Jayne’s True Story

Jayne Mansfield might be best known as Hollywood’s attempt at a Marilyn Monroe replacement, who also met a tragic end – but there’s a lot more to her story! She was a smart woman who wasn’t afraid to go to some hilariously scandalous lengths to try to get the stardom she wanted. And she also has a connection to modern Hollywood that might surprise you! So here are some interesting things you might not have known about Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield.

Figuring out her talents

Born Vera Jayne Palmer in 1933, Mansfield always had an eye towards Hollywood – as a child she wanted to be a star like Shirley Temple. She got her first taste of performing when she began taking ballroom dance lessons when she was twelve. And while she might have eventually gone on to play “dumb blondes” on screen, in real life she was actually quite smart! Jayne did well in school, spoke five languages, and played the violin and piano.

Jayne got married to her first husband, Paul, at only 17, and they spent several years moving around to various colleges where they both took courses (including UCLA and the University of Texas at Austin.) While in Los Angeles, Jayne entered the Miss California contest and won the local round, but Paul found out and forced her to remove herself from the competition. Not one to be held back, she went on to compete in and win nearly 30 beauty pageants in the following years, including Miss Texas Tomato, Miss Fire Prevention Week, and Miss Potato Soup (though she did allegedly turn down the title of Miss Roquefort Cheese…) During their stint in Austin, she had many jobs – including as a nude art model. Jayne wasn’t afraid to show her voluptuous figure to the world (and this freedom with her body would eventually be her ticket to the front pages and Hollywood stardom!).

In 1953, Jayne moved to Dallas and studied acting with Baruch Lumet, father of iconic director Sydney Lumet. It was Baruch who helped Jayne get her foot in the door with a screen test at Paramount in 1954. She and her family moved back to LA that year so that she could start to properly pursue her career, and while she was waiting for her star to rise she worked all kinds of odd jobs, from teaching dance to working as a restaurant photographer.

Her Big Hollywood Breakout

Jayne’s voluptuousness didn’t start out as a boon to her career – she actually lost a General Electric commercial gig because she looked a little too va-va-voom in the swimsuit for a family-friendly ad. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, Hollywood studio heads saw things a little differently, with casting director Milton Lewis telling her that she was wasting her “obvious talents” trying to do drama. Instead, it was decided, she should dye her hair platinum blonde and the studio would begin molding her into a new Marilyn Monroe.

By the time Jayne arrived in Hollywood in the mid-1950s, Marilyn had been at odds with the studios for years. She wanted more control over the characters she played, and her life in general, and the studios did everything they could to keep her under their thumb. As it became clear that Marilyn wasn’t going to play their game anymore, the studio began looking for her replacement. They wanted a new bubbly, voluptuous blonde with a breathy voice that, they hoped, wouldn’t cause problems – and Jayne was more than happy to fill the role if it meant her shot at the big screen.

But one thing Jayne was not was demure and she wasn’t just going to wait around for the studios to get her name in the paper. Jayne had a great knack for coming up with publicity stunts that would get her in the tabloids. From loosening the threads on her spaghetti strap so that it would break off at just the right moment (in front of the cameras, of course,) to giving Sophia Loren an eyeful, to her top somehow falling off in a pool while she just so happened to be surrounded by photographers at a press junket for a film she wasn’t even in. One journalist at the time said that she “suffered so many on-stage strap and zipper mishaps that nudity was, for her, a professional hazard.” She was even allegedly dropped by her wardrobe designer because he worried that the sheer number of so-called “wardrobe malfunctions” she had made him look bad. Jayne overtly used her sexuality to grab attention, a stark contrast to other bombshell starlets that always played coy and aloof. Jayne knew she was hot, and she was going to make sure everyone else knew, too. Due to her anything-for-fame attitude, some even consider her a precursor to modern reality tv and social media stars, with AP noting in 1961 that, “She has found a way to capitalize on fame which may create an entirely new kind of star. There’s not much to the part, but the pay is spectacular.”

She was Playmate of the Month in February 1955, the year that also saw the release of her first film with her supporting role in Female Jungle and her divorce from Paul. She signed a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers and had bit parts in several more films that year, but her first real success actually came on Broadway. She starred in ‘Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?’ as vapid blonde sex symbol Rita Marlowe (an obvious send-up of Marilyn, who had starred in the film version of playwright George Axelrod’s other play The Seven Year Itch only a year earlier,) and the play was a huge success. She then went on to star in the film adaptation of the play in 1957, which essentially got rid of everything from the play except for Jayne’s Rita, which was also loved by audiences and is still seen by many as Jayne’s ‘signature film.’

