Film essay -- The Girl Can't Help It

　

1.

How are we to understand the customs and manners of the men of old?

Confucius gathered the poetry of ancient times into his Shi King or Book of Odes. One of those poems begins:


A clever man builds a city,

A clever woman lays one low...
And that poem ends:


For disorder does not come from heaven,

But is brought about by women.

Among those who can not be trained or taught

Are women and eunuchs.
Last night, the Democratic party anointed Hillary Clinton as its nominee for the presidency of the United States. How are we to understand the customs and manners of the men of old? Perhaps, by watching the movies that they made.

　

　


It has a cum shot. It has a lactation joke. What could be better?
John Waters praising The Girl Can’t Help It in 2004.

　

　

　

　

2.

Frank Tashlin, the director of The Girl Can’t Help It, began his career in the thirties animating cartoons, first for Hal Roach and, then, Warner Brothers. Tashlin went to work for Disney for a time, but transferred to Columbia Studios during the animator’s strike at Uncle Walt’s studio in 1941. Because of his influence, Tashlin lured many of Disney’s top animators over to Columbia, effectively crippling Disney Studios for a number of years. During his Warner Brother years, Tashlin directed the animation on many Porky Pig cartoons produced as part of the Looney Tunes series. At Columbia, Tashlin directed cartoons featuring the fox and the crow for that studios division, Merrie Melodies. Always independent and assertive, Tashlin quarreled with Columbia executives in 1943, was fired, and promptly returned to the "Termite Terrace", the suite of buildings inhabited by Warner Brothers’ animators. After his return to Warner Brothers, Tashlin made several films featuring that "pesky wabbit", Bugs Bunny. His last animated film was "Hare Trouble," starring Bugs Bunny. Tashlin reportedly had serious artistic differences with Mr. Bunny, at that time demanding to be cast against type as a combat veteran in films like The Best Days of Our Lives.

In the late forties, Tashlin pioneered stop-motion films using puppets and, even, produced a movie for the Lutheran church extolling the virtues of peace, The Way of Peace. During that period, Tashlin developed and wrote gags for Hollywood comedians. In 1951, he was called on to complete a Bob Hope film, The Lemon Drop Kid that was in trouble. (This was his first foray into live action.)

The Girl Can’t Help It was Tashlin’s first credited film, completed in 1956, and a huge box-office hit. Tashlin made a string of highly successful comedies including another starring Jayne Mansfield, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? He worked with Martin and Lewis and, then, directed six of Jerry Lewis’ signature films, concluding with The Disorderly Orderly in 1964.

The well ran dry after 1964. Tashlin wrote some scripts, including the screenplay for the Don Knotts’ vehicle The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968). He supervised the production of one of his children’s books, The Bear that Wasn’t, animated by Chuck Jones in 1967. (Tashlin didn’t like Jones’ work on his book and the two men never spoke again.)

Tashlin died in 1972 of a heart attack. He was 59. He was married three times, once to the actress who provided the voice for Princess Aurora in Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty.

　

　


She is a parody of Marilyn Monroe who has gone completely berserk. No one wanted to look like her. Only transsexuals and drag queens wanted to look like Jayne Mansfield.
John Waters.

　

3.

The gangster has in his house a large Degas showing ballerinas, Roualt’s "The Old King,", a Picasso, two large prints by Toulouse-Lautrec, and in his bedroom Vermeer’s "Girl with the Pearl Earring." Some critics think these images are "stolen" – that is, art snatched from museums or private collectors. I don’t share this view – everyone in the movie has paintings on their walls like pretentious citations. (Indeed, Tashlin, who Godard admired greatly, is a film-maker like Godard – allusions are integral to his work.)

The gangster quotes lines from a poem: "Breathes there a man with soul so dead..." This is Sir Walter Scott’s "Lay of the Last Minstrel," possibly cited because of the smutty implications of the poem’s name.

