‘Playboy no.1’ was cover-dated November, but was available in the U.S. 1 December 1953, and from the outset owner-editor Hugh Heffner’s product aspired to be not only a high-gloss magazine, but a life-style statement. This is the ‘Playboy Philosophy’ he articulates each month in his editorial column. ‘‘Playboy’ had been a cornerstone of American life for as long as I could remember,’ recalls author Bill Bryson in his book ‘The Lost Continent’ (1989). ‘Every man and boy I knew read ‘Playboy’. Some men – like my Dad, pretended not to. He used to get embarrassed if you caught him looking at it at the supermarket and would pretend that he was really looking for ‘Better Homes & Gardens’ or something. But he read it. He even had a little stash of men’s magazines in an old hatbox at the back of his clothes closet. Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and that the kids knew all about…’
A young John Phillips – later of The Mamas & The Papas, attended Bullis Prep School in Maryland where his room-mate ‘needed to be alone with the world’s first ‘Playmate’, Bullis was a less lonely place with Heff looking out for us’ and ‘the unmistakeable slapping sound’ (of masturbation) became ‘a nightly feature of life in the dark.’ The fold-out ‘Playmate Of The Month’ is as close to a national institution as soft-porn would ever get, with the J Geils Band topping the 1982 Pop charts by articulating every male fantasy of finding the girl-next-door nude as the ‘Angel Of The Centrefold.’ ‘My blood runs cold, my memories have all been sold’ they confess, midway between betrayal and ecstasy. Jan & Dean, the most high-profile residents of ‘Surf City’ sing about reading ‘Hot Rod News’ and ‘Playboy’ magazine. Even Martians enjoy it. In Tim Burton’s 1996 Sci-Fi satire ‘Mars Attack’ an invading Martian ogles ‘Playboy’, flipping out the centrefold with obvious pleasure.
Pipe-smoking Hugh Marston Hefner, the man who lived the American Dream by creating America’s wettest dream, was born in Chicago, 1926. Back at the onset of the fifties he worked for ‘Esquire’. He asked the editor for a $5 raise. When they turned him down, he quit, to launch his own rival title. Within a year, for those with a more discerning yearning, sales of ‘Playboy’ were outstripping ‘Esquire’. As the ‘Esquire’ editor conceded ‘Hefner out-titted us.’ Inconveniently, the magazine’s large-page format made it too big to safely conceal in your coat-pocket!
1953 is located at the dawn of one of the most sexually repressed decades of the century. The nearest most men came to naughtiness was glimpsing knicker-elastic as girls jived to that new-fangled Rock ‘n’ Roll beat. But early shafts of light to pierce its gloom came with the publication of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel (on 13 April 1953). ‘Casino Royale’ came with an initial print-run of just 4,750 – which proved to be something of an underestimate. Here is the most enduring icon of the century with espionage-thrills to appeal to the ‘Boy’s Own’ audience, spiced with a disarming candour vis-à-vis relationships with the women in his life. In this first novel Bond describes the ‘conventional parabola’ of his relationships with ice-cool disdain, ‘sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness.’ Yes. Chance’d be a fine thing. 1953 was also the year that John F Kennedy – Ian Fleming’s most high-profile reader, became a senator. And the year ‘Playboy’ was launched by Hugh Hefner, whose hedonistic man-of-the-world philosophy Bond came to embody.
The novel was reviewed in the year-end issue of ‘Time’ magazine, alongside Raymond Chandler’s last work of note, ‘The Long Goodbye’, with the reviewer presciently observing that Fleming had created a brutal, amoral hero more suited to our times and tastes than Chandler’s knight-errant private eye, Philip Marlowe. In the now-yellowing Pan paperback edition of ‘From Russia With Love’ (1957) Bond encounters Smersh agent Tatiana Romanova on the Orient Express, she is dressed in ‘nothing but the black ribbon round her neck and black silk stockings rolled above her knees.’ Of course the movies-to-come would nudge such teasing suggestions further. All the way to Q’s knowing joke at the end of ‘Moonraker’ (1979) when they catch Bond (Roger Moore) and Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles) frolicking in zero-gravity, observing ‘I think he’s attempting re-entry, sir.’
