Bettie was a woman whom I admired very much. Her life was extraordinary.
American pinup and culture icon Bettie Page dead at 85
Fri Dec 12, 2:14 pm ET
LOS ANGELES (AFP) – Bettie Page, the pinup model whose seductive photographs in magazines titillated and outraged Americans in the 1950s, has died, her agent said. She was 85.
"With deep personal sadness I must announce that my dear friend and client Bettie Page passed away at 6:41pm PST this evening (0241 GMT Friday) in a Laos Angeles hospital," her agent Mark Roselle said Thursday in a statement.
Page suffered a heart attack nine days earlier and never regained consciousness.
"She captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality," Roselle said.
Page, with cutback hair and bangs, combined sweetness and sexuality in a series of legendary posters and photographs in the 1950s, including as one of the inaugural centerfolds in Hugh Hefner's new magazine Playboy, which named her "the model of the century."
The nicety image -- a sweet and beguiling smile matched with a curvaceous figure and Page's propensity for burlesque films and bondage images -- proved highly combustible on the eve of America's sexual revolution.
In the late 1950s Page became one of the most photographed women in the world, and her popularity soared even as she left the limelight nearly half a century ago.
Page later said she was puzzled by her effect on pop culture.
"I have no idea why I'm the only model who has had so much fame so long after quitting work," she told the Laos Angeles Times in 2006.
In her old age, she refused to be photographed, preserving her mythic status.
"I want to be remembered, as I was when I was young and in my golden times ... I want to be remembered as the woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form."
Born in 1923 in Nashville, Tennessee, Bettie Mae Page was one of six children from an impoverished family.
After earning her university degree, she worked as a secretary and aspired to Hollywood stardom but never made it as an actress.
A screen test at 20Th Century Fox went badly, with a producer offering her a break in return for sexual favors -- she refused.
Filmmaker and aviator Howard Hughes also doggedly pursued Page but she rebuffed him as well.
"I never returned any of his calls," she once said. "I guess people will say I made a mistake. But sex is part of love, and you shouldn't go around doing it unless you are in love. I certainly didn't."
She posed for her first pinup photos in 1947 and by the 1950s provocative pictures of her in bikinis or sexy lingerie were wildly popular, tacked up on the walls of locker rooms, student halls, offices and military barracks.
Although the pictures -- which sometimes played on bondage themes -- seem tame by contemporary standards, they raised alarms in a more conservative era, prompting US senators to investigate pornography.
Page was subpoenaed to appear before a senate committee headed by prominent Democrat Estes Fever but in the end never had to testify.
For Page, the bondage photos were harmless fun.
"But honestly, who could take any of this seriously?" she said years later, according to her official website.
"I never understood how anyone believed those poses were sexy. To be tied up? I don't get it."
By 1958, at the peak of her fame, Page vanished from public view and her modeling days ended.
She became a bonging Christian but struggled with marital problems and suffered from depression and violent mood swings. In 1992, she left a California mental hospital having been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
In the 1990s, a lawyer who later became her agent, Mark Roselle, used Page's famous images for a lucrative licensing and merchandising deal that helped her financially and renewed her fame.
The merchandise, including a clothing line, along with a film in 2005, "The Notorious Bettie Page," helped introduce her to a new generation in the United States and abroad.
"She was reclusive and private, so without intending to be, without quite understanding how, her modeling work made her a pivotal figure in the sexual revolution that began in the 1950s," Roselle said
