As Costume Dramas Go, Bettie Page's Is Rather Brief
By KAREN DURBIN
Published: April 2, 2006
MARY HARRON tackles hot subjects with movies that are cool in both senses of the word. In "I Shot Andy Warhol" (1996), she slyly captured the dizzying self-regard of Warhol's Factory denizens while giving Lili Taylor the chance to be indelible as the artist's would-be killer, Valerie Solanas, the troubled Lower East Side playwright and irate founder of S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men). And with "American Psycho" (2000), Ms. Harron streamlined the most reviled American novel since "Peyton Place" into the sleek, biting satire of 80's yuppie greed it was meant to be.
Ms. Harron explores an enduring icon of another era in "The Notorious Bettie Page," opening April 14 with Gretchen Mol in brunette bangs as the pinup queen of the sexually repressive 50's. Ms. Page, now 82, is a paradox: a reserved and religious woman who looks radiant posing in a Santa hat for Playboy's 1955 holiday nude centerfold and in rocket-ship bras and spike-heeled boots for lesbian bondage scenarios. In a time of bold divisions between good girls and bad, Ms. Page colored outside the lines.
So does the Canadian-born, Oxford-educated Ms. Harron, whose visually adventurous new film drew praise on the festival circuit and some sharp complaints for not probing its subject's psyche more deeply. Speaking recently from the Brooklyn home she shares with the filmmaker John Walsh and their two daughters, she talked about why "The Notorious Bettie Page" bypasses the usual tell-all tropes of a conventional biopic to show a woman who, domesticating lust as effectively as Hugh Hefner ever did, became a magnet for a decade's thrilled, guilty, convoluted attitudes toward sex.
KAREN DURBIN: A Bettie Page revival got under way in the late 70's, and now her image is on everything from art books to lunchboxes. Is that what sparked your interest?
MARY HARRON: In 1993, I worked on a short-lived Fox TV show with Sam Green, who later made "The Weather Underground," and he gave me a fanzine that included one of those banal photos of her in S & M gear. Fox said we could do a segment with her on camera, but the whole thing about Bettie Page is that she won't be filmed or photographed. Even in the E! channel doc a few years ago, it was just her voice-over or her hand. Later Guin Turner, my co-writer on "American Psycho," and I decided to do it as a movie.
The more enigmatic Bettie became, the more interesting the world around her was. Sam became our researcher and found transcripts of the 1956 Kefauver Senate hearings into, of all things, juvenile delinquency. The corruption of youth was a subject of great interest in the 50's and a good way to get publicity. Estes Kefauver wanted to run for president.
Q: You use the hearings to bookend Bettie's experience. We see her early on, nervously waiting to testify and at the end, when they let her go.
A: The Kefauver hearings were about pornography. Investigating the pinup magazines led to the subterranean world of bondage magazines, and that's where most of the obscenity prosecutions came from. Bettie became interesting to me in her contradictions. She was from Nashville, and she'd always been religious — that's part of Southern culture.
Q: And yet her photos show you a woman who doesn't think she's doing anything bad.
A: As opposed to the culture around her. I was always interested in her and the 50's.
Q: Which you evoke by shooting a lot of the film in black and white. It makes the hearings look much scarier, while the opening shot of a darkly gleaming Times Square looks thrillingly sinful.
A: Maybe because I started out researching documentaries, I've always been interested in a person in history, in their time. I can't separate those, particularly with women. Women in the 20th century are astonishing, how much their lives changed. Today, people think who you are is all about internal psychology and what your parents are like. But it's also about your era and where you were born and your class, too, which American films hardly address at all.
Bettie and all those sex goddesses were poor girls — Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner and all the strippers. [Laughing] Grace Kelly was not a pinup! So I think that's part of what made them interesting: what sex made possible for them. Girls could make a fortune. Bettie didn't get a scholarship to Vanderbilt, so she became a secretary, making very small money. And she couldn't make it as an actress, so she becomes a pinup queen.
Q: But you do signal early on that there were psychosexual factors in Bettie's life as well — abuse by her father as an adolescent. And when she's a young woman still in Nashville, there's a horrific encounter with a group of supposedly "nice" boys.
A: Yes, but this is very delicate. Guin and I didn't want to make a Hollywood cautionary tale. The fact is, Bettie wasn't ashamed, and you can see that in her work. What you get from the photographs isn't the usual shame, or a woman in dangerous circumstances. Instead you get power and joy, this 'Look at me, I'm getting to show off, and isn't that great!' I think in posing she found a way of getting enormous satisfaction. I think she was very sexualized, as kids who've been abused tend to be, but she finds a way to express it that's triumphant for her — and safe. She felt the power of getting all that attention, but it was attention she could control because she was the star.
Q: It struck me in the movie that as pleasant and charming as she is, she always has a certain remoteness from the men in her life.
A: Yes, she had sort of an invisible shield around her. Even though she had boyfriends and married three times, you never felt she was totally with someone. She was very much walking through life alone. And never did she have a truly close friend, a girlfriend she shared confidences with. She was only close to her sisters.
Q: Where did you get your info?
A: Interviews with people who knew her and two biographies. The one we optioned is "The Real Bettie Page," which deals with very bad stuff that happened as she got older. She'd had this heyday in the 50's, but after that she became born-again, divorced her second husband and wanted to become a missionary, so she went back to the South and remarried her first husband. When that failed, she became obsessed with religion, really fanatical. In her 40's, she married again and once held her husband and his children at knifepoint, making them stand for hours looking at a picture of Jesus. She was obviously ill and eventually hospitalized.
Q: What do you make of this? And did you consider including it in the movie?
A: You know, I think you can have the beginnings of mental illness, but if your life is going well, that can get pushed aside. But not if you're cast adrift: in middle age, Bettie had no anchors and she was losing her looks, which had been her identity. So religion became her identity. We tried to write a script that flashes forward to include some of this. But inevitably it becomes a very punitive story: sexual abuse plus bondage equals madness. And that's not the truth of her life, not even now.
Let's not judge a film based on its trailer. As we all know, trailers can be very misleading.