Jayne Mansfield's Last Mile on Highway 90 RoadyGoat
1967Just west of the Rigolets bridge and old Fort Pike, Highway 90 runs low and narrow through the marsh. That stretch is inside the New Orleans city limits, and it is where Jayne Mansfield died. In June of 1967 the Hollywood star was playing the Gus Stevens Supper Club in Biloxi. After midnight she set out for New Orleans in a 1966 Buick Electra that Stevens had loaned her, because she was due on WDSU's Midday Show. Her attorney and partner Sam Brody rode up front with her. The driver was Ronald Harrison, who drove for the supper club. Three of her children were asleep in the back seat. A little after two in the morning on June 29th, a tractor-trailer ahead of them slowed down for a mosquito spraying truck that was flashing a red light. The Buick ran up under the back of the trailer, and all three adults in the front seat were killed. Mansfield was thirty-four. The children in the back survived with minor injuries. The youngest was three years old. Her name was Mariska, and she grew up to be Mariska Hargitay of Law and Order, Special Victims Unit. In 2025 she directed a documentary about the mother she never got to know, called My Mom Jayne. Despite a rumor that has outlived her, Mansfield was not decapitated. That story grew out of photographs of the wrecked car. For years a homemade cross marked the crash in the wrong place, miles further down the road. Since 2019, three white crosses have stood on the shoulder near the bridge, one for each of the people who died. The crash also left a name behind. The steel bar hanging across the back of a trailer, the one that keeps a car from sliding underneath, is still called a Mansfield bar. Federal safety officials recommended requiring one on every trailer after she died. The trucking industry fought it, and the rule did not take effect until 1998, thirty-one years later.
