A casting executive for Paramount Studios told a chestnut-haired actress named Jayne Mansfield that she was wasting her “obvious talents”—that is, her body—when she first arrived in Hollywood in 1954. Mansfield, an unmarried mother in her early twenties, was open to anything that would help her break in and eventually launch her career as a serious actor.
As a result, she dyed her hair popcorn butter. To draw attention to her hourglass figure and buxom, she tightened her dresses. In her early acting roles and television interviews, she emitted a coquettish purr, bringing out every syllable into a frustrated coo.
Raised by a mother who took her to singing, dancing, and music lessons as a child, Mansfield had lofty creative aspirations. Her sexually suggestive persona, however, became her meal ticket during a time when studios were eager to imitate the success of Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s resident bombshell, despite the fact that she was also a talented pianist and violinist.
This star-engineering experiment yielded diminishing returns, and Mansfield’s image became more of an albatross than an asset as her film career waned in the 1960s. Hollywood believed she lacked substance and that her only contribution was the atomic blonde costume. She was banished to nightclub appearances by the time she passed away in a car accident in 1967 at the age of just 34.
If Mansfield’s life is taken at face value, it may appear to be the tragedy of a woman who battled to distance herself from her reputation. Her youngest daughter, actress Mariska Hargitay—who was three when her mother passed away and would go on to become well-known as the hard-boiled Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit—urges viewers to reevaluate that framing.
The movie honors Mansfield as an actor and mother while simultaneously acknowledging the injustice of her unrealized creative potential. The end product is a loving ode to a woman who is frequently criticized as Monroe’s dime-store counterpart, and it also serves as a depiction of the studio system in free fall in Hollywood.
Mansfield was an astute observer of the politics of the industry—until they changed so drastically that she was unable to keep up. Hollywood was in turmoil in 1954, the year of Mansfield’s Paramount screen test. From its peak in 1946, when 90 million people went to the movies every week, theater attendance had fallen by a full 50 percent.
Even though it was still a new technology, television offered easy entertainment without the inconvenience of driving. A conformist monoculture of directors, screenwriters, and actors who behaved themselves was fostered by the House Un-American Activities Committee’s busy snooping around Hollywood for suspected Communists.
Hollywood experienced an existential crisis as a result of these mounting demands, which had terrible repercussions for female actors. The once-popular “woman’s films,” which gave actors like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford meaty dramatic material, lost ground to movies with a lot of testosterone. The model of female stardom grew increasingly uniform during the 1950s.
The Hays Code, a set of restrictive regulations that prohibited movies from showing “sex perversion,” was still followed by the industry. But as filmmakers became more eager to explore more rebellious content, it started to seem illogical. As film critic Molly Haskell argued in her seminal 1974 study, From Reverence to Rape, this created an uncomfortable environment in which studios pushed female stars like Monroe and Doris Day, who appeared to be “all about sex, but without sex.”
A young woman like Vera Jayne Palmer, who was born in 1933, had a limited opportunity to succeed on screen because of those circumstances. Mansfield took acting classes and moved to Hollywood after getting married and having her first child in her teens. She continued to use her first husband’s last name after their divorce.
Before an agent gave her the attention she deserved, she made ends meet by modeling, teaching dance, and even selling candy outside a theater. Before the director Frank Tashlin immortalized the Mansfield persona in two comedies, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and The Girl Can’t Help It, Mansfield would spend the next few years performing well in B movies and supporting roles in high-profile studio productions (with a side trip to Broadway in 1955, when she was just 22).
With their vibrant Technicolor canvases, these movies served as tributes to Mansfield’s charm and sense of humor. She took the Monroe archetype to its most humorous extreme by playing two similar roles: a reluctant singing star in the first and a fluttery movie goddess in the second. She delivered each line as though it were enclosed in quote marks and danced around in amazing stoles and dresses adorned with jewels.
