The Notorious Bettie Page

Gretchen Mol, Lili Taylor, Jonathan M. Woodward 

Audrey Munson, her name was Audrey Munson.  She was America’s first supermodel, the American Venus, Miss Manhattan, universally hailed as the most beautiful woman in the world.  She gazes over New York, perched on top of the Municipal Building.  You can bump into her again at the touching Fireman's Memorial, find her hanging out at the Plaza Hotel, Pennsylvania Station, New York Public Library, Central Park, and Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  Never heard of her? I bet your grandfather or great grandfather did and spent many an evening wishing their wife looked more like Audrey.  She was discovered on the streets of New York city, at age 15, in 1906, by a photographer.  For the next decade-and-a-half, she was the model of choice for any artist, photographer, and sculptor who could afford her services.  She is the model on the Mercury Dime and the Half-Dollar.  Ministers across the country organized picket lines and decried her four silent films, which gained her even wider notoriety as the first woman to be nude in a major release.  Telling women that the secret to beauty is never exercising, she thrilled the reading public with tales of her life in Hearst Weekly in 1921 and, the next year, she set off across America to find the “perfect man.” The “perfect woman” could not settle for less.  Amazingly, she lived to be 105 years old, dying in 1996 largely forgotten by the public.  You see; even though every man wanted her, Audrey had a lot of problems.  In 1926, she tried to kill herself and, by 1931, she was committed to the Ogdensburg Psychiatric Institution, a mental hospital, for depression, where she remained for the next 65 years, with nary a visitor. Almost no one journeys to the most beautiful woman in the world’s unmarked grave. 

This is the way it is. Why our society cannot figure this out is beyond me.  Beauty is fragile and what lay beneath the surface is often tragic.  Princess Diane, Frances Farmer, Marilyn Monroe, Clara Bow, just to name a few, troubled souls who the world thought had it all. (Hollywood should long ago have done a biopic on Munson or Bow. With the right actress and script, they would seem to be Oscar gold.) Bettie Mae Page is one of those creatures.  She was “The Girl with the Perfect Figure,” the anti-Marilyn Monroe of the 1950s, the girl next door who was willing to do some really funky things. Who was Bettie Page?  Playboy Playmate? Christian missionary? Fetish and bondage model? Nemesis of the "Kefauver Hearings?” Mental patient? Secretary for Rev. Billy Graham’s organization? Violent offender? Inspiration for countless artists? The girl in the magazines kept under the counter. Trying to nail down who is Betty Page, is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.  One gets the image of a leaf being carried by whatever wind is strongest, a scarred little girl who deeply wanted to be important.  Whoever Bettie Page was, can be traced to a poverty-ridden broken home in Nashville, Tennessee. A place where things got so bad that her sister, Goldie, and her, were placed in an orphanage when she was ten.  The two little girls dreamed of being movie stars, practicing the poses they had seen in magazines.  Even though her father, Roy, and her mother were no longer together after he impregnated an underage girl, he rented a room in their house and visited Bettie at night, paying for his daughter’s silence with movie tickets to the local theater.  To the outside world, like the stars on the screen she watched, she was happy and healthy, an outgoing teenager involved in all sorts of extracurricular activities and was voted “the most likely to succeed,” even winning a scholarship to a local teacher’s college.  She was a 17-year-old war bride, marrying a boy named Billy Neal just after he was drafted.  Following him to San Francisco, while working as a secretary, she tried to get into the movies, but she talked with a southern twang and, like thousands of girls before and after her, Tinseltown had no use for her.  By 1947, the 26-year-old’s marriage was over and, after a two-year lay over at home, she headed to New York. The young secretary felt the lights of Broadway calling, but all she would get was working a couple of off-Broadway shows, a sexual assault, and an affair with a married man.  Then fate stepped in, a police officer named Jay Tibbs walked up to her on a beach on Coney Island and asked her if she had ever done any modeling.  This was her introduction to camera clubs.  Camera clubs are not around anymore, but they were basically a bunch of horny men that would congregate in a room and take “art photos” of a nude young model.  As writer Buck Henry, who attended several of these get-togethers, noted, most of men never bothered to have film in their cameras.  She was making more for posing in her birthday suit for 2 hours than she made all week as a secretary. By 1951, she was posing in men’s magazines with names like He, Stare, Wink, Dare, and Titter, and all the poses she practiced as a little girl came to the forefront.  She loved the camera and the camera loved her.  She posed with whips and leather, wrestled and spanked other women, even appearing in 50 short fetish films or loops, the kind of thing you did not do in the 1950s if you were a good girl. Powerful men like Hugh Hefner and Howard Hughes were beginning to notice her, as was a Senate investigation committee that was trying to link pornography with juvenile delinquency. Just as she was becoming the star she dreamed about being as a little girl, she vanished. Bettie moved to Florida, got married to an old boyfriend with whom she had little in common and found Jesus. Saved, she left her second husband and moved to Los Angeles to be a secretary for the Bible Institute of Los Angeles and counselor for unmarried pregnant girls. This would be a nice way to end her story, redemption, but life is never that easy. She remarried her first husband, Billy, because she wanted to be a missionary, and divorce was still morally unseemly in that era.  The marriage lasted long enough for him to beat the tar out of her, nearly killing her.  There was a fourth marriage, that lasted just 12 years, violence against her husband, her 2 step-daughters, and even stabbing strangers on the street, several stays in mental institutions, the last one lasting 9 years at Patton State Hospital in Highland, California.  Released in the early 1990s, the penniless Bettie did not realize that she was more famous now than in her hay days in the 50s.  Barbi Benton, Lucy Lawless, and Demi Moore modeled themselves after her.  Comic book artist Dave Stevens made her his character’s love interest in The Rocketeer, photo books of her camera club photos and lithographs were being shopped as high art, and nostalgia for the past, coupled with the Internet, allowed for a whole new generation to discover Bettie.

So is this film a good biopic? No, it is nice enough, but can never get beneath the image of the all-American girl in her homemade bikinis.  It suffers from the whitewash that often comes with nostalgia. Gretchen Mol as Bettie does a decent job.  It is fun and fabulous, but not the real Bettie, but more the image she was before the camera, more our memories of the 1950s, then the 50s themselves.  Rather the director, Mary Harron, is more interested in American’s attitudes towards sex than the real life model. It is a B/B+ movie.  

Verdict: An Okay Film