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Author: Jewls Krueger
In the early morning hours of June 29, 1967, 34 year old Hollywood actress and Playboy Playmate Jayne Mansfield was killed when the car she was riding in slammed into the back of a slow moving tractor-trailer on U.S. Highway 90 just outside New Orleans, Louisiana.
The crash also killed her boyfriend and the driver of the car, and is the reason why every tractor-trailer on American roads today has a steel guard across its rear bumper.
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Jayne Mansfield -Public Domain
Vera Jayne Palmer was born April 19, 1933 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She arrived in Hollywood as a young wife and mother in 1954 and adopted her first husband's last name, Mansfield. She quickly became one of the most photographed actresses of the late 1950s and early 1960s. She was often marketed as a successor to Marilyn Monroe, with films including "The Girl Can't Help It" (1956), "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (1957), "The Wayward Bus" (1957), and "Promises! Promises!" (1963), the last of which made her the first American actress to perform a nude scene in a starring film role. She was also a Playboy Playmate.
Mansfield married three times and had five children. Three of those children, Miklós "Mickey" Hargitay Jr., Zoltán Hargitay, and Mariska Hargitay, were from her second marriage to Hungarian American bodybuilder and former Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay. Her youngest daughter Mariska would go on to become an Emmy winning actress and star of NBC's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."
By 1967, with her film career slowing, Mansfield was earning much of her income performing nightclub cabaret shows around the country.
Further Reading
On the evening of June 28, 1967, Mansfield performed two shows at the Gus Stevens Supper Club in Biloxi, Mississippi. After the second show, she, her attorney and boyfriend Samuel S. Brody, three of her children (Mickey Jr., 8, Zoltán, 6, and Mariska, 3), and her four Chihuahuas climbed into a 1966 Buick Electra owned by the club. The car was driven by 19 year old Ronald B. "Ronnie" Harrison, who worked for the supper club. They were headed roughly 90 miles west to New Orleans, where Mansfield was scheduled to appear on WDSU's "Midday Show" the next morning and stay at the Roosevelt Hotel.
At about 2:25 a.m. on June 29, 1967, the Buick was traveling westbound on U.S. Highway 90 on a narrow stretch of road about a mile west of the Rigolets Bridge. Ahead of the car, a tractor-trailer had slowed from 50 to 35 miles per hour as it approached a truck spraying clouds of mosquito insecticide. The thick white fog reportedly obscured the trailer from view.
Traveling at an estimated 60 to 80 miles per hour, Harrison was unable to slow down in time. The Buick struck the rear of the trailer and slid underneath, shearing off the top of the car. Mansfield, Brody, and Harrison were killed instantly. Two of the four Chihuahuas in the car were also killed. The three children, who had been asleep in the back seat, survived with only minor injuries.
Despite a persistent rumor that Mansfield was decapitated in the crash, Orleans Parish Coroner Dr. Nicholas Chetta confirmed that she was not. He said she had died of a crushed skull, but that her head had remained attached. The myth was started by photographs taken at the scene that showed her platinum blonde wig caught in the car's wreckage. James Roberts, the embalmer at the New Orleans funeral home who prepared her body, later told reporters, "She was fully intact. I know. I embalmed her."
Mansfield's funeral was held on July 3, 1967 at Fairview Cemetery in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, where she had lived as a young child. Nearly 1,000 mourners and onlookers turned out for the service, creating what one local paper called a "circus atmosphere" outside the cemetery.
The crash directly led to a major change in trucking safety. In the years that followed, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration required all tractor-trailers to be fitted with a steel guard across the rear of the trailer to prevent passenger vehicles from sliding underneath. These guards are now commonly referred to as "Mansfield bars" in her honor.
The crash site sits along a quiet, two lane stretch of U.S. Highway 90 about one mile west of the new Rigolets Bridge, near Slidell, Louisiana, on the eastern edge of the New Orleans metropolitan area. The original Rigolets swing bridge was replaced in 2009 by a longer, modern fixed bridge, but the road and the marshy landscape immediately west of it remain much as they were in 1967.
A roadside memorial of three plain white crosses honors the three adults who died in the crash. An older marker had been placed in the wrong location and has since been removed. The current marker sits along the shoulder and is visible to passing drivers.
U.S. Highway 90 still carries regular traffic at highway speeds. Please do not stop on the shoulder, and use extreme caution if visiting. Please be respectful of the memorial and of those who continue to visit it in honor of Mansfield and the two men who died alongside her.
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