May 20, 2015 • 45 mins
Pin-up queen Bettie Page is more popular today than she was at the height of her career in the 1950s. Cristen and Caroline explore Bettie's biography, her pinup legacy and why many feminists consider her an icon.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from House Supports
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and it is hashtag pin ups week
here on stuff Mom Never Told You. In our last episode,
we talked about the safer for work pin ups, particularly
(00:26):
during the World War two era, and today we are
shining the spotlight on the most famous pin up of all,
Miss Betty Page. Yeah, the most famous pin up and
also the most famous set of bangs. Oh my god,
the bangs, Such good bangs, such good bangs. I don't
think I have the face or hair type to pull
(00:47):
off those bangs, but the height of my forehead requires
that I have longer bangs, and I'm okay with that.
I I but I love that Betty Page rocked those
bangs and that it has still created It's been creating
just cultural physical shock wave since then, pop stars mimicking
(01:08):
how she looks. Katie Perry has uh well sometimes has
Betty Page here. Yeah, And listeners, I gotta tell you,
if you aren't aware, Caroline has long bangs and she
rocks them. Than the Caroline bang, you know, might might
be a thing too. You never know, Um, I wanted
to share a quick reminiscence though with Betty Page. I
(01:30):
first learned about her from one of my very best friends,
who is a fantastic musician named Madeline, and she wrote
a song when we were in high school all about
Betty Page. And it was like this biographical um Diddy,
which is a horrible way to describe a song all
about Betty Page. And I remember hearing it and asking her, like,
(01:55):
who who is this person you're talking about? And she
was like, you don't know who Betty Pages Kristen And
she taught me so many things I note um and
one of one of the things she taught me that
was really I mean, I don' want to say it
was transformative, but I remember seeing her image for the
first time and it was very arresting, partially because of
(02:17):
the bangs, but also because of the contrast between the
sheer look of delight on her face and the leopard
print bikini that she was wearing in those six inch
fetish the lettos. Well, this is also like, okay, so
you and I are growing up at a time when
like Kate Moss is modeling for Um Calvin Klein and
(02:40):
nothing against Kate Moss she's a very beautiful woman. But
like when you look at how so many nineties and
two thousands and even today ads people and ads are
always just looking so dour and so shiny for some reason,
and and hungry and possibly angry. To look at someone
like Betty Page who is rocking some really sexy get up,
(03:05):
some of which would even be considered sort of taboo today, um,
and to be doing it with a smile, it is.
It is revolutionary. And she wasn't nine ft tall, she
was five five and her weight kind of fluctuated somewhere
around one fifty. I mean, she was a beautiful woman.
But it's just so fascinating to watch the effect that
(03:25):
her re emergence of popularity since kind of the eighties
and nineties has had on people our age and even older. Yeah,
I mean, I think it was just a portrayal of
sexuality that I had never seen before. And it turns
out that Betty Page the person is fascinating as well.
(03:46):
I mean, and especially now when we put her in
the context of this kind of post career fame that
she's had. She's she's far more famous and monetarily successful
today than she was at the apex of the career
when she was working, Yeah, big time. Margaret Talbot, writing
in The New Republic, calls Betty America's underground pin up
(04:08):
queen because it's not like she was super well known
and super famous and mainstream while she was actually modeling.
It wasn't until much later because her pictures used to
literally be kept under wraps in brown paper in magazines
and calendars. Uh, magazines called peak stair gaze Eiffel. You
want to talk about the male gaze Christians, just look
(04:30):
at the title these girls. Yeah. Um, But now, I
mean she, like so many other nameless pin ups from
that era, she is all over postcards, calendars, fan websites.
People all over the world have Betty Page lookalike competitions,
and so those bangs have translated from something that was
(04:52):
very underground to now a cultural movement. And part of
that sort of building up of Betty Page lore us
to do with the most recent Betty Page movie, in
Betty Page Reveals all Um, which actually talked to Betty Page.
She was the narrator and she revealed a lot about
her life. It was way beyond what we just see
(05:15):
in images. Well, in speaking of images, for that documentary,
she wouldn't allow herself to be on camera. All you
hear is her very distinct voice. She said, quote, I
want to be remembered as I was when I was
young and in my golden times. I want to be
remembered as a woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity
(05:36):
in its natural form and in pretty much all of
the you know, the the later her later life interviews
that she gives, at some point she echoes that same
sentiment of no, I don't want to be photographed. You're
never going to see a photo of me again. Um,
and always talks about how weight conscious she is. She says, oh, well,
I'm just old and fat now. And you know she
at one point she talked about how she has all
(05:59):
gray hair and she would hate for people to think
of her in that way. Yeah, and so it's she's
handing you a handful of good and a handful of
bad with that quote. I feel like, because, oh good, Yeah,
you you understand the role that you played in revolutionizing
people's ideas about sex and body image and nudity, and
(06:19):
that's wonderful. Oh, but you don't actually want to be
shown because you're ashamed of how you look being an
older woman. Well, and one thing that is revealed in
Betty Page reveals all even though you know, some critics
panded as a bit of a puff piece. There is
one point when she goes to see a screening of
(06:41):
Gretchen Mall starring as her in the two thousand and
five fictional movie The Notorious Betty Page, and I guess
it would be more of like a biopic, and she
hates it. Like at one point she leaves the screen
screening screaming that it's all lies. Yeah, because she has
(07:02):
Betty Page just like uh, the other pin ups that
we discussed in the first episode is a bundle of contradictions.
And so while yes, she posed nude and nearly nude
and almost nude, uh for for several years, she had
very strong convictions about certain things in life. And so
while she was very pro nudity, that doesn't necessarily mean
(07:25):
she was like super pro have sex with whoever you want,
or drink and all of that stuff. Um, she was
a very multifaceted character really just like any human and
as people who now have kind of co opted her,
we've sort of cherry picked her out of history. We
have sort of willfully ignore the context, both of the
(07:48):
time in which she lived and also the context of
the life that she lived as a little girl. Yeah.
So in she was born in Nashville, Betty Maye Page,
she was the oldest girl to a Baptist family of
five other children, and it was not an easy childhood.
And I feel like a lot of this is kind
(08:09):
of generally known about her background. At one point in
that documentary, Betty Page reveals all. She describes her father
as a quote sex fiend who molested her and her
two sisters. But after her parents divorced in nineteen thirty three,
her mother wasn't exactly a source of comfort for her either. Yeah,
Betty talks about how her mother did not want girls,
(08:32):
She did not want daughters. She thought we were trouble,
Betty said, um to the point where her mother didn't
even talk to her girls, which I feel like is
not terribly uncommon. But her mother didn't even talk to
the girls about getting their period. And so at thirteen,
she thought she was dying because her mother had never
talked to her about it. And then, uh so her
(08:52):
parents have been divorced. Her dad gets arrested in Atlanta
for stealing a cop car, and so mom ends up
playing seeing the Girls not the boys, in an orphanage,
where Betty ends up I guess trying to make the
best of the situation and perform songs and skits for
the other girls at the orphanage. And despite or perhaps
(09:13):
driven by these early traumas, she excelled in high school.
She was in the drama club, she was a member
of the debate team, she was editor of the newspaper
she because sounds like like a little Tracy Flick running
around um. She was also voted most likely to succeed,
and one thing that broke her heart was that she
wanted to be valedictorian, but by like one point or
(09:36):
just a very very small margin, she ended up being salutatorian.
So she gets a scholarship to this place called Peabody College,
which she went to, but she wasn't exactly pleased to
do it um and she graduated with a b a.
In education, and in ninety three, after a short stint
as a teacher, which she did not like because she
(09:57):
said that the male students would essentially bully and harass
her constantly, she married her first husband at nineteen and
moves to San Francisco, And yeah, she wasn't just sitting
around out there in the house doing nothing while her
husband got shipped off to the Pacific during World War Two.
Betty nabs her first modeling job for a local furrier,
(10:19):
so she's getting her pictures taken in the fur coats.
She wins second place also in a Sailor judged beauty contest,
and the prize was a fifty dollar war bon, so
like we see, hey, I can kind of make some
money off of my image here. And in ninet she
goes to Hollywood and she lands a screen test at
twentieth Century Fox, and she kind of claims later on
(10:42):
that she was snubbed because she rejected a studio executive
sexual advances. It's also worth keeping in mind too, though,
that little Nashville born Betty Page also had a very
strong Southern accent that she did take voice lessons to
try to get rid of. But you can even hear
it when in those later life interviews that she still
(11:03):
has like a very particular kind of lilt. Yeah. Well,
so after divorcing her first husband, she moves to New
York City and she has her sites set on acting
because she got a taste of it in Hollywood, and
so she in New York starts taking acting classes. She's
auditioning for parts, and she even landed a few minor
(11:24):
roles on early live TV, but nothing stuck. Similar thing,
uh the accent. Maybe she hadn't owned those acting skills
quite enough. But so in ninety nine, she's on a
trip to Coney Island at the beach and she meets
off duty police officer Jerry Tibbs, who approaches her about modeling,
(11:44):
tells her, girl, you need to get those bangs and
introduces her to camera clubs, which in general those are
groups of amateur photographers to get together and kind of
go out on shooting expeditions. In this case, specifically, these
camera clubs were men's hobbyist groups that sometimes acted as
a front for erotic photography. And as I was reading
(12:04):
about this, it occurred to me more and more, like Betty,
what is wrong with you? Just some strange man walks
up to you on the beach and like ask you
to get into modeling. That is how you get yourself kidnapped.
