The legendary Steve “Hercules” Reeves began his bodybuilding career in the mid-forties and by 1950 achieved world-wide attention upon winning the coveted title of Mr. Universe. An athlete sculpting his body into a classic championship physique, chiseled and cut by hard work, Steve long ago had maintained a strict workout regimen putting on muscle weight the natural way…when steroids were unthinkable.

In the isolated bubble of the sport his talent became organized enough to travel, when he stretched his image across the forty-foot canvas of international movie screens. A big performer who made his presence well known, by the following decade he would emerge as Europe’s highest paid movie star with all the broad-shouldered grace and taper of rugged muscularity.

Steve’s handsomely powerful, vastly persuasive heroic image would suggest that he had it all back when it all seemed so perfect, inspiring millions around the world, at least two generations.

But the decade of the fifties was also one of political dwarfism, fogging the horrors of McCarthyism, as someone else superimposed a more feminine figure upon the scene, like a mystery yielding few secrets with a subsidiary sexual charge.

Bettie Page floated in a mist of exotic images that could never have been conjured by anyone below the summit of Mt. Olympus. From that first look delivered directly into the camera to the final unforgettable shot, she lit the wick casting Promethean light as a prescient feminine iconoclast for the era. She had once raised plenty of eyebrows, including those of the federal government, though she seemed rather clueless of the dark forces surrounding her.

At her most naked in a time of suffocating censorship, she appeared intently risqué and in high relief against the repression of the moral authority by being openly sexual, when such behavior was judged in isolation as tantamount to communism.

Nowadays in the memory of man she’s a knockout. It’s uncanny, really. Her comeliness at times seems too precious to watch—yet too wonderful not to. A woman eerily perfect who photographs like a porcelain doll, Bettie offers up portraiture of the female anatomy sumptuously shimmering in color and supple in the twilight of black and white.

Your eyes crisscross her voluptuous landscape, ski the alpine alabaster slopes and narrow upon those shaded valleys as she robs you of your will not to look. Having feasted your eyes, viscerally destitute but visually rich, you feel seduced and abandoned. You breathe but not easily.

Highly photogenic, Bettie regarded the camera directly, posing in skimpy outfits but with no hint of evil. In photo after photo she’s a sheer delight, reaching the pinnacle of success as America’s premier pinup girl by the mid-fifties. It’s all held in a veritable trunk of visual memorabilia when time out of mind she reigned supreme.

Because her ambition to become an actress never materialized like contemporary screen siren Marilyn Monroe, Bettie had been confined to photo shoots modeling for camera clubs, posing sometimes nude but without peer in gorgeous shape and wholesomely beautiful with that self-assured Hollywood-diva sensibility.

Sexy yet consistently likable, while not too subtle about insisting upon our attention, the wonderful thing to remember about the pinup girls of the 1950’s like Bettie is that they were natural…that is to say, real. No chemicals, just great genetics.

Sadly, from picturesque to picaresque, the soft curves of those bygone days have morphed into hard bodies squeezed into a kind of startling androgyny with a glitzy-tawdry mix. By post-modern standards a picture of Bettie Page without that industrial-strength application of stupefying video images seems to have all the sex appeal of a soothing glass of warm milk.

Notwithstanding her playful poses for sado-masochism (when the brouhaha back then really got going) Bettie’s likeness puts one in a cozier frame of mind, a mind needing a rest from that life force which has largely been Brittany Spears and Christina Aguilera.

It’s like a kind of chain bridge has been crossed, wobbling from winds stirred by the rush to be thin enough to look good in hip huggers. No surprise here that today’s so-called pinup girls feel like parody in service to sensationalism. Strangely, though, these pinups are somehow less appealing, a sort of thingamajig manufactured by showbiz flummery rather than the sort of prettiness that someone might wistfully imagine or hope for.

Who in this dangerous age of Botox will deny that the stuff is being used for that extra gravitas in redefining American pulchritude? With all due respect to Victor Frankenstein, that stealth-like demand for a woman to bloat her breasts with silicon, engineer her lips into a pout, requires the appropriate abracadabra to blow up one part of her body while working together with identical hocus-pocus to suck up some other part.

