HOLLY FARAM, John’s Australian model, creative partner and second wife, seen relaxing on the frontispiece of Jane Garrett’s biography (same image is also the background of our top banner)
Australia: MacNaughts, London Life, Achilles and Holly
It was in Australia in the 1930s, Jane’s account reminds us, that John’s artistic and fetish talents began to blossom.
He discovered Sydney’s fetish-friendly shoe store MacNaughts and its High Heeled Club; the magazine London Life, with a fetish correspondence section to which he contributed; and the Achilles shoe brand — of which he would later become owner.
But probably his most important discovery there was a young lady called Holly Faram, who would become his model, muse and, later, his second wife. Garrett devotes a whole chapter to Holly, who had high status in the Australian artists’ model community and connections that were very important to John.
“I absolutely think Holly was critical to John Willie’s life and work,” Jane tells me. “In fact, I question if he would have seriously pursued fetish art at all without Holly’s influence and connections to the art world in 1930s Sydney.
“Holly was a fascinating woman who started modelling professionally as a teenager. She was the co-founder of a labour union for artists’ models. She worked with most of the major Australian artists of her time, including highly respected figures such as Norman Lindsay.
“John’s photographs of Holly contributed tremendously to Bizarre magazine’s overall aesthetic, and he profited off images of her for the rest of his life.”
To the author, it’s clear the couple had a genuine artistic partnership. “One needs
only to look at John’s other photos from Australia, which feature mostly amateur models,to see the striking difference between his ‘normal’ output in those early years and the images he created with a professional like Holly.
John’s photos of Holly contributed tremendously to Bizarre magazine’s overall aesthetic, and he profited off images of her for the rest of his life, says Jane Garrett (photo c/o Bélier Press)
“He was a visionary artist; she was beautiful, poised, confident, and experienced as a model. Together, they were dynamite.”
Inspired by London Life, John had started planning to publish his own fetish magazine while still in Australia.
But not until after World War Two — and his relocation to America — did circumstances allow him to realise his dream, Jane explains.
New York: Robert Harrison, Irving Klaw and Bettie Page
BETTIE PAGE on the wraparound cover of Bizarre No14. Contrary to popular myth, this photograph was not taken by John Willie and both Page and Willie said they never met or worked together
Coutts took an office in New York City, adopted the pen-name John Willie, and launched Bizarre in January 1946, tagging his first issue ‘Volume 2’ so that he could populate it with fictitious readers’ letters ‘responding’ to the non-existent Volume 1.
FIRST ISSUE of Bizarre edited by ‘John Willie’ was tagged ‘Volume 2’ so John could fill it with fictitious reader responses to ‘Volume 1’
In her chapter about the launch of Bizarre, Jane addresses qualities of Willie’s art that I raised earlier with her, such as his fondness for only moderately exaggerated feminine proportions, as opposed to the tits ’n’ ass cartoonish extremes (as I characterise them) preferred by other fetish artists of those times.
“I think this goes back to that question of why many women have historically gravitated towards John Willie’s work,” Jane thinks. “I love voluptuous women — who doesn’t?.
“But I do find the ‘cartoonish extremes’ you mention to be a bit over the top at times, when we’re talking ‘50 inch bust with 15 inch waist’ type measurements. (Of course, a woman of more ‘Stantonesque’ proportions than myself might feel differently!)
“With John Willie, I think we see more of the sort of exaggeration present in fashion illustrations — the women are very tall and long-legged, with exceptionally tiny waists.
“The common thread between John and his more ‘cartoonish’ contemporaries is that each had a preferred body type to draw, and rarely was there much if any variance.”
John introduced Gwendoline in his Sir D’Arcy D’Arcy comic strip launched in Bizarre issue 3, which continued in issues 4 and 5.
But at the end of 1946, after No5, the magazine fell dormant. However, Gwendoline would soon resurface — under the auspices of NYC cheesecake publisher Robert Harrison.
Harrison published magazines such as Beauty Parade, Wink and Flirt, and Jane’s account traces the connections that led John from an earlier meeting with burlesque costumier and photographer Charles Guyette (aka the G-String King) to his starting to work for Harrison in 1947.
RARE PHOTO of John Willie (bottom left) out of character as a spankee in the June 1949 issue of Robert Harrison’s Flirt magazine
The publisher renamed John’s Sir D’Arcy strip Sweet Gwendoline and ‘upgraded’ Gwendoline’s secret agent pal U-69 to U-89. The new strip first appeared in Wink in 1947.
The same year, Willie’s Diary of a French Maid popped up in Flirt, whose June 1949 issue featured a rare photo of John (who identified as a top) posing for an over-the-knee spanking.
In 1947, John had also been introduced to Irving Klaw by a bondage enthusiast customer of Klaw’s, who’d persuaded Irving and his sister Paula to start producing and selling bondage photos from their Manhattan bookstore.
That store became Movie Star News and bondage imagery would soon became its main mail-order business.
So when Robert Harrison later dropped Sweet Gwendoline from his publications, Willie was able to license his comic strip in its entirety to Irving Klaw, who first advertised it in MSN No29 in 1949.
ERIC STANTON was employed to censor Willie’s Missing Princess so Klaw could sell it renamed as New Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline
Irving Klaw published various other artists including Eric Stanton, and — Jane confirms — actually employed Stanton to censor Willie’s more explicit 1951 series Gwendoline and the Missing Princess, in order to sell it in renamed form as The New Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline.
