Jayne Mansfield

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Jayne Mansfield

Playboy centerfold appearance	February 1955
Birthplace	Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
Birthdate	April 19, 1933
Date of death	June 29, 1967
Measurements	40D - 21 - 36
Height	5 ft 6 in
Weight	Unknown
Preceded by	Bettie Page
Succeeded by	Marilyn Waltz

Jayne Mansfield, born Vera Jayne Palmer April 19, 1933, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania was an American actress and sex symbol who emerged during the 1950s era of well-endowed sex symbols, led by Marilyn Monroe. She was well known for her platinum-blonde hair, dramatic hourglass figure and cleavage-revealing costumes. Her film career proved fleeting after a handful of major Hollywood productions. Negative publicity and poor business decisions forced her into regional nightclub tours, low-budget melodramas and comedies. She died June 29, 1967 at age 34 of injuries sustained in an automobile accident.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Film career and celebrity 2.1 Career high 2.2 Career decline 2.3 Promises! Promises! 2.4 Career end 2.5 Recognition 3 Outside film 3.1 Theater 3.2 Tour 3.3 Television 3.4 Music 3.5 Stage show 3.6 Publicity stunts 4 Comparison to Marilyn Monroe 5 Private life 6 Death 7 Trivia 8 Filmography 9 See also 10 References 11 Footnotes 12 External links

[edit] Early life

Of German and English ancestry, Mansfield was the only child of Herbert William Palmer and his wife, the former Vera Jeffrey,^[1] and she spent her early childhood in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. When she was three years old, her father, a lawyer who was in practice with future New Jersey governor Robert B. Meyner, died of a heart attack while driving in a car with his wife and daughter. After his death, her mother worked as a school teacher, and in 1939, when Vera Palmer remarried, the family moved to Dallas, Texas.

A talented amateur violinist, Mansfield attended Highland Park High School and studied drama and physics at Southern Methodist University. She also attended classes at the University of Texas at Austin, where her first husband, Paul Mansfield, was a student. In Dallas, she became a student of the actor Baruch Lumet, father of director Sidney Lumet and founder of the Dallas Institute of the Performing Arts. On October 22, 1953, Mansfield first appeared on stage in a production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

While living in Texas, Mansfield won several beauty contests including Miss Photoflash, Miss Magnesium Lamp, and Miss Fire Prevention. The one title she turned down was Miss Roquefort Cheese, because she said it "just didn't sound right." In 1954, she and her husband moved to Los Angeles, where she studied drama at UCLA. She also spent a year living at Camp Gordon, Georgia during Paul Mansfield's service in the U.S. Army.

An admirer of the actress Shirley Temple since childhood, Mansfield wanted to be a movie star and was well aware of the power of publicity, whether legitimate or self-generated. She was rumored to have gotten her first TV job by slipping a note to the producer that read "39, 22, 35", and barely a half hour after the birth of her second child, Mansfield insisted on making a personal telephone call to the gossip columnist Louella Parsons to ensure a timely public announcement.

[edit] Film career and celebrity

Her movie career began with bit parts at Warner Brothers. She had been signed by the studio after one its talent scouts discovered her in a production at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1953. Mansfield had small roles in Female Jungle (1954), and in Pete Kelly's Blues (1955) which starred Jack Webb.

In 1955, Paul Wendkos offered her the dramatic role of Gladden in The Burglar, his film adaptation of David Goodis' novel. The film was done in film noir style, and Mansfield appeared along side Dan Duryea and Martha Vickers. The Burglar was released two years later when Mansfield's fame was at its peak. She was successful in this straight dramatic role, though most of her subsequent film appearances would be either comedic in nature or capitalize on her sex appeal.

