Heinlein Month: Live each golden moment as if it were eternity

Marilyn photographed by Sam Shaw.

Live each golden moment as if it were eternity — without fear, without hope, but with a sybaritic gusto.

(Robert A. Heinlein. Stranger In A Strange Land, 1961.)

Flashback Friday — Advice: Marilyn edition, “The few remaining earthbound stars”

This post originally appeared on May 19, 2010 at 3:53 p.m.

I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. All we demanded was our right to twinkle.

(Telegram from Marilyn Monroe declining a party invitation from Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. June 13, 1962.)

You got to fight for your right to twinkle. It is difficult and discouraging and at times seems insurmountable, but in the end, you are raised up to the sky to shine forever. Please try to help each other out and let’s none of us lose heart.

Sharon Tate’s Actual Life Awareness Month: Day 30

At Joshua Tree, probably via geminichilde on the tumblr.

Sharon Tate’s Actual Life Awareness Month is drawing to a close and I have so many beautiful pictures left still to share. I thought I’d use a few today to illustrate an aticle that sheds a lot of light on Sharon’s personality and some of her unique struggles with that unusual program for stardom we’ve touched on this month: how Sharon Tate continued to gratefully and sweetly obey her managers but unrelentingly champion her own intelligence despite being dominated by Marty Ransohoff and his “money men,” which is an admirable thing that many startlets of her day did not bother doing.

Like a lot of quiet, competent people-watchers, Ms. Tate followed the letter of instructions from “superiors” while retaining an independent spirit focused on the maintainenance of goals without compromising her sense of self. She did not want quite the type of spotlight for which they were grooming her, but she wasn’t going to turn down the chance to use their grooming to launch a career which followed more closely her own vision.

So here it is: More on Marty’s master plan and how Sharon integrated that with her own personal identity and gentle, inquisitive intellect. All quotes come from “Venus On A Treadmill,” by Johnny Columbus for Photo Screen, June 1968.

There was a top-level conference in [Marty Ransohoff’s Filmways] office. Sharon Tate, the little girl from Dallas via Rome, was going into hiding. Sharon Tate, Movie Star, was going to be manufactured.

“They said they had a plan for me. They would train me and prepare me,” she remembers. “I was immediately put into training — like a racehorse.”

Three years went by. Sharon was completely under wraps. “I had a job to stay the way I was,” says Sharon. “They told me ‘Cream your face, Sharon. Put on more eyeliner, Sharon. Stick out your boobs, Sharon.’”

Sharon had many things in common with [her Valley of the Dolls character] Jennifer [North]. Both were acutely conscious of the value their bodies held in the flesh commerce of Hollywood; both were innocents; both were involved with European “art” filmmakers.

“I am like Jennifer,” says Sharon, “because she is relatively simple, a victim of circumstances beyond her control. But I have more confidence in myself…”

“I’m so afraid of hurting other people’s feelings I don’t speak out when I should. I get into big messes that way,” she once said.

via welcometothepast.

Both Marilyn [Monroe] and Jennifer [North] were the “Beautiful Blondes” of their day. Both had astonishing figures. Both were treated very badly by those producers who exploited their sex appeal for the moviegoers. Both posed nude before they gained stardom. Both rejected their “dumb blonde” images to marry intellectuals.

“I will never be another Marilyn Monroe,” Sharon says now. “But I had to do what they wanted, at first.”

Valley of the Dolls still via lovely and officially sanctioned sharontate.info.

And they, meaning the money men, wanted her to be a well-trained sex symbol with a vacuum for a head. Sharon was tortured by their demeaning attitude towards her.

via weheartit.

“They see me as a dolly in a bikini, jumping up and down on a trampoline,” she said of her producers. … “I love it on the beach — it gives me a kind of freedom. I don’t have to be a sex symbol or a movie star.”

“Beauty is only a look. It has nothing to do with what I’m like inside … I won’t play any more dumb blondes,” she insisted.

“Sometimes,” she says ruefully, “I think it would be better to be a sex symbol, because at least I would know where I was. But I’d lose my mind!”

Maybe that’s the happy medium. If Sharon can get off the Hollywood treadmill … if she can prove to others what she has proved to herself — that there is a head above her body — then she will have achieved true happiness and satisfaction — without escaping from her responsibilities.

Sharon puts it very beautifully: “I still have this teddy bear I’ve had since I was three … and all my old boxes — valentine boxes, cigar boxes, all kinds of boxes — I just won’t give them up. It’s like if I give them up, I’ve given in to being a movie star.”

Special thanks to the SensationalSharonTate blog for the full transcript of this interview.

Sharon Tate’s Actual Life Awareness Month: Day 11

Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1963). Jennifer North (Sharon Tate) appears in a French art house film to get enough money to get her clingy, vampiric mother off her back and hopefully resolve other financial entanglements in her life. She becames a moderate success and something of a sex symbol in Europe, but continues to grapple with success in America. All the while, what the Jennifer North character wants more than anything is to have a child to whom she can show the affection and provide the loving stability she, herself, never received.

