Some of the best known lurid “facts” about Jayne Mansfield, the American film star of the 50s and 60s, are based on rumour. So the directors of a new documentary about her short and scandalous life faced a difficult task.
Was Mansfield, one of the first actresses to be marketed as a “blonde bombshell”, also a violin-playing intellectual with superb comic timing who spoke five languages? Or was the star who came to be known as the “working man’s Marilyn Monroe” actually a devil worshipper who was decapitated in a car crash as the result of a curse?
For the makers of Mansfield 66/67, these questions were only part of the story. Instead, the American film-makers P David Ebersole and Todd Hughes have created an unorthodox account of the world of Hollywood gossip and illusion. Top-billed contributors to the documentary, out in cinemas last month, include Tippi Hedren, Alfred Hitchcock’s muse, Kenneth Anger, the author of the bible of tacky ephemera Hollywood Babylon, and the film director John Waters, a master of offbeat kitsch.
The release of Mansfield 66/67 in Britain marks the 50th anniversary of the star’s death at 34. Focused on the last two years of her life, the film was made after Ebersole and Hughes failed to find producers for their fictionalised screenplay The Devil Made Her Do It, about Mansfield’s reputed dalliance with the San Francisco-based satanic guru Anton LaVey.
Unconventional elements of their finished documentary include interpretive dance sequences and a series of animated recreations of some key Mansfield myths. There are also clips of the star in the hit films The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? as proof of her sure sense of comic timing.
Born Vera Jayne Palmer in Pennsylvania in 1933, she was initially hired by Warner Brothers in 1955 and then by 20th Century Fox, where she was seen as a potential successor to the troublesome Monroe.
In her short life she also made a string of centrefold appearances as “playmate of the month” in Playboy magazine and had three husbands and five children. Her youngest child from her second marriage to the 1955 Mr Universe winner, Mickey Hargitay, is the actress Mariska Hargitay, a regular on the television show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
One fact about Mansfield never in doubt was her trademark proclivity for revealing her ample bosom. Those not familiar with her acting may know her name simply because of a notorious photograph of her taken in 1957 at a party Paramount Studios gave for the rising Italian star Sophia Loren. Although Loren was officially belle of that ball, it was her bemused reaction to Mansfield’s low-cut gown that became Hollywood folklore.
Mansfield’s film career hit the buffers in the mid-1960s and she was forced to resort to working in nightclubs. She continued to make promotional special appearances, however, and travelled out to cheer the troops in Vietnam. It was at this stage, while also dating a married lawyer, Sam Brody, that she began to see LaVey, the self-styled head of the Church of Satan who had painted his home black and wore a dark cape. When a jealous Brody challenged LaVey over Mansfield’s affections, the legend says a fatal curse was brought down upon his head.
During 1966 and 1967, Mansfield and Brody survived seven car crashes before an eighth eventually killed them both. The actress had been travelling from Biloxi, Mississippi, to New Orleans to appear on television when her car hit a trailer head-on. The accident gave birth to a persistent rumour that Mansfield’s head, or at least her blond wig, had been flung from the car. If it was not LaVey’s curse that killed her, it may have been the fault of a truck that had sprayed a thick fog of insect repellent across the road.
• On 30 April 2018 LaVey’s first name was corrected. It was Anton not Anthony.
