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Fifty years after the fact, she has earned pop-cultural icon status. There are a dozen books about her, and a half-dozen movies, including a new bio-pic, The Notorious Bettie Page, starring Gretchen Mol. Not to mention countless websites and, right now, nearly 1,600 products for sale on eBay. (Alfred Einstein has only 309.) For just $9.99 you can get a Large Bettie Page Red Whip Cloth Wall Banner; for $6.99, a Bettie Page Don't Tread on Me Metal Candle Tin & Candle, which "features an image of Bettie Page in red lingerie and licking a whip." Who'll bid $19.99 for the Bettie Page Retro Cincher Corset Lot? ("Bring out your inner Bettie!") Or a Bettie Page wristwatch "and the band is made of genuine leather." It'd better be.

Today, when an heiress can become a household name by making a porn video, everyone's famous and nobody's shocked. And when consumers aren't gobbling up the latest embarrassments of modern stars, they search the past for artists who were pariahs then, suitable for veneration now. Thus the hierarchy is upended. Novelists lauded in the '50s are forgotten now (don't expect a Sloan Wilson or James Gould Cozzens revival any time soon), while writers who were published only in cheap paperbacks (Jim Thompson) are heroes. Producer Stanley Kramer was the social conscience of Hollywood; yet his films receive little attention now (and if they do, it's dismissive), while Ed Wood gets a Tim Burton hagiography starring Johnny Depp.

In a way, Bettie Page was to '50s movie stars what Edward D. Wood Jr. was to '50s directors. With two differences. One: she had talent, he didn't. Two: Wood's cluelesss movies played in theaters; Bettie's were sold under the counter, mailed in plain brown wrappers. Yet she has been elevated to pulp goddess. The beatification process began in 1980, when artist Dave Stevens created a Bettie character in his graphic novel The Rocketeer. Jennifer Connelly gave her full-figured life in the 1990 movie version, and the cult was under way. A talking Bettie Page tattoo (voiced by Jodie Foster) anchored an episode of The X Files. Robert Foster, in his book The Real Bettie Page: The Truth About the Queen of the Pinups, wonders when the retro celeb will get her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It's about time.

But being a bondage babe wasn't much of a distinction to the mass audience of the '50s, who didn't know Bettie Page existed. If she'd had even a little mainstream fame, Estes Kefauver, who chaired a Senate investigation into the movies she starred in, would surely have called her to the witness stand, to gain tabloid headlines from the exposure of Bettie's lurid luster. Instead, while her producer defended his films ("But there's no nudity!") and psychiatrists attacked them, she sat outside the hearing room for 16 hours, ignored.

Back then, Bettie Page was caviar only to the purchasers of girlie mags, tatty titles like Titter, Whisper and Wink, where she was the preeminent pinup queen of her day, maybe any day. (She was also the 13th model to grace the centerfold of a new slick magazine called Playboy.) As a movie actress she had a different appeal, limited but intense. Bettie was rich Corinthian leather to connoisseurs of specialized, and at the time subterranean, erotica — the kind that showed women, dressed in black undergarments and stockings, and pumps with six-inch heels, getting spanked, trussed and gagged. But primly. This was the '50s. And primitively. No retakes; no expert lighting; no dialogue — no sound. Just the girls. Rather, the girl. The Girl in the Leopard Print Bikini, as she was dubbed. Satan's Angel. Bettie Page.

BETTIE'S JOYFUL DANCE

I'll put it this way: Bettie Page was the Garbo of bondage movies. And you will say that the comparison is odious. For a start, Garbo played Camille and Ninotchka and Anna Karenina, while Bettie played Bettie — or, as it was usually spelled then, Betty (but nobody calls her Page) — in 5 min., 8mm epics with titles like Betty's Clown Dance and Dominant Betty Dances With Whip. Garbo, in Hollywood, had Irving Thalberg, the prince of MGM, as her boss and protector. Bettie had Irving Klaw, "King of the Pinups," who ran, with his sister Paula, a seedy Manhattan emporium called Movie Star News, which peddled celebrity glamour shots to the public and specialized photos and loops to a more discriminating clientele. A brunette Betty Grable type who wanted to be Bette Davis, Bettie couldn't get a job as a Broadway actress. But on East 14th Street she was the star of Movie Star News, the big fish in a little, brackish pond.

