Flashback

Gretchen Mol in the title role of The Notorious Bettie Page. Courtesy Odeon Films/Alliance Atlantis.

This story originally appeared in April 2006.

While the first pin-up girl was probably some prehistoric hottie carved on a cave wall, the form didn’t really take off until the early 20th century, when Hollywood studios sold publicity stills of budding movie stars like “It Girl” Clara Bow, and when artist Alberto Vargas began drawing his iconic, leggy ladies for Esquire magazine.

But it was 1940s movie star Betty Grable who ushered in the golden era of the pin-up, with a famous rear-view shot in which she sports a one-piece bathing suit and a come-hither smile. It’s an image that’s at once sexy and wholesome — even patriotic. More than five million prints were distributed to U.S. soldiers during the Second World War; the picture came to represent not just an idealized American beauty, but the very values the army was defending. As Hugh Hefner once said, fondly remembering his G.I. days and the pin-up girls featured in the official military publication Yank: The Army Weekly (the pun, I assume, was intended), “cheesecake was as every bit American as apple pie.”

In 1953, Hefner founded Playboy magazine, his celebration of all-American cheesecake. In the recently released coffee table tome The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds (Taschen), he calls his creation “a publishing phenomenon [that] changed the way America and the world think about sex.” For Hefner, sex has always been something fun and natural. As he notes in the introduction to the book (written by Playboy contributing editor Gretchen Edgren), “from the very first, I was looking for the girl next door as part of a positive, life-affirming attitude toward human sexuality.... I was simply trying to get across the message that good girls liked sex, too.”

A quick perusal of the centerfold models featured in Playmate’s 1950s section bears this out: they are occasionally glamorous, but always demurely posed, many of them in negligees or the era’s requisite waist-high panties. Petite beauty Marguerite Empey appears several times: once coquettishly perched on a couch wearing nothing but a pair of pedal pushers, elsewhere sipping coffee in bed in an unbuttoned man’s pyjama top (she was pregnant with her son at the time, but not yet showing). Topless Rusty Fisher, Miss April 1956, hangs a modernist painting in a pair of boyish dungarees. And Jonnie Nicely, Miss October 1955, looks through what appears to be a dorm room closet wearing panties, white socks and penny loafers. Even in its time, it must have seemed nostalgic. What Hefner sought to capture for his readers was the adolescent longing of a first crush and thrill of the loss of virginity.

Mol strikes a pose. Courtesy Odeon Films/Alliance Atlantis.

Legendary pin-up model Bettie Page debuted in Playboy in 1955, trimming a Christmas tree and, in the words of Edgren, “wearing naught but a Santa Claus hat and a smile.” At the time, Page — a nice, studious, Christian girl from Nashville — had established herself as a favourite model of the era’s amateur photography clubs (which, because they didn’t sell their pictures, could get away with shooting more skin) and saucy men’s magazines like Wink and Modern Sunbathing.

She is now the subject of Mary Harron’s new film The Notorious Bettie Page. Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho) delves into Page’s semi-lucrative sideline in the kinky bondage films and shoe fetish magazines produced by the brother-and-sister team of Irving and Paula Klaw (portrayed by Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor with good-natured, “oy vey!”-sputtering, brisket-chomping delight). Despite a traumatic past that included incest and gang rape, Page (a game Gretchen Mol in a shiny black wig) is almost freakishly innocent of the meaning of what she’s doing. When her boyfriend balks at one of her naughtier photo spreads, she assures him that she’s just playing dress-up for the Klaws’s “very nice, very respectable” clientele. And when a sleazy photographer asks how she balances her career with her faith, she says that Adam and Eve were naked in Eden, and God gave her a gift for making people happy by posing nude. So what’s a girl to do?

Like Hefner’s early Playmates, Harron’s Page — a fresh-faced girl next door in thigh-high leather boots — exemplifies the longstanding American cultural contradictions of prurience and puritanism that were arguably most obvious in the 1950s. This was the decade, after all, that gave rise to both McCarthyism and the Kinsey sex report, to bobby soxers and beatniks, to Betty Crocker and Philip Roth. Harron, who co-wrote the screenplay with Guinevere Turner, summons up the period with kitschy, rose-coloured artistry, editing in what looks like archival newsreel footage of New York City, Miami Beach and Nashville, and dressing her cast in gorgeous period fashion. It’s the 1950s as interpreted through 1950s movies — seamy and noir-ish at times, but mostly with the gosh-golly wink of a Rock Hudson and Doris Day picture.

In the decades since, porn has never seemed as innocent again (if indeed, it ever was as innocent as Hefner and Harron make it out to have been). The Notorious Bettie Page opens and closes with a threat to all the fun: a smut hunt into the dangers of pornography headed by Senator Estes Kefauver (David Straithairn, in a neat twist, fresh from playing anti-McCarthy crusader Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck), at which Page has been called to testify. The hearings resulted in the Klaws closing up shop and burning most of their work. Page retreated into seclusion in 1957 after becoming a born-again Christian. She married and divorced twice, spent time in a mental institution and only in the last few years has begun to resume public appearances. At Playboy, by the mid-1960s the models turned glossier, more hard-bodied and more self-conscious. In the 1970s, in order to compete with raunchier titles like Hustler, the centerfolds started to show pubic hair and began increasingly to avail themselves of the services of plastic surgeons. Gone was Hefner’s fantasy girl next door. Instead, the porn industry has grown to a multibillion-dollar business of DVDs, internet sites and chat rooms.

Burlesque performer Dita von Teese. Showbiz Ireland/Getty Images.

One person still keeping the torch ablaze for the 1950s brand of peek-a-boo, pin-up sexuality is Heather Sweet, who’s been going by her burlesque stage name Dita von Teese since she began performing in the early 1990s. Her trademark bump-and-grind routines involve a life-size Swarovski crystal horse and a four-foot-tall martini glass.

Her current claims to fame are as fashion muse to designers like Vivienne Westwood and Yves Saint Laurent’s Stefano Pilati, wife to rock star Marilyn Manson and author of the new book Burlesque and the Art of the Teese (Regan Books). In the last, she poses in a variety of retro getups, including a Bettie Page tribute, and laments the modern era of sweatpants and control top pantyhose. “I advocate glamour. Every day. Every minute.... There was a time after all — well, before all — when a lady dressed to the nines no matter what her destination. This great girl wore seamed stockings and garter belts every single day.”

For von Teese, our own era of contradictions has even further polarized the puritans and prurient. Self-appointed guardians of morality still want to tell people what they can look at and do. And on the other side, in its rampant commercialization, sex has lost all its fun. Invoking Hefner, von Teese muses, “I really believe that if people would just admit that everyone enjoys seeing a naked woman, the world would be a much happier place.” Gee, who’d have thought there’d come a day when people would pine for the sexual mores of the 1950s?

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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