JAYNE MANSFIELD – THE HIGH PRIESTESS OF THE PINK PALACE
Posted on: June 6, 2015
I know one can argue that Hollywood has always been a strange place, but mid-20th century Hollywood seems to have been particularly odd. There was something eerie about the time when the glamorous 1950s turned into the seedier Swinging Sixties, dragging many stars down weird paths to their destruction. In her book Scandals of Classic Hollywood Anne Helen Petersen described the 1960s as coming to resemble “a graveyard of tragically beautiful female stars”.
Jayne Mansfield was the epitome of the sexy blonde. She famously had the same vital statistics as Marie Antoinette (40-21-35), and had dyed her hair platinum blonde to catch the 1950s craze for all things Marilyn-ish. For a few years she was thought of as a serious contender for Marilyn Monroe’s crown as the ultimate blonde bombshell love goddess. But she lacked Marilyn’s vulnerable little girl persona, which endeared her to men and women alike. By contrast, Jayne was sassy and knew what she wanted. Sometimes dubbed “the smartest dumb blonde in Hollywood”, I would put her more on a par with our own Diana Dors. Funny, popular and sexy, but without the enduring mythology that Marilyn generated, and which keeps us so fascinated by her over 50 years on from her untimely death.
Jayne was a gifted violinist and pianist, could speak several languages, and reputedly had an IQ of 163. From the mid-50s onwards she had a stream of successes with films like The Girl Can’t Help It, The Wayward Bus, and The Sheriff Of Fractured Jaw. By 1960 she was written about in the worldwide press more than anyone else. It must have helped that Jayne was a tireless self-promoter. She would be right at home nowadays, with the media obsession for all things celebrity.
In 1958, partly using $81,000 dollars inherited from her grandmother, Jayne brought a 7-bedroom house in Beverley Hills, with her fiance, a Mr Universe contestant called Mickey Hargitay, who built her a heart-shaped swimming-pool and heart-shaped fireplace. Jayne turned the mansion into a veritable shrine to the colour pink. There were pink cupids surrounded by pink fluorescent lightbulbs, a pink heart-shaped bath-tub surrounded by pink furs, a massive crystal chandelier, and even a fountain spurting pink champagne. Eat your heart out Katie Price!! Jayne welcomed the press into her home, and constantly had herself photographed in her Pink Palace.
The good times weren’t set to last for Jayne though. The era of the bosomy blonde bombshell was on it’s way out, sealed by the tragic death of Marilyn in 1962. The Swinging Sixties brought with it a demand for a more androgynous type of female beauty, a precursor to the super-waif of more modern times. Elfin, tomboyish models like Twiggy were becoming the norm. The sack dress and dreamy look was replacing the jacked-up bosom and bold brassiness of Jayne’s era.
Jayne tried to move with the times, but – as is often the case with the uncaring bitch that can be showbusiness – everything was moving on too fast. By the mid-1960s Jayne was getting desperate to keep her show on the road. She was said to have gatecrashed the 1966 San Francisco Film Festival, only to be publicly humiliated by festival founder, David M Sacks, who said “Madame, I do not know how much a pound you are charging, but whatever it is I will pay it if you will leave”.
It was around this time that Jayne met Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. LaVey had started out as a church organist, but had been so disgusted by the hypocrisy and lies of the preachers he saw, that he had set up the Church of Satan as a riposte to them. He started it, appropriately enough, on 30 April (Walpurgis Night) 1966. LaVey’s Church struck a cord with the rebellious spirit of the Sixties, the era of “God Is Dead”, and this included Jayne. She had always been fascinated by astrology and the Occult, and after she met LaVey she ordered a custom built pink and black Baphomet medallion, which she wore on her ill-fated trip to the San Francisco Film Festival.
Jayne had been taken to a party at LaVey’s house on California Street. She recalled: “Mr LaVey took me into another room to show me the Black Magic charms … and he presented me with one. He said I was now the high priestess of his church”. Jayne was so taken with all this, that she had her High Priestess certificate framed, and hung in her bedroom at the Pink Palace. She even invited LaVey to the Pink Palace for a photo shoot in June 1967. LaVey was to claim later in life that Jayne had indeed been a practising Satanist.
If Jayne was smitten by Mr LaVey and his Church though, her current lover, Sam Brody, was rather less enamoured. He was said to have mocked LaVey, at which LV shouted at him: “You are cursed by the Devil. You will be killed within a year”. It would come horribly true.
A hideous urban legend has grown up around Jayne’s death, mostly fuelled by Kenneth Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon, which has Jayne decapitated in the car accident. It is thought that the decapitation story arose because a blonde wig had been placed on the dashboard of her car, and witnesses mistook it for her head. Even without the decapitation story, Jayne’s death was horrific. She was driving along a dark stretch of road, in the middle of the night near New Orleans, on 29 June 1967, with Brody and three of her children, when the car drove into the back of a farm truck. Jayne’s cause of death was listed as “crushed skull with avulsion of cranium and brain”. The adults, seated in the front, were killed. Jayne’s children, seated in the back, survived with minor injuries.
