Okay, here’s a sarcastic blog post about Jayne Mansfield’s Hollywood career, stripped down to the point of being a humorous, yet sincere, commentary on the industry.
From the age of six, Jayne Mansfield knew she wanted to be a movie star. The “working man’s Monroe,” as she later came to be known, was 21 when she moved to Los Angeles in 1954 alongside her then-husband Paul Mansfield and their three-year-old daughter, Jayne Marie. She immediately got to work making her superstar aspirations a reality—a scheme that gained more traction with each passing day. “Half of the time the dishes weren’t washed and the kitchen was dirty, for each morning I started out in full pursuit of my dream,” she said, according to biographer May Mann. Mansfield secured her first studio contract less than a year after her arrival in Tinseltown. Within three years, she had won a Golden Globe for her starring role in the musical comedy The Girl Can’t Help It.
The bombshell image she built proved challenging to shed after establishing her career as an actor, but it was instrumental in her rise to fame; at first, studio producers didn’t bite. “If I couldn’t go through them, I figured I’d just have to go around,” she told the Saturday Evening Post of the powers that be in 1957. “Then, right at that moment, I made the greatest discovery of my life. I discovered publicity.” The Dallas-raised starlet bleached her naturally brunette hair, played up a comedic “dumb blonde” persona (despite her purported genius-level IQ), and was photographed as often as possible. Everything in Mansfield’s life, including her trademark feminine interior design style, aligned with a carefully constructed identity. Pink was her signature color, and she embraced an extravagantly girlish style when it came to the home: Faux fur, hearts, cherubs, and stuffed animals were incorporated in excess throughout the actor’s longtime SoCal dwelling, which she dubbed the Pink Palace.
Mansfield holds a six-week old Mariska Hargitay in this 1964 snapshot.
Photo: Archive Photos/Getty Images
A decade after moving to Hollywood, Mansfield welcomed daughter Mariska Hargitay (now a superstar in her own right, of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit fame). Decades after her mother’s fatal car accident, the veteran television actor unpacked Mansfield’s complicated life—and a unearthed few family secrets—in the documentary My Mom Jayne, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. In it, Hargitay grapples with her relationship to her late mom after years of distancing herself from Mansfield’s larger-than-life persona, which included the adoption of a breathy baby voice similar to Monroe’s. “I never wanted to hear that voice,” Hargitay told W magazine, sharing that she avoided watching her mother’s films for a time. “It just undid me.” Mansfield began to pursue more serious roles after making a name for herself in the industry, but those offers were far and few between. “She was put in a box,” Hargitay said of the typecasting. Throughout the documentary, the SVU star uncovers a more nuanced lens through which to view Mansfield, who, like Hargitay, had serious acting aspirations, a gift for learning foreign languages, and—in an eerie case of history repeating—also lost a parent at three years old while riding in a car with them. “Everybody wants to be seen for their true self. And no one saw her,” Hargitay told W. “So I got to see her. And that’s extraordinary.”
Read on for a look at the tenacious star’s domestic life in her equally showstopping abodes.
From the age of six, Jayne Mansfield knew she wanted to be a movie star. The “working man’s Monroe,” as she later came to be known, was 21 when she moved to Los Angeles in 1954 alongside her then-husband Paul Mansfield and their three-year-old daughter, Jayne Marie. She immediately got to work making her superstar aspirations a reality—a scheme that gained more traction with each passing day. “Half of the time the dishes weren’t washed and the kitchen was dirty, for each morning I started out in full pursuit of my dream,” she said, according to biographer May Mann. Mansfield secured her first studio contract less than a year after her arrival in Tinseltown. Within three years, she had won a Golden Globe for her starring role in the musical comedy The Girl Can’t Help It.
The bombshell image she built proved challenging to shed after establishing her career as an actor, but it was instrumental in her rise to fame; at first, studio producers didn’t bite. “If I couldn’t go through them, I figured I’d just have to go around,” she told the Saturday Evening Post of the powers that be in 1957. “Then, right at that moment, I made the greatest discovery of my life. I discovered publicity.” The Dallas-raised starlet bleached her naturally brunette hair, played up a comedic “dumb blonde” persona (despite her purported genius-level IQ), and was photographed as often as possible. Everything in Mansfield’s life, including her trademark feminine interior design style, aligned with a carefully constructed identity. Pink was her signature color, and she embraced an extravagantly girlish style when it came to the home: Faux fur, hearts, cherubs, and stuffed animals were incorporated in excess throughout the actor’s longtime SoCal dwelling, which she dubbed the Pink Palace.
Mansfield holds a six-week old Mariska Hargitay in this 1964 snapshot. Photo: Archive Photos/Getty Images
A decade after moving to Hollywood, Mansfield welcomed daughter Mariska Hargitay (now a superstar in her own right, of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit fame). Decades after her mother’s fatal car accident, the veteran television actor unpacked Mansfield’s complicated life—and a unearthed few family secrets—in the documentary My Mom Jayne, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. In it, Hargitay grapples with her relationship to her late mom after years of distancing herself from Mansfield’s larger-than-life persona, which included the adoption of a breathy baby voice similar to Monroe’s. “I never wanted to hear that voice,” Hargitay told W magazine, sharing that she avoided watching her mother’s films for a time. “It just undid me.” Mansfield began to pursue more serious roles after making a name for herself in the industry, but those offers were far and few between. “She was put in a box,” Hargitay said of the typecasting. Throughout the documentary, the SVU star uncovers a more nuanced lens through which to view Mansfield, who, like Hargitay, had serious acting aspirations, a gift for learning foreign languages, and—in an eerie case of history repeating—also lost a parent at three years old while riding in a car with them. “Everybody wants to be seen for their true self. And no one saw her,” Hargitay told W. “So I got to see her. And that’s extraordinary.”
Read on for a look at the tenacious star’s domestic life in her equally showstopping abodes.
