When you lay the facts out in front of you like dug up bones, it all seems so sensational. The story of Jayne Mansfield stacks up incredulously. Of course, there’s a lot about it that isn’t true. As author Eve Golden writes in her biography about Jayne Mansfield: “Jayne has proved to be very frustrating: a performance artist, she told reporters whatever she thought would entertain them and their readers and cement her persona as a delightfully ditzy movie star.” Jayne, Golden continues, told her own untruths so often that she began to believe them herself.
Then there were the tabloids. The unreliable narrators in the form of friends, family, fans and other strangers. And all the fiction that comes from being famous, because the boring, real and mundane; the everyday sadness, the small wins, the quiet moments, errands and checklists don’t make for a good story.
But here are a few of the facts:
Jayne Mansfield was an actress, Playboy playmate, nightclub entertainer, singer. Mother to five children and even more pets including a Great Dane, a bulldog, a basset hound, a Pomeranian, a rabbit, a poodle (dyed pink), cats and Chihuahuas; with names like TS Eliot, Shakespeare, Gallina, Romulus, Ophelia, Suki, Mopscile, Popsicle (the pets — not the children). She had three husbands and rumoured romances that include both John F. and Robert F. Kennedy. She studied French, Spanish, German and Italian, could play violin and piano and claimed to have an IQ of 163.
Jayne owned a 40-room Mediterranean-style mansion on Sunset Boulevard which she named the Pink Palace, because she had painted it pink and sprinkled with crushed sandstone so it would sparkle in the LA sunshine. The Pink Palace had a heart and cupid motif throughout; including a pink heart-shaped pool and pink heart-shaped tub. Also: a floor-to-ceiling pink shag rug in at least one of seven bathrooms and a fountain of pink champagne. She also owned a pink Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible, with pink tail fins. I’ve Googled the car and never seen better.
As well as her film, TV and broadway performances, Jayne also starred in publicity stunts that mostly involved her top falling off. “I’m staring at her nipples because I’m afraid they’re about to come onto my plate,” said Sophia Loren about her famously-photographed side-eye. “In my face you can see fear.”
These are just a few of the facts; some will be sprinkled with a sparkle of crushed fiction. Of course the story’s end, for Jayne at 34 years, is a true tragedy.
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I was on my daily scroll a few months ago, when I paused at a photo of Jayne Mansfield perched on top of a Rolls Royce outside Armley Prison in Leeds, flirting with a prison guard. I knew it was Jayne Mansfield and a Rolls Royce and Armley Prison solely due to the caption of the Facebook post through which it was shared. The caption didn’t say anything about flirting but it looked that way to me. The whole thing seemed bizarre. Obviously, I loved it.
If you Google “Jayne Mansfield Armley Prison” like I did, the first thing that comes up is a website called “Jayne Mansfield in England — Chronicling Jayne Mansfield’s 1967 Tour of England”. This tour, I learned, was in March and May of that year. Jayne died in a car crash a month later on U.S. Highway on route to New Orleans, just after 2AM. That this was her final tour seemed significant. But so too, did the strangeness of its stopping points: fish and chip shops, markets, car dealerships, dusty working men’s clubs. If you know a bit about Jayne, it doesn’t seem too weird that she’d managed to smuggle two Chihuahuas (Mopsicle and Popsicle) into England under a leopard skin coat. Or that she left the country with four, which may not have included Mopsicle and Popsicle who were placed in quarantine when discovered on arrival. Or that during this tour she’d conjured up an excess Chihuahua to give away (Suki — to 64-year old Dorothy North from Middlesex). What does seem weird, at least to me, was that the Hollywood star, Playboy playmate and public rival to Marilyn Monroe performed in the chapel of a prison that I pass most days in Leeds.
“I sure think I boosted the prisoners’ morale,” says Jayne, in an interview with a Daily Mail reporter. “They looked all cheered-up.”
