Jayne Mansfield in popular culture
Jayne Mansfield was an actress, singer, Playboy playmate and stage show performer who had an enormous impact on popular culture of the late 1950s despite her limited success in Hollywood.
"[1] In the novel Child of My Heart (2004) by Alice McDermott, a National Book Award winning writer, the 1950s is referred to as "in those Marilyn Monroe/Jayne Mansfield days".
[4] Mansfield, Monroe and Barbara Windsor have been described as representations of a historical juncture of sexuality in comedy and popular culture.
Numerous show business people were dubbed "Jayne Mansfield" over the time, including Italian actress Marisa Allasio and professional wrestler Missy Hyatt.
In the eleventh episode of the second season of the sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart - titled Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1993) - Diana Kent plays the role of Mansfield in a time travel story.
[14] In Chicago Confidential (2002), a detective novel by Max Allan Collins, the series private investigator Nathan Heller falls in love with Mansfield, becomes friends with Frank Sinatra and is threatened by Joseph McCarthy.
On the Married... with Children season 3 episode "A Dump of My Own", Al Bundy says that when he was young he had two dreams and one of them was to become an astronaut and land on the planet Jayne Mansfield.
[15] Writer-artist Jack Kirby of Marvel Comics drew inspiration from the strong-woman image of Jayne Mansfield in designing the character Susan Storm of the Fantastic Four.
It was a direct reference to publicity stunt of Mansfield in April 1957 intended to deflect attention from Loren during a dinner party in the Italian star's honor.
In 1993, Daniela Federici created an homage with Anna Nicole Smith as Mansfield and New York City DJ Sky Nellor as Loren for a Guess Jeans campaign.
[20][21] The fatal motor vehicle accident that claimed Mansfield's life and spread the rumors of her decapitation had been the subject of many plots and scenes.
The Hollywood Forever Cemetery,[24] where her cenotaph is located, is described as one of the sights to see in California by the regional tourist guide by Lonely Planet.
In David Cronenberg's film Crash (1996) (based on J. G. Ballard's 1973 novel of the same name), a male stunt driver dressed as Mansfield recreates her fatal accident, killing himself in the process.
"[26] Differing from the book, the storyline of the film revolves around these two partners recreating fatal celebrity disasters, in the name of a project they call retrospectives, including those of James Dean, Grace Kelly, Albert Camus and John F.
[32] As early as in 1959, Harry Carlson, co-founder of Fraternity Records, marketed Jayne Mansfield water bottles shaped after her curves.
[34] Joan Jacobs Brumberg describes the 1950s as "an era distinguished by its worship of full-breasted women" and attributes the paradigm shift to Mansfield and Monroe.
[36] Patricia Vettel-Becker makes that observation more specific by attributing the phenomenon to Playboy and the appearance of Mansfield and Monroe in the magazine.
"[44] In the 2001 fiction and poetry collection of Zaffi Gousopoulos, The I. V. Lounge Reader, a character tries out lipsticks in Mansfield colors and lifting underwear to emphasize her femininity.
In The Broom of the System, a novel by David Foster Wallace, much of the story happens in East Corinth, a Cleveland suburb designed to look like Mansfield's curves from a bird's eye view.
Masons, a punk band from Tucson, Arizona, toured in 2000 playing three songs dedicated to her—"Bombshell", "Crash My Car" and "The Witch".
[57] German punk band The Bates has recorded a tune called "The Lips of Jayne Mansfield", featured in the album Shake (1990).
[58] The Dave Brothers, a punk rock band in the late 1990s had a Sunday show on radio station KRCL (106 FM, later taken over by KCGL) called the Church of Jayne Mansfield and distributed her posters for promotion.
[60] Marc Bolan, one of the most influential artists of glam rock that spawned the punk, compared the demise of Elvis Presley to Jayne Mansfield.
[61] The Japanese female garage punk band The 5.6.7.8's wrote a song titled "I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield", which is featured in the movie Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Lyrics of the song uses Mansfield's catchword "divoon", and refers to her heart-shaped swimming pool, her love of champagne and parties, and to the grisly automobile accident which claimed her life in 1967.
[68] Playboy pictorials of Mansfield and Monroe were part of the emerging trend that gave birth to the large-breasted feminine ideal and men's magazines including Rogue, Nugget and Dude.
[76] In 1963, Hugh Hefner unexpectedly noticed photographs that Bill Kobrin had taken of Jayne Mansfield and asked him to shoot her centerfold for Playboy.
[87] In 1980, a television film was made on her life — The Jayne Mansfield Story — which was nominated for three Emmy Awards in the categories for hair, makeup and costume.
Over the years, several directors including Gus Van Sant, Brian DePalma and Catherine Hardwicke have expressed interest in making a biopic of Mansfield.
Universal Pictures is apparently planning a film and reportedly has a list of actresses and models being considered to play Mansfield, including Ashley Benson, Sienna Miller, Holly Madison, Kate Upton, Kelly Rohrbach, Marisa Miller, Dakota Blue Richards, Hailey Clauson, Holly Willoughby and Charlotte McKinney.
