Will Success Spoil Jayne Mansfield?

Some writers spend their time doing biographies of people like George Bernard Shaw, Herbert Hoover and Groucho Marx, but since I'm known as the Boswell of Bosoms and am an ex-farm boy, I've chosen as my subject Miss Jayne Mansfield, a gal who has an east forty, and also a west forty.

Some observers observe that both her east and her west expand to a 41 or even a 42 when she takes a deep breath, but regardless of measurements, the story of the year's new sexation can be told in just two words: (i) Uncovered. (2) Discovered.

And now that she's been discovered because she was uncovered (as Playboy's Playmate of February, 1955--one short year ago), she's got to be repeatedly uncovered again . . . but the pleasing part of it for the gentlemen involved is that Jayne enjoys being an uncover girl.

Perhaps, due to blindness, deafness or something, you've not become aware of this bustaceous phenomenon who in a few months has made many men forget Marilyn Monroe.

I'll never forget my first meeting with Jayne because she was terribly worried about what she was going to wear in her first Broadway show, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Jayne was afraid that what she was going to wear was too big, and so was I.

"What was she going to wear?" you doubtless wonder.

A towel, men!

"Don't you think it's much too big a towel for me?" she inquired poutingly at the Belasco Theater off Times Square.

I'm no expert on towel sizes, but the more I stared at the Mansfield assets-- none of which were frozen--the more convinced I was that they were covering up too much of her. Julie Styne, the show's producer, loathed having anybody think Miss Mansfield was "cheese-cakey." He wished that the towel be made to cover Miss Mansfield's prized possessions completely. If some of her outlying territories, such as her bare knees and bare shoulders, came into view, he could tolerate this, but he didn't want the towel to be shortened, except maybe three or four inches.

Jayne, however, was somewhat less inclined to conceal facts--bare and otherwise.

For Jayne, after all, is a smart girl. Her mother, the former Vera Jeffrey, a school teacher, has said Jayne was a child prodigy. At 22, Jayne not only knows all the answers--she even knows the questions.

"I've done a little semi-nude modeling," she confessed to me the first day of our meeting. "I used to model for the art class at Southern Methodist down in Dallas to make a few extra pennies. I only did it nude once or twice but mostly I was in a leotard with nothing under it. I didn't earn as much when I wore the leotard, but I wasn't so embarrassed. Besides, with the leotard, they could see the lines of my body almost as well as if I was nude."

Personally, I'd have made her take those extra pennies and said, "Never mind the leotard," but anyway, Jayne was probably the only nude model in history who brought a baby to her job. Little Jayne Marie Mansfield was then a few months old, having been born (continued on page 60) Jayne Mansfield(continued from page 51) when Jayne Senior was still in Highland Park High in Dallas, and only 16.

"Oh, this was a very big deal in high school," is the way Jayne tells it. "Paul Mansfield was 20 and the handsomest boy in our crowd. He was a terrific party boy and had the most beautiful eyes. I think I married him for those eyes.

"So 9 1/2 months later I had a little baby girl."

Maybe some of you fellows are disappointed, just as I was, to learn that Jayne is a married woman. If so, let me lift your spirits by pointing out that all this happened some time ago and that Jayne now lives in a state of single blessedness. But I'm getting ahead of my story. Back to Dallas:

"We weren't living very high on the hog and couldn't afford a baby-sitter so I took the baby to school with me, right into class. I'd stick a bottle in her mouth and just as long as she didn't make any noise, everything was all right. Every so often I'd have to change diapers."

Probably nobody in the art class at Southern Methodist who saw a nude, semi-nude or leotarded Jayne Mansfield pause to change her baby's diaper ever suspected that this babe with the baby would in a few years be one of the most photographed bodies in America and a girl romanced by every major movie company hoping to get her lines on the dotted line.

Jayne, who is a very cooperative girl, kept on talking about how her husband and his beautiful eyes got drafted, and how she whiled away the time during his stay in service by cutting up frogs in a biology class, studying drama, working as a receptionist for a veterinarian, selling photograph albums, and stuff like that. When Beautiful Eyes returned to the bosom of the family, Jayne decided it was about time she tried to crash the movies. So, packing husband, baby and Bikini, she took off for the West Coast.

Always a do-it-yourself, direct-action girl, Jayne didn't wait for anybody to discover her when she went to Hollywood--she phoned up Paramount and announced, "I want to be an actress. I've modeled and won beauty contests. What do I do?"