　

　

　


Irony is a rich person’s taste. Poor countries don’t make ironic films. Tashlin understood how beautiful bad taste could be.
John Waters

　

　

4.

Is this satire or pandering?

Consider the scene in which Tom Ewell, Jayne Mansfield, and an African-American maid are watching a TV show in which a White kid hammers at his guitar and wiggles his hips like Elvis Presley. Ewell doesn’t get it; Mansfield watches politely but looks bored; the maid gets up and spontaneously starts dancing. This maid is played by Juanita Moore, a famous African-American actress, whose performance in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) is iconic – in that film, she plays Annie Johnson whose daughter passes for white; the scene of Annie’s funeral in Sirk’s film, featuring a performance by Mahalia Jackson is very famous.

In three-volumes or less, discuss this scene in The Girl Can’t Help It, with an emphasis of Eisenhower era civil rights issues, current civil rights, and gender analysis.

　


Cool white kids watched black rock and roll acts. Less cool white kids watched white cover bands playing black rock and roll. This was early rock and roll – (some of bands) look scary: Red necks that sang like black people. It was considered freakish. Little Richard was the Queen of Rock and Roll.
John Waters

　

　

5.

The Girl Can’t Help It was made at the dawn of the rock and roll era. The songs featured in the film were recorded before critics and audiences established a canon – that is, what counted as classical rock and roll. The music is sometimes very raw: Little Richard’s version of "The Girl Can’t Help It" sounds like the Ramones or, even, the Sex Pistols. A variety of genres compete in the film: rock-inflected bebop, novelty tunes, jump blues, Doo Wop, even, Gospel. This sort of music mingles uneasily with the lounge ballad or torch singing of Julie London – London was married at the time to the righteously unhip Jack Webb of Dragnet fame. What counted as rock and roll in 1956 was what the radio played and what the radio played was, by and large, corrupted by payola. During the development of the film, the studio approached Colonel Tom Parker and negotiated for an appearance of Elvis Presley in the picture. Parker wanted $50,000 and the studio was not willing to pay that fee. This created conflict with Jayne Mansfield and her agent – they wanted Presley to perform in the film. Parker said that he would flip a coin – heads and Presley would perform three songs for the movie for free, tails and the studio would pay $100,000 for Presley to perform two songs. The studio executives declined.

　

　


I’m convinced that she dyed her roots every single day. You never saw a dark hair on her head. She kept a bar open for the press in her house every day for eight hours a day. How can you not admire a person like that?
John Waters


　

　
6.

The rock and roll performances in The Girl Can’t Help It inspired four lads from Liverpool to form a band. The members of the Beatles all saw the picture many times when it played in their home-town.

In 1964, the Beatles were in Los Angeles. They had rented a mansion in Bel Air and were exploring the possibility of making films in Hollywood. At a press conference, the Beatles were asked if there was anyone that they wanted to meet in Hollywood. Paul McCartney said that they wanted to be introduced to Jayne Mansfield.

A meeting was scheduled with Mansfield and her entourage but she was delayed. The Beatles went to Burt Lancaster’s house to attend a screening of Pink Panther movie with Peter Sellers and Elke Sommer. At Lancaster’s house, Paul McCartney met an actress and slipped away with her. The Beatles left Lancaster’s mansion at 11:00 pm. At midnight, Jayne Mansfield appeared with three or four people at the Bel Air mansion where the Beatles were living.

John Lennon was courtly and said that he was delighted to meet "Miss Mansfield." "You should call me Jaynie," she told him. She ran her fingers through her hair and asked him if it was "real" or a wig. Lennon ran his fingers through her hair and asked her the same thing. He was obviously irritated. She replied: "There ain’t but one way to find out for sure." (There are different versions of this story – in one account, Lennon taps Jayne Mansfield’s bosom and asks "Are these real?) Lennon asked if she wanted a drink. He had hoped that she would come to the mansion alone – instead, she had her entourage, including her husband and agent, Matt Cimber. Jayne said that she would love a drink. Lennon retired to another room and made her a drink with vodka, gin, and a "secret ingredient." Jayne thought the "secret ingredient" was cocaine, downed the concoction, and declared that it was a "humdinger" of a cocktail.

