Bettie Page to Get First-Hand Look at God's Pin-Up Collection
Bettie Page, the most celebrated, bangs-sporting, whip-cracking, bikini-rocking pin-up model of the 1950s, died Thursday of complications following a heart attack suffered last week. She was 85. NSFW memories follow the jump.
Page never regained consciousness after the attack, which followed three weeks of hospitalization with pneumonia. Eulogists remember her today as an impoverished straight-A high school student, an tempestuous BDSM revolutionary, a pioneering Playboy centerfold, an anti-porn crusade target, the subject of a "cult-like revival" whose personal Web site reportedly drew 588 million visits since 2003 and a rehabbed evangelical recluse who would happily exchange a signature and maybe a personal anecdote or two for your pledge to never photograph her. "I don't want to be photographed in my old age," she said in 1998. "I feel the same way with old movie stars. ... It makes me sad. We want to remember them when they were young."
Oh, we've got lots of pictures. We all remember plenty, conceivably requiring an outbreak today of what may be history's first-ever NSFW obituaries. She'd likely be proud.