The day after I watched this zesty documentary about the queen of pinups, I found myself behind a pickup sporting two stickers: “Real Men Love Jesus” and, right next to it, one featuring a cartoon of Bettie Page in black lingerie doing a sultry-waitress pose on a playing card. That slogan and that image sum up the two extremes of Page’s life as captured in “Bettie Page Reveals All.”
Sixty years ago, Page became the most influential cheesecake model of all time, via calendar art, girlie mags (including Playboy) and underground fetish films. Then, outraged by a congressional investigation on pornography that targeted two of her principal employers, Irving Klaw (“The Pin Up King”) and his sister, Paula, she disappeared, moved from New York City to Florida, and was born again. She started posing at age 27 in 1950. By 1958 she was done with it.
Page is remarkable for two reasons. First, though she threw herself into religion, she never renounced her past. She reasoned that Adam and Eve were brought naked into the Garden of Eden, so why would her deity condemn nudity? Second, she reached her peak of fame and impact long after she retired, when new-wave burlesque stars like Dita Von Teese, actress-models like Rebecca Romijn, and comic-book artists like Dave Stevens (“The Rocketeer”) picked up on her girl-next-door-with-the-shades-up allure.
Prints and posters of her old images became sought-after artifacts. They inspired cutting-edge gallery and performance art, with-it advertising graphics, and mass entertainment from the likes of Madonna. She eventually gained legal control over the commercial use of her image. Three years after her death in 2008, her estate earned $6 million.
“Bettie Page Reveals All” tells her story in her own words. The director, Mark Mori, who got to know her in the 1990s, uses Page’s tape-recorded recollections as the basis for a first-person narration. The voice you hear belongs to a wounded survivor who overcame terrible episodes of physical and emotional abuse – from her father molesting her to her first husband holding a knife to her throat.
At the start, her elderly sound doesn’t match up with the radiant, voluptuous images of Page in her heyday. Yet before long, Page’s humor, resilience and emotional directness mesh with the manifold images this movie gives us of the model in her 20s and 30s, clothed (barely) in underwear, bedroom-wear and bikinis of her own design, whether in stills, amateur and semi-professional films, or cartoons. This Tennessee girl who grew up imitating movie stars didn’t cut it in Hollywood when the makeup artists at a screen test tried to turn her into a Joan Crawford-like glamour puss. But when she combed her raven hair out in bangs, flashed a toothy smile and strutted all her stuff, she became a sexual fringe-culture sensation.
This movie is a sprightly biographical collage with an extraordinary subject. Mori interviews Page’s collaborators and lovers, and expert witnesses like Hugh Hefner. They testify that she was both naughty and nice. Is that really revolutionary? Clara Bow and Jean Harlow combined earthiness and innocence decades earlier. But Page stands out because she maintained that balance even when enacting bondage fantasies a half-century before “50 Shades of Grey.” She was a natural at appearing au naturel. She always knew exactly how to position her physique to evoke a particular mood or to elicit a frisson.
In this movie, Page usually has an air of merriment about her: She treats sexuality as adult entertainment and child’s play, simultaneously. In one of the film’s many vivid anecdotes, Page is busted when police round up the models and members of a “camera club” staging an outdoor photo shoot north of New York City. She insists that the charge of “indecent exposure” be changed to “disorderly conduct.” To Page, there was nothing indecent about exposure.
Although Page took a couple of awful turns, veering into a prolonged bout with schizophrenia, Mori’s film traces an irrepressible spirit who lived a valiant life. Thanks to the testimony of Hefner and other fans, the movie captures an era when sexual pleasure couldn’t be frankly acknowledged. American culture’s official gatekeepers feared female sexuality and kept it under wraps. For the most part, Page managed to keep smilin’ through.
Page’s lovers testify to the exuberance of her intimacy and the sublimity of her beauty. The renowned Ford Modeling Agency considered her too broad in the hips to be a proper mannequin, but her devotees saw her as the perfect vision of a “real woman.” “Bettie Page Reveals All” convinces you that her heart, like every other part of her body, was always in the right place.
Contact the writer: msragow@ocregister.com
