Jayne Mansfield - New York Times obituary in 1967.
NEW ORLEANS, June 29- Jayne Mansfield, the actress, was killed instantly early this morning when the car in which she was riding hit the rear of a trailer truck on U.S. 90. Killed with the 34-year-old performer were Samuel S. Brody, 40, of Los Angeles, her lawyer and companion, and Ronald B. Harrison, 20, of Mississippi City, Miss., a driver for the Gus Stevens Dinner Club in Biloxi, Miss., where Miss Mansfield was appearing. Their auto plowed beneath the truck’s trailer as it approached a mosquito-fogging machine. The driver apparently did not see the truck because of the thick white chemical used to spray mosquitoes, the police said. Three of Miss Mansfield’s children, apparently sleeping on the rear seat were injured. They were Mickey Hargitay Jr., 8, who suffered cuts and a broken arm; Zoltan Hargitay, 6, who received cuts and bruises, and Marie Hargitay, who had head cuts and may require plastic surgery. The children were taken to Charity Hospital by a passing motorist but were transferred to Ochsner Foundation Hospital at the request of Miss Mansfield’s former husband, Mickey Hargitay, who telephoned from Los Angeles. Mr. Hargitay arrived this afternoon to be with his children, who were lated told of their mother’s death. Miss Mansfield had been playing the engagement in Biloxi, 80 miles from New Orleans, since June 23. She had left the club after an 11 P.M. performance Wednesday and was on her way to New Orleans for a television appearance at noon Thursday.
“To establish yourself as an actress,” Jayne Mansfield once told an interviewer, “you have to become well known. A girl just starting out, I would tell her to concentrate on acting, but she doesn’t have to go around wearing blankets.” Miss Mansfield didn’t. Her statuesque figure, topped by flowing, platinum blonde tresses and a provocative smile, was cheerfully and generously displayed in films, in newspaper and magazine photographs and on television. This strategic avalanche of publicity made her one of the best-known glamour symbols of the last 10 years. Her unusual dimensions, 40-18-35, certainly helped. “I’ve got to be a movie star. I’ve just got to make it,” she told an interviewer soon after arriving in Hollywood in 1954. “I’ve got to be a movie star.” It took a while for her to succeed, but off-screen she played the role to the hilt. She resided in a huge, pink mansion off Sunset Boulevard that became a tourist attraction, happily splashed for photographers in a heart-shaped pool and drove a pink car around the movie capital. Her actual screen career consisted of about a dozen films, few of them memorable. She invariably played the role of a none-too-bright blonde who was victimized by unsavory characters. Vera Jayne Palmer was born on April 19, 1933, in Bryn Mawr, Pa., the daughter of a lawyer. Her father died when she was 6 and she and her mother moved to Dallas. She later enrolled in Southern Methodist University, where she met and was married to a fellow student, Paul James Mansfield. She was 16 at the time and the following year, her daughter Jayne Marie was born. The Mansfields moved to Los Angeles and the young wife began making the studio rounds. She had little success. As a candy vender in a movie theater, she got a small part in one television play that lead to a bit role in a film called “Female Jungle.” After hiring an agent and a publicity manager, she went on a promotional trip to Florida to help publicize a film titled “Underwater.” Photographs of the blonde Miss Mansfield in a red bathing suit all but put Jane Russell, the star of the movie, out of sight. “I wanted to be a movie star ever since I was 3,” Miss Mansfield said. “They told me I’d be another Shirley Temple, but I guess I outgrew it.” A deluge of revealing photographs soon flooded Hollywood and caught the eye of George Axelrod, playwright, who was casting “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” for Broadway. Miss Mansfield’s playing of a voluptuous dumb movie star who captivates a milquetoast screenwriter, played by Orson Bean, was largely responsible for the comedy’s run of 452 performances on Broadway. It opened in October, 1955, at the Broadhurst Theater. During her nightly appearances, memorable for one scene in which she appeared only in a white towel, the baby-faced actress also managed to perfect an enticing, soft-voiced coo punctuated with squeals. Her publicity campaign continued and she returned to Hollywood in triumph. Previously, she had been seen briefly in “Illegal, “Pete Kelley’s Blues” contract at 20th Century-Fox, where she did the movie version of Rock Hunter,” and “The Wayward Bus,” “The Girl Can’t Help It” and “Kiss Them for Me.” Her performance in the 1957 version of John Steinbeck’s “The Wayward Bus,” in which she played a wistful derelict, was generally conceded to have been her best acting. In 1958, the actress divorced her first husband and was married to Mickey Hargitay, a former Mr. Universe. The wedding was attended primarily by a small army of press representatives. In 1963, Miss Mansfield obtained a Mexican divorce from Mr. Hargitay, by whom she had had three children. Her third husband was Matt Cimber, a director, to whom she was wed in 1964. They were divorced last year. The actress was awarded custody of their child, Octabiano, now 2.