At the mansion, one of Jayne’s entourage, a psychic read Tarot cards. The psychic became very quiet. "What do you see?" Jayne asked. "Terrible things," the psychic said. "A terrible thing that will happen to you in three years." John Lennon heard the prophecy.

The group decided to go to the saloon Whiskey a-go-go. The Beatles did not want photographs to be taken. At the bar, Lennon, already quite drunk from the party at Lancaster’s house, continued to drink. He told Jayne that the "secret ingredient" in her cocktail was his urine, that he had peed in her drink because she had irritated him by running her hands through his hair. Things deteriorated. A cameraman approached to take some pictures. Shrieking "no fucking pictures," George Harrison stood up and threw a drink at the photographer. The drink missed the camera-man but sprayed all over Mamie Van Doren – later, she claimed ice in the drink had hurt her eyes. (Despite the Beatles prohibition on photographs, there are many pictures documenting the chaos on Whiskey-a-go-go.)



In 1965, the Beatles gave a contentious interview to Playboy – they were already quarreling with one another. Paul McCartney said that the Beatles had been disappointed with Jayne Mansfield because she was "an old bag" and a "clot." (She was 32 when he met the Beatles.) He said that he was sure that Playboy would not print that remark because the magazine was "very pro-Jayne." He was wrong – the remark was printed. George Harrison and Ringo Starr were more chivalrous – they said that Jayne was "soft" and "warm."

On January 18, 1968, the Beatles were in the studio recording "Yer Birthday", a cut on the White Album. John Lennon said that The Girl Can’t Help It was going to be shown on TV and that they should go to his house to watch the movie. The band broke-off their studio work and adjourned to Lennon’s house to watch the picture. McCartney said that the rock and roll performances in the film invigorated them and they return to their studio recording with fresh energy.

Lennon was haunted by the Tarot card reading that seemed to have predicted Jayne’s death in 1967 on the highway near Biloxi. Lennon was obsessed with numerology – he noted that Mansfield had been born on April 19 and that she died on June 29. Adding the number 4 (4^th month– April) and the number 6 (6^th month - June), he calculated 10 – or the month of his birth in October. A few more calculations derived from Jayne Mansfield’s date of birth and death led John Lennon to declare that the numbers showed that he would die on a day with a nine in it in the month of December. (He was not quite right; Mark Chapman shot Lennon on December 8, 1980.)

　


I am a star and stars were made to suffer.
Jayne Mansfield

　

　

7.

Tom Ewell, who appears opposite of Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It, was a well-known Broadway performer in the fifties. Ewell is best known for his role as Richard Sherman in The Seven-Year Itch – he reprised his Broadway performance in Billy Wilder’s 1955 picture starring Marilyn Monroe. (Ewell is the guy gazing in wonder at Marilyn Monroe’s legs and ass when air blasing through a sidewalk grating blows her skirts up over her head.)

Tom Ewell’s homeliness – one commentator compares his face and figure to the "back of a bus" – is an amusing counterpoint to Manfield’s extravagant erotic appeal. Tashlin seems to conceive of the couple as cartoon opposites. In the mid-fifties, much was made of an alleged competition between Monroe and Mansfield for the title of Hollywood’s number one "Blonde Bombshell." Casting Ewell, previously well-known for his performance with Marilyn Monroe, with Mansfield was intended as a kind of public relations stunt.

Ewell was too plain for the movies. He continued to appear frequently on Broadway and, then, had an extensive career acting for television. He was last featured in a 1986 episode of Murder She Wrote and died shortly thereafter.

　

7.