By then Marilyn Monroe had already appeared as ‘Sweetheart Of The Month’ for that launch issue of ‘Playboy’. Although the former Norma-Jean Mortenson (who officially changed her name in 1956) was only too willing to strip off for the nude photo-shoot, she hadn’t actually intended it to become part of Hefner’s project. The photos were opportunistically picked up by Hefner to launch his new ‘girlie’ magazine. And it represented the coming together of two iconic moments. 3 June 1955 Billy Wilder’s ‘The Seven-Year Itch’ premiered in New York, screening for the first time the enduring image of Monroe’s white (Travilla-designed) skirts lifting over the updraft from the subway grating. A moment mimicked in everything from ‘The Simpsons’ to ‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994). The movie featured Tom Ewell who – when his wife goes away for a few days, begins to wonder what it would be like to have an affair with the 37-23-36 sex-bomb upstairs. Before long, like the majority of males in the audience, he was lustfully imagining himself in various amorous situations with Monroe.
The one-time ‘Candle In The Wind’ abused orphan Norma-Jean, modeled herself on her idol – Jean Harlow. She managed a brief, cheerfully naïve appearance in the Marx Brothers final film together, ‘Love Happy’ (Dir: David Miller, in 1949), in which she got leered at by Groucho. She started 1950 with a brief, priceless appearance as George Sanders’ blonde bimbo in Joseph L Mankiewicz long, witty, immaculately acted movie ‘All About Eve’ (October 1950). Its dazzling surface almost conceals the artifice and sentimentality of its account of the theatre industry’s Broadway rat race. It gave Bette Davis one of her greatest roles as tough, bitchy, hard-drinking, self-obsessed diva ‘Margot Channing’ exposing her back to a treacherous newcomer, Anne Baxter – the slippery ingénue ‘Eve’. It garnered twelve Oscar nominations, four Oscars – for best film, director, script and a supporting actor award for Sanders who plays acerbic critic ‘Addison DeWitt’ who introduces the film. Yet it’s his bimbo we now watch out for.
Marilyn went on to star – with Jane Russell, in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ (1953), Howard Hawks’ brash adaptation of Joseph Field’s 1949 Broadway musical. In great form, the girls take off to Paris to snare rich husbands, with some iconic musical sequences along the way, including “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” (the template for Madonna’s “Material Girl” video) and “Two Little Girls From Little Rock”. There’s good support from Charles Coburn and Tommy Noonan, but its Marilyn’s charismatic presence that invests the movie with its classic status. In that same year – and to a degree retreading its materialistic theme, came ‘How To Marry A Millionaire’ (November 1953, directed by Jean Negulesco) with its opening street scene designed to showcase the new CinemaScope system, a development perhaps made necessary by her expanding celebrity. This time Marilyn, Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall share a Sex-in-the-City-style New York apartment while intent on hunting rich husbands, naturally there’s time for numerous costume changes before they have to choose between love and money.
By the time of the Billy Wilder-directed ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959), Marilyn was both sexpot, and mainstream. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis co-star as musicians who witness a mob murder and have to go on the run. Their solution – to dress up in drag and rename themselves ‘Daphne’ and ‘Josephine’ in order to join an all-female band bound for Miami, brings them into close proximity with the band’s delightful singer Sugar Kane (Monroe). Her rendition of “I Wanna Be Loved By You” has become the movie’s standout moment. Just as her simpering performance of ‘Happy Birthday Mr President’ for her lover J.F.K has been referenced countless times in pop-culture.