Mansfield demonstrated a refreshing willingness to laugh at herself in real life as well. She established herself as a mainstay in fan magazines and Hollywood gossip pages, and she had no qualms about taking advantage of her own “pin-up publicity,” as she referred to it.
Mansfield told television host Joyce Davidson, “I use it as a means to an end.”
“I’m not sure if I should say that I enjoyed it. However, I believed that I would benefit from being in a position where I could project myself toward my goals.”
According to My Mom Jayne, respect was what she aimed for. Early in the movie, Jayne Marie Mansfield, her eldest daughter, states, “She just had that desire to be a serious actress. And she was adamant about doing that.”
She was fairly shaken by the 1957 Wayward Bus. The drama was different from Mansfield’s comedies in that it was somber and scaled down with a black-and-white color scheme. In order to portray Camille, an exotic dancer plagued by her tarnished reputation and whose private life provides tabloid material, she would tame her trademark squeak.
Mansfield makes the audience want Camille to find happiness even though she worries that it will elude her. Her longing for a life where men will value her for who she is, not for her physical attributes, is heartwarming.
Perhaps her best dramatic moment, the movie suggests a compelling presence whose potential was underutilized by producers who were too shortsighted.
“Why didn’t she play those parts more often?” After a scene from The Wayward Bus is shown, Hargitay asks her sister, and Jayne Marie gives a direct response: “Because the parts didn’t come in.”
Like so many other Hollywood blondes, Mansfield was stuck in a rut as the 1950s drew to a close. Many film scholars today have a tendency to associate Mansfield with two other studio products that were meticulously cultivated to imitate the Monroe template: Sheree North and Mamie Van Doren. Such women were typecast by studio brass and only sometimes managed to break free.
Only a few movies, including her final film, The Misfits (1961), allowed Monroe to fulfill her own dramatic dreams. Monroe’s passing in 1962, according to My Mom Jayne, served as a wake-up call for Mansfield, who started to worry that she would always be stuck in cheesecake roles—that the “whole blonde persona was a box,” as Jayne Marie puts it.
This sparked a deliberate effort to alter her perception: That year, Mansfield told talk-show host Jack Paar,
“I’ve been someone else for a few years. And I’m prepared to be who I am.”
However, box office failures and press skepticism followed. Her studied, shy flightiness started to seem less winklingly subversive and more outdated.
In her book Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties, Martha Saxton noted that
“in the fifties, Jayne was a demonstration of what to do and how to do it, when female sexuality was a come-on, a taste, a broken promise. Look closely, but don’t touch,” she advised.
Her evasions were less effective in the 1960s, a decade marked by a renewed openness to sex. Assuming that Mansfield did significantly better in American cinema during the 1970s would be wishful thinking.
Despite the advancements in the American film industry, Hollywood may continue to be a hostile environment for women even after the Hays Code ended in 1968. Barbra Streisand was the only woman to consistently rank on the “Top Ten Money Making Stars” poll, which is one of the industry’s gauges of an actor’s appeal, during a decade in which Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, and Al Pacino received the majority of the public’s attention.
My Mom Jayne is the perfect movie for this time because it’s only been more common in recent years for once-dismissed female actors to have satisfying second acts.
Watch Pamela Anderson’s well-received and heartfelt performance as a working-class performer at a Las Vegas revue, encased in her own grandiose illusions, in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl. She was welcomed by a critical class that previously might have mocked Anderson’s alleged attempt to gain prestige.
A performer like Mansfield might have found it simpler to change her image as a pinup if she had been born a few generations later. My Mom Jayne freely and rightly laments that she rarely had the chance to do so.
Mansfield once said to Groucho Marx,
“The public pays money at the box office to see me a certain way. I believe that it’s all a part of my role as an actress.”
Although she was aware of the nature of the game she was playing, she secretly knew that its rules were essentially unjust. My Mom Jayne presents herself as a shrewd businesswoman who gave the industry exactly what it demanded of her—even if she demanded more than it could provide—rather than a helpless victim of Hollywood circumstance.
