Hollywood’s Fallen Angel
Jayne Mansfield’s death in a 1967 car crash was tragic, but when fans looked close at the photos, their blood ran cold. Bold, brash, and smart as a whip, Jayne Mansfield simply loved to push the limits of decency. Not only was she a rabidly popular actress, but also one of the most vivacious sex symbols of her age, until it all ended in one of the most shocking tragedies Hollywood had ever seen.
Jayne Mansfield was born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19th, 1933, in Pennsylvania. When she was just three years old, her father Herbert suffered a fatal heart attack. In the blink of an eye, the young girl’s life changed around her. Her mother remarried soon after and moved the family to Texas. Jayne developed early, and by the time she was in high school, she was already settling into her famous curves. Unsurprisingly, she was one of the most popular girls in school. In 1949, 16-year-old Jayne met the strapping, slightly older Paul Mansfield at a party. Both of them were popular, both of them were beautiful, and both of them were immediately drawn to each other, but as it turned out, they were also both very young and very dumb.
When Jayne moved, she moved fast. Less than a year after they met, she and Paul married when she was just 17 years old, but at the altar, she was hiding a dark secret: the teenage beauty was already three months pregnant on her wedding day. She gave birth to a daughter, Jayne Marie, six months later. It was not the best way to start a marriage, and Jayne found that out the hard way. Now that they were official, Paul expected Jayne to settle down and start becoming a domestic mother hen, but his wife had other ideas. A natural-born performer since she was in diapers, Jayne always harbored dreams of stardom. Luckily, she was nothing if not persuasive, and in 1954, she somehow convinced Paul to pick up and move to Los Angeles to start her career.
Mansfield’s looks got her in a lot of studio doors in the early years, but most of her very first meetings ended with crushing disappointment. Although one producer recognized her obvious talent in these screen tests, both Paramount and Warner Brothers passed on her. Until, that is, Jayne got an ingenious idea. Today, Mansfield is famous as one of the most iconic blonde bombshells in Hollywood history, but casual fans might not know the shocking truth: she was actually a brunette. After her disastrous meetings around Hollywood, Mansfield realized that blondes really do have more fun and hit the peroxide. Well, it worked, but not in the way Mansfield might have intended.
In February 1955, Mansfield got a scandalous claim to fame: she appeared as Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Month, launching thousands of teenage fantasies in the process. Suddenly, Jayne Mansfield was the name on everyone’s lips, and all those studio heads that rejected her thought twice. Mansfield was no air-headed blonde, though. Despite her reputation, her IQ was notably high. She was fluent in no fewer than five different languages, and many called her the smartest dumb blonde. However, she often complained that the public didn’t care about her intellect, preferring to focus on her other assets.
In 1956, Mansfield starred in the musical comedy “The Girl Can’t Help It,” yet her big break came with a disturbing ulterior motive. Everybody just wanted to find the next huge starlet to compete with Marilyn Monroe, and Mansfield was simply another rival blonde bombshell in a long line of them. In fact, Mansfield’s studio, 20th Century Fox, even tastelessly promoted her as “Marilyn Monroe king-sized.” Oh, but it gets more icky than that. Fox already had Marilyn Monroe under contract, and they weren’t just using Jayne Mansfield as counterprogramming; they were using her as bait. Monroe was becoming increasingly difficult, and the studio executives hoped that pushing Mansfield as her competition would make Monroe come crawling back to them.
Professionally, Mansfield was on thin ice, and her personal life was about to hit rock bottom. As Jayne rose in stardom, her marriage to Paul Mansfield took a nosedive. For one, Paul was jealous and possessive from the get-go. For example, when Jayne once entered the Miss California beauty contest in secret, Paul found out and forced her to drop out, unwilling to share her with the greedy eyes of the audience. To be fair to Paul, Jayne wasn’t the easiest wife to have around, or the most faithful. With looks like hers, Jayne simply couldn’t limit herself to the attentions of one man, and the couple often fought about her many affairs. By 1956, Jayne’s dysfunctional marriage was tearing at the seams, and she filed for divorce. In retaliation, Paul Mansfield sued for custody of their little girl, Jayne Marie. He claimed that Jayne was an unfit mother primarily because of her appearance in Playboy. Luckily for Jayne, Paul lost that battle.
