Bettie Page, the raven-haired pin-up girl of the 1950s, has been hospitalized after suffering a heart attack.  The 85-year-old former model, who had been hospitalized for the past few weeks for pneumonia, suffered a heart attack as she was about to released from the hospital on Tuesday and was rushed into intensive care, where according to reports, she remains in a coma. 

Page’s fetish modeling and pin-up work inspired a number of artists in the 1980s including Dave Stevens, who based Rocketeer Cliff Secord’s girl friend, Jenny Blake, directly on the sexy Betty Page.  In 1987 Greg Theakston began publishing The Betty Pages fanzine, which helped to spark a worldwide wave of interest in Ms. Page.  In the mid 1990s when she learned of her “revival,” Page was living in a group home in L.A. and told interviewer Robin Leach that she was both “penniless and infamous.”

Page signed with an agent in the 1990s and was able to gain some remuneration from her considerable notoriety.  It is a testament to her continuing fame that two film biographies, Bettie Page: Dark Angel (2004) and The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) have been released in the past five years.