Sophia Loren & Jayne Mansfield Iconic Sexy 1957 Romanoff ' S Restaurant Photograph
Item History & Price
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ITEM: This is a 1957 vintage and original photograph that captures the now legendary moment between Jayne Mansfield and Sophia Loren. Mansfield, known for her publicity stunts, attended a dinner at the exclusive Beverly Hills Romanoff's restaurant hosted by Paramount Pictures to officially welcome Italian actress Sophia Loren to Hollywood. A photograph of the two women, with Loren casting a sideways glance at Mansfield's cleavage, was distributed world-wide and became an international sensation.
Mansfield was widely known for staging publicity stunts which garnered nationwide attention, such as when her top fell off in a pool while surrounded by journalists. According to Loren, Mansfield was the last person to arrive to the dinner and walked directly to her table, where she was seated between Loren and her dinner companion Clifton Webb. Mansfield, wearing a backless satin dress with a deep, plunging neckline, was photographed at the table during the dinner as Loren looks on at her revealing dress.
Measures 8" x 10" on a glossy single weight paper stock.
CONDITION: Fine condition general storage/handling wear and scattered toning on verso. Please use the included images as a conditional guide.
Guaranteed to be 100% vintage and original from Grapefruit Moon Gallery.
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One of the leading sex symbols of the 1950s and 1960s, film actress Jayne Mansfield was born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19, 1933 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the only child of Vera J. (nee Palmer; later Peers) and Herbert W. Palmer. Her parents were well-to-do, with her father a successful attorney in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where she spent a portion of her childhood. Her parents were both born with the same surname, and her ancestry was seven eighths English and Cornish and one eighth German. She was reportedly a talented pianist and played the violin when she was young.
Tragedy struck when Jayne was three, when her father suddenly died of a heart attack. Three years later, her mother remarried and she and her mother moved to Dallas, Texas, buying a small home where she had violin concerts in the driveway of their home. Her IQ was reportedly 163, and she attended the University of Dallas and participated in little-theater productions. In 1949, at the age of 16, she married a man five years her senior named Paul Mansfield. In November 1950, when Jayne was seventeen, their daughter, Jayne Marie Mansfield. The union ended in divorce but she kept the surname Mansfield as a good surname for an actress.
After some productions there and elsewhere, Jayne decided to go to Hollywood. Her first film was a bit role as a cigarette girl in Pete Kelly's Blues (1955). Although the roles in the beginning were not much, she was successful in gaining those roles because of her ample physical attributes which placed her in two other films that year, Hell on Frisco Bay (1955) and Illegal (1955). Her breakout role came the next year with a featured part in The Burglar (1957). By the time she portrayed Rita Marlowe in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) and Playgirl After Dark (1960), Jayne was now known as the poor man's Marilyn Monroe. She did not get the plum roles that Marilyn got in her productions. Instead, her films were more of a showcase for her body more than anything else. She did have a real talent for acting, but the movie executives insisted she stay in her dumb blonde stereotype roles. By the 1960s, her career had options that grew lower. She made somewhat embarrassing guest appearances like on the popular game show What's My Line? (1950), she appeared on the show four times in 1956, 1957, 1964, and 1966 and many other 1950s and 1960s game shows. By 1962, she was dropped from 20th Century Fox and the rest of her career had smaller options like being in B movies and low budget movies or performing at food stores or small nightclubs.
While traveling from a nightclub in Biloxi, Mississippi and 30 miles from New Orleans to where she was to be on television the following day, she was killed instantly on Highway 90 in Slidell, Louisiana in a car crash in the early hours of June 29, 1967, when the car in which she was riding slammed into the back of a semi-tractor trailer truck that had stopped due to a truck in front of the tractor trailer that was spraying for bugs. Her car went under the truck at nearly 80 miles per hour. Her boyfriend Samuel Brody and their driver Ronnie Harrison, were also killed. The damage to the car was so bad that the engine was twisted sideways. She was not, however, decapitated, as had long been misreported. She was 34 years old.
Mansfield's funeral was on July 3, 1967 and hundreds of people lined the main street of Pen Argyl for Mansfield's funeral, a small private ceremony at Fairview Cemetery in Plainfield (outside Pen Argyl), Pennsylvania (where her father was also buried), attended by her family. The only ex-husband to attend was Mickey Hargitay. Her final film, Single Room Furnished (1966), was released the following year. In 2000, Mansfield's 97 year old mother, Mrs. Vera Peers, was interred alongside Mansfield.
After Mansfield's death, Mansfield's mother, as well as her ex-husband Mickey Hargitay, William Pigue (legal guardian for her daughter, Jayne Marie), Charles Goldring (Mansfield's business manager), and Bernard B. Cohen and Jerome Webber (both administrators of the estate) all filed unsuccessful suits to gain control of her estate, which was initially estimated at $600, 000 ($3, 712, 000 in 2018 dollars), including the Pink Palace (estimated at $100, 000 ($619, 000 in 2018 dollars)), a sports car sold for $7, 000 ($43, 000 in 2018 dollars), her jewelry, and Sam Brody's $185, 000 estate left to her in his last will ($1, 145, 000 in 2018 dollars).
