[vale bettie page] how do you want to be remembered

Choosing the right picture wasn't easy - she shunned recent photos so maybe this art print she'd have liked

Imagine you are this woman.

Imagine you had a couple of lucky breaks in the 50s and suddenly found yourself a star, a Hugh Hefner star. Now a battle rages inside you. Everyone around, from Hefner to an adoring public wants you to take your clothes off and if possible, to do as much as you dare.

Unless you’re emotionally scarred and even if you are, maybe especially if you are [which she was] there’s a pretty rampant sexuality in there wanting to get out but its expression is limited by the prudery of the times. I once asked a life partner of mine, a fairly red-blooded Serb, how strong was that little voice in the back of her head to show her body in public.

We’d just bought property and were short of the readies so she said – well, I’d just have to send her to Soho to sell her body and I couldn’t help thinking at the time that she was only 70% joking, as long as she could transfer the responsibility for her actions to me.

Everyone knows the old line “I was young; I needed the money” and it gets down to the core of exploitation. We’re not talking here about the slave trade but about the average woman and that little voice eternally driving her on. Lines like “if you’ve got it, flaunt it” give her the permission she needs and there’s always going to be an appreciative audience.

Imagine that you had allowed your personal sexuality to go public but now the reaction sets in; you find religion and go reclusive. They’d made you go too far. You grant the occasional interview but no photos, please.

Then, in the late 80s, there is a rediscovery of what you were thirty years earlier and now you’re in two minds. You want to be taken for who you are inside but you’d also [as she said] made your money showing your body in the first place and people all round the world appreciated that body and face.

Most unreconstructed.

People say you’re beautiful and they mean the you which had been … but in a little, innocent transference, you partly apply it to yourself now. After all, you’re one and the same person, aren’t you?

Wiki quotes Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who said, of the movie about her:

"The tone of the movie is subdued and reflective. It does not defend pornography, but regards it (in its 1950s incarnation) with subdued nostalgia for a more innocent time. There is a kind of sadness in the movie as we reflect that most of these women and the men they inflamed are now dead; their lust is like an old forgotten song."

I'm not sure about "sad", a bit bewildered, perhaps. In her own words:

"I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer. I wasn’t trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn’t think of myself as liberated, and I don’t believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live."

Vale, Bettie Page.