But I mean, that's also what my mother always told me.
But think about that smile. I mean Betty. Betty's at
least in the way that she looks on film, she
(12:25):
seems so receptive to whatever life tosses her way. Um,
and she gets into this more erotic photography and she's thinking,
you know what, why not, it's paying the bills. She's
good at it. And these are the early signs that
displaying her sexuality before the camera and also a little
(12:48):
bit of nudity or just roll on nudity really didn't
bother her. And at one point she and three other
models were arrested for indecent exposure during a topless photo
shoot near highway. But when she goes before the judge,
she pleads not guilty, insisting that there was nothing indecent
about her body and that the group was a legitimate
(13:10):
camera club. And the judge ends up bumping to charge
down to just disorderly conduct. Yeah, and one of the
sources we were looking at points points to sort of
the radical nature of someone of this time, uh, claiming
that their body is not indecent. It's okay for me
to be naked near a highway, Mr judge. Well, and
(13:31):
that's one thing that she talks a lot about, is
how much She loves being naked outside taking a sun
bath yea, or an air bath. An air bath, that's
what she calls it. Yeah, oh man, Yeah, Betty's having
a good time. You know. Um. The whole thing is like, yeah,
she wants to be an actress, and these nude photos
(13:51):
are really no big deal. It's like, if you know, hey,
just go get a job at Starbucks if you can't
get your dream job and then make money until then,
her her deal was, well, just go take my clothes
off and pose for some pictures. Will be you know,
like you know, working at Starbucks, but nothing is on
underneath your barista aprin perhaps. But as her camera club
photos get more and more popular, she catches the attention
(14:16):
of Irving and Paula Claw. And these are brother and
sisters who are pin up and bondage photo entrepreneurs. So
he's usually the producer, she's usually the director. I've always
found it very strange and fascinating that this brother and
sister duo we're inca hoots to you know, create this
bondage photo business. But all right, y'all do y'all clause.
(14:42):
I just think, yeah, they were just just like Betty.
They were trying to figure out how to make money,
because I think it was Irving who figured out early
on people women specifically wanted to buy, basically tabloid magazines
pictures of movie stars because they would cut them out,
and it would early pinterest boys and girls when you
would actually cut out a picture from a magazine attack
(15:03):
into your wall. But yeah, he realized that there was
money to be made from these pictures, and that sort
of eventually parlayed into well, then we'll just have them
take their clothes off. Well, and then for even more money,
you can specialty order a bondage photo of your choosing.
So Betty at this point says in retrospect that she's
(15:25):
feeling a little adrift and signs a contract with the
clause she said, you know, after all, I could make
more money in a few hours modeling than I could
earn in a week as a secretary. And she also
claims to when it comes to the bondage photos, that
she's not very famous for that the setup was she
had to take the bondage photos in order to take
(15:47):
just the regular modeling photos, and she wanted to get
paid for everything, so it was kind of like eating
her vegetables, she was like, well, I guess I'll put
on this ball gag if I must. But I mean,
she thought the whole thing was ridiculous. There's this quote
where she says, the other models and I enjoyed doing
these crazy things. The craziest thing I was asked to
(16:07):
do was pose as a pony wearing a leather outfit
with a lead and everything. We just died laughing. And
when it comes to the you know, actually setting up
those bondage images, because I mean, she she said some
uncomfortable looking positions and some of them and one she
is actually hog tied. And she emphasizes how it was
(16:28):
Paula who always did the tying up, and it was
really insistent that she was very gentle, So it never was.
It never. There's only one instance that she could think
of where she was really physically uncomfortable because she had
to hold this particular pose for a long time. But
the you know, the things of tying people up and
(16:48):
all of that, really, I don't know, it just kind
of rolled off her back, seemed to um. Well. We also,
in addition to those bondage picture she was also making
sexploitation films like Betty Page and High Heels and teaser rama,
and she was in these five minute, eight millimeter quote
unquote films like Betty's Clown Dance and Dominant Betty Dances
(17:11):
with Whip. I like how straightforward the titles are. And
writing about these films, Richard Corliss, who's a film critic
over it time, was talking about how, yeah, look, these
films were not great. Um, but when Betty shared the
screen with these other women, because it was exclusively women,
because if you featured men, then you faced obscenity charges. Um,
(17:35):
when she shared the screen with these other women, whether
they were just helping each other get dressed or undressed,
or they were actually spanking each other or tying each
other up, you could sometimes spot them giggling. And again,
Margaret's talbot, who was writing a writt New Republic uh
said that these short films sometimes suggest a sort of
lesbian theme park. So everybody agrees, even though these are
(17:59):
just like these cake pictures cheesecake movies, there's no like
cultural larger cultural value. Perhaps it's an interesting snapshot into
just like fun sexuality. Well and also in such stark
contrast to hardcore porn today. Um, but When we get
(18:22):
to the mid fifties, this is really a turning point
for Betty. She isn't quite mainstream, but she still sees
some success. For instance, at one point, Howard Hughes apparently
knew about her and asked her on a date via
a messenger, and she was like, oh, no, thanks, I'm
dating somebody. Well, she had heard that he if you
(18:44):
wanted to be in a Howard Hughes movie, you had
to sleep with him. Whether that was true or not, whatever,
but she was like, I am not being put through
that rigamar role of having a director make me trade
sexual favors for a partner movie. Yeah. Betty was very
vocal about her at least her monogamy. She was she
had sex, and she acknowledged that. But but she didn't
(19:05):
sleep around shall we say? Um. But in nineteen fifty four,
she starts working with now famous photographer and former pin
up herself, Bunny Yeager, who takes Betty's most professional shots.
And he is really the one who helps Betty Bloomore artistically,
you could say, into the icon you know today. Yeah,
(19:25):
And and Bunny herself had wanted to get behind the
camera and her interest in shooting other young women really
came about right as conveniently, Hugh Hefner was launching Playboy magazine,
and so Bunny combines all of these interests and these
money making schemes and shoots Betty for Playboy. And so
in January nineteen fifty five, Betty appears as the Miss
(19:49):
January Playboy centerfold in a Santa cap and a smile.
That's about it. Um. But Bunny wasn't paid much. She
only got a hundred dollars for the pick her. Uh
Heffner had purchased all of the previous year's centerfolds just
as a batch, including the very famous one of Marilyn Monroe,
and later, talking about the appeal of Betty Page, Hugh
(20:13):
Heffner said, quote, She's a combination of wholesome innocence and
fetish oriented poses that is at once retro and very modern.
And in that light, it almost makes sense that bunny
style fell out of fashion as Playboy and other magazines
started featuring more explicit content. And this is something too
(20:33):
that Betty Page talks about a in taking pride in
no other men being on the set, aside from say,
like an irving claw, that she wasn't taking you know,
what would be considered those obscene photos with other men.
And also aside from one incident that she claimed happened
against her will when she was drunk, which was a
(20:53):
very rare occasion for her, she never um did I
forget how she described it exactly, but um she was
talking about how, you know, a dirty photo was one
in which you'd spread your legs, and so that never happened.
And even in those photos with Irving Claw, what we
would be considered her most hardcore stuff, she was wearing,
I mean all sorts of layers of things like you
(21:15):
would you never actually saw her nipples, her volva, certainly
not pubic hair. Yes, she talked about how sometimes she
would have to layer the underwear just so you wouldn't
even see like a shadow or a suggestion of anything
under it, to keep it very very far from court. Basically, Well,
in this two seguys so perfectly from our conversation last
(21:38):
time about the history of pin ups and particularly the
painted pin ups, and how it was really the rise
of Playboy and photographic technology and that new more explicit
style that rendered the old skull pin up obsolete. Yeah,
but I mean Betty was certainly not absolutely yet, because
it was also in that Bunny shoots the famous jungle
(22:01):
Betty photos in Miami, and these are the ones that
you've probably seen, the ones like Kristin referenced with the
leopard print bikini. Uh, and Betty's posing with Cheetah's at
this like wild Animal Park in Florida basically, and uh,
she was very proud that she made that bathing sear herself. Yeah,
she made most of her bikinis, and she lamented the
(22:23):
fact that later in life she she threw everything away
and was enraged that these Betty Page boutiques had popped
up in the meantime copying her styles. Yeah, exactly. Um, well,
so this is this is the height of her popularity really,
when she's appeared in Playboy and Bunny is shooting all
of these fabulous and exotic photos. But it is also
(22:44):
sort of another turning point for the worst for her
for her personal life. And we will talk more about
that in just a second. So it's in and there's
some congressional drama of foot because a senator named st.
