Esther Cohen

On February school break my Cohen family-- four of us--went from Ansonia, Connecticut, a small factory town, to Grossinger’s Resort in Liberty, New York,’ for our annual Jewish vacation. Throughout grammar school I worked for the Peck Observer, and I would always head right for the Grossinger’s press office as soon as we arrived. There I would always ask Julius Schatz, director of Grossinger’s PR, who I could interview for my school paper. Jenny Grossinger and the family was often my subject.

Mr. Schatz was a kind man. He would give me background information. I had a spiral notebook to write it all down. And plenty of Bic pens manufactured near Ansonia.  My father would buy shoeboxes of seconds.

“I have a very good story for you,” Schatz said when I was in seventh grade, and he arranged for me to spend the day with Jayne Mansfield and her husband Mickey Hargitay. I went to their hotel room an earnest seventh grader—skinny, pretty much breastless, myself. I wore a green and white dress with green apples in place of dots.

Jayne Mansfield herself came to the door.  Of course I knew her from the magazines at Claudine’s, my mother’s hair salon. She suggested we do the interview “poolside.” 

I’d never heard the word before.

Mickey was with us.  They were the first two people I ever saw with Real Bodies.  My parents had bodies, of course, but they were deeply undercover in grey suits and housedresses.

There she was Jayne Mansfield--that blonde hair, those breasts no one could ever forget them, wearing a leopard skin bikini (my mother had a plaid bathing suit with a matching plaid robe) Jayne Mansfield had no need for a robe. Her Mister Universe husband Mickey wore a thin black suit nothing like my father’s loose grey boxer short suits. All these years later I can see them.