Bettie Page, 1923 - 2008.

"Bettie Page, the brunet pinup queen with a shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, has died. She was 85.... A cult figure, Page was most famous for the estimated 20,000 4-by-5-inch black-and-white glossy photographs taken by amateur shutterbugs from 1949 to 1957.... Decades later, those images inspired biographies, comic books, fan clubs, websites, commercial products - Bettie Page playing cards, dress-up magnet sets, action figures, Zippo lighters, shot glasses - and, in 2005, a film about her life and times, The Notorious Bettie Page.

Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times.

See also: The Bettie Page Memorial and the Wikipedia entry, a portal leading to a sprawling network of fans.

Updated through 12/15.

Update, 12/13: "To look at these photographs is to enter another world," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "I don't think for a minute it was a more innocent world, but it was one in which sexualized images of women, even trussed up in rope, seemed somehow, well, charming. I'm sure there are plenty of women and some men who would disagree, saying that one generation's erotica is another's pornographic exploitation. But the sheer volume of images that wash over us now have blunted our sensibilities, I think, and made us less alive to the beauty, the poetry and the mysteries of the naked body."

"Bettie was rich Corinthian leather to connoisseurs of specialized, subterranean erotica — the kind that showed women, dressed in black undergarments and stockings, and pumps with six-inch heels, getting spanked, trussed and gagged. But primly; this was the 50s." Richard Corliss in Time.

"I never met her, but I've talked with people who knew her fairly well (including one of her lawyers), and she was apparently just as sweet and charming in real life as she appears in her photos, with a delightful Southern drawl that most of us never heard." C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark.

Michael Carlson recounts her life story in the Guardian.

Online listening and viewing tip. Via Thomas Groh, a playlist at Midnight Radio,

Update, 12/15: "Call it 'naughty naiveté' or 'innocent wantonness,' but Bettie Page definitely helped ease an unsettled conservative America into a more open and honest discussion of desire," writes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "While her photos and films may have stayed the private shame of many a man (and woman), they've since become a symbol of what was brewing beneath the surface of prim and proper society. Without demand, there would have been no legend."

Posted by dwhudson at December 12, 2008 1:50 AM