It's funny how the "mainstream"-- let's call it "old" from now on-- media is reporting the death of nudie pinup model Bettie Page without using the word "fetish." Bettie became "notorious" not because she was as wholesome as her smiling face and healthy naked body implied, but because she did loops that showed her putting on nylons or heels or getting tied up and spanked. Bettie was a perv doll, posing in studios for gangs of amateurs in raincoats, not merely, as the LA Times would have it, "the brunet pinup queen with a shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s." Bettie wasn't an airbrushed Playboy cutie. Bettie was a she devil who projected an innocence in the most kinky situations. Everything else is revisionism and whitewash. Give the lady her due.
The Bettie Page revival was in full swing in Los Angeles when we arrived in 1990, like the night The Blazers played King King and all the rockabilly girls were made up to look just like her. We'd worked at NBC at the Eighties with a producer who would be the first journo to track her down. Sometime in the Nineties. Anyone remember his name?