All right, here's the thing. What Garbo and Bettie both had was It — a radiance, a mystery of personality, that defies technique and passeth understanding. Garbo's allure was mature and fatalistic; reducing men to boys, this ageless beauty dragged them toher doom. In a medium designed to make people feel good, she wrapped herself in the crepe of tragedy. This death-loving regality, stern but sexy, made her seem a creature from another, higher species — the anti-Hollywood star, and thus its weirdest and, I'd say, greatest.

Bettie, too, had a magic, a message, that defied her medium. The dance films she did may have been cheesy documents of bump-and-grind; the bondage films, creepy if genteel invocations of sadomasochism. But what everyone remembers about Bettie, aside from her trademark bangs, is her smile. Guileless and guiltless, it conveyed an Edenic sensuality: how lovely it must have been in the Garden, before the fall. Bettie's erotic energy, writer Harlan Ellison sagely notes, was "absolutely untouched by human depravity." To her fans and her official detractors, who might have agreed that sex was dirty, Bettie's giddy energy said, heck, no, it's fun! Can't you see that, in my unforced, kewpie-doll grin, in every free and frantic move of my arms and hips? It was as natural as breathing to her. Or at least that's what her personality — I'm going to call it her art — expressed on film.

One last detail shared by Garbo and Bettie. Each retired in her mid-30s, preserving the movie image of her youthful allure. But unlike Garbo, who was often cornered by paparazzi in her Manhattan neighborhood, Bettie seemingly did disappear. As Buck Henry wrote in Playboy in 1992, when Bettie-mania was coming to full flourish, "The story itself is banal: She came, she failed utterly to achieve her dream, she split." There is no known moving-picture evidence of her after 1957. Whereas Garbo left California for New York, Bettie left New York for Miami, where she modeled for a few more years, then vanished, reemerging in Southern California in 1992.

In the decades of her silence, all manner of rumors spread. She had run afoul of the Mob. She became a nun. She had kids and grandkids. She was dead. All these speculations were wrong — though the truth, as revealed in Robert Foster's sympathetic and scrupulous book, is even stranger. We'll get to that later. But, rest assured, the pinup girl is not dead. She still resides near Los Angeles. And Saturday she celebrated her 83rd birthday.

DREAM DANCE BY BETTIE

Born April 22, 1923, in Nashville, to a strictly Christian family, Bettie May Page was, by all outward signs, not the the tattered rag doll of movie-star legend, at least of the Marilyn Monroe stripe. Sunny and popular, she was a member of the high school debating team, appeared in theatricals and co-edited the literary magazine. Her grades (second highest average in the class) earned her salutatorian status on graduation day. She married Billy Neal, a gpod-looking football player from another school, attended and graduated from George Peabody Teachers College, then headed for Hollywood, where in 1945 she landed a screen test at 20th Century-Fox.

Fox didn't sign Bettie. The story goes that she was sent packing after she rejected a studio executive's horny attentions. (This would be a motif throughout her career — anyway, throughout her legend.) Apparently it was not the first time, or the last, that Bettie had to decide whether to submit to a man's priapic brutality. Late in life she declared that her father had sexually abused her as a child. She also described an incident in New York where a young fellow asked her if she wanted to go dancing and, when she got in his car, took her to a spot in Queens where she was forced to perform fellatio on a half-dozen men. (Both these incidents are dramatized in The Notorious Bettie Page, though the Queens assault is transplanted to Nashville.)

After a stop in Miami, Bettie arrived in New York City to pursue a serious career as an actress. Like thousands of other bright young things, Bettie auditioned for plays and films, without success, got a few minor roles in early live TV, including The U.S. Steel Hour, and studied with the distinguished acting teacher Herbert Berghof. (There's no mention of her in the HB Studio website's list of 115 distinguished alumni: Geraldine Page, but not Betty; Betsy Palmer but not Bettie Page.)