She stole Mae West’s boyfriend, the Hungarian bodybuilder and Mr. Universe, Micki Hartigay. She spoke five languages. She lived in a pink house called the Pink Palace. In her swimming pool, there was a painting of her in the deep end, bikini-clad and being eaten by purple fish. Her IQ was supposed to be 163. She played classical piano and violin and appeared once with her violin to play a duet with Jack Benny. She became famous first for appearing as a Playboy magazine centerfold – this was a year before The Girl Can’t Help it – she posed for those pictures when her first husband, a soldier, was assigned service in Korea. She had three Chihuahua dogs: Galena, Momsicle, and Popsicle. She decreed pink her favorite color because when she was a little girl she saw the sunset reflected in a swimming pool at 5:40 pm, the hour of her birth and thought this was an omen. She was once paid $100,000 to spend one hour in bed with South American playboy. When she was a toddler, her father, a corporate lawyer in Philadelphia, died suddenly – he was driving the family car with wife and child in tow and, suddenly, slumped to the side; it was raining and she recalled: "there we were, caught in the rain, and daddy was dead – so rain has tormented me all my life." Her breasts began to develop when she was eight and she called them her "angel wings." Her stepfather was from Dallas and she called him Tex. She was prone to wardrobe malfunctions; sometimes, while swimming, her bikini top would spontaneously detach itself from her torso and float away in the pool. When she was first photographed for a GE (General Electric) ad, her image was excised from the picture because her breasts were too large and the public would "not stand for" that sort of thing. In the last years of her life, she liked to watch her boyfriend, Sam Brody, beat her oldest daughter with a belt. She called sexual intercourse "having fun." Once when Mickey Hartigay caught her in bed in Las Vegas with two men – a bellhop and a PR agent – she expressed contempt for Hartigay, then, her husband because he declined to beat her up. She was eight months pregnant when she slept with John F. Kennedy; he was in a corset because of back problems – "a cripple and a balloon" is the way that she described the liaison. She felt closer to Robert Kennedy – she described him as like a boy "on a prom date." Once she was attacked by a shark while water-skiing near Nassau Island – her boat capsized and drifted empty to shore: the press reported that Jayne Mansfield had drowned. But she was found sleeping under a palm tree on a nearby island. Her Chihuahua dogs were Catholic and buried with Catholic ceremonies – the last Chihuahua that she owned she called T. S. Eliot. Once, when she was "on the wagon," she stopped at a Sunset Strip bar and bought her dalmatian, Felice, screwdrivers; the dog liked screwdrivers and spent the afternoon lapping them out of her glass. In the last year of her life, she met Anton La Vey, the high priest of LA’s Church of Satan, and, perhaps, had an affair with him – but her funeral was conducted by a Methodist preacher. Her skin was soft and very smooth and, except for her head, she was virtually hairless. She almost never shaved her legs. Her body smelled of Chanel No. 5, the scent that Marilyn Monroe used. Her breath was hot with the stench of gin.

　

8.

There is no point in dwelling on Jayne Mansfield’s marital and financial problems in the mid-sixties. There is a short shelf life on blonde sex-bombs and she outlived hers.

Jayne was briefly married to Matt Cimber. She drank heavily and used weight pills. After leaving Cimber, Mansfield lived with Sam Brody, a prominent San Francisco lawyer. He became her agent and arranged tours for her – after 1965, she played comedy clubs where she would perform a strip-tease at the climax of her set. She didn’t really have any talent – when Connie Francis’ voice was dubbed over her singing in the 1958 comedy Western, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, no effort was made to create the illusion that she was really singing; this was one more insult that she endured. Indeed, for her story to become iconic and morally probative, it was necessary that she have no real talent and that her face and figure be her fortune. Jayne Mansfield, and to a lesser extent Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe, have the misfortune of being cautionary moral exemplars more than they were real human beings.

