13-07-2025
The dark secrets Jayne Mansfield took to her grave
Jayne Mansfield's death, on June 29 1967, was subject to as much wilfully inaccurate reporting as her life had been. For decades, the rumour circulated that this 34-year-old blonde bombshell – one of Hollywood's favourite post-war pin-ups – had been decapitated when the sedan she was in slammed into the back of a truck, just outside New Orleans.
According to none other than her undertaker, one Jim Roberts, this was hogwash. The impact of the collision, which flung the car's engine into the front seat and killed two other adults and a dog, also caused Mansfield's wig to be thrown to the side of the road. It's this that was mistaken in news stories for her head, a myth morbidly perpetuated for years, including by JG Ballard in his 1973 novel, Crash.
The more ghoulish reports barely concentrated on the fact that three of Mansfield's five children, Mickey, Zoltan and Mariska, had been sleeping in the back, and emerged injured but alive. In fact, three-year-old Mariska rolled completely under the front seat, and was only found after emergency services had driven away from the scene, when one of her brothers realised she was missing.
Mariska Hargitay is now 61. 'I don't remember the accident,' she told Vanity Fair. 'I don't even remember being told that my mother had died.' Today, she's a very successful actress, who since 1999 has played the lead, Olivia Benson, in the NBC police drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – the longest-running character on primetime American drama in TV history. She won a Golden Globe for the role in 2005 and an Emmy in 2006. The Globe sits on her mantelpiece, next to the one her mother was awarded in 1957 as New Star of the Year – a moment when Mansfield's career was full of ballooning promise, before the demoralising blows and public rejection to come.
Hargitay's very personal choice of directing debut is My Mom Jayne, an HBO documentary airing here on Sky, which has several overlapping objectives. It explores Mansfield's rollercoaster life from the poignant perspective of a daughter who barely remembers her. It delves into a complex family history, the by-product of Mansfield being married three times and having numerous significant affairs. It seeks, above all, to understand the person she was. 'My dad would always say…'She was like you,'' recalled Hargitay. ''She was funny and irreverent and fearless and real'… I just wanted my mom to be like the other moms. Why are you always in a bathing suit? Why so much breast? I just wanted a maternal mother image. I was embarrassed by the choices that she made.'
Hargitay speaks to all of her siblings on camera, who let their customary guard down on this most painful of topics. She also interviews her mother's press secretary, Raymond Strait, who is still alive at 101 – a conversation that's not all sweetness and light, seeing as Strait published a tell-all biography, The Tragic Secret Life of Jayne Mansfield, in 2019.
There is much to tell. When Mariska was born in 1964, Mansfield's career and her second marriage, to the Hungarian bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, were both on the rocks. This marked a saddening decline from her brightest years, when her star was in the ascendant, and America's armed forces couldn't get enough of her. Her appetite for publicity – and being photographed wherever she went – may even briefly have eclipsed that of Marilyn Monroe.
Barely out of her teens, Mansfield – born Vera Jayne Palmer – had struck a deal with Hollywood to get famous, fast. She auditioned for Paramount in 1954, using a Joan of Arc monologue she'd hashed out with her acting coach Baruch Lumet (father of Sidney, the future director). Casting director Milton Lewis claimed she was wasting her 'obvious talents', and told her to return and do a scene from The Seven Year Itch.
This required her to dye her hair blonde and, obviously, wear more revealing clothes. Eagerly, she consented. The competition with Monroe – and other female sex symbols of the day, such as Sophia Loren (who famously gave Mansfield 'the original side-eye' in a photograph in which the Italian actress is looking disdainfully at Mansfield's cleavage) – became something like a nuclear arms race. The goal was achieving (in every sense of the phrase) maximum exposure, including posing in Playboy magazine.
Mansfield would often explain that her straining for the spotlight was merely plotted as a means to an end. But she never reached that end. She yearned, much like Monroe, to be taken seriously as an actor, seeing this quick-fix stardom as leverage to get her pick of the parts. In the process, she became the victim of her own success in Hollywood – so obliging at being sculpted into a Monroe-a-like that, ultimately, no one would let her escape being stereotyped as a 'dumb blonde' with particularly pneumatic measurements.