[edit] Career high

Mansfield then starred in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956). On May 3, 1956, she signed a long-term contract with 20th-Century Fox. She then played a straight dramatic role (albeit as a stripper) in The Wayward Bus, (1957). With her role in this film, she attempted to move away from her dumb blonde image and establish herself as a serious actress. This film was adapted from John Steinbeck's novel, and the cast included Dan Dailey and Joan Collins. The role was a change of pace from Mansfield's stereotyped persona and the film enjoyed reasonable success at the box office. She then reprised her role of Rita Marlowe in the 1957 movie version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, co-starring Tony Randall and Joan Blondell.

The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? were popular successes in their day and are largely considered classics. Her fourth starring role in a Hollywood film was Kiss Them for Me (1957) in which she received prominent billing alongside Cary Grant. However, in the film itself she is little more than comedy relief while Grant's character shows a preference for a sleek, demure redhead portrayed by fashion model Suzy Parker. Kiss Them for Me was a box office disappointment and would prove to be her final starring role in a mainstream Hollywood studio film.

[edit] Career decline

Despite her monumental publicity and public popularity, good roles dried up for Mansfield after 1958, the year she married Mickey Hargitay, a Hungarian-born bodybuilder who had been Mr. Universe 1955. The actress, nevertheless, kept busy in series of low-budget films mostly filmed in the United Kingdom and Europe. These were mainly designed to show off as much of her anatomy as possible, but providing little display of her acting or comedic talents.

Even as her career slowed, Mansfield remained a highly visible personality and won a Golden Laurel in 1959 for Top Female Musical Performance for her role in the U.K.-produced movie The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, a western spoof directed by Raoul Walsh.

Fox tried to cast Mansfield opposite Paul Newman in his (failed) first attempt at comedy, Rally round the flag, boys, but the actor prefered her Wayward Bus co-star Joan Collins.^{[citation needed]} Among other unrealized projects, Joe Pasternak was to produce Three Blondes, a film based on a French novel by Pierre Dassete that (hopefully) would have co-starred Mansfield, Lana Turner and Kim Novak. Unfortunately, the project was dropped before production began.^{[citation needed]}

In 1960, Fox loaned her out to appear in two independent gangster thrillers in England, Too Hot to Handle (which was directed by Terence Young and co-starred Karlheinz Böhm) and The Challenge (in which Mansfield appeared opposite Anthony Quayle). Around this time, Fox lined up another foreign production for Mansfield, It Happened in Athens, which would be released in 1962. Despite receiving top billing, Mansfield was relegated to a colorful, scantily-clad supporting role.

Though her roles were becoming increasingly marginalized, Mansfield turned down the plum role of the starlet Ginger Grant in the television sitcom Gilligan's Island, claiming that the role, which eventually was given to Tina Louise, was beneath her because "I am a movie star."

[edit] Promises! Promises!

In 1963, the comedian turned producer-screenwriter Tommy Noonan persuaded Mansfield to become the first American mainstream actress to appear in the nude with a starring role in the film Promises! Promises!. Photographs of a naked Mansfield on the set were published in Playboy. In one notorious set of images, Mansfield stares at one of her breasts, as does her male secretary and a hair stylist, then grasps it in one hand and lifts it high. The issue sold out and resulted in Hugh Hefner being faced with an obscenity charge, which was later dropped. Promises! Promises! was banned in Cleveland, but it enjoyed box-office success elsewhere, and Mansfield was voted one of the Top 10 Box Office Attractions by an organization of American theater owners.

[edit] Career end

By the early 1960s, Mansfield's reign in Hollywood was effectively over. One critic summed up her last decade of film vehicles as "one of the most consistently awful in cinema history". The decision to do nude scenes had ruined any chance of her return to prestige productions. Even Mansfield seemed stunned by her sudden shift in professional status, saying, "Once you were a starlet. Then you're a star. Can you be a starlet again?"

In 1963, she appeared in the low-budget West German movie Homesick for St. Pauli (a.k.a. Heimweh nach St. Pauli), starring with Austrian-born schlager singer Freddy Quinn. Mansfield played Evelyne, a sexy American singer who travels to Hamburg by ship being followed by an Elvis-like American pop star (Quinn) who is really German and homesick for home and his mother. Mansfield sang two German songs in the movie, though her speaking voice was dubbed.