In late June 1967, Mansfield was performing on the "redneck Riviera" at Biloxi, Mississippi. She was staying in a low-rent apartment, the Cabana Courtyard Apartments and appearing on weekend nights at the Gus Stevens’ Supper Club, her act billed as "The most-publicized movie star and SEX QUEEN with Bob Sweeney, "the schoolmaster" who has a masters in Comedy." An interview was scheduled for her on the morning of July 29, 1967 with a New Orleans radio station. After her show in Biloxi, she set off New Orleans in Sam Brody’s Buick Elektra.

Highway 90 joins Biloxi to New Orleans – in 1967, the road was a two-lane black drop that made its curving way along the gulf of Mexico before passing through jungle-like tropical forests. A mile past the Rigolets bridge, a State truck was spraying mosquito control insecticide into the woods and ditch on the north side of the highway. The truck was moving very slowly and the stinging fog of insecticide lingered in the heavy, humid air. Ron Harrison, a college student employed as a bouncer by Gus Stevens, was driving the Buick Electra. Mansfield sat in the middle of the front seat between the college boy and her husband Sam Brody. In the backseat of the car, presumably asleep, were Mansfield’s three of the star’s five children Jayne, Zoltan, and Mariska.

A semi-tractor trailer had come to a stop in the westbound lane, blocked by the State mosquito-control trailer. Harrison was speeding, possibly driving as fast 80 mph. As he rounded a gradual curve, he encountered the truck stopped dead on the road half-hidden in the fog of insecticide. Before he could brake, the Buick Elektra under-rode the semi-trailer. The top of the Elektra was sheared off and the three front seat passengers were instantly killed. The children in the back seat, although spattered with blood and brains, were not seriously injured. One of Mansfield’s Chihuaha’s was hurled from the car and found dead on the side of the road. The other dogs apparently survived.

Autopsy records show that Mansfield died as a result of massive head injuries – she suffered an "avulsion-type injury" to her cranium: in other words the top part of her skull was ripped off in the collision.

Her wrongful death lawsuit was settled for $500,000. But legal fees and creditors devoured most of the spoils of the litigation. Her children were each paid $2000 as their share of the settlement.


She thinks filling a sweater is acting.
Bette Davis

　

9.

Three photographs define Jayne Mansfield’s sad career. All three were published in Kenneth Anger’s notorious book about Hollywood scandals, Hollywood Babylon. Once seen, they can not be unseen.

In the first photograph, Jayne Mansfield is wearing a very low-cut white gown. She leans forward exposing her breasts to the camera. Her skin and face and dress are all very pale and the flashbulb bathes her in an explosive, clinical glare.

In the second photograph, Jayne Mansfield sits at a table beside a young, and exotic-looking, Sophia Loren. Mansfield is leaning forward over a dining table covered in white cloth. An unused coffee cup and a glass tumbler are set before her as well as a round plate on which there is a humble-looking bread roll. A waiter, his head cropped-off by the framing, stands in the shadow behind the movie stars – the man’s hand are crossed under his belly. A couple of other Hollywood entrepreneur-types, beefy-looking men who seem to be barking orders, are visible behind the table. To Mansfield’s right, Sophia Loren is seated at the same table. Loren has cast her eyes in sidelong glance down into Mansfield’s voluminous cleavage. One of Mansfield’s nipples - it is on her right side – is peeping out over the edge of her low-cut white gown – this is the same gown that Mansfield wears in the first photograph described above. (The pictures were taken by paparazzi at a party hosted by Paramount Studios for Sophia Loren – the party in April 1957 at Romanoff’s was to honor Ms. Loren’s first Hollywood picture, The Pride and the Passion (1957), an epic starring Frank Sinatra among others. Mansfield crashed the party, belligerently storming up to Sophia Loren, shaking her hand and, then, draping herself against the 22-year old Italian movie star, apparently seeking to make invidious comparisons between her figure and that of Ms. Loren.) In the picture, both women are elaborately made-up and have glittering, three or four-inch long earrings. Loren wears a string of diamonds at her throat and her dress, although revealing, is nothing like the shred of sheer white cloth that Mansfield wears. Loren’s eyes are cast down sidelong and she has a tight censorious smile on her lips.

