Legends and Lipstick: My Scandalous Stories of Hollywood's Golden Era

by Nancy Bacon

  Mickey was crazy in love with ‘his Jaynie’ and would do anything to please her. More than once I walked into their bedroom to find Mickey on his knees by the side of the bed, painting Jayne’s toenails as she lolled back against pink cushions, sipping a bourbon and reading a script. Even though Jayne knew that Mickey worshipped her, it soon became a drag—and not nearly enough for the seething sex symbol of the fifties—she needed more, much more, adulation to feel truly loved.

  While playing a gig in Las Vegas, she found a new turn-on—two men at once telling her how wonderful and beautiful she was. The gossip was hushed-up, but Jayne admitted it to Rusty; Mickey had walked in and caught her in bed with an agent and a young chorus boy. Things were never the same after that and I, personally, feel that was the beginning of Jayne’s tragic plunge downhill.

  It wasn’t long after that incident that I began to notice the nervousness and restlessness with which Jayne moved through her days. She was taking diet pills, she told me, to help keep her weight down. This did not shock or surprise me. In the fifties and sixties (before all the reports were in on drugs) just about every star, starlet, housewife, teenager, and me, were popping pills as a means to keep our wafer-thin figures. Jayne, however, wanted results yesterday and she took to popping three or four spansules (timed-release) a day—washed down with a tall glass of bourbon. It was a lethal combination. Mickey objected vehemently to the pills and booze, and Jayne, trying to keep peace in the family, took to hiding her supply of pills and to sneaking drinks when he wasn’t around.

  They began fighting daily and did not stop even when friends or business associates dropped by. Jayne began to openly flaunt her sexual encounters with other men and then to jeer at Mickey for being so spineless as to just accept her promiscuity and not do a damn thing about it. She wanted him to beat her up, curse her, or, better still, leave her. She did not believe that he was a ‘man’ if he would calmly accept the fact that his wife was a tramp. Mickey saw it differently. He felt that his love was strong enough to pull Jayne through this defiant period she was going through.

  ‘Why would I leave her?’ he said miserably. ‘I love her so much—would you leave someone you loved just because they are sick?’ What a wonderful, sweet guy Mickey was and how badly Jayne mistreated him.

  By this time the vicious cycle of booze, uppers, downers, and tantrums had flourished into an everyday nightmare. She took so many pills to keep her up that she could not come down to sleep without as many more downers, followed by a whole fifth (sometimes more) of bourbon. Sometimes even this deadly combination would not work and sleep still evaded her. That’s when she would pace the floor of her elegant pink palace and conjure up some wild scheme to get more publicity or a different, more exciting man.

  She found him in Italy while doing a picture there. His name was Bomba and she enjoyed a tempestuous love affair with him, even going so far as to invite him to visit her in Hollywood where she was still married to Mickey. God knows what would have happened to this sick triangle had not a much larger tragedy struck.

  In August of I962, Marilyn Monroe died and sent Jayne reeling into shock. She took the news like her own death sentence and mourned Marilyn for weeks. It was a period of heavier doses of booze and pills, self-pity, recriminations, hopelessness. The short, quick trip down the road of no return had officially begun.

  Her career was going to pot along with everything else in her life. All of Jim Byron’s carefully laid plans for her had been personally screwed up by Jayne herself. Her wild, distasteful antics and her public display of bad manners and blatant sexuality made a mockery of the sweet girl from Texas who Jim saw as an intellectual, though sexy, movie star. It was the final blow when she fired him.

  From the superstar of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? both on Broadway and in the movie version just a few short years ago, Jayne had slipped way down the ladder to appear in a nudie-cutie flick called Promises, Promises—a ninety-minute dirty joke produced by Tommy Noonan. She was so stoned on pills and booze when she did her nude scenes that fellow workers feared she’d drown in her bubble bath. How Mickey managed to stick it out with her I’ll never know, but he continued to follow her everywhere she went, trying, I suppose, to keep a little stability in her life.

  While on tour with her nightclub act, she fell in love again. This time with a singer and performer named Nelson Sardelli, and immediately sent Mickey home so she could have an uninterrupted affair with Nelson. She had wanted his baby from the moment she laid eyes on him and, as mentioned earlier, whatever Jaynie wanted, Jaynie got. She became pregnant and was radiant with love. Mickey, finally defeated, signed the divorce papers.

