page_title: Jayne Mansfield in popular culture
hierarchical_section_title: Jayne Mansfield in popular culture
caption_attribution_description: Photo of actor Steve Cochran, actress Jayne Mansfield and Ed Wynne, the owner of the Harwyn Club in New York, where the photo was taken.
context_page_description: Jayne Mansfield was an actress, singer, playmate and stage show performer who had an enormous impact on popular culture of the late 1950s despite her limited success in Hollywood. She has remained a well-known 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. In an article on her in the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Dennis Russel 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 described Mansfield, Monroe and Jane Russell as personification of the bad girl in popular culture, as opposed to Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Natalie Wood personifying the good girl.
context_section_description: Jayne Mansfield was an actress, singer, playmate and stage show performer who had an enormous impact on popular culture of the late 1950s despite her limited success in Hollywood. She has remained a well-known 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. In an article on her in the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture (1999), Dennis Russel 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 described Mansfield, Monroe and Jane Russell as personification of the bad girl in popular culture, as opposed to Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and 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, 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.
caption: Jayne Mansfield with Steve Cochran and Ed Wynne, the owner of Harwyn Club in New York (1957)
exif: {"Image Model": "FinePix S5700 S700", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Express Editor", "Image Copyright": "", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image ExifOffset": "129", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/70", "EXIF ApertureValue": "18/5", "EXIF FocalLength": "77/10", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "400", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode"}