Insatiable need

[RonPrice]

In October 1957 Hollywood actress and western sex symbol Jayne Mansfield went on a 16-country tour of Europe for 20th Century Fox. She was presented to Queen Elizabeth on November 4th as winter was beginning in the U.K. "You are looking so beautiful," she said to the Queen. The Queen replied, "Thank you very much indeed. So are you." Mansfield was at the top of her acting career in 1957 and won a Golden Globe award that year for "Most Promising Newcomer: Female" thanks to her performance as a 'wistful derelict' in The Wayward Bus. This movie was generally conceded to have been her best acting or so announced the New York Times. Her career from then on was fitful and hampered by her flamboyant image, squeaky voice, "a soft-voiced-coo punctuated with squeals," as one writer put it. She had an almost comically voluptuous figure and limited acting range, as another critic put it. Still, after 1957, Mansfield remained a highly visible personality

November 4th 1957 was a significant day to many others around the world. To Baha'is around this same world on that same day Shoghi Effendi passed away. He was an unassuming man of immense talent. The year I joined the Bahá’í Faith, 1959, Mansfield won a Golden Laurel for Top Female Musical Performance for her role in the U.K.-produced movie The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, a western spoof. That same year she appeared in Too Hot To Handle. In the late 1950s Mansfield also generated a great deal of negative publicity due to her repeatedly successful attempts to expose what many felt were Hollywood's most impressive breasts.

The year my pioneering life began in the Bahá’í community, 1962, Mansfield appeared in It Happened In Athens. Despite receiving top billing, Mansfield was relegated to a colorful, scantily-clad supporting role. Dissatisfied with her film roles, Mansfield and her husband headlined at The Dunes in Las Vegas in an act called The House of Love for which this stunning actress(if you liked big breasts) earned $35,000 a week. It proved to be such a hit that she extended her stay and 20th-Century Fox Records subsequently released the show as an album in 1962. It was called Jayne Mansfield Busts Up Las Vegas.

In 1963 Mansfield became the first American mainstream actress to appear in the nude with a starring role in the film Promises! Promises! Photographs of a naked Jayne Mansfield on the set were published in Playboy which, by then, had been on the market for a decade. Mansfield enjoyed much box-office success in 1963 and was voted one of the Top 10 Box Office Attractions by an organization of American theater owners.

For the Baha'is 1963 was a year of much significance as well: the election of its first international body known as the Universal House of Justice. And so began five "decades of struggle…no longer sustained by the guiding hand of Shoghi Effendi."(1)-Ron Price with thanks to "Jayne Mansfield," Wikipedia Encyclopedia, 11 December 2006 and (1)The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, Bahá’í World Centre, 2001, p. 108.

Jayne died seven weeks before I left
home to live on Baffin Island in my
own turbulent life, significantly less
troubled or….endowed than Jayne's.
She had movie roles in those years
at the start of the Kingdom of God,
as some few knew, some very few,
the years of the first two international
Plans: 1953-1963 and 1964-1973…...

Then, on November 4th 1957, the day
when that shining face which illumined
the horizons of the world shone no more,
when the offspring of that mind: interpreter
and co-sharer in the genius of interpretation,
quasi-divine, could direct & guide his trust no
more--Jayne met the Queen, an event which
also satisfied and transcended her need of the
moment, served the future as well as present
and met her insatiable need for publicity--
his insatiable need had always been relentless
and exacting desires and motivations for data.(1)

(1) Glenford E. Mitchell, "The Literature of Interpretation," World Order, Winter 1972-3, p. 24.

Ron Price
11 December 2006
(updated for Fanbolt Forums
on 16/12/'08)

[ky2here]

Um okay. I'm seeing it, not sure why - but I'm seeing it.