Jayne’s non-Satanic funeral was conducted by a Methodist minister. After her death the Pink Palace was to change hands many times, and rumours arose that Jayne was still in residence. Ringo Starr said that however many times he tried to have the walls repainted, Jayne’s signature pink colour would always come through. Engelbert Humperdinck claimed that he had detected her perfume, when he lived there in 1977. Several years ago I saw a tribute to Jayne, in which someone claimed to have heard her playing the violin downstairs.
Sadly, the Pink Palace is no longer there. It was pulled down and built over in 2002. I can’t help feeling it should have had a preservation order on it.
ADDENDUM 2023: In her book Bombshells: Five Women Who Set The Fifties On Fire, Shar Daws relates that Jayne suffered a miserable run of bad luck in the last year of her life, and was nervous about upsetting LaVey, even though Sam Brody continued to mock him. At one meeting Jayne had begged LaVey to lift the curse, but LaVey countered that this was impossible, he wouldn’t be able to stop it. Sceptics can legitimately argue that Jayne’s bad luck and untimely end was nothing to do with any curses. Her career had been spiralling down for several years, with a run of truly awful cheap movies. Jayne ignored advice not to appear in them. Although the 1950s had seen her as the Queen Of Self-Publicity, the 60s were less welcoming. Jayne was simply out-staying her welcome on the fame front, and people had had enough of her. The world was moving on. Instead of moving on herself, Jayne desperately tried to keep the fire burning, with diminishing returns. One of the hardest lessons to learn with celebrity must be to acknowledge when your time has been and gone. Although she was still only in her early 30s, Jayne was seen as an ageing relic of yesteryear, which was fatal in the youth-obsessed Swinging Sixties. I read somewhere else of a humiliating encounter Jayne had with The Beatles in an American diner, a couple of years before her death. John Lennon (never usually the most tactful of men) treated her as an embarrassing has-been, even though she was only 7 years older than him.
There was the other problem of Sam Brody’s reckless driving. He was involved in a number of car crashes in the final year, including one which left him with a broken leg. Although on the night of the fatal car-crash, it hadn’t been Brody driving, but their driver, 20-year-old Ronnie Harrison. Brody was so jealous of Ronnie though that he insisted on sitting between him and Jayne.
The final question must be, was Jayne really a Satanist? I suspect that question will run and run. Some biographers have asserted that she wasn’t, that Jayne was at best only mildly interested and amused by LaVey’s beliefs. Jayne herself asserted that she was a devoted Catholic. Many years later LaVey’s daughter, Karla, claimed that Jayne had indeed been a practising Satanist, and that Jayne and LaVey had been involved in romantic relationship. It seems to be a case of who you believe.
Jayne does seem to have led a particularly reckless life in her final years. She drank heavily, became more and more desperate for publicity, and indulged in rough sex. Whilst married to her 3rd husband, film director Matt Cimber, she was seen covered in bruises. Jayne confirmed that Cimber did beat her, but that she loved it. Was this really true, or was it bravado? It is true that some women do enjoy relationships like that. Elizabeth Taylor had notoriously rackety relationships with some of her husbands. Debbie Reynolds was appalled when she saw Liz’s 3rd husband, Mike Todd, getting too rough with her at a dinner-party (including dragging her by her hair), and tried to intervene. Elizabeth rebuffed her help, ordering her to lighten up, and saying “we’re only playing!”
In her book Shar Daws quotes a feminist writer who said that some powerful women want such treatment as they get fed up with their own strength and having to take responsibility for everything all the time. Jayne had been captaining her own ship for years. She had had to work hard to try and keep the show on the road. She was responsible for all the family finances, as well as looking after all the children and the pets. It would have been the same with Elizabeth, who had been acting since she was a child. You do of course get the same with men. A man who has a lot of responsibility and power may well enjoy the odd furtive visit to a dominatrix or nanny figure on the side. For once, someone else can take control and boss them around.
Was there any substance to LaVey’s curse? Well I’ve heard it said that a curse can only truly work if the recipient believes in it, and sadly Jayne did believe that LaVey had cursed her. But there’s also the sad problem that Jayne seemed to have done a good job of cursing herself in her final years. If she had been more selective with her relationships (and her career), and not driven herself so hard, then she may well have not ended up in a terrible car accident. At the close of her book Shar likes to speculate what would have happened if Jayne had lived, and wonders if she may have become a crusader for animal rights, like her contemporary, Brigitte Bardot. Towards the end of her life Jayne gave an impassioned anti-war speech about Vietnam – motivated by a visit to a military hospital – and showed she could be a woman of strong feeling. She certainly had it in her to devote herself to a cause. But whether she could have wrestled herself free of the demon of self-publicity is another matter entirely.
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