I tell Jane that when I visited the MSN store in NYC back in my music journalist days, Paula Klaw herself sold me a bunch of postcard-sized prints of MSN’s most famous bondage model, Bettie Page (then spelt ‘Betty’), which I still have in a dedicated photo album.
“I would have loved to meet Paula Klaw,” Jane says. “From everything I’ve read, she was a very savvy woman. And of course, we have her to thank for preserving many of the photos and negatives that were to be destroyed from the Klaws’ studio.
“My husband and I have a number of Klaw photo prints that we’ve collected over the years — and like you, we keep them in a special photo album.
“The bondage images are obviously fantastic, but my favourite photo shows Irving Klaw, Bettie Page and another model taking a break during a photoshoot, eating donuts and drinking coffee together.”
Although Page and Willie were both part of the same fetish talent pool in NYC, and BP did appear on the cover of Bizarre 14 in 1954, that photo was not shot by JW, and all the evidence suggests that they never actually met.
A shame, then, that Mary Harron’s otherwise commendable 2005 movie The Notorious Bettie Page, with Gretchen Moll in the titular role, perpetuated the myth that the pair not only met but worked together.
“Yes, I saw The Notorious Bettie Page in the theatre when it came out, and watched it again while writing the book,” says Jane. “I thought Gretchen Mol was great casting for Bettie and I did enjoy the movie overall, though the John Willie scenes made my blood boil both times I watched it.
“Not only was the photo shoot a work of total fiction, but I felt the characterisation of John Willie (played by Jared Harris) was off-base. The film made him out to be a leering drunk, which I don’t think was accurate.
“Was he a heavy drinker? Certainly — nobody would deny that. Was he going around creeping on models? I’ve found no evidence of that from his models, his own public and private statements, or the statements of his contemporaries.
“Most folk who knew him seem to agree that he was an intelligent, well-educated, witty man, none of which came across in the film.
AFTER ISSUE 5, Bizarre fell dormant until No6 appeared in 1956. But Gwendoline continued under Robert Harrison and Irving Klaw
“At one point, his character also asks Bettie’s character what Jesus would think of her bondage modelling. John Willie was very much opposed to Christianity and loved bondage, so there is absolutely no possibility that this would ever have happened.
“As for the relationship between Bettie Page and John Willie, I think it’s true that they never met. For one thing, they each independently stated at different points in their lives that they never knew each other.
“There are no photographs of Bettie known to have been taken by John. And Irving Klaw was very cagey when it came to his stable of artists and models — he worked quite diligently to compartmentalise his associates and prevent them from meeting each other and collaborating outside of the Klaw studio.
“All that said, I’d love to be proven wrong! Wouldn’t it be great to find a long-lost cache of Bettie Page photos featuring John Willie’s ropework? I think they would have created truly beautiful work together.”
On the subject of Ms Page, I tell Jane that my music journo girlfriend from the late 1970s to early ’80s adopted the name Betty Page (with that spelling) as her pen name.
This became a secret signal to people we mixed with in the music biz, well before the real Bettie Page became the household name she is today. One of those who got the message was our pal David Claridge, who was planning to start a London fetish club called Skin Two, and reckoned — correctly — that he could rely on our support to help get it off the ground!
“I’ve been a big Bettie Page fan since the 1990s,” Jane responds. “In high school I even carried my lunch to school in a Bettie Page lunchbox. As you say, little signifiers like that are a great way to meet likeminded people.
“I first learned about her from a television programme when I was about ten years old. All my life I’ve loved things that are glamorous, feminine, and sexy, and Bettie of course fits that bill all the way.
“Bettie’s frank attitude on nudity always appealed to me; I’ll take my clothes off in the sunshine any chance I get, and I like it when other people do, too (Bettie called this ‘taking an air bath’).
“I also began sewing my own clothes as a teenager (which I still do as a hobby), and Bettie is an influence in that realm as well, since she sewed a lot of her own costumes for modelling.”
While on the subject of meeting (or not) the fetish greats, I can’t resist sharing with Jane that I met and interviewed Eric Stanton in London at the beginning of my time with Skin Two magazine.
One of many things he confided for that interview (which appears in Skin Two Issue 3) was that he considered John Willie’s characters “too rigid”. He attributed this to John’s basing them on photographs — something Eric said he never did for his own characters, as they had to have “movement”.
“How exciting that you got to meet the brilliant Eric Stanton,” Jane says. “I am a fan of his work, too. The ‘rigid’ nature of John Willie’s artwork is, I think, a common and valid criticism, though for me it doesn’t take away from the beauty of the paintings and drawings.
“In fact (though I’m no art critic), I’d argue that the rigidity adds something. There is a quality of immobility — like the women in the paintings are waiting very patiently.
“For me, looking at the artwork feels the way it feels when you are wearing something constricting like a corset, or very high heels, and/or are tied up — very proper posture, not much moving around.
“By contrast, Stanton’s strength lies in his dynamic poses. He loved sexy, full-figured women, often wrestling each other, and you just can’t get that across without knowing something about illustrating movement.
“His work was certainly more lively, but that really wasn’t John Willie’s angle. John was more concerned with restraint. Another fact to consider is that Eric had formal art school training, while John was self-taught.”
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