Tragic Hollywood, Beautiful, Glamorous And Dead

by Jackie Ganiy

  Wherever she went, she traveled with an entourage of bodyguards, photographers and animals, as well as trunks full of furs, designer clothes, and jewelry. There are numerous photos and publicity reels of her posing poolside in a bikini, sucking in her stomach so hard her bellybutton must have been pressing into her backbone. This girl was always “on”, even when it was more appropriate to be “off.” Fox Studios sold her to the public as “Marilyn Monroe King-sized!” and Jayne did her level best to live up to that title. When Director Frank Tashlin foolishly asked her why she wanted to be a star, pointing out it was a life of no privacy and heartaches, she smiled and said, “I like the Jaguars and minks.” Well, okay then!

  Jayne made one serious film before her career took a nosedive into that great empty infinity pool known as “washed up”. It was called The Wayward Bus, and it was based on the John Steinbeck novel of the same name. This is her only performance where the words subtle and Jayne can actually be used in the same sentence without a punchline. She played a melancholy stripper who falls for a traveling salesman against her will, while traveling on a bus.

  Critics praised Jayne’s work, and she was rewarded with a costarring role opposite one of her idols, Cary Grant, in an insipid, poorly-written disaster called Kiss Them For Me. Jayne was again playing an impossibly dumb cartoonish blonde who loses out to a classy, cool redhead, played by model Suzy Parker. Her advisers told her not to take the part, but Jayne wanted to work with Grant, and besides, it was a role she knew oh so well. The movie flopped–one of Grant’s few missteps—and Fox lost interest in Jayne.

  In 1958, after their respective divorces were final, Jayne and Mickey were married in a small chapel, in front of thousands of gawking fans and several members of the press. Fox had decided to ignore Jayne, so she took her act to Las Vegas. Headlining at the Tropicana for weeks, she earned an unheard of $25,000 a week—ten times what Fox paid her. Take that, Marilyn! Playboy came knocking again, and she again posed for a photo spread. This time, the photos were only semi-nudes, and were considered more tasteful than her previous centerfold. Her sharp wit was exposed in an on-camera phone interview she granted to acrimonious nerd supreme, gossipist Hyde Gardner, in 1958. “Jayne you’ve been crowned Queen Of Uranium, Miss Peanut Butter and Jelly, Bluebonnet Bell of Texas. Now of all your honors, which title do you cherish the most?” he asked, with only half his tongue in his cheek. “You know which title I like?” She cooed, “I like to be called mother.” The sardonic smile that flashes across Gardner’s face was priceless. “Touché, dear.” He replied.

  Mary Hargitay, Mickey’s ex-wife, was not having as much fun, and filed a petition for more child support from her stray husband. Mickey and Jayne answered her petition with a plea of poverty (yeah, you heard that right), despite the fact that they had just purchased a mansion in Beverly Hills, and Jayne still had money left over to keep her poodle dyed pink. Jayne signed a sworn statement claiming she slept on the floor of her estate because she couldn’t afford to buy furniture. The judge laughed (no really, he did!), and Mary’s petition was granted. The press rolled it’s collective eyes, and Jayne received the first seriously negative publicity of her career.

  Jayne certainly earned her favorite title, “mother” (five times over, eventually). She was this walking contradiction—her unruly boobs escaping from their almost spiritual restraints in one photograph, then posing with one baby in her arms and three at her feet in another. Fox wanted to cast her in Bell, Book and Candle opposite James Stewart and Jack Lemmon, but she had to turn down the role due to pregnancy. Big mistake. Her career was already on shaky ground, and that would turn out to be the last decent part she was offered for a long time. In 1959 she had a role in the western, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw—a poorly received film that had the distinction of being the last mainstream film of her career. The producers of Fractured Jaw tried to cast her in the Paul Newman comedy, Rally Round The Flag, Boys!, but both Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, disliked Jayne, and made the studio cast Joan Collins instead.