[edit] Recognition

• In February 1955, Mansfield was the Playmate of the Month in Playboy, a magazine in which she would appear several more times over the years.^[2]
• She received the Theatre World Award of 1956 for her performance in the Broadway production of George Axelrod's comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?.
• She won a Golden Globe in 1957 for Most Promising Newcomer - Female, beating Carroll Baker and Natalie Wood, thanks to her performance as a "wistful derelict" in The Wayward Bus. It was "generally conceded to have been her best acting", according to The New York Times, in a fitful career hampered by her flamboyant image, squeaky voice ("a soft-voiced coo punctuated with squeals"),^[3] almost comically voluptuous figure, and limited acting range.
• She won a Golden Laurel in 1959 for Top Female Musical Performance for her role in The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw.
• In 1963, Mansfield was voted one of the Top 10 Box Office Attractions by an organization of American theater owners for her performance in Promises! Promises!, a film banned in areas around the US.

[edit] Outside film

[edit] Theater

After two more movies at Warner Bros., one of which gave her a minor role as Angel O'Hara, a hitman's mistress, opposite Edward G. Robinson in the film Illegal (1955), she went to New York and appeared in a prominent role in the Broadway production of George Axelrod's comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955).

Though she had been unwilling to appear in the play, she received the Theatre World Award of 1956 for what the New York Times described as the "commendable abandon" of her scantily clad rendition of Rita Marlowe, "a platinum-pated movie siren with the wavy contours of Marilyn Monroe.^[4] She also appeared in a 1964 stage production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which also was well reviewed and costarred Hargitay.

[edit] Tour

In October 1957, Jayne Mansfield went on a 16-country tour of Europe for 20th-Century Fox. She received much attention at the Cannes Film Festival and was presented to Queen Elizabeth on November 4, after a screening of the movie Les Girls, which starred Gene Kelly, Kay Kendall, and Mitzi Gaynor. "You are looking so beautiful," she said to the Queen, who replied, "Thank you very much indeed. So are you."^[5]

[edit] Television

The actress toured with Bob Hope for the USO and appeared on numerous television programs, including The Jack Benny Show (where she played the violin), The Steve Allen Show, Down You Go, and The Match Game. Mansfield's television roles included appearances in Burke's Law and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Returning from New York to Hollywood, she made several television appearances, including several spots as a featured guest star on game shows.

[edit] Music

In 1963, she released a novelty album called Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky & Me, on which she recited Shakespeare's sonnets and poems by Marlowe, Browning, Wordsworth, and others against a background of Tchaikovsky's music. The album cover depicted a bouffant-coiffed Mansfield with lips pursed, breasts barely covered by a fur stole, and posing between busts of the Russian composer and the Bard of Avon.^[6]

[edit] Stage show

Dissatisfied with her film roles, Mansfield and Hargitay headlined at the Dunes in Las Vegas in an act called The House of Love, for which the actress earned $35,000 a week. It proved to be such a hit that she extended her stay, and 20th-Century Fox Records subsequently released the show as an album called Jayne Mansfield Busts Up Las Vegas, in 1962.

[edit] Publicity stunts

	Jayne Mansfield is making a career of being a girl.
—Walter Winchell, reporter[7]

By the late 1950s, Mansfield began to generate a great deal of negative publicity due to her repeatedly successful attempts to expose her breasts in carefully staged public "accidents" that today would be euphemistically called "wardrobe malfunctions".

In April 1957, her bosom was the feature of a notorious publicity stunt intended to deflect attention from Sophia Loren during a dinner party in the Italian star's honor. Photographs of the encounter were published around the world. The most famous image showed Loren raising an contemptuous eyebrow as the American actress, who was standing between Loren and her dinner companion, Clifton Webb, leaned over the table and allowed her breasts to spill over her low neckline and expose one nipple.