Travilla, Costume Designer: Sharon Tate is divine, a real find. Just wait and see what happens when the critics and public see her in Valley of the Dolls. Sharon has everything Marilyn Monroe had and more. She has the fascinating, yet wholly feminine strength of a Dietrich or a Garbo….a classically beautiful face, an exciting figure, the kind of sex appeal and personality appeal to become as glittering a star as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor.

(“Valley of the Dolls.” Screen Stories. December 1967.)

Mark Robson: She’s not a sexpot. She’s a very vulnerable girl. The biggest surprise in the film is Sharon.

(Ibid.)

Robert Viharo: Everybody [on set] was competitive with everybody. The only one that I felt was above it, was Sharon Tate. The sweetest, purest, most open spirit.

(Viharo, Robert. AMC’s “Backstory: Valley of the Dolls.” Original airdate: April 23, 2001.)

Jennifer North’s dislike of her career being centered around her body and her desire for a husband and children mirrors Sharon Tate’s own ambitions in life, and discomfort with being viewed only as a sex symbol and not recognized for her free spirit and comedic timing. (Of course, a major difference is Sharon had a very close relationship with her family and a positive upbringing.) Ms. Tate threw herself in to this part and received very good reviews, best of the cast and much better than her far more famous co-star Patty Duke. However, given her unique style and love for others, she would probably dislike that I wrote that comparison out. So I’m sorry, Ms. Tate — I merely wanted to point out that Travilla’s prediction came true!

William Blake Month: She who burns with youth and knows no fixed lot; is bound / In spells of law to one she loathes

Some thoughts from Mr. Blake on free love, fidelity, procreative pressure, and the institution of marriage as it functioned (and did not) for ladies during his lifetime:

Jane Birikin and the dread Serge G.

… She who burns with youth and knows no fixed lot;
is bound
In spells of law to one she loathes:
and must she drag the chain
Of life, in weary lust!

Must chilling murderous thoughts obscure
The clear heaven of her eternal spring?
to bear the wintry rage
Of a harsh terror driv’n to madness, bound to hold a rod
Over her shrinking shoulders all the day;

Marilyn and Arthur on their wedding day. Marilyn’s dress was ivory but her veil arrived white, so rather than freak out or buy a new one she soaked it in tea overnight. She was an orphan and imminently practical.

& All the night
To turn the wheel of false desire: and longings
that wake her womb
To the abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form
That live a pestilence & die a meteor & are no more.

(William Blake, excerpt from Visions of the Daughters of Albion. 1793. Shockingly self-published.)

The Graduate (Kubrick, 1967).EDIT: It was directed by Mike Nichols, not Stanley Kubrick. Jesus-christ-bananas. How that got past me is a mystery. Mucho mas mucho thanks to Peteski for the heads-up!

Happy bride month, am I right? Goin’ to the chapel…

In all seriousness, William Blake was a sort of pre-feminist and a great admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft but for all his forward-thinking, he could behave curiously backwardly and contemporarily to the times in his personal life, almost as if his own wife, Catherine, did not count in his reckoning of the equalities of the opposite sex.

Audrey and Mel. She looks terribly unhappy and trapped. I do not believe this was their wedding day but rather shortly before their breakup in an ad for Givenchy’s L’Interdit, the first celebrity fragrance. I wear Givenchy Amarige when I am Really Me. But that is very rare. So often it is best to be Other Me-s, so I roll with Michael by Michael Kors.

As an example, when they had trouble conceiving, Blake openly advocated bringing another, younger woman into their marriage and relegating Catherine to second-class status in a different bedroom. My guess is he backed up his proposal by citing the timeless, good ol’ Rachel/Leah biblical argument, which reminds me that I get to hit Handmaid’s Tale next month.

Humbert and Lo’s toes. Lolita (Kubrick, 1962).

Okay, I went in to more insomnia-fueled bookfoolery and this entry is now uncomfortably longer than I’d prefer a Blake one to be. I’m going to split it up. Meet me in the next post. More Kubrick, even (I didn’t intend for that to happen but now that it has I’m on board). (edit: again, The Graduate is directed by Mike Nichols. Not Stanley Kubrick.)

William Blake Month: “Rose, thou art sick”

Marilyn Monroe on her honeymoon. Arthur Miller in background.

O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

(William Blake, “The Sick Rose.”)

This is a bad day. Bad things are happening. Shocking, incomprehensible things miles away, coming at a time when I thought accords were being reached and newer, happier stages begun. I don’t understand any of it and there’s nothing I can do to make it better because none of it is anything I’ve done, even though it will all deeply impact me for a long time to come. Once again, I do not control the events of my own life.

Photographed by Andre de Dienes.

All I can do is keep praying for the safety of people I care about, even if I sense they would not care either way about my concern, and hope for peaceful resolutions to their conflicts. I also need to remember that I have my own personal life with its own dreams and priorities, and make sure I am tending to those in order to succeed on my own, and putting a true emphasis on the good, kind, wonderful people involved in my immediate present with the proper attention and attitude. I can’t spend all my time numb, indifferent to food, and losing hair and sleep over lives and behaviors that I am not sure I can ever understand.