This photograph dogged Sophia Loren all her life. Fans often approached her with copies of the widely circulated image and begged her to sign her autograph to the picture. Miss Loren refused because, she claims, that the picture was exploitive and disrespectful to the memory of the dead movie star. When she was 80, Loren gave an interview about the photograph: "I was afraid," she said. "I thought her clothing would come apart and that she would spill all over my plate. I expected her nipple to be on my plate. I was scared and I am looking at her nipples and fearing that they will fall onto the table."

In the third photographs, we see a car badly mangled with its top peeled off. In the foreground, a body lies under a blanket. Another body, face unrecognizable and covered in blood, likes inert like a log next to the smashed car. There is something pale and hairy caught in the remnants of the upper frame around the cars’s windshield. In a close-up, we can see T. S. Eliot lying on his side next to the whiskey bottle. The dog is about the length of the whiskey bottle still a quarter full. Dog’s muzzle is gory and t the dead Chihuahua’s little white teeth are bared.

　

　

10.

Jayne Mansfield is buried in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania. Her gravestone is made of pinkish polished granite.

There is a cenotaph in her memory in the Hollywood Forever cemetery in Hollywood. The fact that there are two monuments of Mansfield, one in Pennsylvania and one in Los Angeles have given rise to the legend that her head is buried under the cenotaph in Hollywood.

On the north side of the road on Highway 90, near the border between Louisiana and Mississippi, there is a home-made white cross standing about four feet tall above a hand-lettered plaque identifying the location as the place where Jayne Mansfield died. Draped over the cross are beads of the kind distributed to tourists in New Orleans.

Until 1998, the death car toured the United States, appearing mostly at County Fairs. The car shown in the exhibit was a dusty-looking grey Buick Elektra. The car appeared with photographs purporting to show the accident scene. But either the car or the pictures were mismatched – there is no resemblance between the car in the show and the grisly crash photographs.

The car wintered in St. Augustine in Buddy Hough’s American Museum of Tragedy, sharing a gallery with Harvey Oswald’s blood spattered clothing and a couple of mummies. The museum closed in 1998 and the whereabouts of the alleged death car are unknown. A collector acquired a billboard touting the museum – it shows a buxom woman lying on her back and the words "JAYNE MANSFIED DEATH CAR – learn the truth."

Learn the truth. – And it will set you free, as the Gospel singer (Abbey Lincoln) in The Girl Can’t Help It sings.

　

11.

Eye-color: light brown

Hair-color: dyed blonde

Height: 5' 6"

Bra-size: 36 D cup up to 46 DD depending upon weight and pregnancy

Measurements: 40-21-35

　

QUIZ:

Eddie Cochran was born in 1938 in (what city and State).


Albert Lea, Minnesota

Cochran’s family members came from (a) Sweden; (b) the United Kingdom; ( c ) Oklahoma; (d) Thunder Bay, Canada.


( c )

When he was 14, Cochran’s family moved to (a) Bell Gardens in California; (b) Edina, Minnesota ( c ) Duluth, Minnesota (d) Nashville, Tennessee.


Bell Gardens

Which of these songs was not associated with Cochran: (a) Twenty-flight rock; (b) Light my Fire; ( c ) Summertime Blues; (d) Teenage Heaven.


(b)

Why doesn’t Eddie Cochran attend Eddie Cochran Days in his hometown?


Because he’s dead.

Eddie Cochran’s musical style is (a) acid rock; (b) rockabilly; ( c ) ska; (d) skiffle music.


(b)

When was Eddie Cochran inducted into Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: (a) 1987; (b) 1972; ( c ) 2004; (d) 1995.


(a)

Eddie Cochran (a) died in a plane crash in Texas in 1959; (b) is still around and played the Medina Ballroom in 2013; ( c ) died in a taxi-cab crash in England in 1960; (d) died of a drug overdose in New Orleans in 1974.


( c )