A similar incident, resulting in the full exposure of both breasts, occurred during a film festival in Berlin, when Mansfield was wearing a low-cut dress and her second husband, Mickey Hargitay, picked her up so she could bite a bunch of grapes hanging overhead at a party; the movement caused her breasts to erupt out of the dress. The photograph of that episode was a UPI sensation, appearing in newspapers and magazines with the word "censored" hiding the actress's exposed bosom. The world media was quick to condemn Mansfield's stunts, and one editorial columnist wrote, "We are amused when Miss Mansfield strains to pull in her stomach to fill out her bikini better. But we get angry when career-seeking women, shady ladies, and certain starlets and actresses ... use every opportunity to display their anatomy unasked."^[8]

Mansfield's most celebrated physical attributes would alternate in size due her pregnancies and breast feeding five children, and indeed many photos show the actress's bosom appearing smaller than its reputed 40D measurement. During a nightclub tour in London, England in 1967, her breasts were measured by paparazzi, and they were reported to be 46D.^{[citation needed]} The director and producer Russ Meyer said that Mansfield's reputation for being large-breasted was based on a misconception and due mainly to her visibly large ribcage and the adoption of daring decolletages. Early in her career, the prominence of her breasts was considered problematic, leading her to be cut from her first professional assignment, an advertising campaign for General Electric, which depicted several young women in bathing suits relaxing around a pool.

[edit] Comparison to Marilyn Monroe

Another difficulty to retaining her position as America's bombshell, especially after the death of Marilyn Monroe, was that she "suffers from too much publicity and too few roles. She has become rather a caricature—like Mae West—and alienates the segment [of movie-goers] which takes sex seriously."^[9]

By 1962, if the studios held her in low regard as an actress, she still commanded high prices as a live performer, though she openly yearned to establish a more sophisticated image. Mansfield announced that she wanted to study acting in New York, in apparent emulation of Marilyn Monroe's stint with the Actors' Studio. But her reliance on the racy publicity that had set her path to fame would also prove to be her downfall. Fox didn't renew its contract with her in 1962.

Even with her film roles drying up she was widely considered to be Marilyn Monroe's primary rival in a crowded field of contenders that included Mamie Van Doren (whom Mansfield considered her professional nemesis), Cleo Moore, Diana Dors and Sheree North.

[edit] Private life

Jayne Mansfield was married three times and divorced twice, producing five children. Her husbands were:

1. Paul Mansfield (secretly married 28 January 1950, public wedding 10 May 1950, divorced 8 January 1958). During this marriage she had one child, Jayne Marie Mansfield (8 November 1950—);^[10]
2. Miklós "Mickey" Hargitay, an actor and bodybuilder who was Mr. Universe 1955. They were married on 13 January 1958 in Portuguese Bend, California and divorced in Juarez, Mexico in May 1963. The Mexican divorce initially was declared invalid in California but in August 1964 she successfully sued to have it declared legal. She had previously filed for divorce on 4 May 1962 but told reporters "I'm sure we will make it up."^[11] During this marriage she had Miklós Jeffrey Palmer (21 December 1958—), Zoltan Anthony (1 August 1960—), and Mariska Magdolina (a.k.a. Maria, 24 January 1964—).
3. Matt Cimber, film director (a.k.a. Matteo Ottaviano, né Thomas Vitale Ottaviano, whom she married on 24 September 1964, separated from on 11 July 1965), and filed for divorce on 20 July 1966.^[12] With him she had one son, Antonio Raphael Ottaviano (a.k.a. Tony Cimber, 17 October 1965—).

