Three Coasts

They're making a movie about Bettie Page.

You know, the pinup girl from the 1950s, the one whose bondage photos are synonymous with kitchy kink. Bettie's had an interesting life: She was born into poverty, the 2nd of 6 children. Her father molested her. Her mother mistreated her. Still, Bettie as a young woman was smart, studious, even a bit of an overachiever. She's been married and divorced three times. After a life of pin-up stardom that ended in a congressional investigation targeting the pornography industry, Bettie found religion. Then she spent 13 years in seclusion.

But what she's most known for are her dimensions: 36-23-35. At least that's what CMG Worldwide, which markets Bettie's image, says her dimensions are. Or were. Bettie's 82 now and no longer wishes to be photographed.

Looking at Bettie's photos, I wonder about the nature of myth-making and about who Bettie Page really was and is.

First, was her waist really only 23 inches in circumference? Is that humanly possible? We're talking about a wasp-waist here. Go ahead, I dare you to measure your own waist and compare. Get a measuring tape and take a look at 23 inches.

In her photos, Bettie looks refreshingly voluptuous compared to the emaciated images that permeate visual culture in the U.S. today. By current standards, her thighs are too large, her arms not toned enough. She does not possess flat abs. Heroically, she stands for another era, one that valorized and not condemned curves.

Second, it is interesting that Bettie is up-front about the incest. That history raises all sorts of questions and complications, for our culture, our literature, tends to paint such wounded girls as either promiscuous or frigid. Bettie could easily fall into the promiscuous camp although none of the material I found on her mentions her sex life. Posing provocatively does not necessarily mean she lived what she portrayed. Even the bondage photos she talks about in a sort of bland professional diction: "The only person I did bondage for was Irving Klaw and his sister Paula. Usually they would shoot four or five models every Saturday. He wouldn't pay for the regular pictures unless we did some bondage. So I did bondage shots to get paid for the other photos." *

Bettie's photos are striking. She seems self-possessed, even joyful. Far from the damaged young girl whose sexuality is stolen from her and equally far from the victim who repeats her victimization in a numbing pattern of abuse (incest-victim-turned-sex-worker), Bettie's photos stand out as rejecting both extremes.

Or do they? Bettie says in interviews that she liked the freedom of nudity, of sunning herself or walking around the house naked. But this information strikes me as merely titillating, not terribly different from the stuff of male-oriented fantasy that could accompany a photo shoot in a porn mag. What if the detail about her father's sexual abuse is meant as another titillation? Bettie's image and story have been hugely commodified, packaged, sold and now re-sold. Will the movie tell her story with dignity and honesty? We will have to see.

* quote from the Bettie Page Web site, www.bettiepage.com