One afternoon, on the Coney Island beach, she was approached by a young man, an off-duty policeman, and asked if she'd pose for some pictures. Perform? Why not? Thanks to the cop, Jerry Tibbs, Bettie received her first lessons in modeling. (In the Gretchen Mol film, he tells her, "Give me pert. Give me naughty. Give me saucy.") Tibbs also offered Bettie some prescient advice: wear bangs. The new hairdo hid her high forehead, provided a straight-line frame for her round face and her pert lips. Voila! she now looked like Bettie Page.

Soon she was posing for Camera Clubs: groups of amateur photographers, almost always men, who got to hone their craft and be near pretty women by taking cheesecake pictures. Professionals noticed her as well, and Bettie had a career as a skin-rag cover girl, though to her it was a rent-paying sideline to her acting studies.

Why did she do it? I'd say, because she was good at it. And, like most people lucky enough to choose (or fall into) a congenial career, she liked doing what she was good at. When the cameras clicked, her personality clicked on. No wonder she keeps smiling.

The pleasure was contagious. Still is. "That was her magic gift," Ellison writes, "the ability, almost fifty years down the line, to crank back your puberty clock so you're just a horny, drooling, simpering adolescent, wishing you cold melt as one with the tachyons in the time stream and rush back to a moment when she was in her early twenties and might have given you a tumble, She is simply pure fantasy. A dream girl in all the nicest ways, in that undiluted human passion way that we all shared at some point in our innocence. She is lust in an ice cream cone (two scoops), enthusiasm in the whisper of nylon, postpubescent rambunctiousness in the back seat of a Studebaker Commander. ... She was an icon, Venus on the spike heel, the goddess Astarte come again, smoother and sleeker and possibly available."

And she created this illusion in men's minds — clouded and clarified them — virtually on her own, without the airbrushing and soft focus of the Playboy nudes (no-focus was as artistic as the Camera Clubbers got), without the sexy repartee that screenwriters gave Marilyn. Bettie was the sole creator of her myth; she was her own auteur. But her gifts were best appreciated in motion, not in repose. To express and exploit them fully, she needed to be liberated from the pages of Wink and Titter and be seen in pictures that moved. She needed a Thalberg to grant her immortality (or at least a half-century's longevity). Well, she got an Irving.

BOUND FOR GLORY

Irving Klaw had run a newsstand for several years before he noticed that girls looking at movie magazines were cutting out pages with their favorite stars. So he corralled thousands of the display photos that theater owners threw out after the movie had played and sold them in his store, now called Movie Star News.

Decades later, when I edited Film Comment magazine, I spent many hours in that 14th Street walkup shop, trawling through those cramped aisles and groaning shelves for obscure film stills with the help of young Howard Mandelbaum (who now owns Photofest, a premier stills outlet). Irving was dead, but Paula still presided at the front desk, and her son Ira Kramer helped out. If I knew the name Bettie Page in those days, and I couldn't swear to that, I was unaware of the role Paula and her brother had played in the Pinup Queen's career. It was crucial.

Bettie could have done burlesque; she had the fan base and, heaven knows, the moves. She did appear in three filmed burlesque shows: Striporama (1953), Varietease (1954) and Teaserama (1955). But for Bettie and her fans, a public exhibition couldn't compete with a private audience. As mail-order products for an audience of one-at-a-time, the Klaw films — which Irving produced and Paula, usually, directed — helped Bettie create an intimacy with the

The movies, shot in the '50s, seem to come from a much earlier decade: the '20s, perhaps, since they are silent films, in black-and-white. But not the '20s of Hollywood features, with their pearly visual sophisticated and the actors' elegant miming. Really, Bettie's films have the feel of the first Edison documentaries, when the camera recorded ordinary events with ethnographic avidity. In most of the extant Klaw movies, all Bettie does is dance.

And, boy, could she dance.

In "G-String" Dance by Betty (available on the Bettie Page Something Weird Video and on the DVD Betty Page Uncensored), she gives herself a nonstop workout, long before Jazzercise or Ann-Margret. She shimmies, gracefully waves her arms, pauses briefly to adjust her fringed costume. But she never loses eye and mind contact with the viewer. The erotic pull is secondary to the emotional magnetism. This is plain old star quality, and the folks at Fox must have been blind to miss it.