While Jayne was still in the middle of her divorce with Paul, she met bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay at a nightclub. However, Hargitay wasn’t just any bodybuilder; he’d actually just won Mr. Universe the year before, and he was performing in Mae West’s chorus line when Mansfield spotted him at the club. Mansfield went gaga at first sight for Hargitay, but one person was no fan of her crush: Mae West herself. The jealous star was enraged at Mansfield’s advances on her Adonis-like employee, and it caused a legendary catfight that same night. The two blondes quarreled, and the spat ended with a fellow chorus member, Mr. California, beating Hargitay up. Mansfield was developing quite the taste for stardom, so when Hargitay proposed to her with a whopping 10-carat ring in 1957, she made sure their wedding was the talk of Tinseltown, marrying the bodybuilder mere days after her divorce from Paul was finalized.
When Mansfield was with Mickey Hargitay, they toured together as a celebrity couple and became famous for their iconic matching leopard print bathing suits and their Tarzan and Jane act. The press even called Mansfield “the girl in the leopard print bikini.” Ever the show-woman, she took shopping trips, went to parties, and even strolled down Hollywood Boulevard in the skimpy getup. In the late 1950s, Jayne Mansfield became her own worst enemy. At the time, Mickey Hargitay was running out of money, and Mansfield claimed very loudly in the press that she was a “poor little rich girl.” Truth be told, Mansfield was getting a little too addicted to celebrity. She quickly became one of the first publicity machines in Hollywood and would purposely set up opportunities to get her picture taken. The biggest trick in her book? The good old wardrobe malfunction. And I’m sure we’re here tonight. One of the most notorious examples of Mansfield’s publicity stunts happened in 1955 when the starlet attended a pool party while wearing an itsy-bitsy red bikini that was two sizes too small.
In 1957, Mansfield starred in the hit film “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?”, which is the flick she’s still most famous for today. In the movie, Mansfield plays the breathy and demanding starlet Rita Marlowe. Only this famous part had a very catty meaning: in playing Rita, Mansfield was essentially just doing a thinly veiled impression of her main rival, Marilyn Monroe. She was at the height of her stardom; that meant there was nowhere to go but down. “Who wants to be tall?”
Although Mansfield and Hargitay had three children together, Jayne quickly got up to her old tricks again. Soon, she carelessly flaunted a series of high-profile affairs right in front of Mickey’s face, and they were doozies. Mansfield’s little black book was the hottest ticket in town. According to many sources, Mansfield had affairs with the likes of Robert Kennedy and even his brother John F. Kennedy, who obviously had a thing for blondes. The nail in the coffin of Mansfield’s relationship to Hargitay, however, was her fling with the Las Vegas crooner Nelson Sardelli. It all led up to a divorce even more bitter and dramatic than her last.
In May 1963, Mansfield was so desperate to divorce Hargitay she insisted they go down to Juarez, Mexico, to push through a quickie split. In a supremely cruel move, Jayne Mansfield also brought along her new lover, Sardelli, to the proceedings just to dig the knife in a little more. Jayne Mansfield could be disturbingly cunning when she wanted. In the wake of her split with Hargitay, the starlet wanted to take the bodybuilder for all he was worth. In a ploy to get more money in the divorce settlement, Mansfield accused Hargitay of kidnapping one of her kids, even though her claims were patently untrue.
Around this time, a strange and terrifying change started to take place in Jayne Mansfield. She had always been a publicity hound, but she now began to push it to the absolute limit. Where she would once accidentally let her gown slip off her braless shoulders, by 1962, she was wriggling out of her entire dress in nightclubs. These antics made her wardrobe designer drop her as a client, and her own agent once sniped, “During this period, she became a freak.”
Although Marilyn Monroe was her early competition, Mansfield always considered fellow racy starlet Mamie Van Doren as her true Hollywood nemesis. So when she had to work with Van Doren in the down-market film “The Las Vegas Hillbillys,” her gloves really came off. Mansfield refused to share scenes with Van Doren, sneering that she was just the “drive-in’s answer to Marilyn Monroe.” In the late 1950s, Mansfield moved from film work to nightclub work, which she was incredibly successful at. Her sultry late-night revue earned her mountains of cash, and it’s not hard to see why.
In 1964, Mansfield married Italian director Matt Cimber, and in many ways, it was her most tragic union of all. Hollywood no longer had as much need for curvy blondes, so Cimber steered Mansfield into trashier and trashier films, dragging her cinematic reputation into the realm of the decidedly seedy. In 1963, Cimber and some greasy male producers convinced Mansfield to star in the upcoming sex comedy “Promises! Promises!” It was a deal Mansfield would likely come to regret. It contained a bare-all scene that made Mansfield the first mainstream Hollywood star to appear fully naked on film, and it got promptly banned all over the world.