Her status may have gone beyond nudity, but would always be defined by her charismatic sexuality. She had a lot of what they call the most. She was photographed by Eve Arnold in Long Island 1955 in a parallel-stripes one-piece swimsuit, deeply engrossed in a hardback copy of ‘Ulysses’, and closer to the finish of James Joyce’s labyrinth novel than she is to chapter one. Or is she?
When asked what she thought of sex, after some thought she replied ‘I think it’s here to stay.’ She wasn’t wrong. Bert Stern’s famous photo session of Marilyn taken in the LA Hotel Bel-Air in June 1962 for ‘Vogue’ – just before her death, shows her lounging on her stomach, the perfect curves of her nude bottom raised, smiling into the camera through stray wisps of hair, clothed in nothing but her own luminous beauty. On 5 August 1962, when she died – allegedly of an overdose, Andy Warhol and his assistants instantly set about creating the Pop-Art silk-screens that would make them both iconic. There are post-modern critics who deconstruct her legend as classic post-abuse trauma, that her little-girl Poo-poo-pi-doo sexuality is evidence of exploitational behaviour patterns. Which may have elements of truth, yet to treat her as victim is to diminish her. She deserves better than that. Better to celebrate what she achieved. When Deborah Harry assumed her peroxide Blondie persona she was consciously recreating herself after the positive Monroe image, the movie-star, the glamour, the fame and success, the era’s nonpareil sex symbol. That’s what she wanted. That’s what she became.
And while ‘Playboy’ featured lavish nudity from the start, spawning an instant litter of imitator titles, it always managed to stay ahead of the pack. Hefner had a keen eye for female form, tastefully photographed in high-quality studio set-ups with artful lighting and no hint of pubic hair – no beaver, never mind split-beaver! But did that make Hefner a force for liberation, or simply a Pimp-upgrade, serving the traditional fuction of a conduit enabling men to ogle naked female bodies? A ‘Playboy’ photoshoot was a prestige assignment. There were always more girls eager to pose than there are pages available for photospreads. But if that has always been true, is it evidence of economic inequality? There are always hard life-choices. The time-worn way for deprived young males to fight their way out of the poverty-ghetto is by becoming a Rapper or a Soul singer, a ballplayer or a pugilist. It’s a way of prioritising necessities. Is what is euphemistically termed ‘glamour modeling’ more mind-rotting than working minimum-wage at a Call Centre or on a supermarket checkout? These are recurring moral equations.
But Hefner knew it wasn’t only sex that made the pages stick together, it was quality journalism too, so he enticed top writers to write – Norman Mailer, Ian Fleming, Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Arthur C Clarke, Vladimir Nabokov, Ursula Le Guin and Hunter J. Thompson. Where many writers assumed guises in order to sell to dubious magazines, ‘Playboy’ rapidly became a high-status sale, with pay-rates way above any other comparable market. They could also afford the best quality creative art, showcasing ‘Mad’ magazine’s Harvey Kurtzman’s delightful ‘Little Annie Fanny’ picture-strip adventures.
By today’s standards, it was all done in exquisitely good taste, but – back then, it immediately provoked vociferous opposition. The U.S. Post Office made its opposition official by denying its mailing privileges, citing its alleged ‘obscenity’ as grounds. The Federal Court subsequently overruled this decision, causing a smug Hefner to proclaim disingenuously, ‘some people think that nudity is pornographic.’
Crusading academician Alfred Kinsey set the scene for this 1950s awakening. Like his bio-movie claims – he’s ‘The Man Who Invented Modern Sex’ (Bill Condon’s 2005 movie ‘Kinsey’, with Liam Neeson in the title role). He’s the man credited – and also discredited, with helping a generation of young Americans to rethink their relationship with sex. Some claim Kinsey was the catalyst that sparked the Sixties sexual revolution. The movie reignites that debate. But even if the film had never happened, Kinsey would still be blamed by regressive conservatives for today’s more enlightened, more tolerant, sexual status quo. He was raised in a strict Methodist family – illustrated in the biopic by his father, played by John Lithgow’s diatribe against a modern technology that makes ‘sin easier’. Within this context, the automobile introduces the possibility of joy-riding. The telephone allows the young woman to hear her suitor’s voice on the pillow beside her. The cinema encourages the viewer to become voyeurs watching the lascivious actions of others. Even the zipper is bad, because it allows the man easy access to the temptations of self-abuse. To this kind of mind-set, the answer is to move ‘from matters of the flesh’ to ‘concerns of the spirit’ – the alternative being ‘moral oblivion’.