  Mansfield on the set of Too Hot to Handle(1960)

  The next few years were not pretty for Jayne. She left her twenties and her youth behind, entering her thirties and a period of financial and career difficulty. Three more children would follow in quick succession, while Fox loaned her out repeatedly to European studios, where she made one terrible film after another. Then something really weird happened. Jayne went missing! Two days later, she and Mickey turned up on a sandbar, apparently stranded there after a boating accident. The pictures of Jayne covered in a blanket and looking like shit were plastered all over the press, and people buzzed that it was just another one of her wild publicity stunts. Come on! This was Jayne Mansfield people! There was no way she would allow herself to be photographed looking like a chewed cat toy if she was staging a publicity stunt! For the first time in her life, she seemed hurt by publicity.

  By the early '60s, Fox had dropped Jayne, her marriage flatlined, and her looks were eroding. She appeared in public visibly plumper. Her face looked puffy due to alcohol and prescription drug abuse. Seeking to bolster her frail ego, she had multiple extramarital affairs. One night, Mickey walked in his bedroom to find her with two strange men in their bed, drunk. He forgave her, maybe because they had three (soon to be four) children together, and the marriage waddled limply on for another year.

  In 1962, the same year Fox dropped Jayne, Marilyn Monroe died from a drug overdose, and the era of the blonde bombshell was officially over. In truth, Marilyn Monroe had that whole fragile, girl/woman thing down, where as Jayne was seen as this crude, oversexed slut who was more object than woman. In the beginning, she really did give Monroe a run for her money, but she played it out quickly, and the public would always prefer the “vulnerable little girl” to the “aggressive sexpot.”

  No one was knocking on Jayne’s door anymore. Playboy to the rescue again! Only this time, the photo spread Jayne did was so explicit, so vulgar, and so shameless that Hugh Hefner was actually arrested and booked on obscenity charges. He was forced to defend himself in a well-publicized trial that must have made Larry Flint proud. Jayne then shocked more people (as if this were possible) by appearing nude in a truly awful movie called Promises, Promises. She was the first well-known star to cross this barrier, and it was out of pure desperation. OMG, stop the madness!

  Jayne entered a period in her life that shall henceforth be called “the supper club nudie years,” in which she would appear at nearly any establishment, and do nearly anything, for money. Most of these shows were little more than striptease acts, but Jayne always referred to them as “parodies.” She appeared regularly in regional theater productions of famous Marilyn Monroe films, such as Bus Stop and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. While she was doing Bus Stop in some Midwestern dump, she fell in love with the director, Matt Cimber. She informed Mickey, and he obligingly agreed to a divorce. That was a long six years. She married Matt in Mexico, and returned home with bruises as a souvenir of her honeymoon.

  Jayne had become hopelessly addicted to diet and sleeping pills, in addition to alcohol. She began to have a more difficult time keeping that 21” waist in check after four pregnancies and a diet rich in booze. She realized, even before the wedding cake was decimated, that she had made a mistake with Matt, but it was too late. She spent endless hours on the phone to long-suffering ex-husband, Mickey, pouring her sad heart out and lamenting her choices. “I loved her but I was powerless to do anything,” Mickey said, “She was married to another man.”

  Baby number five came along, and Jayne temporarily cleaned up her act. Her husband took charge of her career, and she made some of the worst movies of all time during this period. She was offered, and turned down, the role of Ginger in Gilligan’s Island, and her own television show never materialized. Disenchanted with both her career and her husband, she filed for divorce from Matt, and hired powerhouse attorney Sam Brody. She was afraid Cimber would try to take custody of their son, claiming she was an unf
it mother due to her addictions and lifestyle (how silly). Brody, who was married with kids, went a little crazy over Jayne, and left his family to pursue his pink passion, showering her with jewelry and other expensive gifts. Not a wealthy man, he borrowed $250,000 from Jimmy Hoffa and the mob to win his love’s heart.

  In the midst of all of this chaos, her six-year-old son, Zoltan, was badly mauled by a lion during his mother’s publicity shoot at a place called Jungle Land, in Sherman Oaks. The press fallout was immediate, as people were angered that the boy wasn’t there on a family outing, but as a tag along on yet another of Jayne’s endless bids for attention, and had probably not been properly supervised. He developed meningitis, and was given a fifty-fifty chance of survival. He did pull through, but Jungle Land didn’t. Brody sued the park, and won a $1,600,000 settlement for Jayne, forcing the Jungle Land to close. Fortunately for Jayne, she had already won custody of her infant son from Matt Cimber, or things might have gone differently for her in that regard.