  If her love life flourished with the thrice daily administerings of Nelson Sardelli, her career did not. Her performances were in gross bad taste and could not even be completed without the daily consumption of a fifth of bourbon and a handful of pills. Audiences that once had whistled, cheered, and stamped on the floor for Jayne Mansfield, now booed her and left before the show was over. Very soon there was not even an audience to leave because, on more than one occasion, there was no audience at all.

  Her attacks of manic-depression (that’s what bipolar disorder was called in back then) and her fits of rage were increasing at a terrifying and shockingly steady rate. On more than one occasion she threatened to kill her lover with a broken whiskey bottle, and cursed and raved at even her closest friends and relatives. It was now obvious to everyone that Jayne needed the care of a psychiatrist—to no one did a damn thing about it! Said Jayne, ‘They wouldn’t dare have me committed. Who would pay all the bills around here?’

  Her affair with Nelson came to a screeching halt and she returned to Mickey where, in January of 1964, she gave birth to the little baby she had always wanted, a girl named Mariska. Mickey’s strong arms and broad shoulders sheltered both mother and child as he took them home to the pink palace. What other guy would do that for a woman who had embarrassed, hurt, and misused him?

  I remember when Mickey was involved with Joe Louis (the boxer) in some venture he had going at the old nightclub, The Moulin Rouge, where he put on prize fights every Friday and Saturday nights. I went several times with them and sat with Jayne as Mickey clearly did not trust her to be alone. I was shocked at her reaction. Arriving quite bored and in a sour mood, Jayne sat slumped down in her seat until the young boxers jogged onstage and into the ring. At the first blow she sat up a little straighter; at the first sign of blood she was leaning forward in her seat, a fine sheen of sweat on her upper lip, and as the pounding in the ring went on, breaking noses and causing blood to spurt from open gashes, Jayne could barely contain herself. Clenching her fists, her eyes dilated like a junkie, she hissed, ‘Kill him! Kill the bastard! Make him bleed! I want to see blood!’

  I was horrified the first time I witnessed her obsession with violence and blood and remembered it much, much later (when it was too late)—when she was already destroying herself and her last boyfriend, Sam Brody. But this night I was not aware of how very sick she had become. Mickey asked me to drive her home and as we walked outside to my car I was aware of Jayne’s restlessness. She wiggled and squirmed like a cat in heat as we drove down Sunset Boulevard toward her home. The moment we were inside the pink palace she went straight to the telephone and dialed a number, spoke urgently into the receiver, then hung up.

  ‘Nancy, do me a favor, will you?’ she asked as she poured a healthy slug of bourbon into a glass and dug into her purse for her pills. ‘I’ve got to get fucked—those boxers turned me on so much, I can’t tell you!’ She gulped down the booze and pills, rubbed her crotch with her free hand, and continued, ‘Will you stand guard for me? You know, stick around awhile and if Mickey comes home before I’m through, try to keep him busy—no matter how you have to do it!’ She gave me a wink as she slipped out of her dress and ran lightly up the stairs to her pink bedroom. This sort of thing was quickly becoming the norm in Jayne’s life and I was quickly becoming shock-proof concerning
the eccentricities of my friend, the sex queen. A moment later a tall, good-looking man arrived, nodded in my direction, and went up to join Jayne. She was lucky that night. Her resident stud had already finished and gone before Mickey got home.

  Every time we attended the fights (which was often now that Jayne knew what the sight of beating up another human being did to her sexually) this scene was to repeat itself. Usually she was already undressed by the time we reached her pink palace, as the moment we got into my car she began flinging off her clothes with a kind of frenzy.

  One evening a very funny incident happened. We were driving along Sunset Boulevard and Jayne was half-naked, as usual, higher than a kite, drunk, giggling, horny as hell because a sexy, young Mexican kid had been busted up pretty badly in the ring that night, and she was looking to get laid. A car was keeping right alongside us and Jayne had noticed the fact that the driver was a young, handsome guy. She was hanging out of the window, giggling, trying to catch his attention even as I tried to pull her back and tell her to behave herself. Glancing over, I saw that the guy in the other car was my old buddy, Griff the Bear, and I waved and yelled, ‘Hello, Bear!’

