Jayne Mansfield: The brand called two

The screen siren cleverly made herself into an icon, but then the audience stopped wanting what she was selling. What happened?

By Andrew Nelson

Aug. 6, 2001 | In 1967, several months before actress Jayne Mansfield drove into a cloud of insecticide to meet her destiny, a London newspaper took the full measure of the movie star and found her breasts to be 2 inches larger than the 44 inches she was then claiming for them.

"Ooh!" she squealed in delight. "I'm a big girl now!"

Her reaction, absurd, even pathetic to the post-feminist ear, was pure Mansfield. More than 40 years before consultant guru Tom Peters spoke of the free-agent movement and business magazine Fast Company wrote of the "The Brand Called You," Vera Jane Palmer of Dallas had grasped self-promotion's essential points to fashion herself into the hottest dish in the Cold War. From 1955 until the early '60s, Mansfield reigned as Hollywood's gaudiest, boldest D-cupped B-grade actress. "The working man's Monroe,"they called her. Her enormous breasts and baby doll voice embodied the '50s American male's fantasy of female sexuality: curvaceous, flirtatious and grateful for a man's -- any man's -- attention. Shipped stacked and stupid guaranteed or your money back. (For the record, Mansfield advertised her I.Q. as 163, but such intellectual pretensions were a nonstarter. Even she admitted her public couldn't care less. "They're more interested in 40-21-35," she said.)

She appeared in films such as "The Girl Can't Help It," "Promises! Promises!" and "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" Her face became a favorite news wire photo, with "voluptuous" as the usual cutline adjective. But by 1965 it was over. The "big girl" had become a desperate woman. "An old bag" was how uncharitable mop top Paul McCartney described the then 32-year-old actress to Playboy that June. Mansfield's last two years were a sad decline. The press dried up. Movie offers vanished. Her days consisted of fifths and fists as alcohol and an abusive boyfriend, Los Angeles trial lawyer Sam Brody, left their marks on the famous figure. Mansfield was reduced to rounds of telethon and dinner theater appearances. She was returning to New Orleans from just such an engagement in Biloxi, Miss., on June 29, 1967, when she died. Her car's driver, his vision obscured by a mosquito sprayer, ran under a tractor-trailer. The collision peeled back the car's roof -- instantly killing the driver, Mansfield, Brody and two of the star's Chihuahuas. Even now the rumor persists that she was decapitated. She wasn't. "Scalped" is the most polite word to describe what happened.

Mansfield and her gruesome end serve as the bimbo's Ozymandias -- a warning against attaching one's public persona to something so fickle as cultural tastes in allure. Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Christina Aguilera and other pulchritudinous stars: Look upon this ruin, ye mighty, and despair.

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