Above, a cover from the Aussie men’s mag Adam, April 1955, with art depicting a tense moment on the road in Lester Way’s short story “…the Dotted Line.” Below are some interior scans, including one containing the immortal Bettie Page, identified by the editors only as “this brunette”. But even if they didn’t name her, they certainly knew of her. By 1955 she was extremely famous. Her image had been used in dozens of magazines, including Playboy in January of that year, and she had appeared on The Jackie Gleason Show, in the burlesque films Striporama, Varietease, and Teaserama, and had acted in two off-Broadway plays. Page is in panels twelve and thirteen below, and you also get other pin-ups, some nice art, cartoons, and an interesting ad. 

It's been a while since we've had any Bettie Page on the site, so we were pleasantly surprised yesterday to have found some shots of her in a 1953 issue of Carnival magazine. Actually, there were about forty great images of various people, but rather than try to scan all of them, we decided to break the issue into two or more posts. So today, we're uploading only the below shots of Page demonstrating for readers the various legal constraints on disrobement for strippers in different states, with Kansas being the most conservative and Louisiana being the least. We'll have more from Carnival later.

Summer is dwindling in the parts of the world that have actual seasons. As a reminder of everyone’s favorite time of year we’ve searched the internet and cobbled together a collection of thirty vintage images featuring some of yesteryear’s fittest femmes and hommes enjoying the sun, and sometimes each other. If you haven’t had a summertime moment like one of those below, there’s still time. Get to it. 

Nobody really knows where the word burlesque came from—some claim its roots are the Italian and Spanish words “burla”, which mean “hoax” and “deception” respectively. We’ve also seen burla translated as “jest.” Whatever its etymological roots, the art of burlesque began in Victorian England as a type of musical variety show that satirized highbrow art forms such as opera, ballet, and costumed drama. On American soil, burlesque took similar shape, but also began to incorporate semi-clad dancers. Soon, these sexually suggestive dances became the focus of the performances, and the word burlesque became a synonym for striptease. Stars such as Sally Rand, Amy Fong and Dixie Evans became celebrity practitioners of the art. The dancers generally didn’t strip totally nude on stage, but a few, like Bettie Page, did take it all off in short burlesque films. Above is a shot of Betty Blue Eyes Howard, and below we have more assorted burlesque photos featuring some of the biggest stars of yesteryear’s striptease firmament. Of special note are Betty Rowland dancing in panel 12, and being escorted into court to face obscenity charges in panel 13, Bettie Page from one of her nude shorts in panel 20, Lilly Christine in panel 21, Lili St. Cyr in panel 22, two shots from one of Nazi Germany’s legendarily decadent mid-1930s burlesque shows in panels 23 and 24, a shot from a 1945 Tokyo burlesque show staged for American GIs in panel 25, and finally Tempest Storm in the last panel. We hope these images take the edge off those Monday blahs. 

Cover and interior pages of Whisper magazine from April 1955. In addition to some nice shots of Bettie Page, Whisper has a set of Josiane Berenger cheesecake images, which they use to taunt her fiancée Marlon Brando. Berenger had also posed nude at age seventeen for Polish artist Moise Kisling. Brando was aware of that and had offered to buy all Kisling’s negatives, but instead a French department store bought them and displayed the shots in their front window. But Brando got over that and stuck with Berenger, only to have Whisper blindside him a year later. We don’t know if these images were the last straw that ruined Brando and Berenger’s relationship, but we do know that shortly after the images appeared, the couple split. 

The legendary Bettie Page has died in the hospital after a heart attack earlier this week. The photo above, by Bunny Yeager, shows Bettie at her most beautiful and lively, the way she should be remembered.

85 year-old former pin-up queen Bettie Page was hospitalized in Los Angeles this week after a heart attack. Her condition has been described as “critically ill." Page is an icon who rose to fame as an erotic model during the 1950s. She posed for scores of magazines, and also appeared in more than fifty short films. She worked extensively with sister and brother publicity team Paula and Irving Klaw, who sold Page’s material from their firm Movie Star News. In 1955, Irving Klaw came under investigation during the U.S. Senate’s Kefauver Hearings, which were a politically motivated attempt to draw a link between pornography and juvenile delinquency. Under pressure, Klaw shuttered Movie Star News, and Page’s modeling career ended.

Page dropped from public view, spent time as Christian missionary, and married twice more (she had wed and divorced twice already). In 1979, Hollywood’s Belier Press reprinted some Page photos from private camera club sessions for which she had posed in 1950. The shots rekindled interest in Page, and in time a full-blown web-cult formed. In 2005 a motion picture entitled The Notorious Bettie Page was released by HBO with Gretchen Mol in the lead role. The film received wide acclaim, and further cemented Page’s legacy.

As one of the first mainstream nude models, Page is credited with helping usher in the women’s movement. At that time frank depictions of female

nudity were considered empowering, and Page’s popularity, as well as her special gift for embodying nudity as a natural state, dovetailed with the movement’s goals. Photographer and fellow pin-up Bunny Yeager, who shot the Modern Sunbathing & Hygiene cover above, offered an opinion in 1956 about Page’s appeal: “The first thing I noticed was that for some reason when she’s nude she doesn’t seem naked. [snip] Bettie’s attitude toward her lovely, healthy body is the essence of nudism.”

Today, millions of fans are hoping health returns to Miss Page.