(23:05):
Ska Father has his eye on a presidential race and
in order to druma publicity for himself and really positioned
himself as an important candidate. He decides to go on
the war path against obscenity. So he puts together this
senate witch hunt, really investigating pornography, and he calls Page
(23:29):
as a witness, citing some of her more explicit camera
club photos, because by this point they're what like twenty
thousand of these photos out there. Yeah, give her take,
give her take, but yeah, sort of the context, or
what father framed as the context, is that a teenage
boy had died of auto erotic asphyxiation, and during the testimony,
(23:50):
his father on the stand agreed that the pose his
son had been found in, he was all tied up, Uh,
looked just like a bondage photo of Betty's, which is
such a dirty it's just such a dirty trick. But
Betty never had to testify, possibly because she wasn't actually
a mainstream bondage queen who could be made an example of,
(24:13):
you know, she wasn't famous enough to sort of drag
her through the mud. Instead, it was that entrepreneur Irving
Claw who had to defend his films and images, and
he used the defense that well, there was no nudity. Ever,
there were no men in the photos, so it's not obscene, yeah,
but it's still ruined him and ruined him and it
definitely drove Betty off the scene. Yeah, so she decides
(24:37):
to take a new path. In ninety seven, at thirty four,
she basically drops off the face of the pop cultural
planet after all of the obscenity drama, and for a
while she dives head first into Christianity. She attends Bible College, um,
and she gets involved with Billy Graham's crusade. And in
(24:59):
the book The Real Betty Page The Truth about the
Queen of pin Ups by Richard Foster, a book which
she says is mostly lies, Foster says that her classmates
in Bible College remember her as erratic. Yeah, basically, that
her missionary zeal and her fervor for the Lord even
(25:20):
freaked them out, essentially, that she was going a little
too far with it. Um. But yeah, during this time,
and she worked as a teacher, she said, you know, hey,
that's what I was trying to do. I'll go back
and do that. She married and divorced a few more times, um,
and things get really dark in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
She's living in Florida and California, and she runs a
(25:41):
foul of the law quite a bit, and this is
coming from Foster's book. Betty gets in trouble. She's threatening
and even assaulting friends and neighbors. She gets committed to
a state hospital for a few months in Florida and
then again in California after stabbing a landlady, and in
two she nearly kills her new landlady. She informs the
(26:04):
woman that God has told her essentially to kill this woman,
and as a result, she has committed to a state
hospital for ten years and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. And
it's interesting that during this time that she's committed and
she's getting treatment and she's recovering from what she's been through. Um,
it's really during this time that her popularity, unbeknownst to
(26:27):
her and without her having to do a single thing
about it, completely re blossoms. Yeah, I didn't know this
bit at all. In Dave Stevens creates the graphic novel
The Rocket Cheer and it features Betty as a character
or at least a look alike, and he's talked about
how he discovered Betty page photos when he was a
(26:49):
young boy and was immediately in the same way that
I was when I was a younger girl, was immediately
struck by that imagery. Sadly, I am a horrible drawer,
so I started like, couldn't recreate her image. Um. And
then though in the movie version of the Rocketeer comes
out with Jennifer Connolly playing the Betty character, and cult
(27:12):
worship is born, and all of this is coinciding with
her being released from this mental hospital. Yeah, and so, yeah,
you you come out of being out of society for
ten years, and you come out and people are obsessed
with you when you had, even during the biggest success
of your career, you had basically just been a playboy
(27:35):
playmate like that. That's sort of the height of her
mainstream fame, and all of a sudden you emerged to
find that the entire world is sort of looking for you.
I mean, people were convinced that she was dead, or
that she had even become a nun, that she'd run
a foul of the mob, and they had, you know,
gotten rid of her. So all of these Betty theories
(27:55):
were cropping up. And it's so interesting too to watch
how people are drawn to her because we tend to
project a lot of things on too Betty, just the
same way that we have tended to project a lot
of things onto pin ups in general. Um, whether it's
you know, giving her credit for making people feel good
about their bodies, or just um sort of kind of
(28:19):
co opting her as some sort of feminist icon almost.
And this public adoration has also been heavily monetized. So
she died in two thousand eight, and in two thousand thirteen,
for instance, she tied with Einstein at number eight on
Forbes's list of the top earning dead celebrities. I believe
(28:40):
her estate was earning something around eight million dollars a
year because of all of this new imagery and this
new merchandise now associated with her estate. And writing about this,
Richard Corlis, whom we started earlier over at Time, talks
about how her star quality was undeniable, even in those
(29:00):
silent films that she did the what was it Betty,
Betty Uh, Betty's clown Dance, Betty Page and high Heels,
and writing about this in Time magazine, he says, what
everyone remembers about Betty, aside from her trademark bangs, is
her smile. That guilelessness that she presented on camera, and
(29:20):
Cordless almost applauds the brand of sexuality that's present in
Betty's images and her movies. He says, to her fans
and her official detractors who might have agreed that sex
was dirty, Betty's giddy energy said, heck no, it's fun.
And she is. She's laughing, she's having a good time.
She herself is quoted as saying like this is this
(29:42):
is so silly, this is so ridiculous that I'm getting
paid to do this, or you know, she is that
just what she's putting on. Regardless of whether it's true
or whether she's just acting, it's still portraying a version
of sexuality that is fun and, like he said, guileless.
And that's very much echoed in Margaret Talbot's assessment that
(30:03):
she's the sex joke who's in on the joke, or
at least it seems to be that way. Yeah. Talbot's
essay is sort of focused on this issue of fetishistic
nostalgia around Betty Page. Basically that we us modern folks
in the year, like we said earlier, kind of cherry
picked things from the past and conveniently shake off the context,
(30:25):
and that our obsession with these things that were meant
to be disposable fifty years ago ends up driving our
so called eBay economy. And she's wondering, like, okay, so
what is it? Why why do we seem to love
to pick things from the path that we're meant to
be basically like garbage? You know, pin ups were meant
to be advertisements. Betty Page was just meant to be
(30:46):
an images sold to clients who wanted to see women
with ball gags, and Talbot posits that part of it
is that Betty's pictures depict this joy with her work,
this joy in herself, not a joy put on for
the viewers. She's not necessarily looking straight at you trying
to seduce you. She's almost too silly for that. And
(31:07):
Talbot writes that Betty's exuberant persistence of self shines through
and that she's almost too sunny to be a seductress. Well,
and there's also, as she goes on to talk about
that fifties duality going on, because you have Betty at
least appearing to enjoy sexuality at a time when women
weren't supposed to be at least outwardly sexual beings at all.
(31:30):
Sexuality was literally under wraps. These magazines were under wraps. Um.
I mean, she couldn't take a photo with a guy
for fear of getting slapped with an obscenity charge. And
it was happening quote at a time when fetishism and
exhibitionism and ordinary sexual adventure really meant something. And she
goes on to quote Karen Essex and James Swanson, who
(31:52):
wrote a tribute book to Betty essentially uh and they
say that she embodies the stereotypical wholesomeness of the fifth
these and the hidden sexuality straining beneath the surface. So really,
I mean she is just a concrete, flesh and blood
example of what we were talking about with our pin
up models who may or may not have existed that
(32:13):
but the women who were painted on paper. Betty is
sort of the embodiment of that, the contradiction of the
innocence and wholesomeness and joy and exuberance with that darker sexuality.
But the really fascinating thing too is how in her
more modern day reclamation, and this was something talked about
(32:34):
in a piece over the Atlantic, it has been largely
driven by women whereas originally she was largely appreciated by
you know, straight men interested in the kinkier kinds of stuff,
or just you know, we were picking up a playboy.
It's there. There's really something that women today have been
drawn to in terms of her sexuality, her body image,
(32:57):
and also you know, wanting to put a feminine spin
on it as well. Yeah. Talking to The Atlantic, the
director of Betty Page Revial's All Mark More, talks about
how her popularity today, her enduring popularity probably says a
lot about the sexually repressive culture that we're still in
(33:20):
and the fact that we're generally still not cool with
women's bodies, That women's bodies are always a thing, they're
always politicized and discussed and stared at. And so the
fact that women were the target audience for that documentary
and that they respond so strongly to Betty More, he
was talking about how that really says a lot about
the structure of today's society and what it's telling women
(33:42):
they have to be. So it has put her up
as a role model for women to say, oh my god,
here is a photo of this woman with uh, you know,
a not extremely thin looking body. She hasn't been photos shopped,
and she's looking directly into the camera. She is there
isn't another man in the frame. For all we know.
