Jayne's Girl

Mis for the million things she gave me." And for a girl named Jayne Marie Mansfield, embarking upon a movie career of her own--with some inherited savvy and other obviously marketable assets as her birthright--that sloshy old Mother's Day sentiment may not be far wrong. She is her mother's daughter beyond question, though the blue eyes and chestnut hair and more subtly curved contours add up to a cool contemporary understatement of those pinup-girl attributes that Jayne the First deployed as if she meant to shake the world at least once a day with a 21-gun barrage of platinum curls, quotes and cleavage. Jayne Marie is a sexpot of the new breed and would rather be called a daredevil than a femme fatale. Just back from her debut film gig in the lead role of The Great Balloon Race, she talks like an excited home-coming athlete who's had a hot streak at the Olympics: "I should be put into the Guinness Book of World Records for this one.... I was the first woman to cross the Bermuda Triangle and touch ground in a hot-air balloon. It was a real race they used for the film, with lots of sinister little subplots added. I play one of the good guys, a girl who just wants to win (concluded on page 172)Jayne's Girl(continued from page 87) the prize money so she can get married and ride off into the sunset or whatever."

While she may register as a reasonable facsimile of her famous mother, Jayne Marie will quickly point out where their lifelines diverge: Jayne, born Jayne Palmer, was a not-so-plain small-town girl imbued with dreams of glory. Raised in a family of schoolteachers from Pennsylvania and Texas, married and divorced, with a four-year-old child and a Buick among her souvenirs, she set off to conquer a star-spangled world where Jean Harlow and Lana Turner had proved how far a girl could go with a bit of luck and lots of moxie; her first job was at the candy counter of an L.A. movie theater. Jayne Marie--who began living out where the rainbow ends at an early age--dreamed the simple homespun dreams her momma had traded for fame, fortune, three husbands, loneliness and a Mediterranean-style palazzo. She studied singing and dancing, spent nearly half of every year squandering her childhood in Europe's grandest hotels. Most of the baby dolls she knew were backstage on Broadway or in Vegas, where she graduated from grammar school while Mother got her act together.

Nowadays, she can look back at it all without regrets. Wearing a peachy-pink Thirties dress she designed herself, relaxing beside the pool at L.A.'s grandiose Century Plaza Hotel--part of a vast high-rise complex built where the old 20th Century-Fox lot used to be--Jayne Marie manages a faraway smile for times past. "This was my playground, right here, when my mother made all those pictures for Fox. I'd run in and out, trying on gowns from the costume department.

"There are a lot of disadvantages in being a movie star's daughter. I helped my mother learn her lines, did her hair, choreographed, even designed clothes for her. I practically brought up my younger half brothers and half sister--five of us in all. I always lived as an adult, which wasn't normal. I guess that's why I want to devote my life to having a good time."

Tensions mounted, she recalls, as she began to mature. "Not on my side. But offers came to me, usually through my mother. I was asked to do a Broadway play when I was 16 and she said absolutely not. It was a conflict for her, a threat, having a nearly grown-up daughter who might want to take over someday; that fear of competition made her irritable."

Jayne's death cast Jayne Marie in an even tougher role. "I'd been on someone else's merry-go-round my whole life, then suddenly I was on my own, angry at Hollywood and very distrustful." She went to school, tried marriage, delved into religion, took odd jobs--including one stint as a legal secretary--and finally became a globe-trotter. "The pink house was sold with all our clothes still in it, hers and mine. I didn't know why, or even care, at the time. I had no money. If my mother amassed a fortune, she certainly kept it well hidden. But I knew people everywhere, and now I'm grateful that we traveled so much, because that gave me a fabulous education."

It was little more than a year ago that Jayne Marie began to emerge from her period of adjustment and seek a more prominent place in the sun. She'd like, now, to do some high-fashion modeling. "One day I saw Margaux Hemingway on the cover of Time and thought to myself: If she can do that, I can do as well--or better. Determination is another thing I learned from my mother." Jayne Marie's next move will be a movie based on the hit song Rhinestone Cowboy, and she's also planning, with help, to write a book about Jayne. "Mother once told me I'd end up writing a book about her. Maybe it was a premonition. She even gave me the title: My Mother the Sex Symbol-- or Why I Became a Catholic. Which was partly a joke, because I went to two parochial schools and was baptized Catholic. I don't know if the book will be a biography or an autobiography, but it will be a sort of Life with Mother about the two of us--as mother-daughter, girlfriends, sisters, practical jokers. It's a tribute she deserves.

"When you're put up on a pedestal, you attract the wrong kind of people--but you're still real, a person. Years ago, when we were out on the road, Mother would sometimes put on a brown wig and we'd go off and meet guys just for fun--and if they told her she looked like Jayne Mansfield, she'd say: 'Everybody tells me that.' She was very sad, in a way. So much was expected of her. She packed a lot into her life, but she missed a lot, too. I don't want to miss it. And we're living in another era, thank God, and an actress can be herself. You don't have to get caught up in the Hollywood star-making machinery, unless you're hooked on money and glory. There's no way that will happen to me. My idea of a fine time is riding a horse down the beach or just sitting there alone watching the sun set, with a nice glass of wine and my flute." Put 'em all together, that's wine, woman and song. Would you expect any less of Mansfield II?