My real life is not knots in my stomach and pacing around, but is the glad things that bring me joy; my real self and its happiness comes from my friends and family and spending time doing the things I love, like writing, reading, teaching, and photography. Not agonizing and gaining grey hairs over pre-existing situations that I could never better in a month of Sundays. It’s not that I will stop trying, it’s just that I will stop staking my identity and emotions on it. That’s not who I am. A happy person who deliberately seeks friends and family in a positive and creative environment: that is who I really am. I have to remind myself of that.

Soon, I will take my grandmother and we will go pick up kidlet from her last day of kindergarten, and take her out for a girls’ lunch, and I will lay these dark times aside to let her light shine on me for awhile.

Advice: Marilyn edition, “The few remaining earthbound stars”

I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. All we demanded was our right to twinkle.

(Telegram from Marilyn Monroe declining a party invitation from Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. June 13, 1962.)

You got to fight for your right to twinkle. It is difficult and discouraging and at times seems insurmountable, but in the end, you are raised up to the sky to shine forever. Please try to help each other out and let’s none of us lose heart.

Advice: Marilyn Monroe and cats edition

You can be Catwoman without understanding cats or women, it seems.

Photo of Marilyn via nevver on the tumblr.

I have this very hackneyed and cliched theory that women are like cats and men are like dogs. It’s overarching and misogynistic and probably a bunch of hooey, because I can’t even apply it to my own good girl friends, but the thing is sometimes it feels like it is just exactly the truth. In talking to my daughter’s father this weekend, I found out that his wife, from whom he is very recently separated, apparently doesn’t like me. By which I mean, hella does not like me. Historically, even. This is pretty distressing to me because, like an idiot, I thought we were cool.

Not only had I been really excited about meeting her, about which I clearly remember writing in several entries, but in the actual event of it I’d made a point of being polite, respectful, friendly, and talkative with her on the occasions we met. We talked at various times both in person and in letters about my move down here, about cooking, about our families — I really thought we’d hit it off. I gave her a card for Valentine’s day and tried consistently to be as friendly and upbeat as possible when she wrote me about her troubles with my daughter’s father, encouraging her and saying I was praying for the best possible outcome.

Photgraphed by Andre de Dienes.

To find out that she not only never liked me before but I am thinking pretty much actively hates me now was upsetting, but it was not the hardest blow. That was still to come. I don’t understand it, and I’ve known for a long time that his sister didn’t like me, never really understood why she had a bad impression of me but eventually gave up hoping she would change her mind and have just continued in as friendly a way as possible, but things are really compounded now. The toughest thing for me to grapple with is that Grandma P, who I’d always counted as a friend and counted on for sitting for my daughter and as a sounding board now and again in my own life, actually thought that my daughter’s father left his wife for me. That she would even consider drawing a conclusion like that, after knowing me all this time and knowing the separation and pain that I myself have been going through this year, is shocking and devastating to me.

The thing with his wife was bad enough, but the thing with his mom is stunning to me, and, as the time has gone by since he and I talked this weekend and I’ve had a chance to work through the jumble of feelings I have about all this, it turns out that’s one of the things that I’m having the toughest time with. I guess I was a fool? to imagine I had a connection with Grandma P, a) because I know better about myself and how some people just don’t like me, and b) I know that connections with many people are illusory and couched in ulterior motives. But I really did think that we were friends. I’ve welcomed her in to every home in which I’ve lived, always looked forward to her visits, encouraged her to call frequently and to have a relationship with my daughter even when her father and I were not in touch. So this has been a big surprise.

I don’t know why they dislike me so. If it’s because he and I hurt each other five years ago, then, isn’t that between us? I understand. When people hurt my friends and the ones I love, I want to tear them apart — but I also trust my friends’ and loved ones’ judgment. And if they tell me that it’s okay, then I have to know that that’s the end of my anger, and they know the way of it better than me. So if we can forgive one another and rebuild a friendship for not only our daughter’s sake but for the redemption of our own selves, then why in the name of heaven is that a bad or threatening thing?

This is what I mean about cats and women. They are full of secrets and you can never know what they are thinking. When dogs don’t like you, they make no trouble to disguise it: they bark and growl at you and try to bite. Cats are so much sneakier, you think they are fun to play with and you can trust them, and all the while they are stalking around and then coming out of nowhere with their claws … These women that I thought I could tentatively call friends made me think I was doing an okay job of becoming something like close and bonded with them, convinced me to offer up parts of myself and my personal backstories which I have a terrible time doing exactly because of situations like this, and it turns out that I guess I was wrong. I failed to meet the mark in some way, or could never have done so for some reason that is totally shrouded in mystery to me, like when they were handing out the woman-cat brains I was at a Polish sausage stand and missed the memo. It’s a real bummer.

