Jayne Mansfield: Still Too Hot To Handle

Someday, when all the press clippings in Hollywood have been counted, you can make an almost cinch bet that the star with the biggest stack in the bunch will be none other than that perennial sampling of pure sex-appeal—Jayne Mansfield. A cover girl whose uncovered poses have graced the pages of newspapers and magazines from one end of the earth to the other, Jayne has provided a welcome uplift (she never needed one herself) to the spirit of millions of hapless and henpecked males who have followed her hoopla-packed career with no less than avid interest.

Although the almanac claims that Jayne was born in swanky Bryn Mawr, Pa., Texas holds more claim to her than the land of the straitlaced Quakers. Her formative years—and that is more then a casual expression—were spent in Dallas. And when Texans brag about their state having the biggest and best of everything, they can point to Jayne for proof, if just by virtue of the tape measure alone. Robust since the age of ten, Jayne bounced from girlhood into the public eye with a measurement of 41 well-stacked inches in the place where it counts the most.

No catch-as-catch-can starlet, Jayne literally brought her mountains to Mohammed, so to speak, and Mohammed in this instance turned out to be the corps of Hollywood’s hotshot photographers who know exactly what to do with pulchritude when they see it in their view finders—like shooting sexy pictures for mass exposure. Only in Jayne’s case, it turned out to be a matter of double exposure. For she was willing to bare her altogether in order to attain posterity, and the eager photogs reproduced her bountiful endowments willfully and with skill. With Mansfield popping out of her bras, things came to a point where many menfolk would settle for nothing less than a duplication of Jayne’s monumental mammaries, and a run on the padded bra market appeared in the offing.

When all was said and done, however, Jayne held her own in true Texas fashion, despite a few gals who claimed they could rack up a higher tally in face-to-face competition and those who falsified their frontages in order to gain attention. And she never once backed down. Not even a fraction of an inch.

Instead, she rose to even greater fame and glory by resorting to innumerable headline-grabbing gimmicks designed solely for one thing—to make Jayne a household word. With the help of seven press agents and three business agents—all working overtime—she accomplished what she set out to do. She immortalized her figure in a nude statue, and soaked it in champagne in her heart-shaped bathtub. She showed up in Las Vegas in a nylon net costume which all but stopped the action at the gaming tables, lolled around in motion pictures in her birthday suit, got married (more than once), and even got shipwrecked in the Caribbean. And what happened to her image? She made it bigger than ever. Just like everything else about her.

 

It is a quote. BEAU MAGAZINE AUGUST 1966