Kinsey very sensibly turned his back on religion to pursue his studies, and matured into a Midwestern academic with a taste for spotted bow-ties, building a reputation beginning with his studies of gall-wasps. Then, motivated by his own marital problems, he zigzagged his career direction, addressing himself instead to the awkward questions of human sexuality. After all, he reasons ‘people are just like gall-wasps, only more complex.’ Like the creators of the ‘Kama Sutra’ 1,600 years earlier, he tried to turn passion into science. In those repressive, conservative times his initial research discovered so much unhappiness, so much fear, guilt and unfulfilled relationships, tragic lives of discontent and frustration that resulted from narrow-minded sexual philistinism.
He initiated a ‘marriage course’ on the Bloomington campus of Indiana with a research programme sponsored initially by the Rockefeller Foundation, where he was both intrigued and shocked to find levels of extreme sexual ignorance among his students, dangerously coupled with a lot more ‘extra-marital coitus’ then he’d expected to find. Taken together, those two elements form an explosive combination. His obsessive research was essentially observational science, statistics… but nuclear statistics. His resulting 804-page survey of sexual practices was published as ‘Sexual Behaviour In The Human Male’ (1948), which immediately became an overnight cultural event, a chattering-class talking point, and a bestseller, making him an instant celebrity.
He simultaneously came up against a solid wall of incomprehension, indignation, outrage and determined conservative resistance. His programme was even investigated by J Edgar Hoover. The controversy was so high-profile there was even a comedy hick-country record by Charlie Aldrich which revealed that “Everybody’s Reading Kinsey’s Book”, in which – verse by verse, the singer visits the bar and the ball-game to find they are deserted, the clientele are staying home to be titillated by reading the book. In the final verse the singer discovers that his sweet old Grandma has not only read the book, but assisted Kinsey in its more explicit research! Such a level of sales potency must surely have been grounded in its controversial implication that Americans were enjoying a far more healthily promiscuous sex-life than contemporary moralists would have us believe. Or at least a serious suspicion on the part of the reader that others were enjoying a far more active sex-life than they were.
While among his more disturbing revelations – in that curiously conformist era, is that 69% of white males have had at least one experience with a prostitute, and that 37% of those surveyed admit to at least one homosexual encounter. Similarly, at least one biographer claimed that Kinsey was determined to boost the homosexual statistics – because he was bisexual, therefore so must everyone else. ‘There’s a cure for syphilis’ argues Kinsey’s movie-colleague Dr Thurman Rice, ‘– it’s called abstinence.’ ‘Penicillin works just as well’ retaliates Kinsey. Sure, his figures – those 18,000 sexual histories, could have been skewed to a degree by the occasionally bizarre selection of interviewees used to compile such findings. For example, gay novelist William S. Burroughs was one such statistic, volunteering during the same January that he’d checked himself into the Lexington ‘Federal Narcotics Farm’ in Kentucky to detox from a heroin habit (as described in ‘Junkie’, 1953).
And, superficially at least, Kinsey would seem to be highly unrepresentative of the picket-fence American heartlands. While his own disconcerting attempts to free himself from his legacy of sexual hang-ups through a repression-busting open marriage involving troilism achieved only dubious benefits. Others have tried similar social experiments, idealistic communities of friends in which everything, including bodies, are common property to be shared. From hedonist Thomas Morton establishing ‘Merry Mount’, the seventeenth-century New England trading post where anything went by way of sexual licence, miscegenation and devil worship. To poet Byron who planned to set up a utopian colony of free love… through to Charles Manson’s Family.
