Reflections on ... My Mom Jayne (2025) for Filthy Dreams

“Jayne Mansfield was the ultimate sex kitten-gone-berserk, the eternal starlet grasping for fame with both hands, Kenneth Anger’s cooing, squealing Hollywood Babylon made flesh. What, one might justifiably wonder, must it have been like having this outrageous creature for a mother?” 

/ Jayne Mansfield and daughter Mariska Hargitay, 1964 /

Yes! Read my new article “Bow Down Before Jayne Mansfield, the Queen of Low-Brow Trash Culture” which features my reflections on Mariska Hargitay’s 2025 HBO documentary My Mom Jayne on FilthyDreams – the provocative blog (for minorities who don't even fit into our own minorities) that analyses art, politics, and culture with a touch of camp! 

/ Pictured: a glamour shot of Jayne Mansfield promoting the 1963 film Homesick for St Pauli /

Reflections on ... Female Jungle (1955) and Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958)

This Friday (29 June 2018) represents the 51st anniversary of Jayne Mansfield's death, so – as a timely tribute to the ultimate sex kitten-gone-berserk – I’m posting some Jayne-related content in her memory.

As a committed Jayne Mansfield completist, I’m still indiscriminately working my way through all the movies in her filmography I’ve not yet seen. This is challenging because 1) whole swathes of Jayne's oeuvre are unavailable in 2018 and 2) she featured in some of the worst films ever made. (I'm speaking as someone who sat through The Fat Spy in its entirety). 

In May I made my long-suffering boyfriend sit with me through ultra-low budget exploitation b-movie Female Jungle (1955). I did warn him beforehand that I couldn’t vouch for its quality! A would-be hardboiled film noir crime movie starring a frankly worn-out Lawrence Tierney, Female Jungle turned out to be almost stultifyingly bad and inept, almost like an Ed Wood Jr film. The running time is only 73-minutes long (it was meant to be seen as part of a grindhouse or drive-in double feature, clearly) but the pace was so plodding it felt like two hours! It’s a fascinating curio in the context of Mansfield’s career, though: Female Jungle represented her film debut! (Her early films flopped and it wasn’t until she triumphed on Broadway in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and returned to Hollywood as a hot property that her movie career took off). In Female Jungle, the then-unknown starlet’s signature sex-kitten-gone-berserk comedic persona wasn’t in place yet and it’s fascinating to see Mansfield play a “straight” conventional bitchy and unsympathetic nymphomaniac bad girl. On the plus side – in a glittery halter top and sensational pair of painted-on leopard print Capri pants – Mansfield certainly looks delectable!

More recently we watched the mildly funny 1958 comedy Western Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (also known as The Blonde and The Sheriff). It’s no great shakes by even the most generous stretch of the imagination, but it is of interest and not without fluffy retro charm. Considering it was released by 20th Century Fox, filmed in gleaming deluxe CinemaScope and directed by a prestigious filmmaker (Raoul Walsh) , Sheriff of Fractured Jaw must count as Mansfield’s last “reputable” mainstream Hollywood film. (From 1959 onward, she would mainly feature in low-budget Continental exploitation films – or what Neely O’Hara in Valley of the Dolls would call “nudies”). The film is set in the American West, but the interiors were shot at Pinewood Studios in London and the exteriors in Spain. Mansfield stars as frontier town Fractured Jaw’s tough and sensible saloon proprietress Miss Kate. (She plays her with a wandering Southern accent. Martha Saxton, author of 1975 biography Jayne Mansfield and The American Fifties, accurately concludes, "Jayne plays the role with a lot of gusto and an imperfectly thought-out accent which falls somewhere between Fort Laramie and Newark.”). Her incredibly wasp-waisted, tightly-corseted 1880s costumes (and Mansfield was pregnant at the time with her second child) are certainly noteworthy. As well as being saloon keeper, Kate multi-tasks as the saloon’s onstage chanteuse and these musical numbers provide Sheriff of Fractured Jaw’s most gloriously campy moments because Mansfield is clearly lip-synching along to another woman’s voice which bears no relation at all to her own (the singing is, in fact, via Connie Francis!). Watch for a cameo appearance from British character actor Sid James playing a drunk which anticipates his Carry On persona.

Holy Religious Artefacts from Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace

/ Jayne Mansfield luxuriating in the boudoir of her Pink Palace /

The Pink Palace – the legendarily kitsch, lurid and nouveau riche Mediterranean-style mansion on 10100 Sunset Boulevard belonging to Hollywood’s platinum blonde sex-kitten-gone-berserk par excellence Jayne Mansfield (1933 – 1967) from 1957 until her death – was razed in November 2002. In my dreams, the Pink Palace would have been preserved exactly as Jayne left it and open to the public as a museum, like Elvis’ Graceland. (I’m sorry, but in low-brow trash culture terms Mansfield is every bit Presley’s equal!). Incredibly, though – five decades after Mansfield’s tragic premature death in a car crash en route to New Orleans – treasures from her long-demolished Pink Palace occasionally re-surface in the present day! For me, these are sacred holy relics!

Now this is what I call “art”! When I saw this listed online as part of Engelbert Humperdinck’s auction in autumn 2017, I felt like setting up an urgent crowdfunding page just so I could bid on this spectacular genuine vintage bust as seen in The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield (1968)! (The online auction happened in April 2017, but I didn’t find out about it until later). The bust used to be prominently displayed in the Pink Palace.  Humperdinck (who, of course, bought the Pink Palace following Jayne’s death) must have kept it in storage for decades before auctioning it off. Weird: why wouldn’t one of Jayne’s five children have this gorgeous object? Imagine how great this would look on my mantelpiece (if I had a mantelpiece). Read the full details here – and note the status “Lot closed – unsold”. Where is it now? Some hip entrepreneur should make a mould of this bust and sell replicas commercially, like those plaster-of-Paris Elvis Presley busts that were ubiquitous in the seventies and eighties. (I had one when I was a university student! Eventually it got smashed – I don’t like to talk about it!).

/ Glimpses of the bust in situ at the Pink Palace. Mansfield seems to have kept it the bedroom / 

Then came this announcement from the Burlesque Hall of Fame's Facebook page on Valentine’s Day 2018: 

“A special Valentine’s Day reveal: Jayne Mansfield’s heart-shaped settee, refurbished for our upcoming Exotic World exhibit! 

We acquired this piece in the 1990s, shortly before Mansfield’s iconic mansion, the Pink Palace, was razed. The heart shape and colour was a theme of the mansion, which also featured a heart-shaped pool and bathtub.” 

The historical significance of this cannot be overstated! Seeing this put me in a state of religious awe - a genuine artifact from Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace! Jayne, Mickey and her Chihuahuas once frolicked and cavorted on this pink settee! (When I visited the Burlesque Hall of Fame last April when I was in town for Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender 2017,  this was most definitely not on display then! Now I have to return to pay homage!).

Let’s hope further riches are exhumed!  Maybe we could re-assemble the Pink Palace piece-by-piece!

/ Bath time at the Pink Palace /