"A* star* is* all I want to be"
In the afternoon of December 13 last, this reporter tremulously, but relentlessly bore down upon the private diggings of Miss Jayne Mansfield, somewhere in the northern reaches of Beverly Hills. Miss Mansfield, in case you didn’t know, is the pre.eminent candidate for 'Miss Sex Boat of 1957', a reputation that began no larger than a man’s fist when she first appeared on Broadway last year in ' Will Success Spoil Rock, Hunter? ' but has since burgeoned almost in proportion with the lady’s vital measurements, which are staggering. We were to have had lunch, but for one thing: Miss Mansfield’s chihuahua, Philip. Specifically, Philip’s knee cap.
At precisely 12:40, only minutes after your reporter bad introduced himself, Philip’s kneecap popped out of joint causing him to tremble pathetically and make a good deal of shrill noise about it.
Miss Mansfield became immediately and severely unhinged by Philip’s difficulty. Lunch was about to be served but lunch could, so to speak, go fry. “Oh, dear,” she said to your reporter. “Shouldn’t we take him to the vet’s? Now, I mean. Would you drive us? It’s not terribly far. About ten minutes.” ( It was about half an hour.) Philip yipped some more. There had been no choice to begin with. Jayne picked up Philip’s tiny form, cradled it to her own formidable one, and she and her visitor descended 17 wooden steps that flank the west side of her three level modern home in the northern reaches of Beverly Hills.
The home is on a street off what is called Benedict Canyon. Its width could be negotiated by a competent practitioner of the standing broad jump. It is no place in which to turn a car around. In a Buick convertible you back and fill four times before you’ve got it made. For Jayne, it’s easier; her “panty pink” Jaguar is highly maneuverable. Philip cried steadily while the maneuvering was going on. Things would get even more hectic later on. “Nice house you have,” said I, when finally we’d turned north onto* Benedict. I said it both out of courtesy and with some idea of keeping Jayne’s mind off Philip, who was subsiding but still unhappy. “You know about it?” said Jayne. "Shou1d I?” "Oh, yes. Anyway I think so. I bought it when I first came out here. I didn’t have any money. I wasn’t getting anywhere in pictures and*I was modeling for Ziminski photographic studios and the like. But I came into this $5000 inheritance from my father’s estate. He was killed when I was three. Jayne Mansfield’s voice—a voice that is distinctly Mansfield* and invokes some doubt as to who is kidding whom, although sober analysis indicates that America’s current* heart throb is being kidded by no one. “But now,” she said, “I have my eye on this cottage in Bel Air. That’s where I’ll be moving. I think. Not that I don’t love this house: I do.*But you know how it is.”
She became infinitely discouraged by the condition of Philip, who at this juncture suddenly and alarmingly went limp in her arms. Suddenly* she was thrown at the windshield. She braced her long, celebrated, slacks-covered legs against the movement and clung to Philip, who looked up at her with a kind of miserable confidence and trust. “He’s not any better,” she said*at last*and suddenly began to cry... “I’m sorry,” she said after a few moments. “I’m embarrassing you. But I lost a dog just a little while ago.* I was alone so much as a child. I think when you’re lonely, it gives you an extra affection for animals. We lived around quite a lot.*In a place called Phillipsburg in New Jersey.*That’s where I was brought up first.*Then when I was six, we moved to Texas, to Dallas. My mother, stepfather and I.*But I was an only child, and I guess you get in-grown. You know.” Philip perked up a little. "Is* the vet’s* far from here now?” “Oh, sure,” said Jayne. “Keep driving. ”Twenty minutes had passed. Jayne and the Jag might have* made the whole trip in ten, but not in one piece.
The veterinarian staggered only slightly at the presence of his client (who did not go unnoticed on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley) He gathered Philip in, diagnosed what was wrong quickly, and popped the knee back in place. He then guided Jayne’s hand to the weak socket, showed her explicitly where and how to push it, the next time it happened. and said he’d keep Philip for the night, just in case. Philip looked as though he wanted very much to say thank you but didn’t know quite how to go about it, wagged goodbye, and the crisis was momentarily over.
“Lunch,” said Jayne on the way back, "may be completely ruined.” “Never mind. " I said , "Tell me, if you don’t mind, about the sex bit?” “The sex bit,” she said thoughtfully. Miss M. discusses her body dispassionately. There are no incursions of bad taste; yet no evasions, no blushes. “The sex bit. It’s hard to begin. I was well developed when I was eleven, but maybe not conscious of it. But it has something to do with that. But you’ve got to remember one thing first, and keep it in mind all the time. I’m very ambitious and absolutely single minded, and Jayne is Number One. And what I want and have always wanted is to be a movie star and if I couldn’t have done it one way, I would’ve in another. They don’t usually talk like that, do they? The stars, I mean. Well, I do. Everything’s for the record, too. Everything I say. So who was going to look out for Jayne but Jayne? Crazy, huh? But that’s how it was. I’m the do-it-yourself girl. I made this test at Paramount. Joan of Arc. And the man who saw it said I was a good actress but my figure was taking his mind oil the character. And if it would take his off it, it would take everybody’s. Oh, I forgot, I had brown hair then, too. I wasn’t going for sex then. Or comedy. Anyway, Joan of Arc ought to be battened down in the front. So they tried me in a bit from The Seven-Year itch. The piano bit. That went off. And that started me thinking about the sex pitch. I had to sell what I had. Everybody does. So then came the hair, and so forth. I was a kitten with a figure. That’s what I am. I’m a big, curvy kitten with a pink nose and a lot up here. And this voice. . . You should’ve made a left three blocks back.” Ventura Boulevard fell into the past. “I’ll tell you how I feel about sex,” said Jayne after a while, said the Jayne who is the national symbol of sex and uses it deliberately to disrupt simply by being present. “I feel this"*she*went*on,*"men are men and women are women and that’s the best idea ever. Am I wrong? My ideal man would be about six-five, weigh around 240 lbs and have charcoal hair.” ( By charcoal hair, for which Miss Mansfield has an enormous zest, Jayne means black flecked with grey or white.) “And have long hair. I love long hair on a man. But it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t have hair on his chest. I used to think hair on a chest had a lot to do with virility. Now I know better. Look at Mickey.” “Mickey” is Miss Mansfield’s most steady date, although she tends to shrug off anything serious. His last name is Hargitay, a Hungarian with a pronounced Hungarian accent (“I love foreign accents!”) and is a professional body beautiful. A muscle-flexing portrait of him in Jayne’s possession is inscribed, “Jayne, you’re under my skin, I love you.” He formerly appeared in the night club act starring Miss Mae West, and it was in a still picture of this act that Jayne first saw him. The picture was shown to her in the office of a producer friend. “The one on the far left,” she said reflectively. “I’ll take him......and a steak for my dog.” Later, at New York’s Latin Quarter, she caught this mass of muscle and sinew in person. He was wearing leopardskin.
[Mod Edit- Dead Link removed]