Almost as soon as it began, Mansfield’s third marriage to Matt Cimber fell apart. Mansfield had been unfaithful as usual, but this time her flaws extended far past cheating. Depressed, she had started drinking herself to distraction. Mansfield and Cimber’s marriage officially ended in 1966, and to many on the outside, it seemed like her life was spiraling out of control. Mansfield may have looked like an angel, but her private tastes were demonic. In 1966, Mansfield met with the infamous Anton LaVey, the head of the Church of Satan. The rendezvous caused a media sensation, and soon outlets claimed that Mansfield was a practicing Satanist. LaVey even awarded Mansfield the title “High Priestess of San Francisco’s Church of Satan.” Although many people wondered at the time if Mansfield’s interest in LaVey and his church was just another publicity stunt, his daughter made a much more scandalous claim. Karla LaVey not only asserted that Mansfield was indeed a true-blue practicing Satanist, she also confessed that Anton LaVey and Mansfield had a bedroom relationship to boot.
After leaving Cimber, Mansfield began living with her attorney, Sam Brody. She sunk into a life of alcohol and drunken fights and was making most of her money through tawdry burlesque shows. In 1966, Mansfield and her children were visiting Jungleland USA in California when a lion savagely attacked her young son Zoltan, biting him in the neck. The attack was so severe that Zoltan underwent brain surgery and also contracted meningitis after the procedure. Thankfully, he eventually pulled through, but Mansfield would have precious little time left with her son. In December ’66, while her son was still recovering, Mansfield filmed a steamy two-minute cameo appearance in the Walter Matthau romp comedy “A Guide for the Married Man.” As it happened, it would be the very last time that she acted in front of a camera.
In the early morning hours of June 29th, 1967, the last tragedy of Mansfield’s short life occurred. She was on her way to New Orleans with her driver, her attorney, and her children, Miklós, Zoltan, and Mariska. At 2:25 a.m., their Buick slammed into the back of a tractor-trailer that had been covered in a thick fog of insecticide. When the mist cleared, the truth was devastating. When the Buick hit the trailer, all three adults in the front seat perished instantly. Mansfield herself was tragically only 34 years old at the time. The wreckage was so devastating it took officers and first responders an excruciatingly long time to understand what had really happened and what Mansfield’s final moments were like.
When news broke of Mansfield’s violent death, wild rumors started flying. In particular, many people began to whisper that the force of the crash had decapitated her. One of the biggest reasons for this came from a real photograph of the scene, which seemed to show her signature blonde hair pressed into the windshield of the wreckage. The truth, however, was much different. When Mansfield’s official autopsy came out, it was announced that she had died from a crushed skull, not decapitation. So what was that blonde hair doing on the windshield of the sheared-off car? Gruesomely enough, it was actually part of Mansfield’s wig, which went flying in the chaos of the collision. Nonetheless, the urban legend about her decapitation still persists.
Perhaps the only glimmer of light in all this darkness was that all of Mansfield’s children miraculously survived the horrific crash. Still, they didn’t escape unscathed. Mariska Hargitay, who now plays the popular character of Olivia Benson on “Law & Order: SVU,” carries a zigzag scar on the side of her head to this day. After her death, Mansfield’s Buick became an object of morbid fascination. One of her superfans bought the car and kept it perfectly preserved for years. Reportedly, the vehicle even still had bloodstains on the seats from that fateful night. While it’s doubtful that even our glitzy, attention-seeking Jayne would enjoy this tribute, it seems like some people are into that. The car sold for $8,000 at a 1999 auction.
One of the most notorious pictures of Mansfield features a young Sophia Loren giving the actress some serious side-eye while Mansfield grins and poses for a picture in a naturally very low-cut dress. People have wondered about the true meaning behind Loren’s look for years, and the Italian actress finally revealed the whole story. Delightfully, it’s exactly what you think. The party that evening was supposed to be Loren’s official welcoming into Hollywood, but Mansfield apparently sauntered in late, sat down beside her, and tried to steal the spotlight. Despite any dislike that Loren might have had toward Mansfield for hijacking her big debut, she maintains there was never any long-lasting grudge between them. Indeed, for many years after Mansfield’s death, people repeatedly came up to Loren with the infamous photo and asked her to sign it. Out of respect, she refused every single time. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and subscribe for more videos. Leave and walk out on all this publicity.
