Berowne's 223

(Also for Three Word Wednesday and ABC Wednesday: "V" is for Victory.)

I had a strange feeling when I saw the prompt of a tape machine.  Years ago I owned a TEAC just like that one.  "Where are the tapes of yesteryear?"

Speaking of the past, I was glancing through the paper recently and I saw an article on the actress Mariska Hargitay.

Suddenly I was thrust back a half-century or so, back to when young Berowne was trying to make it as a film maker – documentaries and commercials to order.

I found myself sitting in the dingy waiting room of a small company who had called me there because they needed a film made and I had promised that I could offer something most others couldn’t: I worked cheap.

Hey, working cheap is how you got started.

The place was the Superior Welding Alloys Company and I was hurriedly reading their brochures in an effort to learn what welding alloys were.

Don't mean to gripe but their waiting room was undistinguished, to say the least, so I was sort of amazed to find myself sitting next to someone who was also waiting there to see about a job.

Amazed because she was a young woman about whom it is no exaggeration to say that she presented a spectacular appearance.  In the parlance of the time she was a knockout – not the type of person one would usually find waiting to see about a job with your average welding alloys firm.

We got to chatting – after all, she learned that I was a film producer but how was she to know I was just a beginner? – and she told me of the plan she had carefully worked out to become famous.

Later, when she was known to just about every sentient life form in the land, she seemed to many to be playing the role of a dumb blonde.  But her earlier university grades proved that she had been an intelligent student.

She said she wanted fame.  She wanted to be known.  She wanted stardom.  The agents she had contacted had been unimpressed.  They stalled, wouldn't send her out on a call-back.  Sure, she was something to look at, but it seemed she was not all that special when it came to singing, dancing, acting, etc – the things agents were usually looking for. 

She felt there was a crisis.  She sat down and carefully evaluated herself and decided that since the agents weren’t doing much for her, she’d do this fame thing herself.  She had a small inheritance so she made it her job to spend her days methodically going around to companies – not the big corporations but rather the smaller outfits – and explaining to them that she was available as a model for any of their advertising or promotional photography. 

She didn’t have to be paid much, in some cases nothing.  She just wanted lots of pictures of herself published; she thought this way she’d become known.

Well, it worked.  She gradually became Miss Photoflash, Miss Direct Mail, Nylon Sweater Queen, Hot Dog Ambassador, Miss 100% Pure Maple Syrup, Miss Potato Soup and a page-full of other such titles.   And she got parts in a few films.

She achieved victory: she became known to just about everyone in the country.  Her name was Jayne Mansfield.

Our story takes a dark turn.  In the middle of a June night in 1967, Jayne and her family were being driven to New Orleans when they crashed their 1966 Buick Electra into a huge tractor-trailer that had suddenly slowed in front of them.  She and two others were killed. 

Her three-year-old daughter Mariska survived the crash.  You may be familiar with Mariska Hargitay.  Google tells me that she is best known for her role as NYC Detective Olivia Benson on the NBC television drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a role that has earned her multiple awards and nominations, including an Emmy and Golden Globe.