Bettie was great, shaking her tush in those Klaw non-music videos. (Astonishingly, there was no music in the downtown lofts that made do as her movie sets; whatever she danced to was in her head.) But Irving had other aspirations than being the Busby Berkeley of schmutz. A businessman above all, he needed to please his clientele. Some wanted to see Bettie don leather frocks. That was fine with Klaw. He was open to suggestions, so long as there was no nudity; Irving thought that would keep him safe from the feds. And though Bettie posed nude for still photographers, she didn't strip for Klaw. If she did anything with clothes, it was put 'em on. ("Delightful Betty Dresses Up.")

A few of Klaw's patrons had more elaborate ideas... John Rund, who would represent Bettie in the '90s, told Robert Foster that she recalled these fetishists without judging them: "She said, ‘Irving used to get suggestions from his customers as to what kinds of pictures they wanted to see. A lot of Irving's customers liked to see me with a ball gag in my mouth.' Very matter of fact."

And, by modern standards, very mild. In movies with explicitly descriptive catalog titles (Hobbled in Kid Leather Harness), a woman will be tied up, or ball-gagged, or put in the trunk of a car. For a change, Bettie shared the screen with another woman, usually Roz Greenwood — the star couldn't put herself in bondage. But the performers never got hurt; at times you can catch them giggling at the indignities they were asked to portray. If there's kink it's pure nostalgia. Kids today, seeing these (and they do), probably think it's kinky that their grandfathers thought it was kinky.

It was Irving Klaw's misfortune that the FBI and the Post Office thought just that. They hounded him until he decided to burn the negatives of his films. He died in 1966, at 55. Paula, deputized to do the incineration, wisely saved some of Bettie's films from the flames, and gave her star a legacy.

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE That's one of the messages in The Notorious Bettie Page. One of many, along with the sexual repression of the time, the witch-hunt addiction in Congress, the dreadful uses to which men put women — and the iconoclast who becomes an icon. We've seen this a lot lately, in Walk the Line, Kinsey, Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck. (David Strathairn, who played Ed Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, impersonates Kefauver in this one.)

These are also themes that Mary Harron, the director of the Bettie Page movie, addressed in her excellent earlier features, I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho. This time, though, Harron and her co-writer Guinevere Turner (working from the Robert Foster book) don't get inside their compulsive protagonist. How did the Christian girl fall so easily into the 88 demimonde? And do it without shame, as though leather and whips were simply a Halloween costume? ("It's just costumes," she says to a boyfriend who's disgusted when he learns of the bondage scenes. "We're just dressing up.") Was exhibitionism Bettie's defiant declaration of innocence? "Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden," she says. When they sinned they put on clothes."

Gretchen Mol, who has a winning smile of her own, makes a game try at pinning down the Bettie mystique; she's the best thing in the movie, the one sign of restless, beguiling life amid all the social theses. But she tells us less of Bettie's charm in 90 mins. than the original did in the 5 mins, of "G-String" Dance With Betty.

If the movie has a theory to explain Bettie's behavior, it's in her naive and possibly twisted faith. Ending in the religious fervor with which it began, the film has Bettie seeing the light and being born again as a proselytizing Christian. It's an old-fashioned Hollywood bio-pic resolution that couldn't be further from the sordid truth.

THE FELONIOUS BETTIE PAGE

She did indeed become a lay missionary (assisting in a Billy Graham campaign) and spent about a year back at Peabody, to take credits for a Master's degree she never achieved. Fact is, though, her life was much more stable when she was posing for the Klaws' bondage films than it would be in the service of the Lord. In the decade after she left New York, Bettie was wed three times: to the teenager Armond Walterson, again to Billy Neal and finally to Harry Lear, a lineman for Florida Bell. Each marriage ended in divorce. But that was the least of her troubles — of the trouble she made for herself and those she lived with. Her rap sheet, as persuasively documented by Foster, is extensive, instructive and sad.

Jan. 1972: Police alerted Harry to an incident at Bible Town, a ministry retreat in Boca Raton. "Bettie was running through the motel complex, waving a .22-caliber pistol and shouting about the retribution of God." Harry, taking pity on his volatile ex-wife, brought her home to stay with him and his children — Larry, 16, and Linda, 12.

