At a glance
- Jayne Mansfield, dubbed Hollywood’s “smartest dumb blonde” died in a car crash when she was only 34 years old. Her daughter, Mariksa Hargitay, then three, was in the car along with two of her brothers at the time of the accident.
- After discovering a storage unit filled with Jayne’s belongings, Mariksa – now an actress herself – made a documentary to discover who her mother really was.
- Since its release, My Mom Jayne, has been nominated for – and won – a slew of awards.
- During of the documentary, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit star Mariska made several revelations, including the secret of her birth father.
Mariska Hargitay was just three years old when she lost her mother, Jayne Mansfield. She was in the back seat – along with older brothers Miklós “Mickey” Jr Hargitay and Zoltán Hargitay (older sister Jayne Marie Mansfield and younger brother Tony Cimber were not travelling with them) – when the car they were travelling in crashed into a trailer, instantly killing front-seat passenger Jayne, 34, along with driver Ronald B. Harrison and her lawyer-turned-boyfriend Sam Brody.
A mystery to Mariska
She has no memories of her mother. Or rather, she has one hazy recollection of a tender touch, but is unsure if it’s something imagined rather than a real event. Growing up, she saw the images of her mother in varying stages of undress. She heard the put-on ditzy voice in movies and interviews. At a certain point, she started feeling a sense of shame about her mother’s Playboy Playmate sex-pot image, the way she’d portrayed herself to the public and how she’d pursued her career – the prototype of “famous for being famous”.
During the pandemic, however, Mariska – herself an actress who many will know from her long-running role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – decided she wanted to find out more about the woman she’d never really known. Going through the family storage unit which hadn’t been opened since 1969 and interviewing those who loved her mother, she discovered not only several surprises, but made a documentary about the process.
Who was Jayne Mansfield?
Born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19, 1933, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Jayne was the only child of lawyer Herbert and former schoolteacher Vera. At three, she was travelling in the car with her father when he suffered a fatal heart attack. It irrevocably changed her.
“She never told me about her childhood,” Jayne Marie – who was born when her mother was just 17 – tells Mariska in the documentary, revealing she’d see Jayne crying over photographs of her father in unguarded moments. “But I do know that losing her dad, that’s something she carried around … her whole life.”
After her mother remarried, the family moved to Dallas where Jayne (she’d drop Vera in her teens) studied piano and violin. She was so accomplished a musician it was thought at one point she’d find a career at Carnegie Hall. She was getting great French, Italian, Spanish and Hungarian fluently). And she also had her sights set on the movies and a life outside the strict confines of her home.
Marrying her 20-year-old boyfriend, Paul Mansfield, before she’d even graduated, Jayne pursued her dream of being a serious actress while bringing up their young daughter (Jayne Marie arrived some six months after the wedding).
When Paul joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps during the Korean War, Jayne took acting classes while also making her foray into the world of modelling and beauty contests. And when her husband returned in 1954, he agreed to humour her with a trip to Los Angeles so she could try her luck.
How did Jayne Mansfield get her break in Hollywood?
Shortly afterwards, however, Paul returned alone. And so began Jayne’s climb to stardom.
“In the beginning, she’d show up for anything,” says Jayne Marie of this stage in her mother’s life. “She would model, she taught dance, she would sell candy at the theatre, anything to be noticed. And she’d take me with her everywhere.”
Auditioning at Paramount in 1954, she caught the eye of casting director Milton Lewis. And it was here the creation of the Hollywood bombshell began.
He bleached her hair platinum blonde and tightened her dresses to make the most of those impressive curves. She posed for Playboy, took part in a vast number of publicity stunts in the aim of making column inches, and took on a range of small parts all playing off her curvaceous charms. Jayne still yearned to be a serious actress, but these weren’t the roles she was being offered.
“She did what she had to do,” Jayne Marie explains. “She was a 21-year-old kid when she started and she was being moulded by everybody around her and unfortunately, she had the wrong people around her – except for Mickey.”
A fateful meeting
In 1955, Jayne took to Broadway in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? in which she played a vamped up and vapid sex symbol. The show was a smash, yet to her disappointment the critics were likely to discuss her measurements far more than her talent. Still, it wasn’t all bad news. She landed the cover of Life magazine in the aftermath. And it was in New York that she met husband number two, the aforementioned Mickey. Two years later, Jayne reprised the role of Rita for the film version.
Hungarian-born Mr Universe Mickey Hargitay was performing in a Mae West show when he and Jayne met. It was love at first sight. So what if he was married?
In 1957, she hired press secretary Raymond “Rusty” Strait, first to help with fan mail, then to manage her ever mounting public appearances, as well as Las Vegas residencies and tours of military bases.
“She was famous for opening stores, but it was much more than that,” Rusty tells Mariska in the documentary. “She was always on display. In front of fans. She said, ‘Never turn anyone away who wants an autograph, because without them there wouldn’t be me.’”
Making things official
Mickey and Jayne married after her drawn-out divorce from Paul was finalised and started a family, welcoming Mickey Jr in 1958 and Zoltán in 1960. They lived in a pink gated mansion with painted cupids throughout the living spaces, a self-designed family crest pride of place and a heart-shaped pool in the backyard.
And while all the world heard was her baby voice, sultry giggle and inuendo-laden asides, “she didn’t put on those weird airs at home,” says Jayne Marie. “She had her hair up in a scarf and she’d sit out in the sun, no make-up on at home. She was just Jayne.”
