'My Mom, Jayne': When Your Grandma Was a Sex Symbol

Jayne Mansfield was a sex symbol, that is, an actress who doesn't matter that much if she can't act. In the mid-20th century, these women with excessive busts, swaying hips, dyed blonde hair, and miserable lives abounded in cinema. They made films that no one knew the names of because they all sounded a bit the same: The Girl, The Woman, The Blonde , and where they competed with another blonde, another woman, another girl who also wanted to succeed. It was the great rivalry of hair dye, the fight to the death between very tight corsets .

Nothing remains of Jayne Mansfield except death and cleavage . This isn't poetry: nothing truly survives of Jayne Mansfield except her dinner photo with Sophia Loren, where the Italian woman directs her competitive gaze at Jayne's protruding breasts, an image that has been imitated many times; and her death in a traffic accident at the age of 34. The myth was created that she was decapitated . I've heard of both since I was twenty.

Now Max is presenting an hour-and-a-half documentary about Jayne Mansfield, and it seemed like a good time to expand on the things you already knew about her by more than two. How did she get into film? What abuse did she suffer? What was her relationship with Marilyn Monroe like? The answers to these questions, along with the always exquisite pleasure of seeing clips from old films, magazine photographs , and short black-and-white television clips , made My Mom, Jayne a promising title.

It's a horror . It helps its poor quality that the people responsible for the film are Jayne Mansfield's children. I had five. The youngest of them, Mariska Hargitay , directs and leads the film, even putting herself on the poster. Then she called all her siblings, sat them down in a chair, and told them to cry, be tender, and pretend they'd just remembered something related to their mother, who died almost sixty years ago. Mariska herself was only three years old when she lost her mother.

The result is sentimental haute couture. Pink abounds. It's as if her mother had just died. They don't explain why we should care.

The result is sentimental haute couture . Pink abounds. It's as if their mother has just died. These orphans don't explain why we should care so much. Many people make tributes to their deceased parents, with photos and music and home videos, but they don't put them on Max .

However, it could have been something interesting. If you lost your mother at three, nothing of her remains in your memory. But if your mother left an immense mark on the world (as is proper for a movie star ), your approach to her figure is not lacking in material. There are her films, her interviews, the unauthorized biographies written about her, as well as hundreds of images and gossip. But Mariska, also an actress, tiptoes around everything that made her mother a legend, reducing it to filial sentiment, very cheap and bleached out.

It's also worth considering how much this woman has been paid to remember her mother in 2025, half a century after losing her.

Frustrated at not knowing more about the sex bombs of the 1950s, I jumped on the documentary series about Sara Montiel , titled Super Sara , also on Max. It features a lot of film experts, like José Bono and Boris Izaguirre . And a lot of people with weird hair, like Samantha Ballentines and Supremme de Luxe (who might be as much a film expert as José Bono, who knows). Alaska, Norma Duval, and Loles León appear. A lot of people pass by a pink and gold set, with lots of other objects, talking about Sara Montiel as if she'd never made films , but only gossip shows. It's a tribute from the world of gossip to all the decadence that Sara Montiel, aged and depressing, brought to them.

If someone who knows nothing about the actress were to watch Super Sara , they'd think she was a monstrosity on par with any other monstrosity from the 1990s on private television at night. Her beauty, her great films ( Vera Cruz, Yuma, La Violetera ) were merely a pastime until the important thing came: Salsa Rosa. Sara Montiel met Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster, and worked with Robert Aldrich and Samuel Fuller , but that's a trifle and hardly interests us compared to getting married at 74 to a Cuban thirty-six years her junior. Now that's cinema!

If someone who knows nothing about the actress saw Super Sara, they would think it was a farce on par with any other farce from the 90s.

The documentary is impossible to watch; every minute you spend watching it is disrespecting Sara Montiel. What matters most to them is that the actress was a "gay icon" and a "feminist who didn't know she was a feminist." I think that's exactly what Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, and Gary Cooper were thinking when they saw her appear on the set of Vera Cruz: "Hey, here comes the gay icon," they said to each other.

And Burt Lancaster added: “A feminist who doesn't know she's a feminist , friends.”

Jayne Mansfield was a sex symbol, that is, an actress who doesn't matter that much if she can't act. In the mid-20th century, these women with excessive busts, swaying hips, dyed blonde hair, and miserable lives abounded in cinema. They made films that no one knew the names of because they all sounded a bit the same: The Girl, The Woman, The Blonde , and where they competed with another blonde, another woman, another girl who also wanted to succeed. It was the great rivalry of hair dye, the fight to the death between very tight corsets .