Her Signature Appeal

After being dropped by Warner Brothers when she went to Broadway in 1955, she signed a new contract with Twentieth Century Fox in 1956. She starred in The Girl Can’t Help It that same year, which was both critically acclaimed and one of the most successful films of that year, and Fox began promoting her as “Marilyn Monroe king-sized.”

Not wanting to only be known as a vapid blonde bombshell forever, for her next role Jayne wanted to switch gears. She went with a dramatic role as Camille in the 1957 film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus. The film was only moderately financially successful, but Jayne proved that she could really act – and even won the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year.

But unfortunately, even these successes and her penchant for tabloid notoriety weren’t enough to sustain her career for long. 1958’s The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw was her last real mainstream success, but it was surrounded by a number of flops. Due to a string of pregnancies keeping her from being able to film and some audiences apparently growing tired of her blonde bombshell shtick by the early 1960s Jayne’s movie career seemed to be stalling. She spent the end of her contract with Twentieth Century Fox being loaned out to productions in Italy and England. After several more years of flops, Jayne would score her final financially successful film with 1963’s Promises, Promises – most of its success riding on the fact that Jayne appeared in it completely naked, making her the first mainstream actress to appear nude in a post-Hays Code film. While the film was a financial success, it also ruffled some feathers – the film was outright banned in Cleveland, Ohio and Hugh Hefner had obscenity charges brought against him in Chicago after Playboy published nude pictures of Janyne on the set of the film. Even as her star began to wane, Jayne never gave up on her dream. She continued to take on the parts she was able to get, and keep herself in the headlines through her publicity antics and in-person appearances until tragedy struck…

A Tragic Death

While working in film and television, Jayne had also become very popular on the nightclub circuit, where she would perform for crowds around the US and across Europe – she was even one of the first (and highest-paid) female headliners in Las Vegas. On June 28th, 1967, Jayne had just finished up her second engagement at a Supper Club in Biloxi, Mississippi, and set out for New Orleans along with three of her children, her boyfriend, and a driver. Unfortunately at around 2:30 on the morning of the 29th, their vehicle crashed into the back end of a tractor-trailer that had slowed down in front of them. The three children, who had been asleep in the backseat, thankfully survived with minor injuries, but the adults – including Jayne – were killed instantly. Her untimely death at only 34 years old led to the NTSB mandating that tractor-trailers add on underride guards made of steel tubing, sometimes called “Mansfield bars”, in an attempt to save anyone else from also meeting this gruesome fate.

One of Jayne’s children that survived the wreck that night continued on in Jayne’s steps by becoming a Hollywood icon in her own right (though by taking a slightly different path…)

Her Daughter’s Celebrity Legacy

Jayne’s fourth child is someone you’ll probably recognize: Mariska Hargitay of Law and Order fame. Mariska was born in 1964, technically after her mother Jayne and father Mickey Hargitay had separated but before the divorce was finalized. She was only three years old when she lost her mother in the accident and has spoken about how it still affects her to this day, telling Good Housekeeping that it created “a hole in my life that won’t ever be filled. I will never get over it. I will always be a girl who lost her mom.”

Though Mariska has shied away from comparisons to her superstar mother, she did take after her in many ways: she was a pageant queen, being crowned Miss Beverly Hills USA in 1982 and becoming fourth runner-up in the Miss California USA pageant in 1983, and attended UCLA to study acting. Mariska worked in Hollywood in a series of bit parts for years until she finally struck gold when she was cast as Detective Olivia Benson in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 1999 (a role she’s still playing to this day!) In 2013, Mariska received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame right next to her mother’s, sweetly cementing their legacies together forever.

Jayne’s Lasting Legacy

To many, Jayne is solely remembered for her few years of tabloid antics as the ‘new, even more voluptuous Marilyn Monroe,’ or for the unfounded rumors surrounding her untimely death, but she deserves to have her legacy show the reality of her full humanity. She was smart and did what she had to do to achieve her dreams and take care of her family and never let naysayers bring her down. She carved out her place not as a replacement, but as a star in her own right.