  She went from one brutal relationship to another, moving in with Sam Brody, who was suddenly inclined to throw punches, instead of diamonds, at her. Brody had been involved in the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby’s trial, and he knew how to be a bully. He didn’t limit his bad guy antics to Jayne either. He harassed, intimidated and beat sixteen-year-old Jayne Marie as well. Think Nelson from The Simpsons, only meaner. Everything came to a head with Jayne Marie when she walked into the Beverly Hills police station sobbing, with visible bruises and welts, saying Sam beat her with a belt. As Jayne Marie told the story, both her mother and Sam had been as drunk as two Irish Rovers on Sunday, and while Sam wailed on her, her own mother egged him on by saying “Beat her more! Beat her like you beat me!” Wow. Jayne Marie was placed in protective custody, and the press held another Jayne Mansfield BBQ.

  In 1966, she invited herself to the San Francisco Film festival, and the event chairman was not pleased. He held a press conference in which he stated, “She was not invited. She came by herself. I finally approached her and said, ‘Madam, I don’t know how much a pound you are charging, but I will pay it if you will leave.’ I suppose it would be nice to have some sexy starlets at the festival, like they do in Cannes. In my opinion, Jayne Mansfield does not fit the bill.” Ouch. Yes, because the San Francisco Film Festival can afford to be picky, being so prestigious and all.

  While in San Francisco, she decided to stop in at The Church of Satan, and get herself ordained as High Priestess. The church’s founder, Anton LeVey, took a shine to our Miss Mansfield, but he didn’t care for Brody, placing a death curse on his head for supposedly “abandoning” the church. Jayne kept her high priestess certificate framed and hanging in her pink bedroom at her pink mansion. True story.

  Amazingly, during this E-ticket, meteoric free fall, Jayne was offered a small role in A-list Hollywood movie, A Guide for the Married Man. She gave a truly charming performance opposite wonderful British actor, Terry Thomas, as a (what else) busty dumb blonde who, after her and Thomas’s illicit tryst, can’t seem to locate her bras. “Oh don’t worry!” she chirps, “If your wife finds it, she’ll just think it’s hers!” Thomas gives her huge cleavage a sideways glance and replies, “Don’t be ridiculous.” Tsk tsk, Jayne. This temporary career reprieve did not last, and soon she found herself in England, playing coal and stockyard venues for money. The shows were verged on porn, with Jayne playing Jayne, which she again insisted was a parody. She became a caricature of her own ridiculous image, now sad and outdated in the age of Twiggy, Bob Dylan, and the feminist movement. Admittedly, she did try to update her look, with huge bouffant wigs and heavy, exaggerated '60s eyeliner, but it all just looked pathetic and artificial. When she returned to the states, only supper clubs were offering her jobs.

  On the evening of June 29, 1967, Jayne wrapped up another highbrow striptease at the prestigious (tongue in cheek) Gus Stevens Supper Club, in Biloxi, Mississippi. She, Sam, three or four Chihuahuas (seriously, what’s with the Chihuahuas?), three of Jayne’s children (Miklos, Zoltan and Mariska) and a twenty-year-old driver named Ron Harrison, all piled into the borrowed 1966 Buick Electra (owned by Gus Stevens himself!) for a long overnight drive to New Orleans, and a scheduled local television appearance there the following morning. Jayne made one last phone call to Mickey, telling him not to worry about the kids, that they would be asleep in the backseat the whole trip.

  Jayne Mansfield on stage just hours before her death.

  Thirty miles outside Biloxi, on highway 90, they ran into a dense fog caused by a pesticide truck spraying for mosquitos ahead of them. Directly in front of the Buick was an eighteen-wheel truck. When the truck entered the pesticide fog, the driver threw on his brakes because he was suddenly blinded. Unfortunately, Ron Harrison didn’t, and the Buick smashed into the back of the semi with such force, the entire top of the car was sheared off as it became wedged underneath the trailer section. Estimates put The Buick at around eighty miles per hour. Jayne, Ron and Sam were killed instantly, as was at least one of the dogs. Incredibly, all three children survived with minor injuries. Accident photos circulated the world over, depicting what appeared to be a blonde head wedged in the windshield wipers on the dashboard of the mutilated car. Thus, a gruesome urban legend was born. Another, lesser-known photo shows Jayne, her body lying on the side of the road; her head still on her shoulders, but horribly crushed. The blonde “head” on the dash was either a wig, or her actual scalp. Jayne was thirty-four. It was good riddance to Brody, sad for Harrison, who probably had a hard time keeping his eyes on the road while sitting next to busty Jayne, and a tragic sayonara to the last of the screen’s blonde sex bombs.

