Sexbomb: The Life and Death of Jayne Mansfield

by Guus Luijters and Gerard Timmer

This has to be the strangest project I have ever been involved with. In 1985, Guus and Gerard put together 150-some pages of photos of and quotes from blond bombshell Mansfield, arranged the material in alphabetical order by heading (in the English edition, the headings range from "abortion" to "youth," with stops along the way for "breasts," "Hollywood." "nude scenes" and so on), then translated all the quotes into Dutch and had themselves a book.

By the time they sold the US rights to Citadel Press in New York, though, they'd lost the original Mansfield quotations — so, rather than going back and doing all the research all over again, they actually hired me to translate their Dutch-language translations back into English! The front cover of the Citadel edition announces, "Told mainly in her own words," but the fact is that they are my words, not Jayne's, and I doubt that even one of the book's hundreds of quotations is truly authentic — if any of them are, it's only by the purest chance!

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