The Last Days of
Jayne Mansfield
An unexpected gig at Greensboro’s iconic Plantation Supper Club in 1963 revived the fading Hollywood star’s career — and set the stage for her sad demise By Billy Ingram
O
n March 1, 1963, lusty, busty Jayne Mansfield brought her salacious va-va-voom to Fred Koury’s iconic Plantation Supper Club for a nine-day run. Weeks before, Mansfield had pounced upon an out-of-the-blue offer from the thousand-seat club, which touted itself as the premier night spot between New York and Miami. Why? With the era of the Hollywood blonde bombshells drawing to a close, her already fading stardom had taken a nose dive — a predicament that apparently drove her to maximize her assets in Greensboro. Hometown rockabilly artist Billy “Crash” Craddock will never forget what it was like to open for Mansfield during her first show here. In a wardrobe malfunction that predates Janet Jackson’s by forty years, Craddock recalls how, “Mickey Hartigay, her husband, lifted her up with one hand and when he put her down, her zipper came all the way open, from the top to her rear end.” Accidents will happen, but Craddock says the Plantation Supper Club’s co-owner Fred Koury, “thought she planned that.” Considering her subsequent behavior in the days and months that followed, it’s entirely likely that she did. “She’d go around the stage, flirt with the men, rub their bald heads or wink at them,” Craddock says. “She was a sex symbol,” he says,” she didn’t have to do a whole lot more.” But she did. Her finale was dubbed a “satire on a strip.” Parody or no, it was strip tease, leaving little to the imagination. The Plantation crowd leapt to its feet in appreciation. Aware of it or not, in the very heart of the Bible Belt, Jayne had won over the toughest audience she’d ever faced. Wild and wayward Jayne painted our town a lighter shade of red, smashing all national box office records, making a ton of much needed cash for herself. She sent menfolk into a tailspin and their wives hightailing it to the beauty parlor. But it was the beginning of the end for the workingman’s Marilyn Monroe, one of the last highlights of a tumultuous career. Mansfield’s long week in Greensboro lit the match to a fuse that led to her notoriously gruesome death by near-beheading just four years later at age 43.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
s
From the 1940s through the 1960s Fred Koury’s Plantation Supper Club attracted some of the best entertainers in the nation. Andy Griffith launched his career there. Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Andy Williams, Brenda Lee, The Platters and Miyoshi Umeki swooped into town. The zipper that slipped that night in the Plantation was not the star’s first or last wardrobe malfunction. In fact, a 1950s poolside slip of her pink bikini top paved her way to Hollywood. Bubbly and bouncy in all the right places, the platinum blond Mansfield graced the cover of more than 500 magazines and strutted her stuff in a number of iconic films. In 1955, she posed for Playboy as Miss February. Her Holmby Hills home on Sunset Boulevard was an enormous palace where nearly everything was imbued in Jayne’s own specially blended hue, right down to the living room’s Passion Pink shag carpeting, the terry cloth walls and floor of her master bath, even the elaborate stonework surrounding a heart-shaped swimming pool. Filmmaker John Waters dubbed her “the ultimate movie star,” the embodiment of Tinseltown’s vanishing love affair with glamour and glitz, when opulence and ostentatiousness were de rigueur. Jayne Mansfield was a woman of impossible proportions, both physically and in her worldly construct, with a dingbat persona just as pronounced off-screen as on. In truth she was having a laugh . . . her IQ was as outsized as her 40-inch bust. Dick Cavett famously wrote an introduction for talk show host Jack Paar to deliver: “Ladies and gentlemen, what can I say about my next guest, except . . . here they are, Jayne Mansfield.” The Golden Globe winner’s most famous scene in a motion picture came in 1956’s The Girl Can’t Help It. As the camera follows Jayne sashaying down the avenue, the iceman’s glacier liquefies, the milkman’s bottle spontaneously lactates, an apartment dweller’s eyeglasses shatter attempting to get a peek as the lady is climbing the stairs. That minute-long scene made her a major star. Evidence suggests Mansfield had a Mae West complex. A good portion of her Las Vegas act mirrored Mae’s extravaganzas on The Strip. She even September 2015
O.Henry 73