So many people wrote yesterday asking What Actually Happened with Jayne Mansfield
and Grossingers that I’m sending you all part two.
Some context: When I was in seventh grade, to the best of my knowledge, Jews did
not have Bodies per se. Neither of my parents did anything resembling exercise.
They talked. They played bridge. They watched Ed Sullivan. I was a skinny child,
and played absolutely no sports. No one said the word HIKE or HIKING in my house
ever. Even guests.
Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay wanted to be interviewed by the Grossingers
Olympic sized bright blue pool. I wore what I thought could possibly be a reporters
outfit. I was 13 and had never seen a reporter, but I assumed that reporters wore
gold hoop earrings. The only skirt I had with me was for the evening Coke tail lounge,
where my generation congregated every night.
It was my good grey felt skirt with a felt picture of a dog on the front.
I hoped I looked professional.
Jayne and Mickey were both wearing leopard skin bathing suits. Hers was a bikini.
His was very small. I had never seen anything like either of them before.
Her hair was light yellow cotton candy. Her body one of the few that has stayed
with me forever. He was very handsome, as though he could literally
jump right out of his skin. When I saw them I thought I understood sex, and
bodies, and more or less everything else. I tried hard, for some weeks after, to
describe what they looked like, and regretted that Grossingers official staff
photographer did not shoot them at the pool. He did take one formal shot, on their
wall for years, of me with my BIC pen and my earnest notebook and felt skirt,
and Jane in a skin tight dress. We were smiling at one another, and that picture
hung on Grossingers wall for years.
What did she say you probably want to know. And did her husband speak too?
For the record, I tried many conversation topics, even Favorite Foods.
With me anyway they weren’t strong conversationalists. She was very kind,
and after a while I said Is There Something You’d Like to Talk About? My
heart-shaped pool, Jayne replied..
She even has a heart-shaped grave marker. I forget her connection to Pen Argyl, PA, but she is buried there. Pen Argyl is a quiet town in the Slate Belt region. It has a Cornish name thanks to the miners who came from Cornwall to work the slate, and a Cornish flag flies on the town hall. It's a beautiful area, a little remote, and nicer since the piles of slate remnants have been cleared out.
Wonderful 2-parter. With there were a third!