The prison performance was just one of many odd stops that took Jayne from the Savoy Hotel in London through to Newcastle and the North East, Bolton and Blackpool, Liverpool, Weston-super-Mare, Batley and Greasbrough. It was a tour marked by controversies, contract disputes and cancellations, including protests over her planned appearance at Tralee, County Kerry in Ireland. It was just one of many performances that didn’t go ahead. The ones that did, were to mixed reviews — from the "warm and appreciative audience[s]” to those who walked out on the occasion Jayne decided, unexpectedly, to commence her act by reciting Shakespeare. In any case, it started off badly. Of one of her first appearances at Newcastle’s La Dolce Vita Donald Zac of the Daily Mirror wrote: “If I had not seen the whole quivering absurdity with my own bruised eyeballs I would not have believed it.”
Jayne responded to the early criticism in an interview saying: “It just didn’t bother me. I’m playing to sell-out houses. I’m being greeted very warmly, although it’s very cold out right now — but in a minute with all these gorgeous sailors it’s going to be warmer!” She laughs. “But the people are very complimentary. They’re warm, they’re great, I love them, I’m happy to be here.” Of course, we can’t really know whether Jayne was happy to be there, or even happy at all.
“It’s fascinating that somebody who ten — even five — years before was the toast of Hollywood is playing in all these mundane places,” says James Fisher, a librarian at Leeds Beckett University and the creator of the “Jayne Mansfield in England” website. “She basically didn’t turn anything down.”
By the time of the 1967 tour, Jayne was a fading star. And in the backdrop of Northern England, she played — two Chihuahuas in hand — what might have been her most challenging role: her successful former self.
“Just like you, I was fascinated by the pictures of her outside Armley Prison,” says James. “I just thought: why would she choose to do that? And why would she do it in Leeds?”
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The Internet of today, for many of us, consists of a few channels and platforms and timelines owned by the same person or two to three persons. It’s a lot of noise and a lot of notifications. It contains all the empirical answers and an unimaginable number of people can be connected, in some way or another, through it. I could read about literally anything in the entire history of everything, but instead I’ll spend hours tapping my thumb at strangers’ edited lives and feeling insecure. There’s a lot to like about the Internet of today but it’s nice to think too, that a website can still just be a website: a place to read information, share photographs and stories and maybe learn something new.
After James saw the photograph of Jayne at Armley Prison, he wanted to know more about it. While not a fully-fledged Jayne Mansfield fan, he felt it was an interesting part of her story that, while widely reported in the UK press, had become buried beneath what Hollywood remembered of her life and death. “There was quite a lot of source material,” he tells me. “I realised that there was enough there to put together a website about it.” He adds: “I wanted to solve the problem of people having to research it all themselves.”
In the “Welcome” to the website, which is divided into thirteen pages chronicling the story, James, like Golden, acknowledges the challenge around getting the facts right.
“It must be noted that newspapers and the internet get things wrong, and particularly in the case of Jayne, their reporting of events may have been exaggerated,” he writes. “Consequently I have tried to keep a balanced view on what may have happened and where possible have always tried to report Jayne’s side of the story.”
That the researchers of the Jayne Mansfield story want to document her side — to peel away the fictions and filters — is in part a tribute to Jayne; but also an act of excavation. To carefully dust sparkling sandstone from the preserved bones of something true. Which is particularly tough when it comes to Jayne, who didn’t even like pink that much, after all. “I’m not as crazy about it as people are led to believe,” she once said. “My favourite colours are actually neutrals — black and white — but then who thinks of a movie queen in black and white? Everything has to be living colour.”
Since publishing the site in 2019, 52 years since Jayne toured England, James has had some interest and continues to update it with memories and information from those who come across it. He keeps it live for those, like me, who want to learn more about an interesting picture; it’s as much about Leeds, he says, as it is Jayne.
“The entirety of the website could have been a group of Facebook posts, or a series of Tweets; but it would get lost on the timelines somewhere and disappear,” he says. “Maybe a website is old fashioned these days — and I wouldn’t technically say it’s the greatest website I’ve ever seen.”
He adds: “But it does document things, and it will be there as a permanent reminder of that last period of her life, for people to find.”
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Extra Extras.
Read: of course, Jayne Mansfield in England as chronicled by James Fisher & Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It by Eve Golden (2021).
Watch: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? which is a satirical comedy gold.
Listen: “Beg for You” by Charli XCX (ft Rina Sawayama)
Most nights I’ve been reading The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez; an excellent tapas of horrors.
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