Jayne Mansfield in popular culture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Actress, singer, Playmate and stage show performer Jayne Mansfield, despite her limited success in Hollywood, had an enormous impact on popular culture of the late 1950s and has remained a popular subject in popular culture ever since. During a period between 1956 and 1957, there were about 122,000 lines of copy and 2,500 photographs that appeared in newspapers. Dennis Russel, in an article on her in the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture (1999), said that "Although many people have never seen her movies, Jayne Mansfield remains, long after her death, one of the most recognizable icons of 1950s celebrity culture." In the 2004 novel Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott, a National Book Award winning writer, the 1950s is referred to as "in those Marilyn Monroe/Jayne Mansfield days". R. L. Rutsky and Bill Osgerby has claimed that it was Mansfield along with Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot who made the bikini popular.
M. Thomas Inge describes Mansfield, Monroe and Jane Russell as personification of the bad girl in popular culture, as opposed to Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds, Natalie Wood personifying the good girl. Mansfield, Monroe and Barbara Windsor have been described as representations of a historical juncture of sexuality in comedy and popular culture. Evangelist Billy Graham once said, "This country knows more about Jayne Mansfield's statistics than the Second Commandment." As late as the mid-1980s she remained one of the biggest TV draws. As an indication of her impact on popular culture today, more than two generations later, there are numerous cultural references to the Hollywood sex symbol and Playboy Playmate in recent films, books, TV and music. Numerous show biz people were dubbed Jayne Mansfield over the time, including Italian actress Marisa Allasio and professional wrestler Missy Hyatt.
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