There is nothing I can do about it except keep upbeat, focus on the daisies and bluebirds, and keep offering the olive branch as I have tried again and again to do — and pray that it “takes” at some eventual time. Because we have all got to know each other basically until we die, and I don’t understand why that has to be unpleasant or filled with drama, when we can just as easily choose to find the good in the situation? Until then, until they come around, I guess, I have to concentrate, have to try and stop dwelling on it and stop feeling sorry for myself, accept what I cannot change, and go forward. It’s just harder to do than say.

Valentine Vixen — Miss February 1955, Jayne Mansfield

Remember how Jayne Mansfield came up not once but twice over this month in the course of covering the Valentine Vixens, and I kept alluding to how she would appear later in her own extra-focused double-long entry later in the month? Totally keeping my promise right this second!

I have featured the lovely and talented Jayne Mansfield, actress, model and Playboy’s Miss February 1955, before as part of a “The Way They Were” feature, but here she is in her own right.

Photographed by Hal Adams.

There is so very much, true and untrue, written about Ms. Mansfield’s personal history vis-a-vis her men and her mammaries that I decided to try and stick with showing some rare pictures and lesser seen facets of the other, more real side of her personality, and try and feature some clever quotes from her.

Because, as with Pammy, I am totally effing sick of the persistence of the “dumb blonde” thing, and I feel like when people write about Ms. Mansfield, it is usually in passing reference to her body or to her fame only as a symbol of sex in cinema, and almost never dwells on what was beneath the surface of the image she spun in order to be a Hollywood “success.”

The measure of a woman, get it? Funny, yes. The pose is cute but no, that’s no way to gauge us. Here is a kernel of widsom from me to you; write it down and you will land yourself some foxy dates:

“A lady is always greater than the sum of her parts, no matter the greatness of some of those parts.” — E., Right Here, Right Now.

Take it to the bank! Don’t be intimidated. Get to know a woman, ask her about herself, remember the things she says, and you will very easily win her over. Okay? So back to Ms. Mansfield. A couple pithy quotes from the buxom blonde:

“A forty-one inch bust and a lot of perseverance will get you more than a cup of coffee—a lot more.”

and

“I like being a pin-up girl. There’s nothing wrong with it. When I’m 100 I’ll still be doing pin-ups.”

That last is a tough one since she died relatively young. Also,

“If you’re going to do something wrong, do it big, because the punishment is the same either way!”,

“Sure, I know men. Men are those creatures with two legs and eight hands.”

and, more seriously, on the subject of desegregation and Civil Rights,

“God created us equal and we’re not living up to it.”

Jayne was famously married to former Mr. Universe, wrestler and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, but she was not above a pageant or ten herself. Here’s some fun stuff that I cobbled together from various sources about Jayne’s own beauty contest career.

From the wiki: “While attending the University of Texas, she won several beauty contests, with titles that included Miss Photoflash, Miss Magnesium Lamp and Miss Fire Prevention Week.” During this time, she was also married to her first husband, Paul Mansfield. She studied dramatic arts in Austin, then acting at UCLA when she and Paul moved out to the West Coast.

The wiki claims that the only title she ever turned down was “Miss Roquefort Cheese,” because she believed that it “just didn’t sound right.” A biography site I found included a more complete list of her awards, and here are my hand-picked-for-how-bizarre-they-are favorites of the titles Ms. Mansfield held:

Miss Tomato, Miss Negligee, Miss Nylon Sweater, Miss Freeway, Miss Electric Switch, Miss Geiger Counter (?!?!), Miss 100% Pure Maple Syrup, Miss 4th of July, and, last but most certainly not least, Hot Dog Ambassador (hell, yeah, hot dogs!).

This is my favorite picture of Jayne Mansfield — she is so enrapt in a conversation, mid-sentence and animated, that I think it must be the closest thing to what she really looked like. Because she had such a manufactured image, I find this candid touching.

Other fact you may not know about Ms. Mansfield: the famously blonde babe also made a bombshell of a brunette! Jayne got in touch with her “roots” for the film Single Room Furnished, the picture on which she was working at the time of her death. Adapted from a play by Geraldine Sanford for Jayne by her then-husband Matt Cimber (by the time principal photography in NJ was done, Cimber and she were split and Jayne was dating Sam Brody, her attorney, who died with her), the movie was very slow to be released and was tough to find for a lot of years.

Click any to see large. Each one is unthinkably GIANT.

The imdb summarizes it as

Three stories in one: Johnie (Jayne Mansfield) is married, but her husband deserts her when she becomes pregnant. She changes her name to Mae and takes a job as a waitress. She falls in love, but her fiancé leaves her just as they’re about to get married. So Mae changes her name to Eileen and becomes a prostitute.

I’ve heard it’s actually okay, but I haven’t seen it. Anyone?

Thinking about those final years, her slow decline and her sudden death, is a real bummer, so here’s a couple shots from a much happier time:

At the Pink Palace on her wedding day to Matt Cimber, aka Thomas Vitale “Mateo” Ottaviono, September 24, 1964.

So, since the above pictures have raised the topic — Oh, my. The Pink Palace.

