Nightclub
In February 1958, Tropicana Las Vegas launched Mansfield's striptease revue The Tropicana Holiday (produced by Monte Proser, co-starring Mickey Hargitay) under a four weeks contract which was extended to eight. The opening night raised $20,000 for March of Dimes ($161,000 in 2012 dollars). She received $25,000 per week for her performance as Trixie Divoon in the show ($201,000 in 2012 dollars), while her contract with 20th Century Fox was paying her $2,500 per week ($20,000 in 2012 dollars). She had a million-dollar policy with Lloyd's of London in case of Hargitay dropping her as he whirled Mansfield around for the show. When her film offers disappeared, Mansfield turned to Las Vegas again. In December 1960, Dunes hotel and casino launched Mansfield's revue The House of Love (produced by Jack Cole, co-starring Hargitay). She received $35,000 a week as her salary ($275,000 in 2012 dollars), which was the highest in her career.
Her wardrobe for the shows at Tropicana and Dunes featured a gold mesh dress with sequins to cover her nipples and pubic region. That controversial sheer dress that was referred to as "Jayne Mansfiled and a few sequins". In early 1963, she performed in her first club engagement outside Las Vegas, at Plantation Supper Club in Greensboro, North Carolina, earning $23,000 in a week ($175,000 in 2012 dollars), and then at Iroquois Gardens in Louisville, Kentucky. She returned to Las Vegas in 1966, but her show was staged at Fremont Street, away from the Strip where Tropicana and Dunes was. Her last nightclub act French Dressing was at Latin Quarter in New York in 1966, also repeated at Tropicana. It was a modified version of the Tropicana show, and ran for six weeks with fair success.
Her nightclub career became inspirations for films, documentaries and a musical album. 20th Century Fox Records recorded The House of Love for an album entitled Jayne Mansfield Busts Up Las Vegas in 1962. She played the roles of burlesque entertainer Midnight Franklin in Too Hot to Handle (1960) and Las Vegas show girl Tawni Downs in The Las Vegas Hillbillys (1966). In 1967, independent documentary Spree (alternative title Las Vegas by Night) on the antics of Las Vegas entertainers was released. The film, narrated as a part of a travelogue of Vic Damone and Juliet Prowse, featured Mansfield, Hargitay, Constance Moore and Clara Ward as guest stars. Mansfield strips and sings "Promise Her Anything" from the film Promises! Promises!. A court order prohibited using any of the guest stars to promote the film.
Read more about this topic: Jayne Mansfield, Stage Career
Famous quotes containing the word nightclub:
“Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.”
—Anonymous. Popular saying.
Dating from World War I—when it was used by U.S. soldiers—or before, the saying was associated with nightclub hostess Texas Quinan in the 1920s. It was the title of a song recorded by Sophie Tucker in 1927, and of a Cole Porter musical in 1929.
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“That’s playgirl stuff, Brownie. I’ve seen them in London, Paris, Rome. They start life in a New York nightclub and end up covering the world like a paid advertisement. Not an honest feeling from her kneecap to her neck.”
—John Lee Mahin (1902–1984)