(34:04):
She could just be doing this for herself and she
is enjoying it, and she is seems to be fully
embracing her body. There's this one nude photo of her
where she's sitting on the bow of a ship and
her head is upturned to the sun, and I mean,
you wouldn't want to put any clothes on her. She
looks so comfortable, you know. Yeah, And that's that's what
(34:27):
people were driving home, especially Talbot, who says that regardless
of what Betty was or wasn't wearing, she looked supremely
at ease in that body because she was totally unlike
both her contemporaries and our contemporary She wasn't as busty
as Monroe or Mansfield, and she wasn't as thin as
a Kate Moss or at Gazelle. She'd even be been
(34:49):
rejected by the Ford modeling agency for being too short
and too hippie, and so here she is really like.
There's so many pictures of her just laughing, whether she's
in a bikey or whatever. Naked. And it's that sense
that she's embracing her own flaws, that she's made sex
her ally that really makes us want to identify with her. Yeah,
(35:11):
and and as well to her contradictions probably helped make
her real, because here's a woman who was taking nude
photos on Saturday and going to church on Sunday because
she didn't think the two were mutually exclusive, even as
she after she had gone through her really super duper
religious phase, and I think she's still religious, you know,
(35:33):
when she died. She always made very clear distinctions between
you know, what she did and sort of the intent
of it. She didn't seem to harbor a lot of
guilt for posing because she wasn't actively having sex with
a lot of people, which she did wag a finger at. Yeah,
And I mean, so pages basically treated as this gateway
(35:55):
drug almost to pin up culture, burlesque, rockability, and other
cultures that are sort of generally curve positive. But despite
all this, she she herself never considered herself an icon.
And this was in one of the Q and A
s that Kristen and I read, and she says, I
don't know what they mean by an icon. I never
thought of myself as being that. It seems so strange
(36:16):
to me. I was just modeling, thinking of as many
different posts as possible. I made more money modeling being secretary.
I had a lot of free time. You could go
back to work after an absence of a few months.
You couldn't do that as a secretary. And so she
was because she couldn't be that actress, that famous actress
she wanted to be. She took the route that was
(36:38):
open to her. Yes, she was trained as a teacher.
You could be a teacher. Yes she was trained as
a secretary. You could go do that too, But she
she needed to combine the lack of boring with the
need to make money. Yeah, I mean she was kind
of just doing it for herself. She couldn't rely on
anybody else. Um she was. She said in later in
life that she was really in love of with the
(37:01):
last guy that she married. But that was it. I mean,
everybody else was, you know, kind of hurt her ultimately,
And when she died in two thousand and eight, there
were I mean, there was an outpouring of you know,
attention on her, and all of these obituaries and reflective
blog posts and things, and there were a lot of
(37:21):
women and feminists who were hailing her, you know, hailing
the event as the passing of a feminist icon, which
is really interesting to just consider because on the one hand,
of things that she stands for in terms of body
positivity and embracing nudity and being really comfortable on your
(37:43):
own skin and even just you know, getting through the
tough times and making ends meet when you need to. Uh.
Caroline and I you know, spent a lot of time
actually before this podcast kind of puzzling over whether it's
really all that accurate though, to put that feminie is
label on her, and whether it's even necessary. And I mean,
(38:04):
I think talking about Betty Page is an excellent counterpoint
to Andrea Dorkin stuff that we cited in our first
episode on pin Ups, because she basically says that these
images are awful and they're of no value and that
they're just empty vessels for our fantasies. And when you
talk about Betty, I mean, she's a real flesh and
(38:24):
blood human who had an incredibly traumatic upbringing. She really
struggled through hard times and while she was beautiful and
she did what she did to get herself by because
you know, she wasn't depending on some man to get
her by Um, it doesn't necessarily mean that she was feminist.
I think, you know, we tend to take or that
(38:46):
she needs to be feminist. I think that we take
Betty's images, uh, she a flesh and blood person, and
treat them and then think about them the same way
that we do the paintings of pin ups, you know
from uh, and fill those images with our own projections
and hopes and feelings. And well, I think it's wonderful
(39:07):
to empower yourself, however you do, to feel good in
your own skin, and to look at someone like Betty
and say, see, she wasn't a nine ft tall model,
you know she she looked way more normal, and I
can I can achieve that. I do think that's wonderful.
But I do think that just because a woman does something,
or model something, or or acts in a certain way,
(39:27):
it doesn't make it a feminist act, and it doesn't
make her a feminist icon. Yeah. It circles back to
a question that you and I raised in our pre
podcast conversation of at what point, when we are doing
this are we putting words in other women's mouths? Essentially,
because she did speak extensively about her life before she died,
(39:52):
and maybe she just was never directly asked about feminism,
but it was certainly never a mantle that she put
on herself, and I don't think that that in any
way devalues her role. I think that she's still easily
considered a trailblazer and certainly an icon um. But I'm
so curious to hear from listeners about this further compulsion
(40:14):
that we might have to need to say she's a
feminist icon. Yeah, so we want to know about that
and want to know if there are any Betty Page
fans listening. I have a feeling there are, because when
I asked on Facebook, should we do a Betty Page podcast,
the response was overwhelmingly yes. So we want to know
(40:36):
all of your Betty Page thoughts. Mom Stuff at house
stuff works dot com is our email address. You can
also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast hashtag pin ups week,
or messages on Facebook. And we've got a couple of
messages to share with you right now, and stepping away
(40:57):
from pin ups, we have a couple of letters to
share in response to our podcast on women in farming. Yeah,
I have a letter here from Jenny, who has a
resource for ladies out there who are interested in farming.
She says, I recently spent the summer in Maine apprenticing
on a small goat farm where we made goat choose
to sell at farmer's markets. The farm was run by
(41:19):
an older woman and all three apprentices that season were women,
so we had a lot of fun together with the goats.
I just imagine the imagine them gossiping with the goats.
Um Anyway, Jenny says, the decision to become a farmer
and almost thirty years old was kind of a sudden one,
but I know that working with animals was something I
really wanted to do. I'm just not very good at maths,
so being a vet or a vet tech was never
(41:39):
in the cards for me, or really anything I ever
wanted to do. Farming ended up being the best decision
for me, and I absolutely love it. If there are
any aspiring lady farmers out there, I would really like
to suggest the program which I used to get connected
with my host farm. It was through the main Organic
Farmers and Gardeners Association. It's completely free. You just fill
(42:00):
out an application, browse the list of farm descriptions. They
have farms of every type all across Maine, and then
you usually have to visit the farm to interview and
come to an agreement with the farmer. A lot of
the farms are run by women, groups of women, or
women along with their male partners. Maine is in the
midst of a small farm revolution at the moment, so
it's a really great place and program to get in
(42:21):
there and experience farming hands on. Usually don't need any experience,
and most farms will offer free room and board. Some
of the living situations can be a bit alternative, hence
the visit before you accept food and sometimes a small
stipend come along with it. All the information can be
found at www dot m o f g a dot org.
(42:43):
I highly recommend this program for anyone who wants to
try farming but isn't quite sure about it yet. By
the end of your apprenticeship you will know if farming
is right for you. Thanks for the episode on Lady Farmers,
and thank you Jenny Well. I've got to let her
here from Julianna and she writes, how do you Caroline Kristen,
I'm a longtime agriculture advocate and a longtime listener of Sminty,
(43:05):
so I was very excited to see you do a
series on women in agriculture. I grew up in a
rural area my whole life and was highly involved in
the Future Farmers of America. She goes on to say, overall,
in my personal experience, I haven't seen any outright discrimination
keeping girls from working family farms. They just usually desire
a different position in the agg industry. Not only that
(43:26):
many farms aren't changing hands generation to generation anymore, but
for more interested, non related managers. Farmers aren't working hard
to send their kids to college to get degrees, and
those degrees aren't being applied back to the farm, so
their parents need to find a way to keep it
going without their children's support. I can't speak for all
aspects and regions of agriculture, but I think that if
(43:48):
a woman were to desire to run a farm business,
she really would just need to apply herself. Agriculture is
most certainly firmly rooted in traditional and conservative values, but
I think you'd be surprised that it's also one of
the most progressive. It's just so from an external view,
you might not get that impression. As a woman in AGG.
I've had nothing but encouragement from the male and female
(44:09):
bosses and mentors who have no problems with seeing women
as equal contributors to AGG. I think it stems from
being a part of something bigger than yourself, that you
are there literally to solve world problems like hunger and health,
and having the opinion that girls belong there and boys
there is a frivolous thought the best person is put
forth to solve those issues, regardless of their gender. I
(44:31):
think this was a great look at AG, but perhaps
you could expand your definition of agriculture to include more
facets where women are. Even with a traditional view of
a farmer's wife, she isn't merely cleaning house. She's out
there with her husband in the operation, working alongside him
and their children. Also, she's more than likely making many
financial and purchasing decisions for the operation, even if it's
(44:51):
her husband's name on the deed. I have so much
more to say about this subject, and there's so many
topics to be discussed in AGG Blabaram, but I don't
want to take up more of your time. Thanks for
the podcast and thanks for your insights, Julianna, and thanks
everybody who has written into us Mom stuff at how
stuff works dot com is our email address and for
links to all of our social media as well as
(45:13):
all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts, including this one.
