for Picturehouse and HBO Films, was released in 2006, adapted from “The Real Bettie Page,” by Richard Foster. Bettie May Page was born in Jackson, Tenn., the eldest girl of Roy and Edna Page's six children. The father, an auto mechanic, molested all three of his daughters, Ms. Page said years later, and was divorced by his wife when Bettie was 10. She and some of her siblings were placed for a time in an orphanage. She attended high school in Nashville, and was almost a straight-A student, graduating second in her class.
She graduated from Peabody College, a part of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, but a teaching career was brief. “I couldn't control my students, especially the boys,” she said. She tried secretarial work, married Billy Neal in 1943 and moved to San Francisco, where she modeled fur coats for a few years. She divorced Mr. Neal in 1947, moved to New York and enrolled in acting classes.
She had a few stage and television appearances, but it was a chance meeting that changed her life. On the beach at Coney Island in 1950, she met Jerry Tibbs, a police officer and photographer, who assembled her first pinup portfolio. By 1951, the brother-sister photographers Irving and Paula Klaw, who ran a mail-order business in cheesecake, were promoting the Bettie Page image with spike heels and whips, while Bunny Yeager's pictures featured her in jungle shots, with and without leopards skins.
Her pictures were ogled in Wink, Eyeful, Titter, Beauty Parade and other magazines, and in leather-fetish 8- and 16-millimeter films. Her first name was often misspelled. Her big break was the Playboy centerfold in January 1955, when she winked in a Santa Claus cap as she put a bulb on a Christmas tree. Money and offers rolled in, but as she recalled years later, she was becoming depressed.
In 1955, she received a summons from a Senate committee headed by Senator Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat, that was investigating pornography. She was never compelled to testify, but the uproar and other pressures drove her to quit modeling two years later. She moved to Florida. Subsequent marriages to Armond Walterson and Harry Lear ended in divorce, and there were no children. She moved to California in 1978.
For years Ms. Page lived on Social Security benefits. After a nervous breakdown, she was arrested for an attack on a landlady, but was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a California mental institution. She emerged years later as a born-again Christian, immersing herself in Bible studies and serving as an adviser to the Billy Graham Crusade.
In recent years, she had lived in Southern California on the proceeds of her revival. Occasionally, she gave interviews in her gentle Southern drawl, but largely stayed out of the public eye — and steadfastly refused to be photographed.
“I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2006. “I want to be remembered as a woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form.”
Da The New York Times, 12 dicembre 2008

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.

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.
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.
Da The New York Times, 13 dicembre 2008