LOS ANGELES TIMES: Bettie Page, the brunet pinup queen with a shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, has died. She was 85. Page, whose later life was marked by depression, violent mood swings and several years in a state mental institution, died Thursday night at Kindred Hospital in Los Angeles, where she had been on life support since suffering a heart attack Dec. 2, according to her agent, Mark Roesler. A cult figure, Page was most famous for the estimated 20,000 4-by-5-inch black-and-white glossy photographs taken by amateur shutterbugs from 1949 to 1957. The photos showed her in high heels and bikinis or negligees, bondage apparel — or nothing at all.
Decades later, those images inspired biographies, comic books, fan clubs, websites, commercial products — Bettie Page playing cards, dress-up magnet sets, action figures, Zippo lighters, shot glasses — and, in 2005, a film about her life and times, “The Notorious Bettie Page.” Then there are the idealized portraits of her naughty personas — Nurse Bettie, Jungle Bettie, Voodoo Bettie, Banned in Boston Bettie, Maid Bettie, Crackers in Bed Bettie — memorialized by such artists as Olivia de Berardinis.
“I’ll always paint Bettie Page,” De Berardinis said Thursday night . “But truth be told, it took me years to understand what I was looking at in the old photographs of her. Now I get it. There was a passion play unfolding in her mind. What some see as a bad girl image was in fact a certain sensual freedom and play-acting – it was part of the fun of being a woman.”
“The origins of what captures the imagination and creates a particular celebrity are sometimes difficult to define,” Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner said Thursday night. “Bettie Page was one of Playboy magazine’s early playmates, and she became an iconic figure, influencing notions of beauty and fashion. Then she disappeared. . . . Many years later, Bettie resurfaced and we became friends. Her passing is very sad.” In an interview 2 1/2 years ago, Hefner described Page’s appeal as “a combination of wholesome innocence and fetish-oriented poses that is at once retro and very modern.” MORE
PHAWKER: This is a sad day for Earth.
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FINANCIAL TIMES: The recession has turned the long, slow decline of newspapers into a brisk fall. At this rate, US newspapers will be lucky to make it to the weekend…The internet brought trouble for regional and city papers not only because it gave an outlet to bloggers, and broke the monopoly they had on classified and display advertising, but because it let Philadelphians, for example, peruse publications other than the Inquirer. There are things you can only learn about Philadelphia from the Inquirer, or Chicago from the Tribune, or Miami from the Herald. If they went away, they would also take with them a check on local abuses of political power, as the phone-tapped desire of Rod Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois, to get his critics on the Tribune fired shows. MORE