“I looked the other way when I heard the public voice because I knew she was really, really smart,” Mickey Jr adds in the documentary.
“What I have done is this,” Jayne herself would say of her approach to her career. “I used my pin-up type publicity to get my foot in the door so to speak, because it never was really my ambition. I use it as a means to an end … for what I really wanted to obtain.”
A reversal of fortunes…
After first being signed to Fox, Jayne’s career showed promise with some interesting parts among the mix. But the downturn began swiftly. Turns out, the studio wanted her to play the dumb blonde – they weren’t interested in offering her anything more serious. At the same time, her marriage began to falter.
The pair, claims Mickey’s third wife, Ellen Siano, were having disagreements over how to raise the children. Jayne, she believes, had fallen into other men. Filing for divorce in May 1963, the world believed it was over. That was, until October that same year when they announced they were back together and expecting another baby. That child was Mariska.
In My Mom Jayne, Mariska reveals that, after being brought up as Mickey’s daughter, she learned she was actually Nelson Sardelli’s child when she was 25. This is something that she has only now made public. She’d kept silent, she says, to honour the man who had raised her – who she loves deeply and had a wonderful relationship with.
Who is Mariska Hargitay’s father?
Nelson and Jayne had met in March 1963 when they were both performing in neighbouring nightclubs. It was a swift romance. They began doing shows together, she introduced him to the children, he even went with her to Juárez, Mexico, when she obtained her divorce. He told a reporter at the time that he was in love with Jayne, and very much hoped to marry her.
They went to Germany to do a film together shortly thereafter. It was here she found out she was pregnant. Yet she still felt torn between her new love and her ex-husband Mickey. And it led to their split, Nelson tells Mariska in the documentary.
“She looked at me and said, ‘Nelson, suppose if we get married and I get pregnant by another man’,” he reveals she asked him at the end of their trip. “‘Would you take me back?’ I couldn’t believe it, I said how dare you to ask me such a question. It just … it was a crash. And then I couldn’t take it. It was too much. I said, ‘Jayne, tomorrow you go back to America, I stay and then you and I will never see each other again’.”
That was the last time he saw Jayne. She reunited with Mickey upon her return although the pair would separate again shortly after Mariska’s birth. He would, however, raise Mariska on his own – and was adamant until the day of his death in 2006 that she was his child.
Beginning of the end
But back to Jayne. In the wake of her split with Mickey, she turned to both booze and pills.
“I would take it upon myself to hide the bourbon and empty the pills out,” Jayne Marie recalls. “That kind of thing. So I was the caretaker.”
By the time Jayne met husband number three, Matt Cimber, in 1964, her career was in fast decline – hastened, many believe, by her agreeance to appear nude in 1963’s sex comedy Promises! Promises! along with Playboy publishing stills from the set.
“They fought like wildcats, they were always fighting,” Randy revealed of the ill-fated romance. “I asked her about it. ‘Oh, we have our battles, we’re alright.’ But you know, she would have bruises … I think Matt was the worst thing that ever happened to her.”
Randy believes Jayne married Matt because he was a director. “But he didn’t do anything for her career. Things were changing for her in the ’60s and so she had to turn to doing nightclubs.”
The duo welcomed a boy, Tony. But by 1966 she’d filed for divorce. Her attorney, Sam Brody, was representing her in the custody battle – they soon started dating.
“I didn’t like him, there was a lot of fighting,” Mickey Jr recalled, adding he’d once gone into his mother’s bedroom to find her hiding there with two black eyes in the aftermath. “I knew he was a bad man, I knew right away.”
How did Jayne Mansfield die?
In the early hours of June 28, 1967, Jayne was travelling from a nightclub engagement in Biloxi, Mississippi to a television appearance in New Orleans. Zoltán recalls that she was sitting in the back with him, Mickey Jr and Mariska. But with tensions between her and Sam evident, she relocated to the front seat. It haunts him that had she not made that move, she may have survived when the car struck the rear of a trailer truck. Jayne was killed instantly.
“I feel that if you bear children your first obligation is to your children, whether you are a movie star or you wash dishes,” Jayne had famously said several years earlier – the footage of which is shown in the documentary. “If anything ever happens to my career, if I’m in an auto accident, if my face is scarred, if I lose my legs, if any terrible mishap happens my children will always be cared for.”
Sadly, she had never made a will. And in the aftermath of her death, her belongings were sold off by the state to pay off debts. Her children were separated – Mickey Jr, Zoltán and Mariska going to live with Mickey; Jayne Marie with an uncle and Tony with his father, Matt.
Leaving a legacy
However, while the valuables may have been gone, much of Jayne’s memorabilia remained in the family storage unit.
Mariska found a treasure trove of letters, photographs, press clippings, baby books and even her mother’s Golden Globe, which she won for New Star of The Year in 1957, beating out Natalie Wood. The gong now sits proudly alongside Mariska’s own, which she won in 2005.
Making the film, Mariska has said, has helped her realise just how extraordinary – and misunderstood – Jayne was.
“She was a kind, compassionate, funny, empathetic, ambitious woman,” Mariska said in an interview on US Today. “An artist with a whole lot of dreams and an appetite for love. I just think she was extraordinary.”
This story appeared in the 30th issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly ICONS. Buy back copies HERE.
Share this post