Jayne Mansfield was the larger than life star of the films Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and The Girl Can't Help It. A vivid childhood memory of mine was finding an issue of Playboy, and discovering in it a black-and-white photo feature on Mansfield 'spontaneously' stripping at a party. This purported bit of exhibitionism blew my repressed young Catholic mind.
But that early erotic memory is forever linked to something darker: later seeing a frontpage story in the newspaper about Mansfield's gruesome death in a car accident. Jump ahead a few decades, and I was asked to illustrate a "Loathsome Lore" feature in the first issue of Creepy from Dark Horse Comics. That story just happened to dish some gossip about the supposed devil worship of certain Hollywood celebrities...including Jayne Mansfield.
Somehow my long distance connection to Mansfield had come full circle, travelling from sex to death to art.