In 1971, Beverly Brody sued the Mansfield estate for $325, 000 ($2, 011, 000 in 2018 dollars) worth of presents and jewelry given to Mansfield by Sam Brody; the suit was settled out of court.
In 1977, Mansfield's four eldest children (Jayne Marie, Mickey, Zoltan, and Mariska) went to court in 1977 to discover that some $500, 000 in debt which Mansfield had incurred ($3, 093, 000 in 2018 dollars) and litigation had left the estate insolvent.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Joel Nickerson/Robert Sieger
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Sophia Loren was born as Sofia Scicolone at the Clinica Regina Margherita in Rome, Italy, on September 20, 1934. Her father, Riccardo Scicolone, was married to another woman and refused to marry her mother, Romilda Villani, despite the fact that she was the mother of his two children (Sophia and her younger sister Maria Scicolone). Growing up in the slums of Pozzuoli during the second World War without any support from her father, she experienced much sadness in her childhood. Her life took an unexpected turn for the best when, at age 14, she entered into a beauty contest where she placed as one of the finalists. It was there that Sophia caught the attention of film producer Carlo Ponti, some 22 years her senior, whom she eventually married in 1966 once he finally obtained a divorce from his first wife. Perhaps he was the only father figure she ever had. Under his guidance, Sophia was put under contract and appeared as an extra in ten films beginning in 1950, before working her way up to supporting roles. In these early films, she was credited as "Sofia Lazzaro" because people joked her beauty could raise Lazzarus from the dead.
By her late teens, Sophia was playing lead roles in many Italian features such as La favorita (1952) and Aida (1953). In 1957, she embarked on a successful acting career in the United States, starring in Boy on a Dolphin (1957), Legend of the Lost (1957), and The Pride and the Passion (1957) that year. She had a short-lived but much-publicized fling with co-star Cary Grant, who was 31 years her senior. She was only 22 while he was 53, and she rejected a marriage proposal from him. They were paired together a second time in the family-friendly romantic comedy Houseboat (1958). While under contract to Paramount Pictures, Sophia starred in Desire Under the Elms (1958), The Key (1958), The Black Orchid (1958), It Started in Naples (1960), Heller in Pink Tights (1960), A Breath of Scandal (1960), and The Millionairess (1960) before returning to Italy to star in Two Women (1960). The film was a period piece about a woman living in war-torn Italy who is raped while trying to protect her young daughter. Originally cast as the more glamorous child, Sophia fought against type and was re-cast as the mother, evidencing a lack of vanity and proving herself as a genuine actress. This performance received international acclaim and was honored with an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Sophia remained a bona fide international movie star throughout the sixties and seventies, making films on both sides of the Atlantic, and starring opposite such leading men as Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, and Charlton Heston. Her American films included El Cid (1961), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Arabesque (1966), Man of La Mancha (1972), and The Cassandra Crossing (1976). She gained a wider respect with her Italian films, especially Marriage Italian Style (1964) and A Special Day (1977). During these years she received a second Oscar nomination and won five Golden Globe Awards.
From the eighties onward, Sophia's appearances on the big screen came few and far between. She preferred to spend the majority of her time raising sons Carlo Jr. (b. 1969) and Eduardo (b. 1973). Her only acting credits during the decade were five television films, beginning with Sophia Loren: Her Own Story (1980), a biopic in which she portrayed herself and her mother. She ventured into other areas of business and became the first actress to launch her own fragrance and design of eye wear. In 1982 she voluntarily spent nineteen days in jail for tax evasion.
In 1991 Sophia received an Honorary Academy Award for her body of work, and was declared "one of world cinema's greatest treasures." Later that year, she experienced a great loss when her mother died of cancer. Her return to mainstream films in Ready to Wear (1994) ("Ready to Wear") was well-received, although the film as a whole was not. She followed this up with her biggest U.S. hit in years, the comedy Grumpier Old Men (1995) in which she played a sexy divorcée who seduces Walter Matthau. Over the next decade Sophia had plum roles in a few non-mainstream arthouse films like Soleil (1997), Between Strangers (2002) (directed by Edoardo), and Lives of the Saints (2004). Still beautiful at 72, she posed scantily-clad for the 2007 Pirelli Calendar. Sadly, that same year she mourned the loss of her spouse, Carlo Ponti, who died at age 94. In 2009, after far too much time away from film, she appeared in the musical Nine (2009) opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. These days Sophia is based in Switzerland but frequently travels to Los Angeles to spend time with her sons and their families (Eduardo is married to actress Sasha Alexander). Sophia Loren remains one of the most beloved and recognizable figures in the international film world.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
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