With those links so that you can learn more about
Betty Page, head on over to stuff mom Never Told
You dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from House Supports
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and it is hashtag pin ups week
here on stuff Mom Never Told You. In our last episode,
we talked about the safer for work pin ups, particularly
(00:26):
during the World War two era, and today we are
shining the spotlight on the most famous pin up of all,
Miss Betty Page. Yeah, the most famous pin up and
also the most famous set of bangs. Oh my god,
the bangs, Such good bangs, such good bangs. I don't
think I have the face or hair type to pull
(00:47):
off those bangs, but the height of my forehead requires
that I have longer bangs, and I'm okay with that.
I I but I love that Betty Page rocked those
bangs and that it has still created It's been creating
just cultural physical shock wave since then, pop stars mimicking
(01:08):
how she looks. Katie Perry has uh well sometimes has
Betty Page here. Yeah, And listeners, I gotta tell you,
if you aren't aware, Caroline has long bangs and she
rocks them. Than the Caroline bang, you know, might might
be a thing too. You never know, Um, I wanted
to share a quick reminiscence though with Betty Page. I
(01:30):
first learned about her from one of my very best friends,
who is a fantastic musician named Madeline, and she wrote
a song when we were in high school all about
Betty Page. And it was like this biographical um Diddy,
which is a horrible way to describe a song all
about Betty Page. And I remember hearing it and asking her, like,
(01:55):
who who is this person you're talking about? And she
was like, you don't know who Betty Pages Kristen And
she taught me so many things I note um and
one of one of the things she taught me that
was really I mean, I don' want to say it
was transformative, but I remember seeing her image for the
first time and it was very arresting, partially because of
(02:17):
the bangs, but also because of the contrast between the
sheer look of delight on her face and the leopard
print bikini that she was wearing in those six inch
fetish the lettos. Well, this is also like, okay, so
you and I are growing up at a time when
like Kate Moss is modeling for Um Calvin Klein and
(02:40):
nothing against Kate Moss she's a very beautiful woman. But
like when you look at how so many nineties and
two thousands and even today ads people and ads are
always just looking so dour and so shiny for some reason,
and and hungry and possibly angry. To look at someone
like Betty Page who is rocking some really sexy get up,
(03:05):
some of which would even be considered sort of taboo today, um,
and to be doing it with a smile, it is.
It is revolutionary. And she wasn't nine ft tall, she
was five five and her weight kind of fluctuated somewhere
around one fifty. I mean, she was a beautiful woman.
But it's just so fascinating to watch the effect that
(03:25):
her re emergence of popularity since kind of the eighties
and nineties has had on people our age and even older. Yeah,
I mean, I think it was just a portrayal of
sexuality that I had never seen before. And it turns
out that Betty Page the person is fascinating as well.
(03:46):
I mean, and especially now when we put her in
the context of this kind of post career fame that
she's had. She's she's far more famous and monetarily successful
today than she was at the apex of the career
when she was working, Yeah, big time. Margaret Talbot, writing
in The New Republic, calls Betty America's underground pin up
(04:08):
queen because it's not like she was super well known
and super famous and mainstream while she was actually modeling.
It wasn't until much later because her pictures used to
literally be kept under wraps in brown paper in magazines
and calendars. Uh, magazines called peak stair gaze Eiffel. You
want to talk about the male gaze Christians, just look
(04:30):
at the title these girls. Yeah. Um, But now, I
mean she, like so many other nameless pin ups from
that era, she is all over postcards, calendars, fan websites.
People all over the world have Betty Page lookalike competitions,
and so those bangs have translated from something that was
(04:52):
very underground to now a cultural movement. And part of
that sort of building up of Betty Page lore us
to do with the most recent Betty Page movie, in
Betty Page Reveals all Um, which actually talked to Betty Page.
She was the narrator and she revealed a lot about
her life. It was way beyond what we just see
(05:15):
in images. Well, in speaking of images, for that documentary,
she wouldn't allow herself to be on camera. All you
hear is her very distinct voice. She said, quote, I
want to be remembered as I was when I was
young and in my golden times. I want to be
remembered as a woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity
(05:36):
in its natural form and in pretty much all of
the you know, the the later her later life interviews
that she gives, at some point she echoes that same
sentiment of no, I don't want to be photographed. You're
never going to see a photo of me again. Um,
and always talks about how weight conscious she is. She says, oh, well,
I'm just old and fat now. And you know she
at one point she talked about how she has all
(05:59):
gray hair and she would hate for people to think
of her in that way. Yeah, and so it's she's
handing you a handful of good and a handful of
bad with that quote. I feel like, because, oh good, Yeah,
you you understand the role that you played in revolutionizing
people's ideas about sex and body image and nudity, and
(06:19):
that's wonderful. Oh, but you don't actually want to be
shown because you're ashamed of how you look being an
older woman. Well, and one thing that is revealed in
Betty Page reveals all even though you know, some critics
panded as a bit of a puff piece. There is
one point when she goes to see a screening of
(06:41):
Gretchen Mall starring as her in the two thousand and
five fictional movie The Notorious Betty Page, and I guess
it would be more of like a biopic, and she
hates it. Like at one point she leaves the screen
screening screaming that it's all lies. Yeah, because she has
(07:02):
Betty Page just like uh, the other pin ups that
we discussed in the first episode is a bundle of contradictions.
And so while yes, she posed nude and nearly nude
and almost nude, uh for for several years, she had
very strong convictions about certain things in life. And so
while she was very pro nudity, that doesn't necessarily mean
(07:25):
she was like super pro have sex with whoever you want,
or drink and all of that stuff. Um, she was
a very multifaceted character really just like any human and
as people who now have kind of co opted her,
we've sort of cherry picked her out of history. We
have sort of willfully ignore the context, both of the
(07:48):
time in which she lived and also the context of
the life that she lived as a little girl. Yeah.
So in she was born in Nashville, Betty Maye Page,
she was the oldest girl to a Baptist family of
five other children, and it was not an easy childhood.
And I feel like a lot of this is kind
(08:09):
of generally known about her background. At one point in
that documentary, Betty Page reveals all. She describes her father
as a quote sex fiend who molested her and her
two sisters. But after her parents divorced in nineteen thirty three,
her mother wasn't exactly a source of comfort for her either. Yeah,
Betty talks about how her mother did not want girls,
(08:32):
She did not want daughters. She thought we were trouble,
Betty said, um to the point where her mother didn't
even talk to her girls, which I feel like is
not terribly uncommon. But her mother didn't even talk to
the girls about getting their period. And so at thirteen,
she thought she was dying because her mother had never
talked to her about it. And then, uh so her
(08:52):
parents have been divorced. Her dad gets arrested in Atlanta
for stealing a cop car, and so mom ends up
playing seeing the Girls not the boys, in an orphanage,
where Betty ends up I guess trying to make the
best of the situation and perform songs and skits for
the other girls at the orphanage. And despite or perhaps
(09:13):
driven by these early traumas, she excelled in high school.
She was in the drama club, she was a member
of the debate team, she was editor of the newspaper
she because sounds like like a little Tracy Flick running
around um. She was also voted most likely to succeed,
and one thing that broke her heart was that she
wanted to be valedictorian, but by like one point or
(09:36):
just a very very small margin, she ended up being salutatorian.
So she gets a scholarship to this place called Peabody College,
which she went to, but she wasn't exactly pleased to
do it um and she graduated with a b a.
In education, and in ninety three, after a short stint
as a teacher, which she did not like because she
(09:57):
said that the male students would essentially bully and harass
her constantly, she married her first husband at nineteen and
moves to San Francisco, And yeah, she wasn't just sitting
around out there in the house doing nothing while her
husband got shipped off to the Pacific during World War Two.
Betty nabs her first modeling job for a local furrier,
(10:19):
so she's getting her pictures taken in the fur coats.
She wins second place also in a Sailor judged beauty contest,
and the prize was a fifty dollar war bon, so
like we see, hey, I can kind of make some
money off of my image here. And in ninet she
goes to Hollywood and she lands a screen test at
twentieth Century Fox, and she kind of claims later on
(10:42):
that she was snubbed because she rejected a studio executive
sexual advances. It's also worth keeping in mind too, though,
that little Nashville born Betty Page also had a very
strong Southern accent that she did take voice lessons to
try to get rid of. But you can even hear
it when in those later life interviews that she still
(11:03):
has like a very particular kind of lilt. Yeah. Well,
so after divorcing her first husband, she moves to New
York City and she has her sites set on acting
because she got a taste of it in Hollywood, and
so she in New York starts taking acting classes. She's
auditioning for parts, and she even landed a few minor
(11:24):
roles on early live TV, but nothing stuck. Similar thing,
uh the accent. Maybe she hadn't owned those acting skills
quite enough. But so in ninety nine, she's on a
trip to Coney Island at the beach and she meets
off duty police officer Jerry Tibbs, who approaches her about modeling,
(11:44):
tells her, girl, you need to get those bangs and
introduces her to camera clubs, which in general those are
groups of amateur photographers to get together and kind of
go out on shooting expeditions. In this case, specifically, these
camera clubs were men's hobbyist groups that sometimes acted as
a front for erotic photography. And as I was reading
(12:04):
about this, it occurred to me more and more, like Betty,
what is wrong with you? Just some strange man walks
up to you on the beach and like ask you
to get into modeling. That is how you get yourself kidnapped.
