Jayne Mansfield

Mansfield acted both on stage and in films. She was a student of acting, theater arts and dramatics in college and with Baruch Lumet. She started acting with campus clubs and summer stock theatre. Her first big break was at Broadway with Will success spoil Rock Hunter, for which she won a Theatre World Award as the most promising actress. In her later career she was more busy on stage, performing and making appearances with her nightclub acts, club engagements and performance tours.

During her tenure at Dallas, she and Paul participated in a number of local theater productions. Between 1951 and 1953 she acted in The Slaves of Demon Rum, Ten Nights in a Barroom and Anything Goes. Her performance in an October 1953 production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in Dallas, Texas attracted Paramount Pictures to audition her. Lumet trained her for the audition. Read Less

At the same time, the world's media were quick to condemn Mansfield's stunts. One editorial columnist wrote, "We are amused when Miss Mansfield strains to pull in her stomach to fill out her bikini better; but we get angry when career-seeking women, shady ladies, and certain starlets and actresses use every opportunity to display their anatomy unasked". By the late 1950s, Mansfield began to generate a great deal of negative publicity because of repeated exposure of her breasts in carefully-staged public "accidents". Richard Blackwell, her wardrobe designer (who also designed for Jane Russell, Dorothy Lamour, Peggy Lee and Nancy Reagan), dropped her from his client list because of those accidents. In April 1967, Los Angeles Times wrote, "She confuses publicity and notoriety with stardom and celebrity and the result is very distasteful to the public."

Mansfield adopted pink as her color in 1954 and was associated with pink for the rest of her career. Her original choice was purple, but she thought it too close to lavender, Kim Novak's signature color. "It must have been the right decision," she said, "because I got more column space from pink than Kim Novak ever did from lavender." For her wedding to Hargitay she wore a tight-fitting gown of pink lace with a flounce of 30 yards of pink tulle (designed by a 20th Century-Fox costume designer), and at the reception she had Hargitay drink pink champagne. Read Less