If Gretchen Mol seems guarded as I plonk down my tape recorder in front of her, I shouldn’t be surprised. I know she’s waiting for The Question. No, not how she feels about appearing completely nude in her latest film, The Notorious Bettie Page, in which she plays the 1950s American bondage pin-up queen, though we will get to that. No, the question about the infamous September 1998 cover of Vanity Fair, when, as a 25-year-old unknown blonde ingénue, Mol was photographed by Annie Liebovitz, her nipples poking through a skintight, Alberta Ferretti silk dress, under a cover line that read, “Is She Hollywood’s Next It Girl?”.
The provocative cover was supposed to herald the arrival of Gretchen Mol, who had two high-profile films about to open, as the most exciting young actress in Hollywood. “She’s sizzling! She’s hot! She’s on the brink!” a breathless Michael Douglas said of her in the story inside. It was the kind of publicity any young actress would kill for and a few probably have. But even then, the uncommonly level-headed Mol — interviewed by Vanity Fair in her tiny, two-room apartment in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, which she shared with her pet rabbit — was wary. She obviously knew she was tempting fate, even if the opportunity was just too good to turn down. “There’s a lot with me and my situation that’s kind of premature,” she told the magazine. “I do have these moments of anxiety, which is hardly surprising.”
Tempting fate she was. Both films — Rounders, also starring Matt Damon, and Celebrity, a Woody Allen dud in which Mol played Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend — flopped. Instead of becoming an overnight star, Mol became, as she says, “the poster child of hype” and the butt of Hollywood jokes. It was a disaster, professionally and, to some extent, personally. For a number of years, based in New York, Mol scratched around the edges of Hollywood in often forgettable indie films and in misfires such as the television remake of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons. Mol would be cast when the producers couldn’t clinch a bigger name or didn’t have the money to get one.
When I do get round to asking her about it, Mol visibly relaxes, glad to get it out of the way. And it’s not as hard for her to answer as it might have been a couple of years ago. She admits it has been difficult knowing that: “For the past eight years, it’s been the thing that always precedes my name. It’s very strange. But I can’t really keep up with what the perception of it is now; I’ve lost the plot. I know how it felt in the moment, which was, ‘Oh-oh, that was bad, it was wrong, it didn’t work and now it’s harder to get jobs.’
But then I think, ‘Well, it was always hard to get jobs, and I’ve never had a career where one thing came after another. And it still doesn’t, even now.’ I’ve certainly spent time thinking about it and analysing it, to the point where it feels like it happened to somebody else. It was just the timing, really. It was just funny that the magazine would have so much impact.”
It is easier for Mol to have a sense of perspective now because she has changed Hollywood’s negative perception of her. She has rebuilt her career and restored her self- confidence about her abilities as an actor. That’s apparent from the abandon with which she threw herself into the role of Bettie Page. In the film, she is often naked and sometimes trussed up like a particularly succulent chicken, a gag ball in her mouth. She evidently loved it. Her portrayal wowed most American critics. The New York Times suggested that: “Maybe because she knows how beautiful her gently padded silhouette looks in the raw, Ms Mol takes to this tricky role with the carefree expressivity you tend to see only in young children who have learnt the joys of nudity... When she strips, Bettie soars.”
Mol (the name may have its origins in the Low Countries) is very blonde, quite slight and genuinely sweet, and so seems an odd choice to play Bettie Page, with her emblematic black hair cut in a severe fringe, her buxom, reined-in pulchritude and the fetishised “badness” that her bondage photographs and cheap 8mm black-and-white film loops evoke. But the director, Mary Harron (who made I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho), knew from the first audition that in Mol she had found her Bettie. It took almost two years to convince the film’s financiers, however. Harron felt Mol’s own struggles with fame gave her the “vulnerability and melancholy” needed to play Page. “But in my initial audition, I didn’t even wear a wig,” Mol recalls, “They were asking, ‘Isn’t there someone who looks more like her?’ I’m sure they wanted a bigger star. There’s always that.”
