it was the year you forgot my birthday. if anyone asks, that’s what i’ll tell them. the year the rain turned away from me. it seems so small now, but back then, the world was a war i was fighting. the trees all had shadows trying to ruin me. i tried to fix it. i even spoke to the birds, but they scattered like dandelion seeds. you wrote me a letter to tell me how lonely love was. i tried to retrace my steps to before it all happened, but our lives went on and our hearts never looked the same. i had a phantom poem in my head that i promised to give you if you stayed. you didn’t. the poem did. after two more years of silence, i was still sorry. i pictured your ghosts, and they looked nothing like me. i imagined a world where i was big enough to at least haunt you. it was the same world you burned down in all your dreams.
In November 1957, shortly before her marriage to Mickey Hargitay, Mansfield bought a 40-room Mediterranean-style mansion formerly owned by Rudy Vallée at 10100 Sunset Boulevard in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles Much of the investment to buy the house came from the $81,340 ($685,318 in 2016 dollars) she inherited from her maternal grandfather Elmer Palmer. Mansfield had the house painted pink, with cupids surrounded by pink fluorescent lights, pink furs in the bathrooms, a pink heart-shaped bathtub, and a fountain spurting pink champagne, and then dubbed it the “Pink Palace”. Hargitay, a plumber and carpenter before getting into bodybuilding, built a pink heart-shaped swimming pool. Mansfield decorated the Pink Palace by writing to furniture and building suppliers requesting free samples. She received over $150,000 ($1,263,803 in 2016 dollars) in free merchandise, paying only $76,000 ($640,327 in 2016 dollars) for the mansion itself. It was still a large sum, when the average cost of a house at the time was under $7,500 ($63,190 in 2016 dollars). The Pink Palace was sold and its subsequent owners have included Ringo Starr, Cass Elliot and Engelbert Humperdinck. In 2002, Humperdinck sold it to developers, and the house was demolished in November of that year. (x)