But equations of cold analysis can surely tell only part of the story. Sex is not just the friction of bodies, it is the ‘whole thing,’ and emotional entanglements are an unavoidable part of promiscuity. In the movie, Kinsley does not include emotions in his statistics because ‘it’s impossible to measure love.’ And maybe that’s true. Nevertheless Kinsey followed up his success with ‘Sexual Behaviour In The Human Female’ (1953). He died in 1956, but some things would never be quite the same again.
Lenny Bruce strove to render sexual profanity harmless. On the principle that by removing the stigma from sex-slang, the sex act would itself be liberated from moral judgement, a proposition that is still up for negotiation. Bruce was first busted for obscenity in San Francisco in 1961, for violating the California Obscenity Code. As writer Grover Sales points out, when he used the word ‘cocksucker’ on stage in the early sixties, he was prosecuted. When Meryl Streep uses it in the movie ‘Sophie’s Choice’ (1982) two decades later, she’s awarded an Oscar.
While consumers bought – and continue to buy, whatever they can get away with, largely oblivious, apathetic or unconcerned about the legal – and counter-legal machinations going on around their predilection. With a sharp eye to satire songwriter Phil Ochs observes ‘there’s a dirty paper using sex to make a sale, the Supreme Court was so upset they sent him off to jail, maybe we should help the pain and take away his fine, but we’re busy reading ‘Playboy’ and the ‘Sunday New York Times’, and I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody …outside of a small circle of friends.’
For the immediate post-war generation, the Beatnik was the first of the modern counter-culture figures on that arid social horizon. Their appearance provoked all manner of vile associations with BeBop drug-fuelled degeneracy, depravity and all-purpose immorality. But as early as their June 1959 issue ‘Playboy’ was scoring an original article – ‘The Origins Of The Beat Generation’ by King Beat himself, Jack Kerouac. It was actually a version of a late-1958 address he’d delivered to Brandeis College students, but to Heffner the movement to which Kerouac was the poetically-shabby figurehead represented a smoothly jazz-literate free-loving alternative to the straight world. Within months ‘Memory Babe’ was following it up with, what the December issue editorial column (‘Playbill’) introduced as ‘a foursome of fiction, by the ever-Beat Jack Kerouac, the sometimes beat Alberto Moravia, the rarely beat Max Shulman, and the never-beat Roald Dahl.’ Kerouac’s contribution this time was a specially-crafted ‘Before The Road: The Earlier Adventures Of Dean Moriarty’, detailing the exploits of his part-fictional existential hero Neal’s World War Two Denver poolroom days.
But the issue featured further delights. There was Yvette, a ‘Beat Playmate’, blonde, crop-haired… and nude. ‘A Beatnik found in a coffee-house… she’s interested in serious acting, ballet, the poetry of Dylan Thomas, classical music (‘Prokiev drives me out of my skull!’)’ and is restless and uninhibited enough to drive a Jag in the desert for kicks.’
The louche pre-war Spiv, the Flash Cad, the Dandy, the lecherous Rakehell and the dissolute Roué with his cravat and cigarette-holder, had all been traded in for a newer hipper breed of sleek life-style sophisticat who knows precisely where it’s at when it comes to music, booze, narcotic preference… and women. Battered round the edges perhaps, but the Free-Spirit Living-For-Kicks Beat Generation writers became the living embodiment of one revision of ‘Hef’s magazine’ philosophy. Only their anti-materialism and antipathy to a Designer Label mindset failed to chime with the advertiser’s early identification of ‘Playboy’s natural demographic. And ‘Escapade’ was not slow to poach Kerouac, signing him up for a monthly column, kicking off with its October 1959 issue offering his ‘didactic thoughts’ on Buddhism’s ‘Four Noble Precepts’. In a magazine boasting ‘acres of pink flesh’ (according to Beat Generation biographer James Campbell), and despite the warning that ‘Buddha… preaches against entanglement with women,’ this was hardly the kind of light edification that pre-war readers of Girlie Mags might have expected to find between the pin-ups, but Alfred G. Aronowitz goes on to interview Kerouac in the October 1960 issue about his ‘The Yen For Zen’.