  ‘Who is it? Do you know him, Nancy?’ Jayne asked, peering intently into Griff’s car as if she were sizing him up for dinner.

  ‘Sure,’ I answered. ‘It’s Griff you know, my old friend? You’ve met him—he worked with you and Mickey at The Home Show when you guys were showing your barbells and stuff.’

  ‘Griff?’ she fairly shrieked. ‘You mean the one with the big cock?’ She flung herself half out of the window, the famous Mansfield boobs naked and gleaming in the street lights as she yelled, ‘Hey, Griff—wanna fuck?’

  Jayne’s final miles were quickly approaching by 1964. She was still the most talked about sex symbol in the world, but now people were referring to her as a dirty joke and the photographs of her showed a booze-bloated face painted in a parody of a sex goddess (a la Cleopatra), topped by an uncombed tangle of blond hair and wiglets. Her outfits would have been appropriate on a sixteen-year-old girl (skin-tight miniskirts and white go-go boots), but on a big, busty woman of thirty they merely looked ludicrous.

  Her movie career was all but washed up and she reluctantly went back to New York and the stage—but not on Broadway as she had begun. This time she was slated for a run at Yonkers Playhouse in one of Marilyn Monroe’s old vehicles, Bus Stop. The director, Matt Cimber, was a young, ambitious Italian, and, as everyone knew, Jayne loved anything Italian—especially their sausages! It was ‘Goodbye, Mickey’ again and ‘Ciao, Matt’ as Jayne proceeded to charm her third and final husband. She promptly moved Matt and his entourage into her suite of hotel rooms where they balled every spare moment that she was not onstage.

  As always, Jayne had several dogs with her as she ‘couldn’t travel without them’ and it wasn’t long before the hotel carpets were replaced with wall to wall dog-shit. It was a scene that was to become a part of Jayne’s remaining days. Wherever she went after that, hotel managers all over the United States had the embarrassing task of telling her that she was not welcome back. Several magazines and newspapers ran articles describing the utter, stinking mess that Jayne and her entourage left behind them when they checked out; broken whiskey bottles, crushed beer cans, dog mess everywhere, urine-stained beds, drapes and carpets and just plain dirt and disregard in every room. As with most junkies and alcoholics, Jayne no longer cared if she was clean or dirty—just as long as she was high.

  I remember running into Jayne one evening at Jerry Lewis’ old restaurant on the Sunset Strip and how shocked I was at her appearance. She was wearing a lowcut white dress that dipped almost to the navel, a white fox stole with a white satin lining that was more gray than white. It was streaked and stained with old makeup and just plain old-fashioned dirt all over the inside, and had fallen to the floor where one of the guys at the table had unconsciously placed his foot upon it. I picked up the fox stole, folded it to cover the dirty lining, and handed it to Jayne.

  ‘Here, Jaynie,’ I said. ‘You’d better watch this thing or somebody may walk off with it.’

  She merely shrugged, then said, ‘You want it—you can have it.’

  ‘No, I don’t want it,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, then how about a drink?’ I sat down and we talked for a few minutes. She really looked like hell. She was wearing several falls in her hair, all different shades of blond, that looked so cheap and obvious. Her eyes were painted in those thick, black lines that now were melted and greasy, looking like slick, oily snakes. Her lipstick was smeared. The small, fine lines around her neck were caked with days-old makeup that settled in the creases. Just then, Vic Damone (who was appearing there that evening) came onstage and began singing. Jayne’s eyes gleamed and she squeezed my arm and breathed, ‘God! He’s gorgeous! I want that man!’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her that a decent man like Vic Damone would not be caught dead with the woman Jayne Mansfield had become. I left early, so I do not know the outcome of the evening.

  Jayne and Matt were still making headlines and ugly stories appeared about ‘a kidnapping’ (Mickey had taken the baby, Mariska, away from Jayne, as he considered it an unsafe place for an infant) and newspapers ran an almost daily account of the continuing battle. Mickey and Matt actually traded blows for the grinding television cameras and cursed one another for the media. It was a sordid time for a once glamorous movie star.

