The headless corpse of Jane Mansfield, Hollywood’s most audacious blonde bombshell, was not decapitated in the fiery wreck that killed her at 34—but the lie that she was has haunted her legacy for decades, and the truth is far more gruesome than the myth. In the early morning hours of June 29, 1967, Mansfield’s Buick slammed into the back of a tractor-trailer on a foggy Louisiana highway, killing her instantly alongside her attorney Sam Brody and her driver. The crash was so violent that the car’s roof was sheared off, and when first responders arrived, they found a blonde wig plastered to the windshield, fueling a macabre urban legend that has persisted for over half a century.
The official autopsy revealed a crushed skull, not a severed head, but the damage to Mansfield’s reputation—and the chilling details of her final moments—have only deepened the tragedy.
Jane Mansfield was born Vera Jane Palmer on April 19, 1933, in Pennsylvania, but her life was marked by loss from the start. Her father Herbert died of a heart attack when she was just three years old, forcing her mother to remarry and move the family to Texas. By high school, Mansfield had developed her famous curves and was already one of the most popular girls in school, but her ambition burned far brighter than any small-town life could contain.
At 16, she met Paul Mansfield at a party, and the two were instantly drawn to each other—both beautiful, both popular, and both reckless. Within a year, they were married, with Jane hiding a dark secret: she was already three months pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter, Jane Marie, just six months after the wedding, but the marriage was doomed from the start.
Paul expected a domestic wife, but Jane had other plans. She was a natural-born performer, and in 1954, she convinced him to move to Los Angeles to launch her career.
Mansfield’s looks opened doors, but her early screen tests ended in crushing disappointment. Paramount and Warner Brothers both passed on her, until she had an ingenious idea. She was a brunette, but she realized that blondes really do have more fun in Hollywood, so she hit the peroxide.
The gamble paid off in February 1955, when she appeared as Playboy’s Playmate of the Month, launching thousands of fantasies and suddenly making her the name on everyone’s lips. Studio heads who had rejected her now reconsidered, but Mansfield was no airheaded blonde. Her IQ was notably high, and she was fluent in five languages, often complaining that the public didn’t care about her intellect, preferring to focus on her other assets.
In 1956, she starred in the musical comedy “The Girl Can’t Help It,” but her big break came with a disturbing ulterior motive: Hollywood was desperate to find the next huge starlet to compete with Marilyn Monroe, and Mansfield was simply another rival blonde bombshell in a long line of them. Her own studio, 20th Century Fox, tastelessly promoted her as “Marilyn Monroe king-sized,” using her as bait to force Monroe, who was becoming increasingly difficult, to come crawling back.
As Mansfield’s star rose, her marriage to Paul Mansfield nose-dived. He was jealous and possessive, once forcing her to drop out of a beauty pageant because he couldn’t share her with the audience. But Jane was not the easiest wife to have around, either.
With her looks, she simply couldn’t limit herself to the attentions of one man, and the couple often fought about her many affairs. By 1956, the marriage was tearing at the seams, and she filed for divorce. In retaliation, Paul sued for custody of their daughter, claiming Jane was an unfit mother because of her appearance in Playboy.
Luckily for Jane, he lost that battle. While still in the middle of the divorce, she met bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay at a nightclub. Hargitay had just won Mr.
Universe the year before, and he was performing in Mae West’s chorus line when Mansfield spotted him. She went gaga at first sight, but Mae West was enraged at Mansfield’s advances on her employee, leading to a legendary cat fight that same night. The two blondes quarreled, and the spat ended with fellow chorus member Mr.
California beating Hargitay up. Mansfield was developing quite the taste for stardom, so when Hargitay proposed with a whopping 10-carat ring in 1957, she made sure their wedding was the talk of Tinseltown, marrying him just days after her divorce from Paul was finalized.