Apr. 13, 1972: Bettie brandished a knife and forced Harry and the kids to pray before a portrait of Jesus. "If you take your eyes off this picture," she shouted, "I'll cut your guts out!" Foster reports that she was charged with breach of the peace and confined in Jackson Memorial, a state hospital, for four months. Then Harry took her back home.

Oct. 28, 1972: Hialeah policeman Tom Fitzpatrick was called to the Lear household, where Bettie was tearing the place up. He sat her in the patrol car while he took a statement from Harry. Returning to the car, he "saw Bettie in the back seat, with her dress pulled up, panties around her knees, masturbating with a coat hanger that the officer had left" there. Fitzpatrick's report: "defendant psycho." Assault and battery and disorderly conduct charges were dropped after she recommitted herself to Jackson Memorial, where she spent six months, part of it under a suicide watch.

Apr. 19, 1979: Having relocated to Southern California, living in Lawndale in a trailer owned by her neighbors Esther Trevin, 67, and her 77-year-old husband, Bettie unprovokedly attacked Esther with a knife and was subdued by Mr. Trevin, who, after warning Bettie to drop the knife, knocked her out with a crescent wrench. Charged on two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, Bettie was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

On July 24, 1980, she was sentenced to five years' confinement at Patton State Hospital. Just seven months later, on her doctor's recommendation, she was released.

June 12, 1982: At four that morning, while a boarder in the Santa Monica home of Leonie Haddad, she entered the bedroom of her sleeping landlady, straddled her and shook her awake, brandishing a foot-long serrated bread knife and whispering, "God has inspired me to kill you!" She attacked Haddad, "slicing her from the corner of her mouth to her ear ... Bettie stabbed Haddad four times in the chest, narrowly missing her heart... stabbed the hand eight times, severing the top of Haddad's third finger." Summoned by Haddad, police "found Bettie in the shower with her clothes on, trying to wash out the blood stains. She kept the police waiting for an hour before she dried herself off." When brought to court, "Bettie pleaded not guilty but changed her plea to not guilty by reason of insanity after two California Department of Medical Health doctors testified that she was insane and had confessed to the attack." She was sentenced to 8-1/2 years in Patton. She stayed there until 1992.

Haddad sued the state of California for $1,750,000, arguing that Bettie should not have been released from Patton and that a prospective landlord should have been alerted to her history of violence. The state settled for $70,000, which, after lawyers' fees, brought Haddad about $40,000 — hardly enough, she told Foster, to cover her medical expenses. When he interviewed her in 1994, she still had no feeling in two of her fingers. Bettie, while in confinement, got word to Haddad that she hoped to meet again some day and express her remorse. Haddad said no thanks.

TEASER GIRL IN HIGH HEELS

Maybe it's a mistake to ask who Bettie was, or what her underground eminence signifies. As Buck Henry writes: "The oft-told Betty Page story is peculiar — a morality tale with no discernible moral, not much plot, and a leading character who is at least elusive."

Elusive indeed. Watching Bettie dance, or being touched by her smile, or monitoring the inane dedication she brings to tying up or getting tied down, may give viewers the feeling they know Bettie Page the person, when all they're getting is what Bettie Page the performer wants them to see. She has given her audience what artists impart: the illusion of knowing someone. Indeed, it may be a tribute to the mystery of Bettie's personality that neither Mary Harron nor the host of Bettie-maniacs, young and old, can penetrate it.

I'm pleased by reports that the real Bettie Page has buried, or tamed, her demons. I hope she had a happy birthday, and that the people she hurt have healed themselves and forgiven her. Three years ago, she finally posed for a public picture, her first in more than 40 years that wasn't taken by a police photographer. Here it is. For 80, she looks great. I'd like the real Bettie Page to have a happy ending.

But there's a Platonist streak, deep in the movie critic I have been all these years, that believes the truth is up there on the screen — that the shadows on the wall have more answers for me than the people who put them there. To me, the real Bettie Page is that two-dimensional image, forever young, tender, sexy and smiling.

• Richard Corliss