Jayne Mansfield(1933-1967)

One of the leading sex symbols of the 1950s and 1960s, film actress Jayne Mansfield was born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19, 1933 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the only child of Vera J. (née Palmer; later Peers) and Herbert W. Palmer. Her parents were well-to-do; her father was a successful attorney in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where Jayne spent a portion of her childhood. Her parents were born with the same surname, and her ancestry was seven-eighths English and Cornish and one-eighth German. She was reportedly a talented pianist and played the violin when she was young.

Tragedy struck when Jayne was three: her father suddenly died of a heart attack. Her mother remarried three years later, moving Jayne to Dallas, Texas and buying a small house where the child had violin concerts in their driveway. Her IQ was reportedly 163, and she attended the University of Dallas and participated in little-theater productions. In 1949, at age 16, she married Paul Mansfield, who was five years her senior; in November 1950, 17-year-old Jayne gave birth to Jayne Marie Mansfield. The union ended in divorce, but she kept the surname Mansfield, considering it a good surname for an actress.

After some productions there and elsewhere, Jayne decided to go to Hollywood. Her first film was a bit role as a cigarette girl in La peau d'un autre (1955). Although the roles in the beginning were not much, she was successful in gaining those roles because of her ample physical attributes which placed her in two other films that year, Colère noire (1955) and Le témoin à abattre (1955). Her breakout role came the next year with a featured part in Le cambrioleur (1957). By the time she portrayed Rita Marlowe in La blonde explosive (1957) and La blonde et les nus de Soho (1960), Jayne was now known as the poor man's Marilyn Monroe. She did not get the plum roles that Marilyn got in her productions; her films were more of a showcase for her body. She did have a real talent for acting, but the movie executives insisted that she stay in her dumb-blonde stereotype roles. By the 1960s, her career options were shrinking to making somewhat embarrassing guest appearances on game shows, such as four appearances on the popular game show What's My Line? (1950) in 1956, 1957, 1964, and 1966. By 1962, she was dropped from 20th Century Fox and the rest of her career had smaller options like being in B-movies and low-budget movies or performing at food stores or small nightclubs.

While traveling from a nightclub in Biloxi, Mississippi, she was 30 miles from New Orleans where she was to be on television the following day when she was killed instantly on Highway 90 in Slidell, Louisiana in a car crash in the early hours of June 29, 1967, when the car in which she was riding slammed into the back of a semi-tractor trailer truck that had stopped due to a truck in front of the tractor trailer that was spraying for bugs. Her car went under the truck at nearly 80 miles per hour. Her boyfriend Samuel Brody and their driver Ronnie Harrison were also killed. The damage to the car was so bad that the engine was twisted sideways. She was not, however, decapitated, as had long been misreported. She was 34 years old.

Mansfield's funeral was on July 3, 1967 and hundreds of people lined the main street of Pen Argyl for Mansfield's funeral, a small private ceremony at Fairview Cemetery in Plainfield (outside Pen Argyl), Pennsylvania (where her father was also buried), attended by her family. The only ex-husband to attend was Mickey Hargitay. Her final film, Single Room Furnished (1966), was released the following year. In 2000, Mansfield's 97 year old mother, Mrs. Vera Peers, was interred alongside Mansfield.

After Mansfield's death, her mother, as well as her ex-husband Mickey Hargitay, William Pigue (legal guardian for her daughter Jayne Marie), Charles Goldring (Mansfield's business manager), and Bernard B. Cohen and Jerome Webber (administrators of the estate) all filed unsuccessful suits to gain control of her estate, which was initially estimated at $600,000 ($3,712,000 in 2018 dollars), including the Pink Palace (estimated at $100,000 ($619,000 in 2018 dollars)), a sports car sold for $7,000 ($43,000 in 2018 dollars), her jewelry, and Sam Brody's $185,000 estate left to her in his last will ($1,145,000 in 2018 dollars).

In 1971, Beverly Brody sued the Mansfield estate for $325,000 ($2,011,000 in 2018 dollars) worth of presents and jewelry given to Mansfield by Sam Brody; the suit was settled out of court.

In 1977, Mansfield's first four children (Jayne Marie, Mickey, Zoltan, and Mariska) went to court to discover that some $500,000 in debt which Mansfield had incurred ($3,093,000 in 2018 dollars) and litigation had left the estate insolvent.