John Willie
| John Willie | |
|---|---|
| Born |
John Alexander Scott Coutts 9 December 1902 Singapore |
| Died | 5 August 1962 (aged 59) England |
| Occupation | Photographer, artist, comic strip cartoonist, Editor of Bizarre Magazine (1946-1956) |
John Alexander Scott Coutts (9 December 1902 – 5 August 1962), better known by the pseudonym John Willie, was the artist, fetish photographer, editor, and publisher of the soft-porn cult magazine Bizarre. Willie is best known for his bondage comic strips, specifically "Sweet Gwendoline", featuring the villain Sir Dystic d'Arcy. Coutts was able to avoid controversy in censorship through careful attention to guidelines and the use of humor. Though "Bizarre" was a small format magazine, it had a huge impact on later kink publications and experienced a resurgence in popularity along with well-known fetish model, Bettie Page, in the 1980s.
John Coutts was born in 1902 to a British family in Singapore, but moved with his family to England in 1903, where he grew up during the Edwardian era. It has been suggested that the restrictive fashions worn by women of that time, such as whale-bone corsets, and the constant repression of sex and sexual desire characteristic of this era, may "go some distance to explain [Willie's] fluency in the semiotics of dress." He is said to have had a rather typical upbringing in a middle-class family and attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Although he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant into the Royal Scots, Coutts was forced to resign in 1925 when he married a night-club hostess, Eveline Fisher, without the permission of his commanding officer. He migrated with his wife to Australia, where their marriage ended in divorce in 1930.
After moving to Brisbane, Australia, in 1926, Coutts was able to put his affinity for fetish wear to use when he joined the High Heel Club, where he was probably introduced to the print media of a community of "shoe lovers" and other fetishists. He met his future second wife, Holly Anna Faram, sometime in the early 1930s, and the couple married in 1942. She became his muse and modelled for him often. When one compares Willie's drawings and photographs of his wife, one is left with the impression that Faram incorporated his ideal body type, tall and slender, and she is said to have shared the artist's interest in bondage and high heels. Because of his access to the High Heel Club's mailing list, Willie was able to begin producing and selling his own illustrations and photography. He worked at a variety of jobs as well as pursuing his hobby and eventually established a company to produce exotic footwear, called "Achilles". In 1945, Willie moved to North America, while Holly chose to remain in Australia, where she died in 1983 at the age of 70. Willie hoped to settle in New York but was forced to remain in Montreal, Canada, for a year or so because of immigration issues.
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