Mickey Hargitay - the Guardian Obituary in 2006.
Depending on one’s point of view, the bodybuilder-cum-screen actor Mickey Hargitay, who has died aged 80, can either be thanked or blamed for the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Born Miklos Hargitay in Budapest, he emigrated to the US in 1946, won the Mr Universe contest in 1955, married blonde sex symbol Jayne Mansfield and became an actor of sorts. For the young Schwarzenegger, Hargitay was an “inspirational force”. That someone from central Europe could become Mr Universe gave Schwarzenegger hope for someone like myself and others to dream about that”. It was appropriate that Schwarzenegger played Hargitay in the television movie The Jayne Mansfield Story (1980), with Loni Anderson as Mansfield.
As a boy, Hargitay was a skilled footballer, and he and his brother performed an acrobatic act throughout Hungary. Still in his teens, during the second world war he joined the anti-Nazi resistance. As the communists were taking over after the war, and to avoid being drafted into the military, Hargitay moved to the US. First he went to Indianapolis, where he worked as a builder and performed a nightclub dance act with his first wife, Mary. One day in 1947 he walked into a gym out of curiosity and lifted a 215lb bar over his head, a feat which astonished the gym owner because Hargitay weighed only 180lb.
So began a bodybuilding career which included winning Mr Indianapolis and Mr Eastern America. After becoming Mr Universe, Hargitay’s handsome face and well-chiselled body decorated many a fitness magazine. He did much to popularise a sport which had been considered a rather freakish activity.
In 1955, a 64-year-old Mae West saw Hargitay on the cover of Strength and Health magazine. She asked him to join her chorus of musclemen, clad in leopardskin G-strings, in her Las Vegas nightclub act, the Mae West Revue. According to West, when she first met him, Hargitay had said: “Miss West, you are the end of my search for an ideal, my dream come true.”
One evening, the buxom 23-year-old Jayne Mansfield, who had just become a star in Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), was in the audience. Legend has it that when her dinner companion asked her what she would like, she answered: “I’ll have a steak and the man on the left.”
After each had divorced their respective spouses, Mansfield and Hargitay were married in 1958 amid much publicity. They appeared together in a number of films, the best being Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), a satire of sex, money and fame. Hargitay’s muscles did most of the acting as Bobo Branigansky, a Jungle Boy TV actor, jealous of his starlet girlfriend (Mansfield), who is called upon to endorse Stay-Put Lipstick, whose motto was “For those oh-so-kissable lips”.
Among the low points was the badly dubbed, Italian-made The Loves of Hercules (1960), in which Hargitay, in the title role, falls for two Jaynes, one good (in a black wig) and one evil (red wig), and decapitates a three-headed dragon. Promises! Promises! (1963), a wife-swapping comedy, gained notoriety because Mansfield bared almost all. Offscreen, the couple were continually photographed in their Beverly Hills mansion, usually alongside the pink, heart-shaped swimming pool. After their divorce in 1964, Hargitay continued to appear in schlocky Italian movies for six years. He then became a successful contractor and real estate investor.
Hargitay is survived by Ellen Siano – his wife of 38 years – two sons and two daughters, one of whom is Mariska Hargitay, the star of the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit series. She, with her two brothers, Zoltan and Mickey Jr, were in the back seat of the car that crashed killing their mother, Jayne Mansfield, aged 34, in 1967.
· Miklos ‘Mickey’ Hargitay, bodybuilder and actor, born January 6 1926; died September 14 2006