JAYNE MANSFIELD: The Girl Couldn't Help It
EVE GOLDEN
University Press of Kentucky (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$34.95 all editions, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: Jayne Mansfield (1933–1967) was driven not just to be an actress but to be a star. One of the most influential sex symbols of her time, she was known for her platinum blonde hair, hourglass figure, outrageously low necklines, and flamboyant lifestyle.
Hardworking and ambitious, Mansfield proved early in her career that she was adept in both comic and dramatic roles, but her tenacious search for the spotlight and her risqué promotional stunts caused her to be increasingly snubbed in Hollywood.
In the first definitive biography of Mansfield, Eve Golden offers a joyful account of the star Andy Warhol called "the poet of publicity," revealing the smart, determined woman behind the persona. While she always had her sights set on the silver screen, Mansfield got her start as Rita Marlowe in the Broadway show Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. She made her film debut in the low-budget drama Female Jungle (1955) before landing the starring role in The Girl Can't Help It (1956). Mansfield followed this success with a dramatic role in The Wayward Bus (1957), winning a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year, and starred alongside Cary Grant in Kiss Them for Me (1957). Despite her popularity, her appearance as the first celebrity in Playboy and her nude scene in Promises! Promises! (1963) cemented her reputation as an outsider.
By the 1960s, Mansfield's film career had declined, but she remained very popular with the public. She capitalized on that popularity through in-person and TV appearances, nightclub appearances, and stage productions. Her larger-than-life life ended sadly when she passed away at age thirty-four in a car accident.
Golden looks beyond Mansfield's flashy public image and tragic death to fully explore her life and legacy. She discusses Mansfield's childhood, her many loves—including her famous on-again, off-again relationship with Miklós "Mickey" Hargitay—her struggles with alcohol, and her sometimes tumultuous family relationships. She also considers Mansfield's enduring contributions to American popular culture and celebrity culture. This funny, engaging biography offers a nuanced portrait of a fascinating woman who loved every minute of life and lived each one to the fullest.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I was a young boy when Jayne Mansfield died. It was stunning how insensitive the chatter around the tragedy was...my mother vocally disapproved of the demeaning way she was talked about as a "sex kitten" and bringing up her nude photos and scenes. I've been interested in her ever since, as my judgmental mother was *defending* her, so something had to be interesting about her.
More interested in being a star than an actress, the lady was quite a handful as a person—ramping up the public persona that would've made her zillions in the Aughties, fighting, undressing, taking risqué to its apotheosis in the days when Marilyn Monroe, Diana Dors, and she were working the blonde bombshell vein in the publicity mine.
Like those ladies, Jayne Mansfield was an intelligent, troubled person with a hot ambitious streak in her that her face and body were able to fuel. She never hesitated to use her sex appeal...and sex...to get her name in front of the public. It worked; she was famous.
She was not respected, as no woman in that era was really respected; but certainly no frankly, openly sexual anyone, still less a woman, was going to be highly regarded in the film or television industry. Thus when fashions changed and gamines became The Next Thing, she had no baseline of support in the industry she'd made so much money for.
Turbulent, addiction-haunted personal lives were, are, always have been back into pop-culture history all too common among the famous. Jayne Mansfield was no different than so many others with messy personal lives. She did seem to get married a lot and ended up with five children born between 1950 and 1965.
The terrible tragedy of a life cut so very short is that her potential, her development, her impact on the world is frozen at a moment; not a moment I suspect, reading about her in this book, she would have stayed in forever. Author Golden has come in for criticism in her supposed inaccurate information about what, when I poked into it a little bit, looked to me like pretty insignificant dates and details about trifles. Looking at the notes...all fiftyish pages of 'em!...Author Golden *lived* in newspaper archives for a good while. Where the issue seems to arise is in the slightly too-prominent tone of disapproval some have seen in the text. It did not feel moralizing to me. I was more interested in the trajectory of a proto-Kardashian sibling.
When Yule gifting is the point, the life and times of bygone stars make very instructive reading. We're in fame hyperdrive thanks to a level of mass communication unknown in Jayne Mansfield's life, but the exploitive outlines are still there. Your budding feminist film scholar might enjoy seeing how we got where we are; your brodawg cousin might just like seventy-plus pictures of Jayne Mansfield. The Fifties and Sixties exert fascination that will peak in the late 20s and early 30s as the TCM crowd starts watching the silly innocent farcically "naughty" work of the era. A book like this will please those audiences.
She might not have received the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, but this family is very much a testament to the fact she did something right.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.