Jayne Mansfield with two pet Chihuahuas in an undated photo.
Jayne Mansfield was a star like few others by the fall of 1964, when she arrived in Milwaukee for a week-long engagement of the play Champagne Complex at the Pabst Theater. She had starred in hits on both stage and screen while becoming one of her era’s most prominent sex symbols and perhaps Hollywood’s most photographed celebrity. Just a year before, she had become the first name actress to appear nude onscreen, doing so in Promises, Promises!, which got the film banned in Milwaukee until it was trimmed of the offending scenes. And while her play would receive only tepid appreciation from critics, audiences loved the show which, she told the press on the eve of its opening, was “about a girl who drinks pink champagne and wants to take her clothes off.”
But despite the nightly applause, Mansfield would leave Milwaukee heartbroken.
Mansfield was known for many things by 1964. Among her many eccentricities was an avid love of animals, so much so that she would travel with her many pets and would often have them on hand for various promotional and press events. Arriving in Milwaukee, she had three dogs in tow—TS Eliot, a Pomeranian; a basset hound named Shakespeare; and a pregnant Chihuahua named Gallina. The pups garnered almost as much attention in Milwaukee as her new husband (#3, as so often noted in the gossip pages), actor Matt Cimber, who also arrived in the city with Mansfield.
The Chihuahua was Mansfield’s baby. She slept with the starlet on the road and had even once appeared with her on the Jack Parr Show. She had been adopted several years earlier, rescued from a family of circus dogs. She was scheduled to have a caesarean and deliver her pups just after Mansfield’s run in Milwaukee ended. But one morning during rehearsals, Mansfield—staying at the Pfister Hotel—woke up to find that the dog had passed away in her sleep. Inconsolable, she wrapped the dog in a bedsheet and carried her to the lobby in search of help.
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The Milwaukee Sentinel ran this image of Mansfield laying her beloved Gallina to rest.
The week before the play was set to open, Mansfield commissioned one of the more surreal funerals in Milwaukee history. Riding in her custom blue Bentley convertible, she led a small procession to the cemetery at Thistlerose Kennels on Loomis Road, in Greendale. Gallina was laid to rest in a bronze-plated casket as a small gathering of mourners—including Mansfield’s two other dogs and at least one neighborhood cat—paid their respects. Local media covered the ceremony, as did a smattering of other paparazzi, who were always close behind when Mansfield was making the news. A number of locals were drawn to the scene as well, standing at a respectful distance while a teary-eyed Mansfield said goodbye to her beloved dog. Just before the casket was covered, she made a sign of the cross. “She was Catholic. We’re Catholic,” She told the few reporters who had gathered. “People who don’t have dogs don’t understand.” She signed a few autographs for some neighborhood children before departing. Mansfield later ordered a bronze plaque for the plot, to be engraved with a short, hand-written message from Mansfield to her dog.
Less than three years later, Mansfield was killed in an automobile accident. She had four Chihuahuas with her in the car at the time, two of which also perished in the wreck.
In 2009, this long-forgotten story was back in the papers when the Thistlerose land was sold and the cemetery—which by then contained about 180 burials—was dug up and removed. Gallina’s grave marker had long-since been removed (measure taken after Mansfield’s death to preempt any macabre souvenir-seekers) and the little bronze casket was—after attempts were made to contact Mansfield’s children about preferences for the remains—moved with the rest of the unclaimed caskets to a communal grave at Forest Hill Cemetery.