Mol says that some years before she was sent the script, she had seen some of Page’s photographs, all whips, tight black bondage gear and 5in heels. “My initial impression of her was the ‘bad girl’ vixen,” she says. “But then I caught an E! True Hollywood Story television documentary on her, which was mainly re-enactments of her life. They kept promising they would show the real Bettie Page at the end, but when they did, she was all blacked out, because she prefers that people remember her as she was in her photos.
“But it was her voice that was so interesting: gravelly and southern. Who is this character? I wondered. Years later, the script came, and I remembered the sunny images of her from the documentary, her brightness, the country girl. That’s why I thought I could have a shot at it. Because I am often cast as the ‘good girl’ — and there is some truth to that — and she actually was a kind of ‘good girl’.”
What is surprising about the film is that Mol and Harron depict a Bettie Page who is apparently unconcerned, even unaware, about what her fetish posing might mean to the men who buy the magazines and films she appears in. She was genuinely shocked when people told her that what she was doing was “dirty”. Although the film touches on Page’s sexual abuse as a young girl at the hands of her father, and a gang rape she later suffered, it doesn’t offer that as an explanation for what she did. Instead, Harron and Mol present Page as an enigma who finds a genuine pleasure in her work, perhaps because it restored a power and an innocence that had been stolen from her when she was younger. That Page combined her bondage career with an intense religiosity is one of the other enigmas the film explores. Mol says that understanding this about Page helped her cope with her own fears about appearing completely nude and in all sorts of bondage poses in the film.
“To me, the images of Bettie when she was nude were beautiful and free,” says Mol. “In her whole life, that was really the one glimmer of happiness she had, a true happiness. Yes, she had a talent for modelling 5in stilettos, but when she was naked, she seemed lost in her own physicality, as if there was a ‘lifting up’. She seemed like she had found some kind of out-of-body moment. That was so attractive and infectious. I thought, ‘Yes, this is going to be difficult and I have to get over my self- consciousness about my own body,’ but it was a challenge I really wanted to take on.”
Some American critics have had problems with the film because, by portraying Page with such naivety, Mol almost de-sexualises her. She makes bondage and fetishism seem sweet and playful rather than dangerous and eroticised. She plays Page as if she had stepped out of a nudist magazine from an altogether more innocent era. Well, she had, as the names of some of the magazines in which she appeared — Wink, Chicks and Chuckles, Modern Sunbathing — indicate. Page was rediscovered in the late 1970s and, now 83, although she is in ill health, she still makes money signing and selling photographs from her heyday. Her influence can be seen everywhere these days, from Madonna videos to the wares in shops such as Agent Provocateur.
“Playful” and “innocent” were certainly not the adjectives used to describe Page at the time. The film is book-ended by the 1955 US congressional hearings into pornography, which denounced the images that had made Page an underground fetish sensation. The film does not delve into Page’s troubled life in subsequent decades. She retired from modelling in 1957, was “reborn” and wanted to become a missionary. At one point, she was taken to hospital after she held her husband and his children at knife-point and made them stand for hours looking at a picture of Jesus. Page was not involved in the film because she had earlier sold the rights to her life story to someone else. Mol has never met her. “The idea of meeting her is kind of scary. I don’t know why.”
As for conquering the fears that dogged her after her initial, disastrous brush with fame, Mol attributes that to appearing in London in the Almeida theatre’s production of The Shape of Things, written and directed by Neil LaBute. The controversial play, which also starred Rachel Weisz, later transferred to Broadway and eventually became a film, keeping the original cast.
“I wasn’t the lead: it wasn’t all on my shoulders and I felt as if I was under the radar a bit, so that felt safe,” she says. “It was so nice that it was well received in London. It reignited for me the excitement I could have as an actor. It gave me back my confidence, which was great, because I had felt pretty unconfident until then.”
Mol followed that by appearing on Broadway as Roxie Hart in the award-winning musical Chicago, and, on a more personal level, by getting married, two years ago, to the director Tod Williams (The Door in the Floor). They moved from New York to Los Angeles last year, although Mol has spent much of the intervening time working out of town. And when she’s not working? Mol likes to swing, but not the kind of swinging she portrays in The Notorious Bettie Page. Golf. Yes, she likes to play golf. See, Gretchen Mol really is a good girl.
The Notorious Bettie Page opens on Friday
