Queen of Kink

-- Pin-up provocateur Bettie Page was a scandal in 1955. Now she's become an American icon.
Even when she's lashed to a chair, chains around her ankles and a gag over her mouth, there's something innocent and practically perky about pin-up Bettie Page. It's still there in the images, 50 years after they were taken.

Whether she's posing with leopards, brandishing a whip or - in thigh-highs and stilettos - coyly looking back over her shoulder, Page always manages to come across as nothing more than a particularly curvaceous girl next door, just having some All-American fun.

Which isn't quite the way folks saw her in the mid-'50s, when she was an underground sensation on the covers of pulp magazines such as Wink, Beauty Parade, Black Nylon and Titter. In the uptight Eisenhower era, those photos landed her in the hot seat of a nationally televised Senate hearing on pornography.

As depicted in "The Notorious Bettie Page," Friday's new release starring Gretchen Mol, the pin-up icon helped redefine what we think is sexy in the 21st century. --