The actress reportedly also had affairs and sexual encounters with numerous individuals, including Claude Terrail (the owner of the Paris restaurant La Tour d'Argent), the Brazilian playboy billionaire Jorge Guinle,^[13] Robert F. Kennedy^[14]

She had a brief affair with Jan Cremer, a young Dutch writer who dedicated his autobiographical novel I, Jan Cremer (1965) to the actress, who called it "a wild and sexy masterpiece" and the author "my Pop Hero".^[15] She also had a well-publicized relationship in 1963 with the singer Nelson Sardelli, whom she said that she planned to marry once her divorce from Mickey Hargitay was finalized.^[16] "I need to have a man around," Mansfield once said, when asked about her often overlapping romances. "I have to sleep with a man every night. I really do."^[17]

In November 1957, shortly before her marriage to Hargitay, Mansfield bought a 40-room Mediterranean-style mansion formerly owned by Rudy Vallee at 10100 Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, which she had painted pink and then called the "Pink Palace." As its name implies, the mansion's interior and exterior color scheme was largely what would become the actress's signature color, with cupids surrounded by pink fluorescent lights, pink furs in the bathrooms, a pink heart-shaped bathtub, and a fountain spurting pink champagne. Hargitay, who was a plumber and carpenter before he got into bodybuilding, built its famous pink heart-shaped swimming pool.^[18]

Weeks after her brief, tempestuous marriage to Hargitay finally ended in an acrimonious divorce that had the actress accusing her husband of kidnapping one of her children to force a more favorable financial settlement,^[19] Mansfield married her third husband, Matt Cimber. He was an Italian-born director with whom the actress had become involved when he directed her in a widely praised stage production of Bus Stop in Yonkers, New York, which costarred Hargitay. Cimber took over managing her career during their marriage.

In 1967, the year she died, Mansfield's time was split between nightclub performances and the production of her last film, Single Room, Furnished, a low-budget production that was directed by Cimber. Work on the movie was suspended when the Cimbers' marriage collapsed in the wake of the actress's alcohol abuse, open infidelities, and her claim to Cimber that she had only ever been happy with her former lover, Nelson Sardelli. Mansfield continued her nightclub appearances in the U.S., South America, England, and Asia and became romantically involved with her married divorce lawyer, Sam Brody.

Two weeks before her death, the actress was dogged by publicity over a beating Brody reportedly gave her 16-year-old daughter, Jayne Marie, on 16 June 1967, at Mansfield's home on Sunset Boulevard.^[20] The girl's statement to officers of the West Los Angeles police department the following morning implicated her mother in encouraging the abuse, and days later, a juvenile-court judge awarded temporary custody of Jayne Marie to a great-uncle, W.W. Pigue.^[21]

[edit] Death

After an engagement at the Gus Stevens Supper Club in Biloxi, Mississippi, Mansfield, Brody, and their driver, Ronnie Harrison, along with the actress's children Miklós, Zoltan, and Mariska, headed in Stevens' 1966 Buick Electra 225 to New Orleans, where Mansfield was to appear in an early morning television interview. On June 29, at approximately 2:25 a.m., on U.S. Highway 90, the car, which was reportedly going 80 miles per hour, crashed into the rear of a tractor-trailer that had slowed down because of a truck spraying mosquito fogger. The children survived with minor injuries, but the adults were killed instantly.^[22]

Rumors that Mansfield was decapitated have been proven untrue, though she did suffer severe head trauma. This urban legend was possibly spawned by the appearance in police photographs of what resembles a blonde wig tangled in the car's smashed windshield. It is believed that this was either a wig that Mansfield was wearing at the time, or was her actual hair and scalp and that she was scalped in the crash.^[23] The car was returned to its owner, Gus Stevens, who eventually sold it. It was in a museum in Florida for several years but now is owned by a Mansfield fan in North Carolina.

The actress's funeral was held on July 3, 1967, in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania. The ceremony was officiated by a Methodist minister, though Mansfield, who long tried to convert to Catholicism, had become interested in Judaism at the end of her life, through her relationship with Sam Brody, though she apparently had not officially converted.^[24] She is interred in Fairview Cemetery, southeast of Pen Argyl.