"Talk to our talent department," they told her.

So far, so good. Milton Lewis of the talent department heard her story and said, "Won't you come in in about two days?"

She did but nothing much happened. Then as she was leaving the studio, a man stopped her . . . not an unusual experience for Jayne.

"Do you work here?" he asked her.

"No, I don't," Jayne said, tossing her nose and her torso a little haughtily and starting to wiggle-waggle away.

"Well, drop by my studio in two weeks," the man said . . . and he walked away.

Jayne held her breath--a very pretty sight, I've noticed--and then squealed to a passerby, "Who is that man?"

"Him?" replied the passerby. "Oh, that's Sam Goldwyn."

(But she never saw him again--until just last fall when he walked up to her at a party in New York and told her he'd seen her in Rock Hunter and thought she was talented and beautiful. Jayne didn't tell him of their previous meeting.)

She had become so busy immediately in California that she didn't go to see Goldwyn--besides, her agent thought she wasn't ready to talk to him. Jayne made a test at Warner Bros., but Jack Warner was in Italy and he probably never knew anything about her being there.

"He didn't even see the chest--I mean the test," she relates. (She was right the first time.)

But she did get a TV role, on Lux Video Theater, in October of 1954, a small part in The Angel Went AWOL. her first professional appearance. Then she got into a movie, Hangover, with Laurence Tierney and John Carradine, in which she played the female lead. She often wonders whether that picture will ever be released.

"I was floundering around, getting nowhere, when someone advised me to fly to Florida and join a junket that was down there publicizing Underwater, the Jane Russell movie.

"I bought a red bathing suit and went down there. The bathing suit was skin-tight. Not much cleavage, but no one seemed to mind.

"It was quite a bathing suit." Her hands moved to her bosom to emphasize the kind of a bathing suit it was.

"What ever happened to it?"

"I washed it and it shrank."

The rest is history. The photographers had a field day. When Jayne got back to Hollywood, offers from five studios were awaiting her.

"By the way," I interrupted, thinking that as the Boswell of Bosoms I should get some statistics about her figure, "are you still growing?"

"Still growing where?" Jayne asked.

"Where else?" I countered.

This snappy comeback amused her something awful.

"I stopped growing when I was 17," she said.

"At 40 inches?" I cried, somewhat incredulous.

"That's right, Earl. At 40 inches. I started developing when I was ten, in Dallas. I was terribly sensitive about it. Especially when I was 13. I wouldn't wear a bra, because I thought that going without one would de-emphasize my bosom. It didn't.

"I soon got over being sensitive, though.

"Now it's bread-and-butter, of course," she said, "but before it worried me because everybody stared at my bust. Even now I'd rather they stared at my face."

I told her I was having a hard time deciding where to stare--everything was so nice.

She smiled modestly and said, "People say to me sometimes, 'You know, I just noticed your face for the first time, and it's pretty.' I wish more people would look at my face. After all, every girl has a bust."

"Well ..." I drawled doubtfully, then changed the subject. "Some glamor-girls exercise daily to keep well-rounded. Do you?"

"Sure," she said.

"How?" I leered.

"You put your hands back of your head and sort of tighten your chest muscles," she explained. "Like this."

"Very interesting," I mumbled.

"When I'm 40, I want to be as firm as I am now," she said.

One night at the opening of the new plush Maxfield ice cream parlor in New York, I saw Jayne speak up to a photographer who was in the act of putting his hand on her bosom--just jokingly, of course. Jayne had on a high-necked blue dress. One photographer was working on some pictures of another photographer at work, and, as Jayne understands it, "He needed a shot of a photographer fixing a girl's thing. Everybody in the shop was looking at me, and pretty soon the photographer who was doing the posing had his hand on my chest. I said, 'Oh, no, you're not going to do that!' Well, they all apologized, and I'm sure nobody meant anything wrong."

I'm sure, too. How could any clean-cut photographer have naughty intentions toward a sweet girl with a 40-inch bosom, a 22-inch waist, 35 1/2-inch hips, very good legs, a face uncommonly beautiful as well as warm and pleasant, and a thick crown of hair made champagne-blonde by Hollywood (the only part of Jayne not made in heaven) ? The idea is ridiculous.

I asked Jayne what kind of a schedule she maintains and she gave me a quick run-down. It's usually about 7 A.M. when she pulls her naked body out of bed. She owns no nightgowns or pajamas although there are always people willing to lend her some.

