Jayne Mansfield died in a car crash 49 years ago today. It is an urban myth that she was decapitated – that is her wig you see on the windscreen and beside the dead chihuahua in the death scene pictures. Neither was she ‘scalped’ as some would argue. The coroner who examined her says her head was intact when he saw it so, kittens, he should know, right?

But hers was a dramatic, tragic death. She’d probably have wanted to go out in a big way – everything about her was overblown and big, after all. But, although she spent her life basically turning herself into a cartoon, she would not have wanted to remembered as a cringe-inducing joke. Jayne just wanted love; mass love, as much love as she could elicit from the entire world.

Jayne was a Marilyn Monroe copyist, to be sure, but she was no poor man’s MM. She was incredible in her own right. Compelling, funny, deeply sexy and stunningly beautiful, she is rightly one of the 50s screen goddesses. But unfortunately she pushed all of this a little too far and most of her output was trash and she ‘sank’ to getting her tits out quite frequently. Nothing wrong with that but it’s just what you did then at the start of your career and joked it away, pleading poverty, as Marilyn did. It wasn’t what you continued to do if you were wanting to be an A-grade movie star.

But Jayne was different. She wanted to be a sex goddess, celebrating sex and nudity. Yes, there was a sleazy element to her cheesecake porn, especially the later it got into her career. But Marilyn strips off her flesh coloured bikini for her last (uncompleted) film and the footage and stills are forever lauded over as examples of her free sexuality and beauty. Jayne does it and she’s hailed as a desperate slag.

But for many of us queers who worship her, it is this late period, messy Jayne who we love most. Yes, her immaculate early image is just dreamy, delicious and – as she’d squeal – divoon! You could eat her up with a spoon. Well, you’d probably need a ladle. But as she slipped towards the end of the decade and into the 60s she became trashier and trashier. And it wasn’t because she was broke; she was one of the few who was good with money. Her style-savvy just veered off a bit – into the mondo fabulous, natch! And one of the most glorious details is that her poor daughter Jayne Marie (born when Jayne was 17) was in charge of mother’s wardrobe and hair pieces, setting and styling Momma’s skanky wigs, wiglets and falls.

Jayne did do something canny though. As the fifties bombshell look became old hat, she embraced the sixties. Only she embraced some of the tackier elements. Big baby doll bows in her ratty ‘hair’, dresses and skirts getting shorter and shorter, pvc gogo boots, white lipstick. Oh my, but she looked magnificently cheap. Her whole kooky, ditsy blonde act became more extreme too, going beyond self-parody and at times a little nails-on-a-chalk-board too much. She replaced her trademark ‘divoon’ with words like ‘kicky’… or is it ‘kinky’? Most say the latter but I swear it’s the former. As in getting a kick out of life.

By the time she took that fateful car ride with her nasty, abusive boyfriend-manager (who also died) and her kids curled up asleep on the back seat (who all survived), she was making soft porn films, doing the rounds of bargain-basement cabaret in extremely revealing outfits, sitting on the laps of goggle-eyed men, and stealing dogs left right and centre (or ‘not paying for them’ because, naturally, everyone should give things to Jayne Mansfield).

The legacy we’re left with is her apocryphal death story, one of the most fun and compelling blonde goddesses of the cinema, countless images of her looking deliciously immaculate or fabulously trashy… And the extraordinarily weird and wonderful documentary The Wild, Wild World Of Jayne Mansfield. This film – which you can see on Youtube – was incomplete at her death requiring a stand-in to portray Jayne from the back and an imitator to provide the narration. For most of the film it’s a travelogue, seeing Jayne wander all over Europe seeking out nude beaches, topless girl bands, Best Boobs contests and learning to strip. But it ends abruptly with lurid images of her death scene and former husband Mickey wandering heartbroken around their gloriously tacky Pink Palace. This juxtaposition of tits and tragedy seem sudden and jarring in the film but does sum up what we’ve been left with when people think about Jayne Mansfield.

By Fallon Gold

The Death of Jayne Mansfield by Wayne Hollowell, 2016