The pin-up queen teams up with an ape for a bodyguard in a gloriously kitsch 1950s girlie magazine spread.
The glamour magazines of yesteryear had to try that bit harder to titillate the reader, especially those that weren’t willing to take the perilous step into showing bare breasted beauties. The results are often bafflingly entertaininging, and rarely more so than this fantastic photo story from a 1954 edition of Wink, which pairs fetish pin-up queen Bettie Page (here with her name unusually spelled correctly) with a gorilla. Well, gorilla movies were still pretty big at the time, and there is a long and admirable history of nubile young ladies being carried away by monsters.
In the spread, Bettie gets to wear a variety of sexy outfits while putting Gus the gorilla through his paces as bodyguard and dishwasher. It’s curious and cute, and both whjolesome and slightly suspect simultaneously.
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Any thoughts on who’s playing the gorilla? Ray Corrigan had ape roles either side of this photoset, but Charlie Gemora was into monkey business all the way through this period.
I imagine the lucky gorilla will be forever anonymous.