Flashback: October, 1966. While in San Francisco for a film festival, Jayne Mansfield took an excursion to meet with His Satanic Majesty Anton LaVey at his all-black Victorian home. From The Devil in Miss Mansfield: “That weekend Mansfield and her lover, Hollywood lawyer Sam Brody, heard about Anton LaVey from other festivalgoers. The founder of San Francisco’s new Church of Satan, LaVey, 36, had been in the news recently for his Black Mass replete with naked women draped across altars. The occult was no stranger in town, but in the ’60s devil worship was seen as another sign that the End was at hand. Did LaVey really commune with Old Scratch? Who cared? If journalists called, LaVey could be trusted to have a sound bite waiting. And when someone at a party suggested a drive out to the Richmond to meet the Black Pope himself, the blonde bombshell agreed. LaVey welcomed the revelers into his Victorian home on California Street. Mansfield later told her friend and biographer May Mann, ‘Mr. LaVey took me into another room to show me the black-magic charms from the devil, and he presented me with one. He said I was now the high priestess of his church.’ Already crowned Miss Freeway, Miss Geiger Counter, and Miss Tomato, Mansfield probably just shrugged. What was another title to the Queen of the Chihuahua Show? ‘I didn’t want to insult him,’ Mansfield told Mann. Brody, however, mocked the ceremony, infuriating LaVey, who shouted at him, ‘You are cursed by the devil. You will be killed within a year.'”
Sure enough, six months later on a dark stretch of road in Biloxi, Mississippi, where Jayne was doing dinner theater, her car ran under a semi. The driver, Brody, and Mansfield were killed instantly. The children, asleep in the back seat, were unharmed. A blonde wig photographed at the accident scene gave rise to the rumor she had been decapitated. Not so. Still the question remains: Was Jayne’s death merely an accident or were dark forces involved? Did Satan himself rise up and steer her car into the oncoming semi to avenge the slur upon his favored servant LaVey? WE MAY NEVER KNOW. BOO!
