- Marilyn Monroe
- Audrey Hepburn
- Bettie Page
Although I've never really been a huge fan of Bettie Page (which I know is odd, given my pin-up enthusiasm), I have to say that the latter group of women have always been my favorites. I feel that through them, and through her general social contribution, contributed a great deal of happiness to my life. When she passed earlier this year, I felt a surprising pang of sadness.
Bettie Page's image became associated with the sexual revolution partly because of timing. She became the Dylan or Shakespeare of, well, smut, because she was in the right place at the right time. But, like Dylan and Shakespeare, she also became that icon because she had a rare talent. When you look at her images, there's a kind of power that she always reserves. She isn't there for us, isn't merely an object of our gaze. She's there for herself. Her smile (and the mock-terror she occasionally employs for the bondage images) has an impressive genuine quality. She portrays a kind of innocence that enhances the scandalous nature of some of the images, and then normalizes them. The net effect is a statement that a woman doesn't have to be a degenerate to enjoy her sexuality. She can be healthy, happy, and sexy all at the same time.
Because Page is a raven-haired beauty, brunettes profited more than other women from this change. Brunettes had always been a little naughty (I'll talk more about that below), but now, suddenly, that was a good thing. Brunettes were seen as smarter, tougher, and more independent, all qualities that have been increasingly valued in women both in society and in fiction.
It's not that there weren't big-box-office brunettes in golden-age Hollywood. But there weren't many. Ingrid Bergman, maybe. But there were two things going against brunettes, especially really dark brunettes, in early Hollywood. First, the simple schema established by filmmakers, with the good guys wearing white & the bad guys black meant that good women were blondes. Second, if I may cite The Little Sister again (and, heck, maybe I'll do it again in the future), dark-haired women had a taint of foreignness, especially Spanish blood. The blonde in Chandler's novel is sexy, almost desirable, but the brunette is over-sexed, dangerous, manipulative, and Spanish (?). This begins to dissipate in the 50s with Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jane Russell, but it isn't until the exotic element of Latin blood is embraced through Raquel Welch and Sophia Loren that brunettes are free to really move to center stage. And, of course, these things ebb and flow. I believe that the current brunette revival would have been impossible without mainstream culture embracing Latinas and African-American women as it did during the 90s. But now the trend is definitely brunettes.