Naturally, the results are quite unnatural, giving her all the sensuality of a kick in the teeth. Besides that, to look at her…frankly, this sort of thing scares the children.

That said let’s ask the burning question: What is the maximum tolerable weight allowed for any woman in eyeshot of a camera who shines with the tinsel of celebrity? Clearly, from what we can see there’s more iron will at work here than inspiration. One thing’s for sure, whatever might be called “contemporary beauty”—if that it can be called—these women have very little thick and far too much thin.

Jennifer Aniston, more jejune than jenesaisquoi, is the latest attempt to look non-corpulent when standing before the gods—that almighty, unforgiving red-eyed blinking Cyclops.

Is there any wonder? She joins a small but growing sorority of porcine-averse models, singers and actresses distinguished by starving themselves into thinness, preferably ultra-thin, while wrapped up in that common dietary obsession over body weight. Rather than risk being ostracized by the Industry, ridiculed by the media—worse, becoming Schadenfreude for the public—like any sycophant of the spotlight a popular star, if called upon, would willingly etch herself into whatever the whim of the zeitgeist.

But let’s not lose our compass. What might appear as publicity-hungry glamour girls are, for the most part, young women of rudimentary talent exploiting some tabloid notoriety. Nevertheless, these waifs and frails and wee little things in hip-huggers are identifying for the next generation what “sexually attractive” is—or is supposed to be—as the latest corpse of the “next blonde” is grotesquely added to that growing taxidermy of former stars. It’s like a dream when you’re waking up…the next Marilyn Monroe just keeps fading away.

Is that true? We say “no”—we think not. If not, then who is equal in glow and sex appeal, worthy of our adulation and biological urge? Who else on camera artfully draws upon our amatory desire and lascivious appetite while baffling all human understanding?

Three souls shine through the polymorphous celebrity baggage with a clean and honest development of the feminine mystique with a look as rewarding as the results on film are absorbing.

The instrument which is the genius of Jennifer Lopez is her charmed physique, a cinnamon-tinged corporeal delicacy of health and bloom skillfully put before a camera to hew the art of being there, as we eternally gaze with fascination and an erotic wish.

The luminous Nicole Kidman loves the camera. Her eyes twinkle in making that strange human connection with the lens and, by whatever perfect nonplus, the camera loves her. We’re haunted by God’s handwriting, a splendid signature of white infinity as she takes firm hold on our eyes and we’re swept by infatuation.

At arm’s length Halle Berry in tableau vivant poses quietly and proudly, keeping all admirers at bay so they can enjoy the brilliant perspective, a poem without words, the ardent sexuality of the shot, the breath-taking elegance that not only permits libidinous arousal but also allows a moment of contemplation. “There, but for the grace of God….”

Knowing they are what we need right now, their exquisiteness alone would be welcoming enough. But without even being asked to like them, passionately hungry, we’re seduced into loving them. Okay, so we may not think this is sexual love, not out loud…but then who did way back in the fifties when all eyes fell on Bettie Page?

As for “Hercules”…no one in more than half a century has risen to rub shoulders with Steve Reeves. The first light of the earliest star in the young universe of a Baby Boomer, he endures as the most dazzling celestial body in the cosmos of strength and health. Like that mythological hero who pushed the limits of human masculinity, his evolution into legend is an emerging field of inquiry for a new generation.

So rather than let his death be that last wisp from a dissipating cloud, he stands on the boundary of an observable universe burning off the fog while liberating the light.

From every picture ever taken of his breathtaking ultra-masculinity—not that ersatz super-massive bodybuilding of Arnold Schwarzenegger—it’s more than apparent to anyone that Steve’s clean, good-looking manliness has not existed for decades; and it’s our immutable belief that if the world braved the next thousand years it will never see his kind again.

As one generation drains away, the next understands the importance, the absolute necessity, of holding dear the totems of photographic virility and loveliness as preserved and revered through the vessel of time in memorial. What else might resist that inevitable fade when Olympian beauty fails and with no last looks or long goodbyes our icons enter into the twilight of the gods?

By Beverly Richardson and Frederick Louis Richardson
January 12, 2003
Copyright © 2003 DreaMerchant All Rights Reserved