“I was never that pretty”
So said Bettie Page, Fifties pinup queen and pop-culture icon, who died last night at 85.
Page walked away from fame in the late 1950s and embraced Christianity; decades later, she was mystified to find that she’d become something of a cult figure. She wasn’t apologetic about her life in front of the camera, as she told Playboy in 1998:
“I never thought it was shameful. I felt normal. It’s just that it was much better than pounding a typewriter eight hours a day, which gets monotonous.”
In her later years, she declined to be photographed: better, she said, to be remembered as she was.