“I’ll have to have a palace, of course. I may not be a princess, but I am a movie queen, and every queen should have a palace.” — Jayne Mansfield

The house has become a part of the lore that surrounds Jayne’s “story,” with most people focusing on the heart-shaped tub, the pink walls, the fur carpets, the fountain of pink champagne, and so on, as evidence of what a Barbie Doll baked in a vanilla cupcake frosted with glitter she was alleged to be. But here is the real deal. Ms. Mansfield bought the Pink Palace in November of 1957 for a cool $76k after some very shrewd real estate backdoor bargaining. A 40-room mansion smack on Sunset Boulevard, the house was built in 1929 by highly regarded Los Angeles architecht G.C. McAllister and had previously been owned by singer Rudy Vallee. It could have gone for much, much more than what Ms. Mansfield wrangled as the end price. But it gets better.

Jayne in the driveway of the Pink Palace.

You need to understand that Jayne was a very specific type of famous. She did not land in big moving pictures so much as her big moving boobs landed her in printed pictures. She was not rated and weighed to be serious in the manner of someone like Audrey Hepburn or even Marilyn Monroe, but you can bet your ass that “Jayne Mansfield” was absolutely a household name. That’s because she was an accessible gal who could move her some magazines. Rags like People and Star were born in this post-war Hollywood boom — men, average men, wanted to ogle star boobies, and women, average women, wanted to read about how they did their makeup, and Jayne was willing to provide both.

Jayne Mansfield created the brand of Jayne Mansfield, made herself worth knowing about before actually having a lot of star credits to her name. In this stroke of genius, in her complete creative control of a public image that made her famous mainly for being famous, she is sort of the fairy godmother of a Hilton or a Kardashian; hell, she wore a transparent wedding dress when she got hitched to Mickey Hargitay, and she was manufacturing wardrobe malfunctions and nip slips when Janet Jackson was still a twinkle in her mother’s eye. At the apex of her career, Jayne actually sold her used bath water by the bottle for $10.00 a pop. Walter Winchell said of her that she was making a career simply “of being a girl,” which the same can be said for a lot of D-listers these days. But I do feel the need to add that I believe Jayne was not as empty-headed and low-class as the current crop of celebutard and I think she had more tinfoil and hardboiled brains in her elegant hot pink pinky nail than Paris Hilton has in her whole spray-tanned size 00 body.

Jayne “crashes” the party.

One really famous instance of Jayne’s cleverness with public relations was at a party thrown for Sophia Loren in 1957. Jayne stole the show by showing up braless in a very low-cut dress. Oops! Some of her decolletage spilled out, and suddenly the event swung from being about the lovely new Italian broad on the block to be focused solely on the Jayne Mansfield brand (available at a newsstand near you!). Above is a famous picture of Sophia grimly bird-dogging the shit out of Jayne, although I think she also looks faintly amused. The arch of her brows is almost a tip of the hat to Ms. Mansfield, as if to say, “Cheap. But well played.” I love it. It’s a pretty famous picture. The picture reminds me of when she went on The Tonight Show and Jack Paar, the forerunner of Johnny Carson, introduced her by saying, “Here they are: Jayne Mansfield!”

“Fucking-a!, how does this boobs-and-the-media history lesson relate to the Pink Palace?” you are asking, and I am saying, “Hall and Oates!, have some patience — it relates directly, and can you please clean up that language?” Okay, so. Parlaying this common-folks’ notoriety and fame in to lucrative wheeling-dealings, Jayne made phone calls and dangled phantom photoshoot promises to area interior decorators, asking for samples to use in her new famous residence. Tantalized by the possibility of a potential publicity relations juggernaut, decorators delivered by the truckload. Thanks to her fame and their greed, the clever Ms. Mansfield managed to decorate the entire mansion with over $150,000 worth of free stuff.

Most of it was in pink, the signature color of her public persona. However, privately she once wrote, “I’ve been identified with pink throughout my career, but I’m not as crazy about it as I’ve led people to believe. My favorite colors are actually neutrals — black and white — but then who thinks of a movie queen in black and white? Everything has to be in living color.” You see what I mean about complete awareness of the image, the public face, and her creative control over it? So much more to her than met the eye. The pink thing must not have been created completely out of whole cloth, though; Mariska Hargitay, star of Law & Order: SVU and Jayne’s daughter from her second marriage to body-builder Mickey Hargitay, remembered well enough her mother’s association with pink and her time with her in the Pink Palace that, in honor of her mother, she wore a pale pink wedding gown and a pink-gold heart-shaped locket when she walked down the aisle in 2004 with her husband, actor Peter Summer. (Whoa, there is dust in here again…so ridiculous, all this dust.)

Since Jayne’s tragic not-decapitating death, the Pink Palace has been owned by Ringo Starr, patron saint Mama Cass Elliot, and Englebert Humperdinck. It was demolished November 9, 2002.

This is Jayne’s actual headstone, at the Fairview Cemetery at Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, where she was interred following her death June 29, 1967 (exactly thirty-five years before the death of my cousin Thomas which changed my life forever). There is a memorial cinotaph in the Hollywood Forever cemetery, but it has the incorrect date on it. This error is not the Jayne Mansfield Fan Club’s fault; true to loveable character, Ms. Mansfield had given out for many years the incorrect year of her birth in order to appear younger.