When Mansfield was with Mickey Hargitay, they toured together as a celebrity couple, famous for their iconic matching leopard print bathing suits and their Tarzan and Jane act. The press even called her “the girl in the leopard print bikini.” Ever the showwoman, she took shopping trips, went to parties, and even strolled down Hollywood Boulevard in the skimpy getup.
But in the late 1950s, Mansfield became her own worst enemy. Hargitay was running out of money, and she claimed very loudly in the press that she was a “poor little rich girl.” Truth be told, she was getting a little too addicted to celebrity, quickly becoming one of the first publicity machines in Hollywood.
She would purposely set up opportunities to get her picture taken, with the biggest trick in her book being the good old wardrobe malfunction. One of the most notorious examples happened in 1955, when she attended a pool party wearing an itsy-bitsy red bikini that was two sizes too small. In 1957, she starred in the hit film “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
,” which is the flick she’s still most famous for today. In the movie, she plays the breathy and demanding starlet Rita Marlo, but this famous part had a very catty meaning: in playing Rita, Mansfield was essentially just doing a thinly veiled impression of her main rival, Marilyn Monroe. She was at the height of her stardom, which meant there was nowhere to go but down.
Although Mansfield and Hargitay had three children together, she quickly got up to her old tricks again. She carelessly flaunted a series of high-profile affairs right in front of Mickey’s face, and they were doozies. Her little black book was the hottest ticket in town, and according to many sources, she had affairs with the likes of Robert Kennedy and even his brother John F.
Kennedy, who obviously had a thing for blondes. The nail in the coffin of her relationship with Hargitay, however, was her fling with Las Vegas crooner Nelson Sardelli. It all led up to a divorce even more bitter and dramatic than her last.
In May 1963, Mansfield was so desperate to divorce Hargitay that she insisted they go down to Juarez, Mexico, to push through a quickie split. In a supremely cruel move, she also brought along her new lover Sardelli to the proceedings, just to dig the knife in a little more. Jane Mansfield could be disturbingly cunning when she wanted.
In the wake of her split with Hargitay, she wanted to take the bodybuilder for all he was worth, so in a ploy to get more money in the divorce settlement, she accused him of kidnapping one of her kids, even though her claims were patently untrue.
Around this time, a strange and terrifying change started to take place in Jane Mansfield. She had always been a publicity hound, but she now began to push it to the absolute limit. Where she would once accidentally let her gown slip off her braless shoulders, by 1962 she was wriggling out of her entire dress in nightclubs.
These antics made her wardrobe designer drop her as a client, and her own agent once sniped that during this period, “she became a freak.” Although Marilyn Monroe was her early competition, Mansfield always considered fellow racy starlet Mamie Van Doren as her true Hollywood nemesis. So when she had to work with Van Doren in the down-market film “The Las Vegas Hillbillys,” her gloves really came off.
Mansfield refused to share scenes with Van Doren, sneering that she was just “the drive-in’s answer to Marilyn Monroe.” In the late 1950s, Mansfield moved from film work to nightclub work, which she was incredibly successful at. Her sultry late-night review earned her mountains of cash, and it’s not hard to see why.
In 1964, she married Italian director Matt Cimber, and in many ways, it was her most tragic union of all. Hollywood no longer had as much need for curvy blondes, so Cimber steered Mansfield into trashier and trashier films, dragging her cinematic reputation into the realm of the decidedly seedy. In 1963, Cimber and some greasy male producers convinced Mansfield to star in the upcoming sex comedy “Promises!
Promises!” It was a deal Mansfield would likely come to regret. It contained a bare-all scene that made Mansfield the first mainstream Hollywood star to appear fully naked on film, and it got promptly banned all over the world.
Almost as soon as it began, Mansfield’s third marriage to Matt Cimber fell apart. She had been unfaithful as usual, but this time her flaws extended far past cheating. Depressed, she had started drinking herself to distraction.
The marriage officially ended in 1966, and to many on the outside, it seemed like her life was spiraling out of control. Mansfield may have looked like an angel, but her private tastes were demonic. In 1966, she met with the infamous Anton LaVey, the head of the Church of Satan.