It was all a performance, and one even her children found wearying at the time. Her oldest son, Mickey Jr, talks of rolling his eyes when he heard Jayne donning her trademark squeaky voice – not just in film roles, but her publicity interviews. Mansfield had been schooled by everyone around her to be this crowd-pleasing version of herself, without fail. But when she wanted to step outside that box, as Elizabeth Taylor (and indeed Monroe) were beginning to manage, she found no roles of substance awaiting her.
The peak of her film career came early, in Frank Tashlin's satirical comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), based on a play by Itch screenwriter George Axelrod. That same year, Mansfield was interviewed on CBC's Tabloid in Canada. 'I've used my pin-up-type publicity to get my foot in the door,' she explained. 'Because it never was really my ambition and now I feel I'm at a point where I can relax on the pin-up publicity – the cheesecake – and go much further dramatically… [it was] a means to an end, I don't know if I should say I liked it, but I felt it would do me some good as far as being recognised and being put into a position to be able to project myself for what I really wanted to attain.' One of those ambitions, she continued, was 'to win an Academy Award – at least one.'
But, by 1963, after a spate of gritty noirs and international productions that did her few favours, she was reduced to baring everything in the sex comedy Promises! Promises!, which openly courted her Playboy fans – 'Now See ALL of Jayne Mansfield!'. In a slightly toe-curling encounter with Robert Robinson in 1960, Mansfield was asked to sum up what she felt was the secret of sex appeal. 'It's a wonderful, warm, womanly feeling,' she said. 'It has nothing to do with measurements and lipstick… it's the vibrancy you find present in a young kitten.'
Following Promises! Promises!, Mansfield found it even harder to be taken seriously. She had studied piano and violin at school, talents she trotted out on the talk-show circuit to prove her intelligence (she apparently had an IQ of 163). The documentary has a clip of her performing Vivaldi, very impressively, on The Ed Sullivan Show. When she tried to repeat this for Jack Paar a few years later, he interrupted her with, 'Who cares? Kiss me!', to the delight of the crowd. She played along with giggles on air – but the implications were obvious. Keen as she was to orchestrate a shift in how the public perceived her, that ship had sailed.
The bedrock of her marriage to Mickey Hargitay was crumbling at the same time, mainly because of her own infidelities. There were reasons for those, too – liaisons which (perhaps apocryphally; the rumour gets zero airtime in the documentary) may have included both Kennedy brothers.
Mansfield's father had died when she was three years old – from a heart attack, while driving. In a freaky parallel with her three-year-old daughter's later experience, she was in the car. It doesn't take a psychology degree to puzzle out the paternal void this planted in her life, which she tried to fill with every man – husband, lover, whatever – who came along. Hargitay's siblings have few kind words to say about husband number three (the film director Matt Cimber, in a short-lived marriage marked by violent rages) or Mansfield's next relationship with her divorce attorney, Sam Brody, who died alongside her.
The weirdest publicity stunt of Mansfield's career – if that indeed is what it was – happened the year before her death. While visiting the San Francisco Film Festival in 1966, she met a man called Anton LaVey, one of the most notorious characters on the counter-cultural scene. This self-styled founder of the Church of Satan did not convert her into worshipping the Devil, as has sometimes been claimed, but he did get Mansfield to hold a skull for one photoshoot, while he mimed some kind of ritual in a black cape. And he did place a curse on Brody – who was jealous of their friendship – claiming that the lawyer would be dead within a year. In a car crash. This occult myth is related at length in a hybrid documentary musical, the considerably-less-authorised Mansfield 66/67 (2017).
A last shock lay in wait for Hargitay in adulthood. When she was 25, the head of one of her mother's fan clubs showed her a photo of a man named Nelson Sardelli, an Italian singer who was her own spitting image. Mansfield and he, it turned out, had a brief dalliance in 1963, and Hargitay was his biological daughter.
After Mansfield's death, Mickey Jr, Zoltan and Mariska were raised by their father and stepmother, Ellen Siano. Only the two boys were Mickey Hargitay's own. Sardelli didn't want, he claims, to disrupt or meddle with his daughter's new chance for a happy childhood, so allowed the cover story to stand. Even when Mariska was told, she too kept the secret for years, after having it out with the man who raised her. 'It was all about loyalty,' she said to The Hollywood Reporter. 'Mickey didn't admit it to me… he said it wasn't true, and he was such a loyal human who I thought was the best father – I saw how much it hurt him in the moment of me confronting him.'
It's just the final twist in a Hollywood life that has kept on entwining sadness and scandal long after it was shattered.
My Mom Jayne is available on Sky Go and NOW