Pictures published in the mag from the set of this movie, Promises, got Hef and Playboy slapped with an indecency lawsuit and nearly shut them down — hot story for next time. Oooh, anticipation!

Besides her work on the screen and in print, a lasting legacy of Jayne’s tragic death in an automobile-tractor-trailer crash is the so-called Mansfield bar, a safety feature now standard on all tractor trailers.

The NHTSA began requiring an underride guard, a strong bar made of steel tubing, to be installed on all tractor-trailers. This bar is also known as a Mansfield bar, and on occasions as a DOT bar. (the wiki)

Over the course of her career, the lovely and talented (and, I hope I have convinced you, underratedly clever) Jayne Mansfield appeared in Playboy magazine over 30 times. You may visit Jayne’s star on the Walk of Fame at 6328 Hollywood Boulevard. As her gravestone says, “We live to love you more each day.” R.I.P., Ms. Mansfield.

Movie Moment: Death Becomes Her

Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, 1992).

Anna: How about a nice collagen buff?
Madeline: “A collagen buff”? You might as well ask me to wash with soap and water!
Anna: I could do your make-up myself…
Madeline: Make-up is pointless. It does nothing anymore! Are you even listening to me? Do you even care? You stand there with your 22-year-old skin and your tits like … like ROCKS and laugh at me…

Madeline: Wrinkled, wrinkled little star. Hope they never see the scars.

Helen: You? You couldn’t lift an eyebrow without major surgery.

Madeline: What’d she call this one. Forever Young?
Rose: I like that title.
Madeline: Pfft! “Forever young” — and eternally fat.

Madeline: Bottoms up! (drinks potion)
Lisle: Now, a warning —
Madeline: Now a warning?!

This is a noteworthy film for me because, besides being hilarious and featuring fun performances by some of my favorite actors, it’s the first movie in which I ever saw Isabella Rossellini.

When I found out that on top of being crazy-beautiful, she is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter (she and her twin resulted from a marriage whose scandalous origins nearly got the great Bergman blackballed), I was totally blown away.

However, today’s brief research turned up a surprising fact about what was, for me, one of the more memorable scenes in the movie, when Isabella in the role of Lisle von Rhuman, the sorceress who provides eternal youth to the materialistic L.A. clientele shown in the film, emerges naked from a pool in a rear view.

Come to find out all these years later, it was not Isabella. A body double was used in the scene. It was a chick named Catherine Bell. Even today, at 57, the lovely and talented Isabella Fiorella Elettra Giovanna Rossellini still makes annual lists of “Most beautiful women,” so I can only guess that either (a) Ms. Rossellini’s modesty forbade her to bare all and she requested the body double because she had enough clout between her talent and her lineage to demand that kind of thing, or, (b) her actual ass was so mind-meltingly terrific that the studio felt it would be irresponsible to expose it to the viewing public, fearing it might spark riots, mind control, and catatonia. Almost definitely (b), wouldn’t you say?

Helen: That was totally uncalled for.

Ernest: She’s dead!
Madeline: She is? Oh, these are the moments that make life worth living.

Madeline: I hurt you. And I’m sorry.
Helen: I hurt you, and I‘m sorry.

Helen: Do you remember where you parked the car?

edit: So, despite having had a huge lady-crush on Isabella Rossellini since I was 13, I somehow missed the fact that she had scoliosis as a kid and underwent painful bone grafts, braces, stretching, and spinal surgery to correct it which left her with a network of scars. Thus, no back-side-nudity for Isa, now or ever. Still predict her ass was mind-meltingly terrific, tho.

Valentine Vixen: Sally Todd, Miss February 1957

The lovely and talented Sally Todd first appeared in Playboy in June of 1956, in a clothed pictorial about girls in Las Vegas. She was asked back to be the gatefold model for the February issue in 1957.

Photographed by David Sutton and Ed DeLong.

When Sally was 19, she entered and won a beauty pageant in her hometown of Tuscon at the urging of her mother and began doing local modeling gigs.

A few years later, she wanted to take a trip to Canada but had only saved enough for Los Angeles, so she went to Hollywood. She had studied drama in Tuscon and was spotted while shopping by a scout for 20th Century Fox. He had her in for screen tests and a very nice B-movie career was born! Fox billed her as “a young Lana Turner and much prettier than Marilyn Monroe.”

Being a young Lana I can somewhat see; being prettier than Marilyn I have to put my hands in a “T” and call bran flakes and cheese sticks on. Sorry. No dice. That is total chicanery. But I’m a big Marilyn guy from way back, whereas I’ve only had li’l Stripey Butt here saved on the computer for around six months, so I suppose I am a biased judge. Ms. Todd starred in, to name some highlights, The Unearthly, Frankenstein’s Daughter, and Al Capone, as well as guest-appearing on a slew of television shows.

She became a regular Hollywood fixture, often popping up as the hot date of various popular actors and landing herself in Walter Winchell’s gossip column. As a cross-connection, Winchell also narrated the 60’s era television hit “The Untouchables,” on which Sally appeared both in front of camera and behind, dating a few of the stars.