  Matt and Jayne were finally married, in Mexico, and nothing was ever the same again. Jayne did not love Matt and the day after the wedding she took Rusty aside, and whined forlornly, ‘Cooz, tell me why I married Matt?’ That was her nickname for her friend, and it’s stuck to this day.

  However, regardless of the fact that Rusty had known Jayne intimately for ten grueling years, he could not answer that question, and so Jayne buried her mistake in a fifth of bourbon. (Rusty wrote a tell-all about the time he spent with his famous and eccentric boss, entitled The Tragic, Secret Life of Jayne Mansfield, which I consider to be the best ever written about a public figure.)

  Jayne’s drinking was so intense by this time that many thought it would kill her if the pills didn’t get her first. Her home life was nonexistent. Her two sons by Mickey and her daughter by Nelson Sardelli were kept by this maid and that one, sometimes (more often than not) they were given in the care of Jayne Marie, the teenage daughter who was an innocent victim of this horror movie that was her life.

  Jayne’s career was also nonexistent. Every major movie studio in town knew of her alcohol and pill addiction and wanted no part of her. The lesser, independent studios offered her parts in the currently popular skin flicks… pornography. But something of the old Jayne still lived within her and she refused to even read the scripts.

  Her nightclub engagements were few and far between and the money was almost embarrassing; she now received for the run of the act the same money she had been paid for one night’s performance just a few short years before. Her audiences, who had once loved the impish blond bombshell, now left in disgust as she staggered onstage, tripping over light cords and practically falling into the orchestra pit, as she was too stoned to stand up. A few diehards stuck around for the strip number so they could tell their friends that they had seen Jayne Mansfield naked, but that was about all. (Against everyone’s wishes and advice, Jayne insisted on stripping in every act; she had a compulsion to show her body to the world.)

  She fought Matt like a tiger, trying to claw his eyes out even as he tried to help her to bed and the much-needed sleep that was hard in coming. She had taken so many sleeping pills during her life that they no longer had any effect on her; instead of calming her, they wired her in combination with the booze and uppers. Matt had to resort to shoving suppositories up the famous Mansfield derriere almost nightly so her exhausted body would have at least a few hours of rest to rebuild some of the damage done by the drugs and alcohol.

  She cheated on Matt with anyone who took her fancy and dared him to leave her
if he didn’t like it. She openly rebelled against any advice given her by her family or friends and made life a living hell for anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped in the same room with her for any period of time.

  She was a sick, sick woman, and yet not even those who professed great love for her did anything about it. All it took was a signature by a member of the family to have her committed to an institution where, perhaps, something could have been done to arrest her psychotic condition. They were reluctant, I guess, because even in her mentally deteriorated state, Jayne still pulled in enough money to pay everyone’s bills. When I think of such a thing my stomach turns, and I wonder who the ‘sick’ ones really were.

  Jayne’s final act came when she kicked out Matt and embraced a sadistic attorney, Sam Brody. Brody was the only man who was able to match Jayne drink for drink, rage for rage, mood for mood. In fact, he even taught her a few new quirks in her already twisted mind. He turned her on to that old killer, LSD, and together they flew higher than the highest high. So high that there was no place else to go-but down.

  Jayne had had a beautiful baby son, Tony, by Matt Cimber, and when she kicked him out, Matt started proceedings to have his son taken away from Jayne. God knows, he was well-acquainted with her fits of violence, despondency, and drug-induced illnesses, and he feared for his son’s safety. It was to be a long, drawn-out court battle, one that was settled only when Jayne was dead.

  Jayne, who once had been touted as ‘Hollywood’s best mother,’ began mistreating her children shamelessly. The baby, Tony, seemed to receive the brunt of her rages and she would kick him and slap him and lock him up in a small room off the maid’s quarters, a room that was without heat or even within hearing distance of the other part of the house. Rusty told me on many occasions how shocked he had been by Jayne’s treatment of her children. Rusty was perhaps the only man in Jayne’s life (with the exception of Mickey) who truly loved her and cared enough to be extremely worried with her sickness.