In May 1953 an unknown Brigitte Bardot caused a storm by making her Cannes Film Festival debut in what was considered a scandalously revealing bathing suit. With Roger Vadim’s ‘And God Created Woman’ (1956) she became a genuine star, taunting weak screen-husband Jean-Louis Trintignant by romping in energised Beatnik cool with butch men. Later the ‘Observer’ would claim that ‘in 1956 Bardot had created the Sixties’ (15 May 1994). On his ‘Freewheelin’ (1963) album Bob Dylan relates how ‘my telephone rang, it would not stop,’ it was President J.F. Kennedy on the line asking ‘my friend Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?’ Without pausing Dylan advises ‘my friend John – Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren – country’ll grow’ (“I Shall Be Free”). Inevitably, with Heftner enticing top celebrities to strip, Bardot’s ‘Playboy’ photo-spread appeared in the March 1958 issue…
‘Blaze Starr – Miss Spontaneous Combustion’ was born Fannie Belle Fleming in 1932, in Wilsondale, West Virginia. A vivacious, voluptuous 38D-24-37 red-haired force of nature, she assumed her new identity for a career as a larger-than-life Burlesque performer. She saw herself as an ‘entertainer’ rather than a stripper, a novelty dancer rather than a sex-worker, even using an onstage panther trained to remove items of her clothing during her set. When the panther inconveniently died prior to her dance-spot, she simply imitated it, snarling at the audience and prowling on all-fours. She also used a stage-prop couch primed to smoulder increasingly the more she disrobed. She walked out on Red Snyder, her original discoverer and wannabe Svengali when he made it obvious he expected more than a merely formal business arrangement. For Blaze was never less than strong and independently willed.
She then found herself in Baltimore, working the ‘Two O’Clock’, a nightclub she’d eventually own. It was from here that an article in ‘Esquire’ (February 1954) – ‘B-Belles of Burlesque: You Get Strip-Tease With Your Beer In Baltimore’ first brought her uniqueness to national prominence, after which she became a regular photo-spread fixture in pin-up magazines. Her legendary status was soon embellished by an overnight liaison with a young John F Kennedy in New Orleans in 1960, and a long-term adulterous affair with New Orleans Governor Earl Long. Later, director Doris Wishman capitalised on her risqué celebrity with exploitational skin-flick ‘Blaze Starr Goes Wild’ (1965) – also known under a confusing selection of alternate titles such as ‘Blaze Starr Goes Nudist’, with Russ Martin (aka Ralph Young), Gene Burk, Sandra Sinclair, and William Mayer, yet it was never less than a vehicle for her intimidatingly robust talents. Pioneer of a new breed, or perhaps providing new expressions for a long-time franchise, Blaze Starr’s confident and open sexuality could be a revelation. Brash, full-on, with a name as exotic as an outer-space Flash Gordon Martian Empress, with a bold straight-to-camera physicality that defied your moral disapproval, she was every bit the brilliant sky-searing comet her assumed identity announced, with a defiant ‘here I am, this is me, accept it’ attitude.