Unlike some of the other playmates, who mainly did not do much actual real-life modeling, in addition to her screen credits Sally was a genuine full-time model. She did modeling both of clothing and of products, first in Tuscon and then with great success in Los Angeles, where her blonde wholesome looks landed her in the Los Angeles Home Show, which is actually a pretty big event. Beginning in 1955, Ms. Todd modeled on Johnny Carson as one of the Carson Cuties, and by 1956 she was television’s highest-paid model. Not bad!

Of course, the Tinseltown high life does take its toll from time to time. On August 26, 1958, Ms. Todd caused a Hollywood freeway accident involving five cars. It’s estimated she was going around 70 miles per hour when she lost control and collided with four other vehicles. She didn’t die — this isn’t one of those right-curve-bummer-ass posts that I sometimes do on the playmates, don’t worry.

She suffered some bruises on her left wrist, fingers, and right knee when she went flying through the window of her sports car and was thrown out onto Barham Blvd (with a seat belt, she’d probably have been completely unscathed). After failing an intoxication test at the scene, Ms. Todd was booked for drunk driving by the LAPD.

She spent the night in jail and on August 27th was informed she’d be charged with felony drunk driving. Ms. Todd’s story, to which she stuck, was that she’d had two drinks with a girlfriend and was en route home when the car went out of control as she stepped on the brake. Apparently the story worked. On September 2, 1958, Ms. Todd appeared in court expecting to be formally charged with felony drunk driving, but was told to return in eight days, when the DA’s office had their case more prepared.

She never was charged with anything, in the end. At the time, she was on-the-downlow-dating married man and popular local figure Jack Webb, of television’s Dragnet. Webb had creator credit on the show and widely touted the importance to him that the show be “realistic;” he insisted on lots of police consultants and was in general a gladhander of the cops all-around. (When he died, they gave him a funeral with full police honors and the LAPD retired badge #714, which had been Sgt. Joe “Just the facts, ma’am” Friday’s number on Dragnet). So, you know. Boyfriend with majah LADPD pull. Felony charge that disappears. Do the math.

Ms. Todd actually had quite the full dance card with some big names for a lot of years, but I want to go read this book called Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, Will There Be Enough Room with my kidlet, so I’m afraid I’m putting the kebosh on what could have been a lengthy walk down lovers’ lane.

Bonus factoid for historical stalkytimes: the articles from this incident also list her as living at 11060 Fruitland Drive, North Hollywood. I think it is batshit bananas that papers used to print addresses, because I don’t think people were any more trustworthy with personal information then than they are now. Probably got shitloads of folks harassed, burglarized, or worse. Scandalous.

Once again, as was the case with Ms. Kubert’s issue, Jayne Mansfield is on the Playboy cover. Don’t worry, I am not neglecting her — she is an extra-special Valentine Vixen who will appear later this month.

Final quick thought: why did they keep making her put that stupid straw in her mouth? How is that even a Thing? Is she supposed to look like a hayseed, but then the next second she is at the beach? Really inconsistent. Weird. Anyway. Catch you on the flip!

Music and Movie Moment: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes — Marilyn Monroe, “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend.”

Marilyn Monroe – Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953). Lorelei Lee, played by Marilyn Monroe, and Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell) are a couple of good-time gals. The pair are a double act of nightclub singers from Little Rock, Arkansas who go to perform on a transatlantic cruise and have some fun adventures while at sea and in Paris.

Lorelei has a boyfriend, Gus, who is an heir to a fortune. They genuinely love each other and plan to marry, but his father is suspicious of Lorelei’s intentions where his son is concerned. Lorelei and Gus are supposed to go on a cruise to France together. However, Gus’s father forbids Gus to go along, so Lorelei convinces Dorothy to come with her instead.

Lorelei: Dorothy — Mr. Esmond and I are getting married!
Dorothy: What, to each other?
Gus: Of course to each other. Who else to?
Dorothy: Well, I don’t know about you, Gus, but I always figured Lorelei would end up with the Secretary of the Treasury.

Gus’s father catches wind of this and, hoping to catch Lorelei doing something unfaithful or illegal which will convince Gus of her unacceptability as a mate, he hires a private investigator named Ernie Malone to follow the girls abroad. For his part, Gus warns Dorothy to keep an eye on Lorelei while they’re on the cruise.

Gus: Dorothy Shaw. I want you to remember you’re supposed to be the chaperone on this trip.
Dorothy: Let’s get this straight, Gus. The chaperone’s job is to see that nobody else has any fun. But nobody chaperones the chaperone! [pauses] That’s why I’m so right for this job.

Dorothy: I’m not in condition to wrestle
I’ve never trained in a gym
Show me a man who can nestle
And I’ll pin a medal on him

I like big muscles
And red corpuscles
I like a beautiful hunk of man,
but I’m no physical culture fan.
Ain’t there anyone here for love? (“Ain’t There Anyone Here For Love,” Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson, 1953)

Malone, the private investigator hired by Gus’s father to tail the girls, falls in love with Dorothy, while Lorelei gets up to shenanigans with the owner of a diamond mine, convincing him to snag for her his wife’s sparkly tiara (Shiny object?! Dogpile!!! — oh, we ladies) and a shitload of trouble in the process.