She slips quietly into some peddle-pushers and a sweater, dons a pair of sunglasses and, skipping breakfast, is out into the morning, exercising Lord Byron, her coal-black Great Dane who is named not for the Byron you're thinking of, but Jim Byron, a Hollywood press agent.

Occasionally when Jayne so nudely arises, photographers are already waiting downstairs, ready to whisk her to some proper site for publicity pictures for newspapers and magazines. It might be Central Park for pictures of The Real Jayne.

"You know, the contrast between the voluptuous movie queen I play in the show and the candid, just-plain me."

"Oh, yes," I said, dutifully, although I was wondering how she managed to be a plain-Jayne.

In the early afternoon she might dash over to the Waldorf to accept three white orchids and be crowned National Flower Queen. A trip to a radio studio (continued on page 65) Jayne Mansfield (continued from page 60) to record an interview or a television chit-chat might round out the afternoon.

"That takes me up to cocktail time, which is usually reserved for columnists. Dinner I usually grab on the run. I can't remember the last time I went someplace just to have dinner. I eat plenty of steaks and gobs of orange juice to keep up my stamina. I just adore steak. Oh, and my vitamin pills!"

She reached into her handbag and pulled out a bottle of the pills and gulped one down. Then she ran down the list of deficiencies and necessities this little pill embraces. Very impressive.

"You're at the theater at 8," I said, getting back to business. "And after the show you're out on the town living it up?"

"I have been 'out on the town living it up' exactly three times since the opening," she said, firmly.

"You're not a party girl?"

"Sure! With the right guy."

"What do you consider 'right?' " (Jayne and Paul Mansfield were recently divorced, I should add.)

"Well, I'm a big girl, and I feel I need a big guy. I like him well-muscled. At parties, I want him suave. On the beach, I want him wholesome. I like graying black hair, kind of charcoal."

Her public voicing of these qualifications once before caused a small stampede. "It's miraculous," Jayne said, "how many big, well-muscled, suave, (concluded on next page) wholesome men with charcoal hair are kicking around."

"You wouldn't," I said coyly, "consider anything less?"

"There's an exception to every rule," she answered encouragingly.

Now that all you playboys have had the good news about Jayne, I must deliver the bad news:

She's in love (as this issue goes to press, anyhow).

"My baby" is the expression she reserves for American Airlines pilot Robby Robertson, 38, tall, wide-shouldered, romantic, adventurous, and the possessor of the required "charcoal-gray hair."

They met on a plane last April when she was returning from a personal appearance tour in Texas, and she's been flying ever since.

"All the other men including some pilots on the plane were making these huge pitches, but when he walked through the plane--he was flying it--I thought 'I've got to have this!' He's the only person in my whole life I ever gave my phone number to the first time he asked for it."

Jayne will really rhapsodize about Her Guy.

"Oh, I've been infatuated with quite a few, but there aren't any others who are so perfectly made for me and who I'm so perfectly made for. He's so very handsome and he's got that wonderful hair, and he's willing to go along with my career. He wants me to be the biggest thing since Jean Harlow. This is just a beautiful thing and when I go out with anybody else, I say, 'Why am I doing this?'

"He's 16 years older than me . . . which I think is just about right."

I know this stuff about Robertson and his charcoal hair must be quite a blow to all you blonde-, brown- and black-haired guys who have been counting on making a play for Jayne next time you hit New York, but it's not hopeless. Something that happened just near the end of our interview gave me an idea which I'll pass on to you. Jayne was so busy that she said the only chance we'd get to wind up the interview would be for me to sneak into Larry Matthews' hairdressing establishment while he was gilding the lily. It was. she figured, the most likely place we could be alone for a couple of hours.

She was on the phone. It was Jack Toohey, the show's press agent, the guy overseeing Jayne's schedule.

"But Jack," Jayne was protesting, "a person's got to sleep. I haven't been doing much of that lately ... I know this is important, but so's my sleep if I'm supposed to be beautiful at 8 A.M. tomorrow . . . Okay, I'll see him after the show . . . I've got a date at midnight. A man who owns a chain of fan magazines. Promised he'd buy me a steak ..."

There, said I to myself, is this girl's weakness -- her tummy! So remember that, men--Jayne Mansfield softens at the sight of charcoal-gray hair, yes, but a charcoal-broiled steak might turn the trick, too.