But I mean, that's also what my mother always told me.
But think about that smile. I mean Betty. Betty's at
least in the way that she looks on film, she
(12:25):
seems so receptive to whatever life tosses her way. Um,
and she gets into this more erotic photography and she's thinking,
you know what, why not, it's paying the bills. She's
good at it. And these are the early signs that
displaying her sexuality before the camera and also a little
(12:48):
bit of nudity or just roll on nudity really didn't
bother her. And at one point she and three other
models were arrested for indecent exposure during a topless photo
shoot near highway. But when she goes before the judge,
she pleads not guilty, insisting that there was nothing indecent
about her body and that the group was a legitimate
(13:10):
camera club. And the judge ends up bumping to charge
down to just disorderly conduct. Yeah, and one of the
sources we were looking at points points to sort of
the radical nature of someone of this time, uh, claiming
that their body is not indecent. It's okay for me
to be naked near a highway, Mr judge. Well, and
(13:31):
that's one thing that she talks a lot about, is
how much She loves being naked outside taking a sun
bath yea, or an air bath. An air bath, that's
what she calls it. Yeah, oh man, Yeah, Betty's having
a good time. You know. Um. The whole thing is like, yeah,
she wants to be an actress, and these nude photos
(13:51):
are really no big deal. It's like, if you know, hey,
just go get a job at Starbucks if you can't
get your dream job and then make money until then,
her her deal was, well, just go take my clothes
off and pose for some pictures. Will be you know,
like you know, working at Starbucks, but nothing is on
underneath your barista aprin perhaps. But as her camera club
photos get more and more popular, she catches the attention
(14:16):
of Irving and Paula Claw. And these are brother and
sisters who are pin up and bondage photo entrepreneurs. So
he's usually the producer, she's usually the director. I've always
found it very strange and fascinating that this brother and
sister duo we're inca hoots to you know, create this
bondage photo business. But all right, y'all do y'all clause.
(14:42):
I just think, yeah, they were just just like Betty.
They were trying to figure out how to make money,
because I think it was Irving who figured out early
on people women specifically wanted to buy, basically tabloid magazines
pictures of movie stars because they would cut them out,
and it would early pinterest boys and girls when you
would actually cut out a picture from a magazine attack
(15:03):
into your wall. But yeah, he realized that there was
money to be made from these pictures, and that sort
of eventually parlayed into well, then we'll just have them
take their clothes off. Well, and then for even more money,
you can specialty order a bondage photo of your choosing.
So Betty at this point says in retrospect that she's
(15:25):
feeling a little adrift and signs a contract with the
clause she said, you know, after all, I could make
more money in a few hours modeling than I could
earn in a week as a secretary. And she also
claims to when it comes to the bondage photos, that
she's not very famous for that the setup was she
had to take the bondage photos in order to take
(15:47):
just the regular modeling photos, and she wanted to get
paid for everything, so it was kind of like eating
her vegetables, she was like, well, I guess I'll put
on this ball gag if I must. But I mean,
she thought the whole thing was ridiculous. There's this quote
where she says, the other models and I enjoyed doing
these crazy things. The craziest thing I was asked to
(16:07):
do was pose as a pony wearing a leather outfit
with a lead and everything. We just died laughing. And
when it comes to the you know, actually setting up
those bondage images, because I mean, she she said some
uncomfortable looking positions and some of them and one she
is actually hog tied. And she emphasizes how it was
(16:28):
Paula who always did the tying up, and it was
really insistent that she was very gentle, So it never was.
It never. There's only one instance that she could think
of where she was really physically uncomfortable because she had
to hold this particular pose for a long time. But
the you know, the things of tying people up and
(16:48):
all of that, really, I don't know, it just kind
of rolled off her back, seemed to um. Well. We also,
in addition to those bondage picture she was also making
sexploitation films like Betty Page and High Heels and teaser rama,
and she was in these five minute, eight millimeter quote
unquote films like Betty's Clown Dance and Dominant Betty Dances
(17:11):
with Whip. I like how straightforward the titles are. And
writing about these films, Richard Corliss, who's a film critic
over it time, was talking about how, yeah, look, these
films were not great. Um, but when Betty shared the
screen with these other women, because it was exclusively women,
because if you featured men, then you faced obscenity charges. Um,
(17:35):
when she shared the screen with these other women, whether
they were just helping each other get dressed or undressed,
or they were actually spanking each other or tying each
other up, you could sometimes spot them giggling. And again,
Margaret's talbot, who was writing a writt New Republic uh
said that these short films sometimes suggest a sort of
lesbian theme park. So everybody agrees, even though these are
(17:59):
just like these cake pictures cheesecake movies, there's no like
cultural larger cultural value. Perhaps it's an interesting snapshot into
just like fun sexuality. Well and also in such stark
contrast to hardcore porn today. Um, but When we get
(18:22):
to the mid fifties, this is really a turning point
for Betty. She isn't quite mainstream, but she still sees
some success. For instance, at one point, Howard Hughes apparently
knew about her and asked her on a date via
a messenger, and she was like, oh, no, thanks, I'm
dating somebody. Well, she had heard that he if you
(18:44):
wanted to be in a Howard Hughes movie, you had
to sleep with him. Whether that was true or not, whatever,
but she was like, I am not being put through
that rigamar role of having a director make me trade
sexual favors for a partner movie. Yeah. Betty was very
vocal about her at least her monogamy. She was she
had sex, and she acknowledged that. But but she didn't
(19:05):
sleep around shall we say? Um. But in nineteen fifty four,
she starts working with now famous photographer and former pin
up herself, Bunny Yeager, who takes Betty's most professional shots.
And he is really the one who helps Betty Bloomore artistically,
you could say, into the icon you know today. Yeah,
(19:25):
And and Bunny herself had wanted to get behind the
camera and her interest in shooting other young women really
came about right as conveniently, Hugh Hefner was launching Playboy magazine,
and so Bunny combines all of these interests and these
money making schemes and shoots Betty for Playboy. And so
in January nineteen fifty five, Betty appears as the Miss
(19:49):
January Playboy centerfold in a Santa cap and a smile.
That's about it. Um. But Bunny wasn't paid much. She
only got a hundred dollars for the pick her. Uh
Heffner had purchased all of the previous year's centerfolds just
as a batch, including the very famous one of Marilyn Monroe,
and later, talking about the appeal of Betty Page, Hugh
(20:13):
Heffner said, quote, She's a combination of wholesome innocence and
fetish oriented poses that is at once retro and very modern.
And in that light, it almost makes sense that bunny
style fell out of fashion as Playboy and other magazines
started featuring more explicit content. And this is something too
(20:33):
that Betty Page talks about a in taking pride in
no other men being on the set, aside from say,
like an irving claw, that she wasn't taking you know,
what would be considered those obscene photos with other men.
And also aside from one incident that she claimed happened
against her will when she was drunk, which was a
(20:53):
very rare occasion for her, she never um did I
forget how she described it exactly, but um she was
talking about how, you know, a dirty photo was one
in which you'd spread your legs, and so that never happened.
And even in those photos with Irving Claw, what we
would be considered her most hardcore stuff, she was wearing,
I mean all sorts of layers of things like you
(21:15):
would you never actually saw her nipples, her volva, certainly
not pubic hair. Yes, she talked about how sometimes she
would have to layer the underwear just so you wouldn't
even see like a shadow or a suggestion of anything
under it, to keep it very very far from court. Basically, Well,
in this two seguys so perfectly from our conversation last
(21:38):
time about the history of pin ups and particularly the
painted pin ups, and how it was really the rise
of Playboy and photographic technology and that new more explicit
style that rendered the old skull pin up obsolete. Yeah,
but I mean Betty was certainly not absolutely yet, because
it was also in that Bunny shoots the famous jungle
(22:01):
Betty photos in Miami, and these are the ones that
you've probably seen, the ones like Kristin referenced with the
leopard print bikini. Uh, and Betty's posing with Cheetah's at
this like wild Animal Park in Florida basically, and uh,
she was very proud that she made that bathing sear herself. Yeah,
she made most of her bikinis, and she lamented the
(22:23):
fact that later in life she she threw everything away
and was enraged that these Betty Page boutiques had popped
up in the meantime copying her styles. Yeah, exactly. Um, well,
so this is this is the height of her popularity really,
when she's appeared in Playboy and Bunny is shooting all
of these fabulous and exotic photos. But it is also
(22:44):
sort of another turning point for the worst for her
for her personal life. And we will talk more about
that in just a second. So it's in and there's
some congressional drama of foot because a senator named st.