During Lorelei’s “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” number, a scene for which the movie is justly famous, women serve as chandeliers, wall sconces, and candelabras.

Ah, the ornamental sex. The girls disembark in Paris and discover that Malone has sent Gus pictures of Lorelei’s flirtation with Beekman, the diamond mine owner, and Gus has subsequently cut Lorelei’s line of credit off. Penniless and stranded on an unfamiliar side of the Atlantic, the girls go with what they know and begin performing as nightclub singers there.

Despite being completely poor and in dire straits, the girls continue to dream big, impressed by the couture shops of Paris. They have no idea that their troubles have followed them.

Lorelei stands accused of theft by the wife of the diamond mine owner, and, in a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, Beekman steals the tiara back. The girls don’t know this so they try to find it when the police come looking for Lorelei, which of course would be disastrous for her hopes of marriage to Gus.

The only way for Lorelei to clear her name and end the whole mess is for them to find the tiara and return it to Lady Beekman, so the girls divide their efforts. Lorelei goes on the hunt while Dorothy dons a blonde wig and allows the police to arrest her, claiming to be Lorelei.

I will not now continue to spoil the details, I will only let you know it works out great and to everyone who ever claimed Marilyn was a “bigger” actress or what-have-you, sizing worked differently back then and I think this picture of both the lovely ladies proves that Marilyn was actually pretty petite for the era.

All of the pictures in this post are just a few of the wonderful stills that are posted on the Nostalgia Party No. 2 community, a lovingly curated collection of screencaps on the lj. The stills from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes were posted by bowied. I strongly urge you to go and waste a ton of time in the community’s beautiful neck of the woods.

I’m sick as heck so I’m’a throw up a Daily Batman and hit the hay. It probably took me two hours to write this, and that is sheer nonsense. Good night, mainly!

Post-Holiday Pick-Up Day: December, 1953 — Marilyn Monroe

Last but never least. December, 1953: photographed in 1949 when she was still obscure, this nude picture of Norma Jean “Marilyn Monroe” Mortensen was sold to Playboy absent of Marilyn’s control — it was the magazine’s first issue and she was a rising star by that time. She was also featured on the cover, again without her express permission, but there was nothing she could do about it. The pictures were the property of the photographer Tom Kelley. Kelley had pursued Marilyn a number of times asking her to pose for him, and she finally agreed during a particularly low point in her struggling early career, on the condition that his wife Natalie remain present during the photoshoot.

“Golden Dreams,” photographed by Tom Kelley.

Kelley sold the pictures.

Alhough the nude calendar shots are two of the most famous photographs in Hollywood history, Marilyn received only $50 for her efforts. Kelley himself received only a pittance when he sold the two shots to the Western Lithograph Company, but crafty manufacturers and slick promoters made a great deal of money selling bootleg versions of the calendar and other merchandise. (“Marilyn Monroe’s Early Career,” retrieved from HowStuffWorks.com)

Western Litho eventually turned the pics over to Hugh Hefner, and Marilyn became the magazine’s inaugural cover girl and centerfold (then still called the “gatefold”) accompanied by the title “Sweetheart of the Month.” A bum deal. Really bad faith on Kelley’s and Western Lithography’s part. They probably could have blackmailed her studio with the photos and gotten more money than was got out of Hef, seeing as she had come out that year with the massive, career-making hits Niagara, How to Marry a Millionaire (one of my all time favorite movies, co-starring Betty “Legs Insured by Lloyd’s of London” Grable and fabulous smoky siren Lauren Bacall — run don’t walk to the video store and grab it STAT), annnnnd Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (another absolute classic), making her a very hot and important-to-protect property in Hollywood.

Not only that, she already had half of Irving Berlin’s There’s No Business Like Show Business in the can and it would be ready for release by Summer. Western Litho could’ve turned a real buck off of those publicists and studio producers, waiting for the highest bidder to turn over the nude negatives to. But they didn’t much do their homework because apparently the guy in charge of the deal was was a greedy, shortsighted idiot. So he undersold, to Hef. Serves him right.

These other shots are just two of several cell-painted examples of the “Golden Dreams” photoshoot damage control put out by the swarm of money-hungry publicists who always thronged around poor Marilyn — they wanted her to be slightly less tarnished by the shoot, but still profit from its popularity, so they had artists paint clothes on her and sold the reprints, allegedly autographed by Marilyn herself. (Side note: the first time she ever had to autograph something with her show business name, she asked the nearest studio guy how they wanted her to spell it. UGH. What the eff is wrong with people who see an orphan soul and suck it dry?!)

Just bad stuff and feelings all around with this entry of the December women, huh? And of course, RIP, although it scarcely seems possible: I’m not sure she will ever know peace, like, in any universe. Man. Why did I pick so many bummers for this project?? I’ll make it up to you another day. I promise!