The Triumph and Tragedy of Jayne Mansfield

Jayne Mansfield’s name has become synonymous with the golden age of Hollywood—or at least its slightly tawdry tail end, when she found fame as a Hollywood bombshell and a walking punchline. But 58 years after her death from a freak car accident, it’s become clear we never really knew her at all. Mansfield’s daughter, Mariska Hargitay, set out to change that with her personal documentary, My Mom Jayne, which premieres this Friday, June 27, on HBO and Max.

So, who was this “smart dumb blond”? This single mother turned overnight star? This Marilyn Monroe manqué, who lived in a pink palace on Sunset Boulevard and became famous for being famous?

Mansfield was born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19, 1933, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the only child of a successful lawyer and a former schoolteacher. She experienced a great deal of loss and dislocation early on, starting with the death of her father: three-year-old Jane was in the car with him when he suffered a fatal heart attack. Her mother soon remarried, and the family moved to an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Dallas, where an ambitious Mansfield mastered four foreign languages, as well as dancing, piano, and violin. She dreamed of moving to Hollywood to be an actor, and even dropped her first name in favor of her middle name, which she thought was more marquee-worthy. Antsy to escape her parents’ strict rules, Jayne married her high school sweetheart, Paul Mansfield, before she’d even graduated. By the end of that year, she’d given birth to her first daughter, Jayne Marie Mansfield.

Determined to have a career, Mansfield enrolled in the University of Texas the next spring, along with her husband. The couple both performed with the Austin Civic Theater—she as an actor, he as a pianist. When Paul joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps during the Korean War in 1952, Jayne took acting classes and bided her time until he returned. One of her early acting coaches remembered her as being “very serious about a career in the theater. And she had a little talent too, for comedy in particular,” according to an article later cited in the biography Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It by Eve Golden. When Paul returned, he agreed to move to Los Angeles, but the marriage quickly fractured, and by 1954, Jayne and her young daughter were on their own in Hollywood.

Although she hoped to audition for serious roles, Mansfield took a casting director’s suggestion and bleached her hair platinum blond. Her first break came via a thriller called Female Jungle, which nabbed her a seven-year contract at Warner Bros. While the studio put her to work with a flurry of small parts, Mansfield did all kinds of public appearances and sexy publicity stunts to raise her profile, even as she insisted to journalists that she wanted to be known for her acting, not her bust.

She briefly got attention for both as a Marilyn Monroe–style star in the Broadway show Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? The play fast-tracked Mansfield’s career, landing her on the cover of Life magazine at the age of 22. But even positive reviews were often wrapped in lewd references to her body, or they framed her as the sexy new girl nipping at Marilyn’s heels.

Mansfield found romance in New York, falling in love with one of Mae West’s chorus boys: bodybuilder and Mr. Universe winner Mickey Hargitay. (Both were still married to others at the time.) When she returned to Hollywood to star in the movie The Girl Can’t Help It, Hargitay followed. Her performance in that movie is effervescent, but already you can see her—or at least her voluptuous body—being turned into a sight gag.

Mansfield certainly played along, as the legendary photo of her at a party next to Sophia Loren, who is side-eyeing Mansfield’s extremely exposed decolletage, makes evident. “She came right for my table. She knew everyone was watching,” Loren later recalled. “I’m staring at her nipples because I am afraid they are about to come onto my plate.”

Mansfield’s next film—an adaptation of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?—was a hit. But that was more or less the peak of her career as a respected actor, after which her reputation increasingly revolved around B movies and breasts. The Girl Couldn’t Help It quotes the celebrity evangelist Billy Graham complaining to a Madison Square Garden crowd that “the average teenager knows Jayne Mansfield’s statistics better than he does the First Commandment,” while talk show host Jack Paar famously introduced her by saying, “And here they are, Jayne Mansfield!”

Occasionally, someone would point to the artificiality of Mansfield’s ditzy, sex bomb persona. “This is a whole facade of yours that isn’t based on who you are—it’s an act!” Groucho Marx said on a talk show at the time. But she saw being “known” as part of her job. An influencer half a century before the term existed, Mansfield attended a dizzying array of store openings and sponsored appearances, in addition to Vegas residencies and military base tours. In between, she started a family with Hargitay, raising Mickey Jr., Zoltan, and Jayne Marie in their pink mansion, complete with a custom-made heart-shaped pool.

After she was dropped from her studio contract, Mansfield put the final nail in her career by agreeing to appear in the sex comedy Promises…Promises!, the first major movie release to feature a Hollywood star (that is, Mansfield) nude. This was still the conservative early 1960s, and several American cities banned it. Accompanying photos of her in Playboy further besmirched her image. In My Mom Jayne, Hargitay’s third wife, Ellen, speaks of Mansfield being absorbed in negativity and depression at that panicky time, because “she wasn’t doing the kind of work she dreamed of doing.”

The Mansfield-Hargitay marriage started showing deep cracks; at one point, she filed for divorce, then reconciled with Hargitay the next day. Rumors of affairs swirled around her, and Mansfield eventually separated from Hargitay for real. While performing at a club in Atlanta in 1963, she began a high-profile, combustible affair with a 28-year-old lounge singer named Nelson Sardelli. When she realized she was pregnant, however, she knew she was at a crossroads. Mansfield reconciled with Hargitay and called off the divorce. The child would be named Mariska Hargitay, and she would be raised as Mickey’s child. “She knew: Mickey will love me forever, and he will love this child,” Mariska told me this past spring. While it took Mansfield’s daughter many years to understand that, she says, “I grew up where I was supposed to, and I do know that everyone made the best choice for me.”

Still, there would be no happily ever after for Jayne and Mickey. Soon after Mariska’s birth, Mansfield got close to Matt Cimber, whom she had hired to direct her in a series of touring theater productions. By September 1963, she had split from Hargitay and soon after married Cimber, with whom she became pregnant with another child. Mansfield also jokily threw her hat into the ring for the presidency and starred in some kitschy films. But none of this seemed to make her happy. In 1966, she divorced Cimber and began dating Sam Brody—who was her lawyer in a nasty custody fight with Cimber. Both her personal life and career began to spiral further.

In June 1967, Mansfield and Brody brought three of her children—Mickey Jr., Zoltan, and Mariska—on a trip to Biloxi, where she visited an air force base and played a few night club gigs. She was due the next day in New Orleans, so a local offered to chauffeur the whole family on the late-night trip. They never made it to their destination: The car slammed into a truck on an unlit road and slid underneath. The three children in the back seat survived, but the driver, Brody, and Mansfield all died.

A gruesome rumor quickly circulated that Mansfield had been beheaded; it was later dismissed by a funeral home employee who saw her body post-crash. But her death did spur the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to propose a new safety feature on semi-trucks to stop smaller vehicles from sliding underneath. They called it the Mansfield Bar. Even in death, Jayne Mansfield could not help but leave her mark.