Read "Jayne Mansfield: The Brand Called Two" by Andrew Nelson.
I was working in the sports department of the Asheville Citizen in Asheville, N.C., the night Jayne Mansfield was killed and remember distinctly the dozen or so gruesome AP photos of the accident.
Following transmission of the photos, there was an alert (as there often was with Vietnam War photos: "Caution: The word 'fuck' appears on the side of the tank in Photo No. 1234") that several of the photos were of a more sensitive nature. One, especially, was striking. It was of a blond head sitting at the juncture of the convertible's body and the right windshield support post. It was, warned AP, Jayne Mansfield's head. Another photo was of her body, covered with a tarp or a sheet, with an obvious indention where the head would have been.
If Miss Mansfield was just "scalped," as Nelson contends, it was one hell of a scalping.
Also, I never considered Mansfield to be quite as "full-figured" as reported, having seen photos of her nude. She had an enormous rib cage, the result of weight lifting, but I doubt that her breasts were more than a medium "C" cup (huge by supermodel standards, but hardly bigger than the average woman's breasts).
-- Dan Smith, Roanoke, Va.
I found your article on Jayne Mansfield smarmy, condescending and lazy. You describe her as the anti-feminist, a woman exploiting herself for fame and fortune. But your paternalistic and judgmental tone is certainly as misogynistic. The story purports to be about the vagaries of creating a human brand, but you spend all of about three paragraphs discussing her branding and about seven denigrating her. You throw in a paragraph or two on Britney Spears and Madonna to give the article relevance and then mention that no one really knew Mansfield because she didn't reveal herself. Why not put a little work into the article and try to find who she was? You're relying on superficialities as much as you allege Mansfield did.
-- Anne Knowles
Andrew Nelson's otherwise thought-provoking attempt to discuss Jayne Mansfield as a capitalist product who lost her audience (due to an inability to alter the meaning of her "brand," i.e., her body, as public taste changed) unfortunately fails to take into account the fact that Mansfield's "career" was widely acknowledged as a joke, even during the period of her greatest success. In her two most famous mainstream films (both of which Nelson mentions only in passing), "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" and "The Girl Can't Help It," Mansfield is treated as an object of fun, and in neither comedy are her "characters" at all central to the narrative. She exists solely as a physical object to inspire thoroughly adolescent sex jokes.
After 1956, Mansfield's career as a mainstream star was essentially over. Since Mansfield could neither act, sing nor dance, the collapse of her "career" into sleazy exploitation pictures and burlesque was inevitable. Although a supreme product of the capitalist entertainment machine, Mansfield couldn't deliver the ultimate good -- talent of any kind. Not even the best image in the world can sustain a performer devoid of talent forever. In addition, the late 1960s replacement of Mansfield's overblown style of "beauty" by the likes of Twiggy, far from being a progressive development, was really no more than old wine in new bottles: The curve-free Twiggy incarnated a fantasy of female beauty even more childish than Mansfield's, in that it combined a naive girlishness with a body free of adult female characteristics. How could this change have been in any way progressive or closer to "reality," as Nelson seems to believe?
-- Bragan Thomas
What you characterize as a Broadway musical ("Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?") was definitely NOT a musical. Nor, in fact, was the translation to the screen, also with La Mansfield.
-- Jack H. Kindsvatter
Read "The Art of Lying" by Martin Lewis.
Thank you for getting the record straight. This was a perfect example of how the devil's radio works. All the Beatles fans around the world know that George Martin wouldn't be part of this kind of dirty work. Besides that, who can't admit that we all die -- sooner or later? In this material world, at least ...
-- Ilkka Yrja, Finland
Thank you for printing the Martin Lewis article on how the Mail on Sunday twisted and manipulated the remark made by George Martin re: George Harrison's state of health. Having been a huge admirer of Harrison's work for some 35 years, it was a terrible thing to read in my Sunday newspaper after George's assurances that he was feeling fine. Let's hope and pray for George and his family and that the tabloid press will give him the privacy he deserves to fight his latest battle.
Once again, well done for reminding us that some journalists will not let the truth stand in the way of a good story. As Harrison said in his autobiography, "He who tells all that he knows often tells more than he knows."
-- A. Devine
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