Saturdays with the Stars: Jayne Mansfield

Each month of 2020 we will be looking at the careers of some of Hollywood's most famous sex symbols, women whose intense beauty frequently overshadowed their filmic careers.  Last month, our focus was on Marilyn Monroe, the personification of a "sex symbol first, actress second" career, whose iconic look is still synonymous with the movies decades later.  This month, we will investigate the work of a woman whose career wouldn't have been possible without Monroe's, someone who came about as a response to the former Norma Jean's rampant success, but who never achieved the triumphs of Monroe's career, and only truly matched Monroe's fame by having an equally tragic death.  This month, we take a look at the career of Jayne Mansfield.

It would be entirely possible (but probably a bit repetitive) in a series about sex symbols in classic Hollywood to simply focus all 2020 on Marilyn and those actresses who were hired in the years following her fame to be the "next Marilyn."  There's a famous scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta talks about how two seemingly identical actresses dressed in blonde wigs and push-up bras are impersonating totally different actresses, with one being a Marilyn impersonator and another impersonating Mamie van Doren (with a comment about how "Jayne Mansfield must have the night off").  Mansfield and Van Doren are the two most well-known "Marilyn successors," (collectively they were known as "The Three M's") but they were hardly the only ones.  A dozen or so similarly built-and-coiffed women all had varying degrees of success in the years following Monroe's trailblazing at Fox as blonde, buxom women who got the leftover parts that would have gone to Monroe had she not been too famous for them.  Some, like Kim Novak, became so famous as an established star herself that few people think of her as a woman hired at one point to be "the next Marilyn" (Novak isn't going to be a part of this series because I've seen almost all of her most famous films and I wanted to expand my opinion of some of these stars, though she'd obviously fit and I'm hoping to include her in a future season).  Others like Diana Dors & Sheree North quickly rose-and-fell, their names entirely forgotten to even serious film historians.

Since I only had one slot to fill with a "Marilyn knockoff" for the series, I boiled it down to Mansfield and van Doren, but Mansfield's infamous death seemed to fit the mold of a screen star stuck forever in their youth & beauty (the growing theme of this year's series) better than her onetime rival at Universal.  Van Doren, now nearly 90 years old, was able to have a full life that Monroe & Mansfield were never afforded, living long enough to see her career become camp, and profiting off of it, eventually becoming one of the last living stars of the 1950's & getting her own pictorial in her 70's opposite a future generation's sex symbol: Pamela Anderson.  Jayne Mansfield's life took a different turn.

Born Vera Jane Palmer, the future Jayne Mansfield was not an overnight success, even with Marilyn proving there was an obvious appetite for curvaceous blondes (early in her career, Mansfield, a natural brunette, dyed her hair as a result of feedback from a screen test).  She struggled to find stardom, getting turned down by both Paramount and Warner Bros, and didn't really come into the public consciousness until her time as a Playboy centerfold, which in that era was a good way to gain fame (Monroe had done it, albeit against her will, as had household names like Bettie Page and Anita Ekberg).  She worked briefly for Warner in bit parts before finally signing a contract to Fox, less in an effort to mold Mansfield into a star than to try and tamp down Monroe's diva behavior at the studio by proving there were more gorgeous blondes in the sea.

Mansfield's stardom was brief.  She had a huge hit with The Girl Can't Help It (for which she won a Golden Globe), a 1956 movie that had multiple appearances by rock-and-roll stars of the era (including Fats Domino and Little Richard), and the idea that she might succeed Monroe rather than just be a studio ploy erupted as an option.  She had success in the next couple of years with Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (a part she played on Broadway and then in film, and is arguably her best-known performance) and The Wayward Bus, a rare dramatic turn.  However, she quickly evaporated as a box office option, and made poor decisions with her career (turning down, for example, the Kim Novak part in Bell, Book, and Candle which was a big hit at Columbia).  By 1960, she was pretty much washed up at the age of just 27, relegated to supporting parts, independent pictures, and nightclub acts.  She eventually became the first mainstream American actress to go completely nude in the sound era in Promises! Promises!, which briefly reinvigorated her as a box office draw, but she didn't make anything of it (Mansfield had to turn down most of the offers heading her way at the time because she was pregnant with future Law & Order star Mariska Hargitay).  She even made a film toward the end of her career with her nemesis Mamie van Doren (Mansfield reportedly hated her), and probably wouldn't be remembered today were it not for her gruesome death.

Mansfield died on June 29, 1967, in a massive car crash when her driver ran into a tractor-trailer and killed all three adults in the front seat of the car, while Mansfield's three children (including Mariska) survived.  Despite urban legend, Mansfield was not decapitated during the crash, though her head received enough trauma that she almost certainly died upon impact-she was just 34 years old.  One can argue that this is the legacy she's most well-known for today: a buxom, blonde Marilyn knockoff who couldn't find Monroe's success on the big-screen, and is more famous in death than she ever could have hoped to be in life.  This month, we'll investigate the tangible legacy left behind by Mansfield in her movies, and try to get beyond the gorgeous facade we associate most with her.