The Betty Page mystique

Mighty Matt:I've seen her name mentioned in an issue of the Reader a few weeks ago. Matt Groening has also mentioned her name in the first issue of "Simpson Comics." Last week I saw her name creep up again in a collector’s card magazine. All I want to know is this: Who the BLEEP is (or was) Betty Page? — Curious, Vista

Bleepin’ Betty is a cult figure (emphasis, figure) whose cultishness may have been ruined by too much recent publicity. By the time insider stuff gets to Vista, I guess, it’s old news to the Generation X techno-underground crowd.

Betty Page was probably the most widely photographed figure model of the 1950s (half a million pics, by her estimate). Her trademarks were her jet-black, shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and bangs and pale white skin. She spent a lot of time rigged up in baby-doll nighties, leather and spike heels, leopard-skin, and in just plain Betty-skin. Aside from whatever indescribable quality made her face, figure, and personality so camera-friendly, she was exceedingly popular because of a long association she had with a photographer who ran a mail-order girly pics business specializing in soft-core bondage. (Betty herself has declined to call her work pornography, no “open poses — legs open,” that kind of thing.) A little threatened spanking, whipping, stiletto-heel-to-the-chest coyness in the best ’50s style was more Betty Page’s thing. As is essential for any cult figure, Betty suddenly dropped from sight, spawning 25 years of rumor and speculation. She was last seen publicly in 1957, after being subpoenaed to testify at a U.S. Senate hearing on pornography.

The big early ’80s pop-culture revival of interest in Betty Page is generally attributed to former San Diegan Dave Stevens, creator of “The Rocketeer” comics, who fashioned the adventurer’s girlfriend after Betty. Since then, fueled by Betty’s “dominatrix” image, there have been magazines, mugs, posters, T-shirts, trading cards, and all manner of junk with her face and figure on them. There’s a quasi-underground S&M club in Toronto called the Betty Page Society; at one point there was some outfit that billed itself as a “Betty Page tribute band” making the rave rounds; and there’s still the occasional Betty Page look-alike contest. Seventy-year-old Betty was relocated in 1992 in Southern California by, of all people, Robin Leach, for a segment of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, undoubtedly the show’s first and last Social Security pensioner. A February 1993 Playboy photo feature and follow-up story the next month pretty much removed Betty from the ranks of the well-underground and inspired her to hire a lawyer to begin trying to recoup a few dollars from the trade in Page nostalgia. You know that once the lawyers get involved, the cult icon loses its cachet, so Page-o-philes may now be casting about for the next postcard image.