The fascinating 2006 biopic ‘The Notorious Bettie Page’ (from director Mary Harron, with Chris Bauer, and Lili Taylor) had Gretchen Mol in the title role billed as ‘Good Girl. Bad Girl. Sinner. Saint. Who is…?’ Well, she was another of the irrepressible force majeures who placed some oomph emphatically into the 1950s. The movie opens in a sleazy neon-drenched Times Square. A bookstore clerk who is selling men’s mags is busted by an FBI man in the guise of a client seeking something ‘that shows restraint’ (code for bondage). Cue a photo-image of a beautiful bound-up Bettie. The plot then unfolds in scrolls of lustrous black-and-white newsreel-style flashback cinematography. In the first glimpse of Bettie in the flesh she’s wearing a grey suit with white gloves, sitting demurely outside a Tennessee courtroom. She’s waiting to appear before smut-hunting Senator Estes Kefauver’s (David Strathairn) on a Senate sub-committee investigating juvenile delinquency. Following the suicide of a Florida boy scout, his father had found bondage photos in his son’s room. Director Harron slyly subverts the conventions of Porn by presenting a winsome portrait of a natural-born exhibitionist who loved Jesus, loved taking her kit off, and enjoyed the power her fetish goddess role gave her.
Raised in a fundamentalist Baptist community in the Depression-years Tennessee Bible-Belt it seems that Bettie was both sweet-natured and deeply religious. But she was sexually abused as an adolescent by her father, then trapped in an abusive marriage, and later gang-raped before escaping to New York where she was discovered by a photographer on a Coney Island beach in 1949. During that conformist Eisenhower era she became a phenomenon, posing for mail-order entrepreneurs Irving and Paul Klaw, a brother-and-sister team who took thousands of raunchy pictures of her. There are chemically-bright colour sequences that show her at her happiest and most free, strolling on the beach, or when she bares her breasts in the woods for a flummoxed young photographer. Whether pouting, mock-snarling, or making a suggestive ‘O’ of her mouth, the real Bettie was more sunny than sultry.
Among those photo-shoots were the ‘discipline’ shots of Bettie wearing leather corsets and six-inch patent-leather heels while brandishing a whip, though – as she told the ‘Los Angeles Times’ much later, ‘we were not naked’ and ‘I never whipped anybody in my life, it was all pretend.’ She also accomplished her movie-star ambitions in the form of cheap fuzzy-colour soft-core Super-8 titles such as ‘Sally’s Punishment’ aimed at the spanking market. She justified her posing for bondage snaps because ‘it seems to make people happy.’ Although it’s hard to reconcile her prim attire with her skyrise lace-up boots, murderous corsets and the kinky leopard-print bikinis that she’d sewed herself. Perversity and religion intertwine. Strung up in a mock-crucifixion in one of the movies’ funniest sequences, Bettie gestures to the louche English bondage snapper John Willie (played by Jared Harris) to remove her ball-gag so she can explain why she considers Jesus would be OK with what she’s doing. ‘Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden’ she argues ingenuously, it was only ‘when they sinned, they put clothes on.’
The film never makes explicit the psychological damage Porn can perpetrate on its actors, and if her bio-pic suggests she was traumatised and incapable of intimacy, it tends to skip her mid-life breakdowns, violent outbursts – which include the attempted murder of her third husband, and a lost near-decade of institutionalisation. She eventually discovered a kind of moral salvation in religion on New Year’s Eve 1958. A recluse of 84, reclaimed as a post-feminist icon when the movie was first screened, she seldom discussed her troubles on the rare occasions she ventured out to sign autographs for fans, or pose with the likes of Pamela Anderson or Anna Nicole Smith. ‘She never gave a full-on come hither look’ Mol explained to the ‘Observer’ (30 April 2006). ‘She was never asking her audience to accept her, but gave them permission to feel the way they felt about her – to enjoy her. There was something so pure in her posing.’
Bettie Page was ‘Miss January 1955’, one of early ‘Playboy’ ‘Playmates Of The Month’. Meanwhile, Hefner’s second marriage failed. In 1989 he proposed to ‘Playmate Of The Year 1989’ Kimberly Conrad at the Playboy Mansion, their union produced two sons before they separated in 1998. To Heffner, ‘quite frankly, I think I’m probably the luckiest guy in the world.’ Any regrets? No. ‘When I die,’ he said, ‘I would like to be born again as me.’ He died 27 September 2017, leaving a mixed legacy. Still a contentious figure of controversy.
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON