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...Bettie Page was the Garbo of bondage movies. Granted, Greta Garbo played Camille and Anna Karenina, while Bettie played Bettie - or, as it was usually spelled then, Betty - in five-minute, 8 mm epics with titles like Betty's Clown Dance and Dominant Betty Dances With Whip. Garbo, in Hollywood, had Irving Thalberg, the prince of MGM, as her boss and protector. Bettie had Irving Klaw. Calling himself the "King of the Pinups," Irving and his sister Paula ran a seedy Manhattan emporium called Movie Star News, which peddled celebrity glamour shots to the public and specialized photos and loops...
...pumps with six-inch heels, getting spanked, trussed and gagged. But primly; this was the 50s. And primitively: no retakes, no expert lighting, no dialogue, no sound. Just the girls. Rather, the girl. The Girl in the Leopard Print Bikini, as she was dubbed. Satan's Angel. Bettie Page...
...hallmark of modern pop culture is that everyone's famous and nobody's shocked. And when fans search the past, they look to venerate artists who were once pariahs. The movies of Bettie Page, the actress-model who died Thursday, Dec. 11, at 85 in Los Angeles after a heart attack, couldn't be more infra dig: they were sold under the counter, mailed in plain brown wrappers. Yet decades later she was elevated to the status of pulp goddess. The beatification process began in 1980, when artist Dave Stevens created a Bettie character in his graphic novel The Rocketeer...
...being a bondage babe wasn't much of a distinction to the mass audience of the '50s, who didn't know Bettie Page existed. Back then, Bettie was caviar only to the purchasers of girlie mags, tatty titles like Wink, Whisper and Flirt, where she was the preeminent pinup queen of her day. In January 1955 she was also the 13th model to grace the centerfold of a new slick magazine called Playboy...
...what Garbo and Bettie Page both had was It - a radiance, a mystery of personality, that transcends technique and passeth understanding. Bettie had a message that defined her medium, and a magic that defied it. The dance films she did may have been cheesy documents of bump-and-grind; the bondage films, creepy if dainty invocations of sadomasochism. But what everyone remembers about Bettie, aside from her trademark bangs, is her smile. Guileless and guiltless, it conveyed an Edenic sensuality. To her fans and her official detractors, who might have agreed that sex was dirty, Bettie's giddy energy said...