The rendezvous caused a media sensation, and soon outlets claimed that Mansfield was a practicing Satanist. LaVey even awarded Mansfield the title of High Priestess of San Francisco’s Church of Satan. Although many people wondered at the time if Mansfield’s interest in LaVey and his church was just another publicity stunt, his daughter made a much more scandalous claim.
Carla LaVey not only asserted that Mansfield was indeed a true-blue practicing Satanist, she also confessed that Anton LaVey and Mansfield had a bedroom relationship to boot. After leaving Cimber, Mansfield began living with her attorney Sam Brody. She sunk into a life of alcohol and drunken fights, making most of her money through tawdry burlesque shows.
In 1966, Mansfield and her children were visiting Jungle Land USA in California when a lion savagely attacked her young son Zoltan, biting him in the neck. The attack was so severe that Zoltan underwent brain surgery and also contracted meningitis after the procedure. Thankfully, he eventually pulled through, but Mansfield would have precious little time left with her son.
In December 1966, while her son was still recovering, Mansfield filmed a steamy two-minute cameo appearance in the Walter Matthau comedy “A Guide for the Married Man.” As it happened, it would be the very last time that she acted in front of a camera. In the early morning hours of June 29, 1967, the last tragedy of Mansfield’s short life occurred.
She was on her way to New Orleans with her driver, her attorney, and her children Miklos, Zoltan, and Mariska. At 2:25 a. m.
, their Buick slammed into the back of a tractor-trailer that had been covered in a thick fog of insecticide. When the mist cleared, the truth was devastating. When the Buick hit the trailer, all three adults in the front seat perished instantly.
Mansfield herself was tragically only 34 years old at the time. The wreckage was so devastating that it took officers and first responders an excruciatingly long time to understand what had really happened and what Mansfield’s final moments were like. When news broke of Mansfield’s violent death, wild rumors started flying.
In particular, many people began to whisper that the force of the crash had decapitated her. One of the biggest reasons for this came from a real photograph of the scene, which seemed to show her signature blonde hair pressed into the windshield of the wreckage. The truth, however, was much different.
When Mansfield’s official autopsy came out, it was announced that she had died from a crushed skull, not decapitation. So what was that blonde hair doing on the windshield of the sheared-off car? Gruesomely enough, it was actually part of Mansfield’s wig, which went flying in the chaos of the collision.
Nonetheless, the urban legend about her decapitation still persists.
Perhaps the only glimmer of light in all this darkness was that all of Mansfield’s children miraculously survived the horrific crash. Still, they didn’t escape unscathed. Mariska Hargitay, who now plays the popular character of Olivia Benson on “Law & Order: SVU,” carries a zigzag scar on the side of her head to this day.
After her death, Mansfield’s Buick became an object of morbid fascination. One of her super fans bought the car and kept it perfectly preserved for years. Reportedly, the vehicle even still had blood stains on the seats from that fateful night.
While it’s doubtful that even our glitzy, attention-seeking Jane would enjoy this tribute, it seems like some people are into that. The car sold for $8,000 at a 1999 auction. One of the most notorious pictures of Mansfield features a young Sophia Loren giving the actress some serious side-eye while Mansfield grins and poses for a picture in a naturally very low-cut dress.
People have wondered about the true meaning behind Loren’s look for years, and the Italian actress finally revealed the whole story. Delightfully, it’s exactly what you think. The party that evening was supposed to be Loren’s official welcoming into Hollywood, but Mansfield apparently sauntered in late, sat down beside her, and tried to steal the spotlight.
Despite any dislike that Loren might have had toward Mansfield for hijacking her big debut, she maintains there was never any long-lasting grudge between them. Indeed, for many years after Mansfield’s death, people repeatedly came up to Loren with the infamous photo and asked her to sign it. Out of respect, she refused every single time.
