Jayne Mansfield passed 54 Years Ago

When I was a kid there was Jayne Mansfield. She was a playboy bunny, actress of the large and small screens, and did various appearances selling that sex appeal which was her symbology and claim to fame. I always liked her but my experience with her work was quite limited due to my age and her risque product line.

Jayne Mansfield did a lot of modeling, acting and won a Theatre World Award as well as a Golden Globe, was an accomplished singer, appeared in the pages of Playboy as a Playmate, and did nightclub entertaining. She was a major Hollywood sex symbol during the 1950s and early 1960s under contract with 20th Century Fox. She did not travel with an entourage ... rather by automobile by and large.

It was alleged that she was intimately involved with various men. The list included Robert and John F Kennedy, her attorney Samuel S. Brody, and Las Vegas entertainer Nelson Sardelli among others. Her involvement with the Kennedys has cast doubt on the nature of her passing in my mind. I failed to understand the cut throat nature of politics in general even during this earlier timeframe.

Now, it's simply a given.

While we were traveling from Charleston, South Carolina to Key West Florida pursuing my daddy's Navy career we heard on the radio that she had been killed in an automobile wreck while traveling to a venue.

At once I was saddened because this was a person that I pretty much had always known (of) and now she was gone.

That tragedy which was the concurrent losses by her children had escaped me because I knew nothing of her background. One of her children, Mariska Hargitay became a faviorite character actor of mine later in life. She had five kids altogether with two becoming actors.

Jayne Mansfield was the stage name of one Vera Jayne Palmer who was born April 19, 1933 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She passed in an auto accident on June 29, 1967 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

She was interred in Fairview Cemetery at Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania beside her father Herbert Palmer. She has a cenotaph in Hollywood at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in California. It has an incorrect birth year.