five star records

Playboy Playmate of the Month, beauty queen and B-movie starlet Jayne Mansfield patterned her career and image after the reigning dumb blond of the fifties, Marilyn Monroe. Although Mansfield didn't quite measure up to Marilyn in the looks department, her hourglass figure and willingness to expose her enormous breasts in public earned her a loyal following among the less cerebral movie-going crowd.

Infamously promiscuous, Mansfield was romantically linked to many rich and famous men (other than her three husbands, of course) around the globe, including both of the dead Kennedys (Jack and Bobby, not Klaus Flouride and Jello Biafra).

Her marriage to former Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay helped keep her photo in the tabloids while key roles in films like 'The Girl Can't Help It' (1956) and 'The Wayward Bus' (for which she won a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year in 1957) began to earn her respect as an actress.

But alas, those huge boobs got in the way, and at some point Jayne couldn't buy a role that didn't cast her as the dumb blond with the big chest. So she took advantage of it, becoming the first mainstream American actress to appear naked in a movie in 1963. Her scandalous role in 'Promises, Promises' resulted in the movie being banned in Cleveland (not a surprise really, I've been there) and also got Hugh Hefner slapped with an obscenity charge after he published some nude shots of her in Playboy that were taken during the film's production.

Jayne appeared on the covers of a slew of LPs for other artists, and she even recorded a few as a singer herself. While she doesn't perform on 'Music for Bachelors', she practically glows as the cover model here in one of the cheese-cake-iest of all poses, her shapely and tender pink flesh barely, just barely covered by a translucent wisp of lingerie.

I'd rate the listening experience on this one as a shade on the too-mellow side for my tastes, the orchestra under the direction of Henri Rene with guitar solos by Barney Kessel working my internal doze button better than four shots of Nyquil and a lullaby. Rene was a house conductor for RCA in the fifties and sixties and also recorded LPs with Eartha Kitt and Harry Belafonte. Barney Kessel made a career out of white-guy jazz-guitar playing, moonlighting as a pop session musician and appearing on top-forty records by groups like The Monkees and The Beach Boys.

Jayne's career came to an abrupt halt when, while traveling from Mississippi to New Orleans in 1967, the car in which she was riding collided with the rear of a slow-moving semi-trailer, killing both her and the driver immediately. Contrary to popular belief, Mansfield was not decapitated in the accident, but the coroner who performed the autopsy on her body was quoted at the time as saying: “Boy, that must have hurt.”

Did you know?...

-Jayne recorded a couple of singles with rock guitar legend Jimi Hendrix. Yep, Jimi played bass and lead on 'As The Clouds Drift By' and 'Suey', both from 1965.

-Although she encouraged the perception that she was the proverbial 'dumb blond', Mansfield actually had an I.Q. over 160 and spoke several languages, including Hindi, Aramaic and Ig-Pay Atin-Lay.

-After her death, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began requiring a special bar be built into the rear of semi-trailers to prevent accidents like the one that killed her. The device is known as a 'Mansfield Bar'. No shit.

-During the course of her adult life, Jayne's bust size varied from 40D to 46DD depending on whether she was breast-feeding or not.

-While working as a writer for Jack Paar, debonair funny man Dick Cavett wrote an introduction for Paar to use when Jayne appeared on 'The Tonight Show' one night... “Here they are, Jayne Mansfield!”

I bought my VG+ copy of this LP a long time ago for three bucks, but the going rate now is higher. I saw as much as $22 on the Internet, and all of Jayne's covers fetch a better than average price, whether she sings on the records or not.

One of the funnier stories of Jayne's early career as a beauty queen was how, after winning a number of competitions (including Miss Fire Prevention and Miss Magnesium Lamp), a young Mansfield refused to accept the title of Miss Roquefort Cheese, declaring that the moniker just didn't "sound right" to her.

I love her and all, but Miss Some-Kind-Of Cheese sure sounds right to me.