(23:05):
Ska Father has his eye on a presidential race and
in order to druma publicity for himself and really positioned
himself as an important candidate. He decides to go on
the war path against obscenity. So he puts together this
senate witch hunt, really investigating pornography, and he calls Page
(23:29):
as a witness, citing some of her more explicit camera
club photos, because by this point they're what like twenty
thousand of these photos out there. Yeah, give her take,
give her take, but yeah, sort of the context, or
what father framed as the context, is that a teenage
boy had died of auto erotic asphyxiation, and during the testimony,
(23:50):
his father on the stand agreed that the pose his
son had been found in, he was all tied up, Uh,
looked just like a bondage photo of Betty's, which is
such a dirty it's just such a dirty trick. But
Betty never had to testify, possibly because she wasn't actually
a mainstream bondage queen who could be made an example of,
(24:13):
you know, she wasn't famous enough to sort of drag
her through the mud. Instead, it was that entrepreneur Irving
Claw who had to defend his films and images, and
he used the defense that well, there was no nudity. Ever,
there were no men in the photos, so it's not obscene, yeah,
but it's still ruined him and ruined him and it
definitely drove Betty off the scene. Yeah, so she decides
(24:37):
to take a new path. In ninety seven, at thirty four,
she basically drops off the face of the pop cultural
planet after all of the obscenity drama, and for a
while she dives head first into Christianity. She attends Bible College, um,
and she gets involved with Billy Graham's crusade. And in
(24:59):
the book The Real Betty Page The Truth about the
Queen of pin Ups by Richard Foster, a book which
she says is mostly lies, Foster says that her classmates
in Bible College remember her as erratic. Yeah, basically, that
her missionary zeal and her fervor for the Lord even
(25:20):
freaked them out, essentially, that she was going a little
too far with it. Um. But yeah, during this time,
and she worked as a teacher, she said, you know, hey,
that's what I was trying to do. I'll go back
and do that. She married and divorced a few more times, um,
and things get really dark in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
She's living in Florida and California, and she runs a
(25:41):
foul of the law quite a bit, and this is
coming from Foster's book. Betty gets in trouble. She's threatening
and even assaulting friends and neighbors. She gets committed to
a state hospital for a few months in Florida and
then again in California after stabbing a landlady, and in
two she nearly kills her new landlady. She informs the
(26:04):
woman that God has told her essentially to kill this woman,
and as a result, she has committed to a state
hospital for ten years and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. And
it's interesting that during this time that she's committed and
she's getting treatment and she's recovering from what she's been through. Um,
it's really during this time that her popularity, unbeknownst to
(26:27):
her and without her having to do a single thing
about it, completely re blossoms. Yeah, I didn't know this
bit at all. In Dave Stevens creates the graphic novel
The Rocket Cheer and it features Betty as a character
or at least a look alike, and he's talked about
how he discovered Betty page photos when he was a
(26:49):
young boy and was immediately in the same way that
I was when I was a younger girl, was immediately
struck by that imagery. Sadly, I am a horrible drawer,
so I started like, couldn't recreate her image. Um. And
then though in the movie version of the Rocketeer comes
out with Jennifer Connolly playing the Betty character, and cult
(27:12):
worship is born, and all of this is coinciding with
her being released from this mental hospital. Yeah, and so, yeah,
you you come out of being out of society for
ten years, and you come out and people are obsessed
with you when you had, even during the biggest success
of your career, you had basically just been a playboy
(27:35):
playmate like that. That's sort of the height of her
mainstream fame, and all of a sudden you emerged to
find that the entire world is sort of looking for you.
I mean, people were convinced that she was dead, or
that she had even become a nun, that she'd run
a foul of the mob, and they had, you know,
gotten rid of her. So all of these Betty theories
(27:55):
were cropping up. And it's so interesting too to watch
how people are drawn to her because we tend to
project a lot of things on too Betty, just the
same way that we have tended to project a lot
of things onto pin ups in general. Um, whether it's
you know, giving her credit for making people feel good
about their bodies, or just um sort of kind of
(28:19):
co opting her as some sort of feminist icon almost.
And this public adoration has also been heavily monetized. So
she died in two thousand eight, and in two thousand thirteen,
for instance, she tied with Einstein at number eight on
Forbes's list of the top earning dead celebrities. I believe
(28:40):
her estate was earning something around eight million dollars a
year because of all of this new imagery and this
new merchandise now associated with her estate. And writing about this,
Richard Corlis, whom we started earlier over at Time, talks
about how her star quality was undeniable, even in those
(29:00):
silent films that she did the what was it Betty,
Betty Uh, Betty's clown Dance, Betty Page and high Heels,
and writing about this in Time magazine, he says, what
everyone remembers about Betty, aside from her trademark bangs, is
her smile. That guilelessness that she presented on camera, and
(29:20):
Cordless almost applauds the brand of sexuality that's present in
Betty's images and her movies. He says, to her fans
and her official detractors who might have agreed that sex
was dirty, Betty's giddy energy said, heck no, it's fun.
And she is. She's laughing, she's having a good time.
She herself is quoted as saying like this is this
(29:42):
is so silly, this is so ridiculous that I'm getting
paid to do this, or you know, she is that
just what she's putting on. Regardless of whether it's true
or whether she's just acting, it's still portraying a version
of sexuality that is fun and, like he said, guileless.
And that's very much echoed in Margaret Talbot's assessment that
(30:03):
she's the sex joke who's in on the joke, or
at least it seems to be that way. Yeah. Talbot's
essay is sort of focused on this issue of fetishistic
nostalgia around Betty Page. Basically that we us modern folks
in the year, like we said earlier, kind of cherry
picked things from the past and conveniently shake off the context,
(30:25):
and that our obsession with these things that were meant
to be disposable fifty years ago ends up driving our
so called eBay economy. And she's wondering, like, okay, so
what is it? Why why do we seem to love
to pick things from the path that we're meant to
be basically like garbage? You know, pin ups were meant
to be advertisements. Betty Page was just meant to be
(30:46):
an images sold to clients who wanted to see women
with ball gags, and Talbot posits that part of it
is that Betty's pictures depict this joy with her work,
this joy in herself, not a joy put on for
the viewers. She's not necessarily looking straight at you trying
to seduce you. She's almost too silly for that. And
(31:07):
Talbot writes that Betty's exuberant persistence of self shines through
and that she's almost too sunny to be a seductress. Well,
and there's also, as she goes on to talk about
that fifties duality going on, because you have Betty at
least appearing to enjoy sexuality at a time when women
weren't supposed to be at least outwardly sexual beings at all.
(31:30):
Sexuality was literally under wraps. These magazines were under wraps. Um.
I mean, she couldn't take a photo with a guy
for fear of getting slapped with an obscenity charge. And
it was happening quote at a time when fetishism and
exhibitionism and ordinary sexual adventure really meant something. And she
goes on to quote Karen Essex and James Swanson, who
(31:52):
wrote a tribute book to Betty essentially uh and they
say that she embodies the stereotypical wholesomeness of the fifth
these and the hidden sexuality straining beneath the surface. So really,
I mean she is just a concrete, flesh and blood
example of what we were talking about with our pin
up models who may or may not have existed that
(32:13):
but the women who were painted on paper. Betty is
sort of the embodiment of that, the contradiction of the
innocence and wholesomeness and joy and exuberance with that darker sexuality.
But the really fascinating thing too is how in her
more modern day reclamation, and this was something talked about
(32:34):
in a piece over the Atlantic, it has been largely
driven by women whereas originally she was largely appreciated by
you know, straight men interested in the kinkier kinds of stuff,
or just you know, we were picking up a playboy.
It's there. There's really something that women today have been
drawn to in terms of her sexuality, her body image,
(32:57):
and also you know, wanting to put a feminine spin
on it as well. Yeah. Talking to The Atlantic, the
director of Betty Page Revial's All Mark More, talks about
how her popularity today, her enduring popularity probably says a
lot about the sexually repressive culture that we're still in
(33:20):
and the fact that we're generally still not cool with
women's bodies, That women's bodies are always a thing, they're
always politicized and discussed and stared at. And so the
fact that women were the target audience for that documentary
and that they respond so strongly to Betty More, he
was talking about how that really says a lot about
the structure of today's society and what it's telling women
(33:42):
they have to be. So it has put her up
as a role model for women to say, oh my god,
here is a photo of this woman with uh, you know,
a not extremely thin looking body. She hasn't been photos shopped,
and she's looking directly into the camera. She is there
isn't another man in the frame. For all we know.
(34:04):
She could just be doing this for herself and she
is enjoying it, and she is seems to be fully
embracing her body. There's this one nude photo of her
where she's sitting on the bow of a ship and
her head is upturned to the sun, and I mean,
you wouldn't want to put any clothes on her. She
looks so comfortable, you know. Yeah, And that's that's what
(34:27):
people were driving home, especially Talbot, who says that regardless
of what Betty was or wasn't wearing, she looked supremely
at ease in that body because she was totally unlike
both her contemporaries and our contemporary She wasn't as busty
as Monroe or Mansfield, and she wasn't as thin as
a Kate Moss or at Gazelle. She'd even be been
(34:49):
rejected by the Ford modeling agency for being too short
and too hippie, and so here she is really like.
