The Girl Can’t Help It: The Fame Game

The Girl Can’t Help It is, ostensibly, a comedy about the music business. More specifically, it is a movie about rock and roll, a musical genre born out of rhythm and blues and exploited commercially by blue-eyed white boys, who by 1956 were already using gimmicks and gyrations to land themselves on national television. The film, which emerged two years after Judy Garland’s A Star Is Born, is a clear satire on the popular trope of “girl throws herself headlong at showbiz.” In The Girl Can’t Help It, Mansfield plays a sweet naïf named Jerri Jordan who wants nothing to do with being a star. All Jerri wants, deep down, is to be a June Cleaver–esque housewife, spending her days cracking eggs and making batter and picking up Tinkertoys. It is her pushy boyfriend, the mannerless mobster Marty “Fats” Murdock (an uproarious Edmond O’Brien in cheap polyester suits), who wants to see Jerri’s name in lights. He used to be somebody, at least before his slot-machine racket got him tossed in jail, and he has no intention of settling down with a nobody, even if she does have a twenty-one-inch waist and look like the Venus de Milo in a satin dress. On the terrace of his penthouse on Park Avenue in New York, Fats tells a down-and-out alcoholic press agent named Tom Miller (a dough-faced but debonair Tom Ewell)—not quite at gunpoint, but with the specter of a good knee-whacking haunting his every word—that Tom must make Jerri a star.

What follows is a classic screwball setup: Fats agrees to pay off Tom’s debts if he can make Jerri famous, but, alas, Jerri cannot sing a note. All she has going for her is that she is terminally hot and eager to learn. Fortunately, Tom is a good enough agent to realize that he needs very little else to go on. In this way, The Girl Can’t Help It is a fantastic send-up of the capitalist machinery that churns out marquee names; it’s all a fix. Talent has little to do with it. It’s all about marketing, supply, demand, cheap tricks. In one of the film’s best moments, Tom escorts Jerri to a series of nightclubs, where he instructs her to cover her décolletage with a mink stole. When a club’s owner is in sight, Tom instructs Jerri to drop the fur cover-up, revealing a skintight scarlet evening gown. Jerri, looking like a proto–Jessica Rabbit, then sashays past the owner to the powder room, her backside swaying like a river reed. Naturally, the club owner takes an interest and makes a beeline to Tom and Jerri’s table to inquire about her skills and availability. All Jerri can say in response to any question—by Tom’s order—is “Ask my agent!”

This sequence is a meta-joke about Mansfield, who at the time of filming was being dogged in the press for biting Marilyn Monroe’s shtick—though now, in retrospect, we can see the two were flexing neighborly but distinct comedic muscles. Monroe was more of a daffy and devious ditz, while Mansfield was more of a reluctant bimbo with a fatalistic sense of how her figure gaveth free cocktails and tooketh away respect. The going take among the gossips of the day was that Mansfield had no acting chops to speak of; she had just posed nude at the right place and time. Of course, the columnists were wrong, but Tashlin played right into their grubby, inky hands: Jerri repeating “Ask my agent!” starts to sound like Mansfield herself taking the piss out of the press. She evades definition while stealing the scene; it takes a true comedic brain to play dumb so smartly.

The Girl Can’t Help It is, more than anything, a total blast. This is not to undercut its cinematic or technical merit—Tashlin does know how to frame a shot well: take the way he shoots Jerri in her final performance in a cupcake gown the purple-pink ombré of a unicorn’s mane, against a merry band of men in striped pajamas, or the hilarious two-shot of Fats and his henchman Mousie sidled up to the bar with matching cigars dangling off their lips. But it is designed to charm and to provoke, much like the music it features. Tashlin highlights several marvelous Black musicians in the film—including Little Richard, who sings the movie’s catchy theme; the Platters; and Abbey Lincoln—and puts many of them inside ritzy champagne-and-dinner clubs where they never would have performed in real life. As Waters has noted, “The early days of rhythm and blues were hardly in the Stork Club.” But Tashlin could see that rock and roll was already becoming gentrified, and so why not elevate it to such a discordantly glamorous setting? The authentic performances in the film sparkle with magic and potentiality, showing us the dawn of a new art form at its most vibrant. As a “music film,” The Girl Can’t Help It is a genre pioneer—it was, for many viewers, the first time they had ever laid eyes on these acts. The movie found Tashlin, who was also one of the first directors to allow bands to perform full numbers within the narrative arc of a film, inadvertently making cutting-edge music videos.

But by the time Jerri has her big hit—“Rock Around the Rock Pile,” a jailbird anthem written by Fats that some scholars think may have influenced Elvis Presley’s later hit with a similar theme—the art form has already become a parody of itself. Jerri “sings” just one note in the song, mimicking the sound of a police siren. During her recording session for this ridiculous number, we glimpse her sheet music, which has just one huge note marked on it. Between takes, she chomps on an apple and rolls her eyes at the band. She knows, even as she is recording a gold record, that the business is both corrupt and boring. She knows, even before it happens, that her record will work because the men in her life will strong-arm their way into bars and radio stations using violence and manipulation to ensure that her voice dominates jukeboxes. She sees it all unfurling, and she can barely bring herself to care. All she wants is to rule a family roost, to exercise some real control for once. Some may read this messaging as antifeminist; I read it as Jerri wanting to finally drop the act and care for someone else the way that nobody has ever cared for her. At the very end of the film, she finally reveals that she can, in fact, sing like a canary when she wants to. And it doesn’t even matter. She already knows that celebrity is for the birds.

Mansfield and her domestic yearning provide the sentimental beating heart of The Girl Can’t Help It, but Tashlin is not a sentimentalist. He’s a prankster. The energy in the film comes from its visual humor: for all its strengths as a musical, The Girl Can’t Help It could easily work as a silent film. Is there anything funnier than the sequence in which Tom’s former client Julie London keeps appearing to him as a torch-singing ghost in every corner of his apartment, changing evening gowns a dozen times in quick succession? Or when Mansfield goes behind a sparse plant to change but reveals her entire bottom half? Or when she walks down the street and ice starts to melt, or holds up two actual jugs of milk in front of her brassiere? Or when Fats bum-rushes the stage to avoid an assassination attempt and sings so well that a rival gang of mobsters decides to sign him to a record deal rather than kill him? Tashlin packs each scene with so many sight gags that the film feels carbonated. There is an exuberance to his work, and his symbiotic collaboration with Mansfield, that stands the test of time—it’s fizzy enough to bubble over into the future. The Girl Can’t Help It is a Pink Palace: a testament to beautiful bad taste, a bubblegum fantasia, a pop product that understands its own power. For those who get the punch line, it’s a comfortable and cozy place to be. For those who don’t, well, the girl can’t help you.