Jayne Mansfield and I share a name, and it’s because of my dad, Paul Mansfield. Vera Jayne Palmer Peers and Paul James Mansfield were married in 1950 at Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. Not too long after that, my half-sister Jayne Marie was born. Then, a few years later, the couple moved to Hollywood and Jayne started her acting career. She became a big star, a bombshell. It all really exploded in 1957. Dad never felt comfortable with that lifestyle and they divorced – he found my mom, Sue, back in Dallas about a year later. Jayne had only ten more years before her fatal car crash on the road to New Orleans one dark night in 1967.
In this song, I sing of both Jayne and her contemporary bombshell and Hollywood rival, Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jean) by trying to get at what it possibly could have been like to be an international sex symbol during those heady years. “Oh, for a Man,” heard as a refrain throughout the song, refers to one of Jayne’s more obscure movies and describes the panting nymphomania of the sex goddess archetype.