There's so many pictures of her just laughing, whether she's
in a bikey or whatever. Naked. And it's that sense
that she's embracing her own flaws, that she's made sex
her ally that really makes us want to identify with her. Yeah,
(35:11):
and and as well to her contradictions probably helped make
her real, because here's a woman who was taking nude
photos on Saturday and going to church on Sunday because
she didn't think the two were mutually exclusive, even as
she after she had gone through her really super duper
religious phase, and I think she's still religious, you know,
(35:33):
when she died. She always made very clear distinctions between
you know, what she did and sort of the intent
of it. She didn't seem to harbor a lot of
guilt for posing because she wasn't actively having sex with
a lot of people, which she did wag a finger at. Yeah,
And I mean, so pages basically treated as this gateway
(35:55):
drug almost to pin up culture, burlesque, rockability, and other
cultures that are sort of generally curve positive. But despite
all this, she she herself never considered herself an icon.
And this was in one of the Q and A
s that Kristen and I read, and she says, I
don't know what they mean by an icon. I never
thought of myself as being that. It seems so strange
(36:16):
to me. I was just modeling, thinking of as many
different posts as possible. I made more money modeling being secretary.
I had a lot of free time. You could go
back to work after an absence of a few months.
You couldn't do that as a secretary. And so she
was because she couldn't be that actress, that famous actress
she wanted to be. She took the route that was
(36:38):
open to her. Yes, she was trained as a teacher.
You could be a teacher. Yes she was trained as
a secretary. You could go do that too, But she
she needed to combine the lack of boring with the
need to make money. Yeah, I mean she was kind
of just doing it for herself. She couldn't rely on
anybody else. Um she was. She said in later in
life that she was really in love of with the
(37:01):
last guy that she married. But that was it. I mean,
everybody else was, you know, kind of hurt her ultimately,
And when she died in two thousand and eight, there
were I mean, there was an outpouring of you know,
attention on her, and all of these obituaries and reflective
blog posts and things, and there were a lot of
(37:21):
women and feminists who were hailing her, you know, hailing
the event as the passing of a feminist icon, which
is really interesting to just consider because on the one hand,
of things that she stands for in terms of body
positivity and embracing nudity and being really comfortable on your
(37:43):
own skin and even just you know, getting through the
tough times and making ends meet when you need to. Uh.
Caroline and I you know, spent a lot of time
actually before this podcast kind of puzzling over whether it's
really all that accurate though, to put that feminie is
label on her, and whether it's even necessary. And I mean,
(38:04):
I think talking about Betty Page is an excellent counterpoint
to Andrea Dorkin stuff that we cited in our first
episode on pin Ups, because she basically says that these
images are awful and they're of no value and that
they're just empty vessels for our fantasies. And when you
talk about Betty, I mean, she's a real flesh and
(38:24):
blood human who had an incredibly traumatic upbringing. She really
struggled through hard times and while she was beautiful and
she did what she did to get herself by because
you know, she wasn't depending on some man to get
her by Um, it doesn't necessarily mean that she was feminist.
I think, you know, we tend to take or that
(38:46):
she needs to be feminist. I think that we take
Betty's images, uh, she a flesh and blood person, and
treat them and then think about them the same way
that we do the paintings of pin ups, you know
from uh, and fill those images with our own projections
and hopes and feelings. And well, I think it's wonderful
(39:07):
to empower yourself, however you do, to feel good in
your own skin, and to look at someone like Betty
and say, see, she wasn't a nine ft tall model,
you know she she looked way more normal, and I
can I can achieve that. I do think that's wonderful.
But I do think that just because a woman does something,
or model something, or or acts in a certain way,
(39:27):
it doesn't make it a feminist act, and it doesn't
make her a feminist icon. Yeah. It circles back to
a question that you and I raised in our pre
podcast conversation of at what point, when we are doing
this are we putting words in other women's mouths? Essentially,
because she did speak extensively about her life before she died,
(39:52):
and maybe she just was never directly asked about feminism,
but it was certainly never a mantle that she put
on herself, and I don't think that that in any
way devalues her role. I think that she's still easily
considered a trailblazer and certainly an icon um. But I'm
so curious to hear from listeners about this further compulsion
(40:14):
that we might have to need to say she's a
feminist icon. Yeah, so we want to know about that
and want to know if there are any Betty Page
fans listening. I have a feeling there are, because when
I asked on Facebook, should we do a Betty Page podcast,
the response was overwhelmingly yes. So we want to know
(40:36):
all of your Betty Page thoughts. Mom Stuff at house
stuff works dot com is our email address. You can
also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast hashtag pin ups week,
or messages on Facebook. And we've got a couple of
messages to share with you right now, and stepping away
(40:57):
from pin ups, we have a couple of letters to
share in response to our podcast on women in farming. Yeah,
I have a letter here from Jenny, who has a
resource for ladies out there who are interested in farming.
She says, I recently spent the summer in Maine apprenticing
on a small goat farm where we made goat choose
to sell at farmer's markets. The farm was run by
(41:19):
an older woman and all three apprentices that season were women,
so we had a lot of fun together with the goats.
I just imagine the imagine them gossiping with the goats.
Um Anyway, Jenny says, the decision to become a farmer
and almost thirty years old was kind of a sudden one,
but I know that working with animals was something I
really wanted to do. I'm just not very good at maths,
so being a vet or a vet tech was never
(41:39):
in the cards for me, or really anything I ever
wanted to do. Farming ended up being the best decision
for me, and I absolutely love it. If there are
any aspiring lady farmers out there, I would really like
to suggest the program which I used to get connected
with my host farm. It was through the main Organic
Farmers and Gardeners Association. It's completely free. You just fill
(42:00):
out an application, browse the list of farm descriptions. They
have farms of every type all across Maine, and then
you usually have to visit the farm to interview and
come to an agreement with the farmer. A lot of
the farms are run by women, groups of women, or
women along with their male partners. Maine is in the
midst of a small farm revolution at the moment, so
it's a really great place and program to get in
(42:21):
there and experience farming hands on. Usually don't need any experience,
and most farms will offer free room and board. Some
of the living situations can be a bit alternative, hence
the visit before you accept food and sometimes a small
stipend come along with it. All the information can be
found at www dot m o f g a dot org.
(42:43):
I highly recommend this program for anyone who wants to
try farming but isn't quite sure about it yet. By
the end of your apprenticeship you will know if farming
is right for you. Thanks for the episode on Lady Farmers,
and thank you Jenny Well. I've got to let her
here from Julianna and she writes, how do you Caroline Kristen,
I'm a longtime agriculture advocate and a longtime listener of Sminty,
(43:05):
so I was very excited to see you do a
series on women in agriculture. I grew up in a
rural area my whole life and was highly involved in
the Future Farmers of America. She goes on to say, overall,
in my personal experience, I haven't seen any outright discrimination
keeping girls from working family farms. They just usually desire
a different position in the agg industry. Not only that
(43:26):
many farms aren't changing hands generation to generation anymore, but
for more interested, non related managers. Farmers aren't working hard
to send their kids to college to get degrees, and
those degrees aren't being applied back to the farm, so
their parents need to find a way to keep it
going without their children's support. I can't speak for all
aspects and regions of agriculture, but I think that if
(43:48):
a woman were to desire to run a farm business,
she really would just need to apply herself. Agriculture is
most certainly firmly rooted in traditional and conservative values, but
I think you'd be surprised that it's also one of
the most progressive. It's just so from an external view,
you might not get that impression. As a woman in AGG.
I've had nothing but encouragement from the male and female
(44:09):
bosses and mentors who have no problems with seeing women
as equal contributors to AGG. I think it stems from
being a part of something bigger than yourself, that you
are there literally to solve world problems like hunger and health,
and having the opinion that girls belong there and boys
there is a frivolous thought the best person is put
forth to solve those issues, regardless of their gender. I
(44:31):
think this was a great look at AG, but perhaps
you could expand your definition of agriculture to include more
facets where women are. Even with a traditional view of
a farmer's wife, she isn't merely cleaning house. She's out
there with her husband in the operation, working alongside him
and their children. Also, she's more than likely making many
financial and purchasing decisions for the operation, even if it's
(44:51):
her husband's name on the deed. I have so much
more to say about this subject, and there's so many
topics to be discussed in AGG Blabaram, but I don't
want to take up more of your time. Thanks for
the podcast and thanks for your insights, Julianna, and thanks
everybody who has written into us Mom stuff at how
stuff works dot com is our email address and for
links to all of our social media as well as
(45:13):
all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts, including this one.
With those links so that you can learn more about
Betty Page, head on over to stuff mom Never Told
You dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
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