Shortly after her funeral, Mickey Hargitay sued his former wife's estate for more than $275,000 to support the children, whom he and his third and last wife, Ellen Siano, would raise. Mansfield's youngest child, Tony, was raised by his father, Matt Cimber, whose divorce from the actress was pending when she was killed. In 1968, wrongful-death lawsuits were filed on behalf of Jayne Marie Mansfield and Matt Cimber, the former for $4.8 million and the latter for $2.7 million.^[25]

[edit] Trivia

• In the 1996 film Crash, a character recreates Mansfield's fatal accident and kills himself in the process.
• The Japanese female rock band The 5.6.7.8's wrote a song titled "I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield", which is featured in the movie Kill Bill Vol. 1, directed by Quentin Tarantino.
• The subject of the Siouxsie and the Banshees song Kiss Them for Me, the title of her 1957 film.^{[citation needed]}
• During the late 1950s, the front bumpers of some American cars came with extensions that resembled a pair of the conical brassieres of the period. Soon after their introduction, these extensions were nicknamed "Jayne Mansfields."^{[citation needed]}
• In the film "To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar", Patrick Swayze's character, Vida Boheme, remarked while trying out a used automobile, "I feel like Jayne Mansfield in this car".
• Mansfield claimed to have an I.Q. of 163.^[27] A BBC America TV special for The Ovation Network aired on February 17, 2006 stated she was a trained classical violinist, pianist, spoke five languages and had a working knowledge of Shakespeare. Nevertheless her school grades were average.
• She was the subject of a sketch entitled 'The Worst Job I Ever 'Ad' by comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore alter-egos Derek and Clive from their 1976 LP Derk and Clive Live, in which Clive (Cook) had the terrible job of retrieving lobsters from Jayne Mansfield's derriere.
• In 1989, the band L.A. Guns released "The Ballad of Jayne".
• In the 2003 single "Overdrive," Katy Rose sang, "I'm sitting in Jayne Mansfield's car."
• In 1990, the cyberpunk band Sigue Sigue Sputnik released "Hey Jane Mansfield Superstar"
• Jayne Mansfield has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6328 Hollywood Boulevard.
• In an A&E Network Biography program about Jayne Mansfield, the actor Tony Randall, who had appeared with her in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, talked about how friendly and down-to-earth Jayne was. He said that when tourists would drive by her mansion, she would wave and greet them. As Randall said, "She was a hoot!"^{[citation needed]}
• A memorial cenotaph, showing a wrong birth year, was erected in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California.

[edit] Filmography

Female Jungle (1954) Hell on Frisco Bay (1955) Pete Kelly's Blues (1955) Illegal (1955) The Girl Can't Help It (1956) The Wayward Bus (1957) The Burglar (1957) Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) Kiss Them for Me (1957) The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958) The Challenge (1960) The Loves of Hercules (1960) Too Hot to Handle (1960) The George Raft Story (1961) Lykke og Krone (1962) (documentary)

It Happened in Athens (1962) Homesick for St. Pauli (1963) Promises! Promises! (1963) Primitive Love (1964) Panic Button (1964) Dog Eat Dog (1964) The Loved One (1965, cameo appearance from film before release) The Las Vegas Hillbillys (1966) The Fat Spy (1966) A Guide for the Married Man (1967) Spree (1967) (documentary) Mondo Hollywood (1967) (documentary) The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield (released 1968) (documentary) Single Room, Furnished (released 1968)

[edit] See also

• List of people in Playboy 1953-1959
• List of Playboy Playmates with big breasts

[edit] References

Strait, Raymond (July 1992). Here They Are Jayne Mansfield. S.P.I. Books. ISBN 1561711462.

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] External links

• Jayne Mansfield at Playboy.com
• Jayne Mansfield at the Internet Movie Database
• Jayne Mansfield at the Internet Broadway Database
• Photographs of Jayne Mansfield, taken by Peter Gowland
• The official Jayne Mansfield Website