Jayne Mansfield has often been characterized -- perhaps unfairly -- as the poor man's Monroe. An outrageously endowed 40-21-32 who epitomized the bigger-is-better bombshell look of the Fifties, Mansfield was a virtual unknown when she posed as Miss February 1955 for Playboy.

Having appeared in minor roles in forgettable films, Mansfield struck professional gold in the pages of Playboy. After seeing her pictorial, casting agent Jules Styne suggested the buxom blonde for a role in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, the Broadway musical written by George Axelrod and later made into a Hollywood film. Mansfield achieved notoriety of a different sort when a racy still of the nude star (from the film Promises! Promises!) appeared in the June 1963 Playboy, resulting in an obscenity charge against the magazine from the Chicago police.

Mansfield craved publicity and gladly endowed the pages of six issues of Playboy with her voluptuous frame. She welcomed any scandal that might follow, never taking her acting career seriously enough to feel threatened. As Mansfield once purred, "I decided early in life that the first thing to do was to become famous -- I'd worry about acting later."

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