Satanic Sex Bomb – Sasha Selavie explores Jayne Mansfield’s dark allure

Jayne Mansfield

Is there a common link between extreme gay sex and black magic? Oh fuck, yes! Viewed from the ultra-closeted, super-pedantic mindset of Joe Straight and his unimaginative pals, gay sex and black magic are major crimes against nature! Just think; both, supposedly, invert the metaphysical orthodoxies of nature. Gay sex by joyously liberating an orifice designed for waste, and black magic by denying Christ and shamelessly invoking a contrarian Lucifer! Both, obviously, transgress arbitrary physical limits and constipated moral codes; what, possibly, could be more fun than pissing on a Bible or energetic fisting?


    So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that in the latter half of the swinging, utterly shagadelic and mind-expanded Sixties, California USA gleefully embraced a pop-culture Satanism. In a culture frantic for new thrills, excesses and taboo-busting insolence, flirting with Big Daddy Satan – the living god of erotic extremity – was practically de rigeur.
    Most infamously, gay author and filmmaker Kenneth Anger – who’d created fetishistic, filmic love-letters to gay bikers and leather queens – unleashed his Hollywood Babylon, two volumes of previously unthinkable, highly salacious celebrity gossip. Later in the decade, he’d flirt with attempting to entice Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull into working on his Lucifer Rising epic, but mercifully, our Kenny was merely the passive side of besotted Satanism.
    With psycho-killer Charlie Manson, however – possibly inspired by Roman Polanski’s satanic horror film, Rosemary’s Baby – sick voyeurism spilled over into mass murder. And scarily, the black magic epidemic – even if only real in the minds of its believers – didn’t end there. Enter the striking, shaven-headed and goatee-bearded figure of one Anton La Vey, self-appointed leader of California’s very own Church of Satan, and author of The Satanic Bible.

    Which is just where a strong element of gay interest – legitimized by the adoration of an icon of pure, ultra-camp kitsch – comes storming in. Ever heard of the breathy, 1950s sex-film goddess Jayne Mansfield? Ok, these days, unfairly, she’s often dismissed as a clueless, sub-Marilyn Monroe bimbo, but the reality was this living, Jessica Rabbit clone had a genius-level IQ.

She’s utterly riveting in every frame of her two, totally unimpeachable masterpieces – Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and The Girl Can’t Help It – but by the mid-60s, was a barely employable has-been. The reason? Tits and curves, darlings. In the savagely slim, chemically gaunt, mid-60s spearheaded by Twiggy’s waif-like, undernourished glamour, super-buxom Jayne was simply physically out of fashion. Treated as a living cartoon joke, her intellect breezily dismissed by condescending hordes of mentally inferior, male misogynists, Jayne descended to plying cheesy cabaret immortalised in the album Jayne Mansfield Busts Up Las Vegas.

    Did she deserve better? Of course, and enter Anton La Vey, a man who for once appeared to completely value and respect Jayne’s criminally disregarded intellect. Allegedly – according to La Vey – a deeply fascinated Jayne became an official member of La Vey’s Church of Satan, and the mind simply boggles at imagining Jayne’s spectacularly perverse initiation rites. Was she expected, perhaps, to fill Satanic chalices to the brim with fresh, piping-hot, pints of what fetishists worldwide call ‘Madame’s Wine’ – female urine? We’ll never know, but the entire La Vey/Mansfield connection is beguilingly explored in Mansfield 66/67, a new, forthcoming documentary. And for those frantic fans of kitsch too impatient to wait, there’s Walter Fischer’s sumptuous book of striking, black-and white portraits of this remarkably odd couple – King Satanist and movie queen – California Infernal.

    Unlike many of today’s super-sterile, so posed they’re positively embalmed and sickeningly sycophantic celebrity photo-books, California Infernal often seems shockingly raw, imperfectly focused and scathingly candid. But then, how could it be otherwise, considering the incendiary subject matter? And shortly after these shots, Jayne Mansfield’s partner – one Sam Brody – verbally abused La Vey, who promptly cursed him. You don’t believe in magic? You should; both Jayne and Sam got decapitated in a car-crash, to the enduring fascination of camp conspiracy theorists worldwide. The point? Satanism – like gay sex – is thrillingly unpredictable! Enjoy!

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