  “The movie star, well she crashed her car. Everyone said she was beautiful, even without her head. Everyone said she was dangerous.” So goes the opening line to song “Movie Star”, made popular in the '90s by a band called Cracker. Was that a cryptic reference to poor Jayne? Probably.

  How disappointed the Blonde dynamo would be to discover that only her death is talked about today, not her life. How frustrated she would be to find out that all those publicity-seeking, attention-grabbing efforts were a huge waste of time, and that the single headline she did not solicit was, in the end, the only one that mattered.

  Rare newspaper photo of Jayne Mansfield’s body with her head still attached.

  Sharon Tate

  The news crackled across radios and spread across television screens, all over the sprawling chaos of Los Angeles. With the revelation of each grisly detail, shock and fear spread as well, starting in the posh living rooms of the rich and famous, then trickling down into the ordinary family rooms of the rest of the city. Three people had been found murdered, no four, no five! Five souls horribly butchered in a gated estate in Benedict Canyon, surrounded by a high wall and a sophisticated security system! Holy crap! If those people weren’t safe in their own home, who was?

  They weren’t merely murdered either, but mutilated, stabbed and shot over and over and over again, and their blood was used to scrawl cryptic messages all over the house. One of the victims was lovely Sharon Tate, an actress who just made a big splash in the highly publicized film, Valley of the Dolls. It got worse. Tate, wife of the Polish director Roman Polanski, was eight months pregnant. The horror! Why? Why this house? Why her? Just why?

  Sharon Marie Tate was born in Dallas, Texas in 1943 (why does Texas get all the pretty girls?) to Doris and Paul Tate. Her father was in army intelligence, and spent most of his time away from the family. Doris got bored one day and decided to enter her six-month-old daughter in the “Miss Tiny Tots of Dallas” contest (this was years before “Toddlers In Tiaras”), and of course, Sharon won. As the years passed, Sharon realized the power that the attention her beauty commanded, and began modeling. She even appeared on the cover of Stars and Stripes magazine in a bathing suit and straddling a missile. Colonel Daddy was not pleased, but also never home, and Sharon carried on with her activities without any long, boring speeches or mor
al comeuppances.

  The colonel moved his growing family—with two more daughters newly added—to Italy in 1959, where Sharon blew the boys away at Vicenza American High School in Verona (where Romeo and Juliet are ‘buried’). She was a cheerleader, with endless offers from lovestruck admirers looking to carry her books, and she reigned supreme as the glittering homecoming queen, a position the school created for her. She was the girl that most other girls really wanted to hate, with her perfect skin and knockout body, but because she was so damn nice, they ended up being her best friend, and basking in her aura instead. Sharon enchanted everyone everywhere she went.

  In the early '60s, American movies were using exotic European locales as backdrops for period pieces. She snuck herself into a crowd scene in Barabbas, and got hired as an extra on Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man. One of the costars in that film, Richard Beymer, was so smitten that he took her out few times, surely giving her the thrill of her life. He also gave her his agent’s business card.

  Once home in California, Sharon wasted no time in dialing up Hal Gefsky to arrange a meeting. She convinced her family to let her move to Hollywood by herself, at the tender age of nineteen, to pursue her dream. Despite having nearly zero acting experience, Gefsky signed her up on the spot. See, pretty girls really do get all the breaks. She started with a little fashion modeling and a few commercials. Photographs taken of her at the time clearly show she had that mod, waif-thin, '60s vibe going on, with just a touch of whimsy. There were also a lot of candid photos of her and Mr. Gefsky, who looked uncomfortably like a dirty old man, frolicking in his fancy backyard pool.