"Kiss Them For Me"

Kiss Them For Me (1991) Siouxsie & the Banshees

For a song that came out in 1991, Kiss Them For Me holds up very well. If it were released today it would sink like a stone with a car battery tied to it, but if someone did happen to hear it, they would like it.

I didn't realize at the time that it was written about Jayne Mansfield but one night I was looking through the TV section and saw that there was a 1957 movie with the same name so I figured there was some kind of connection.

Jayne Mansfield was a movie star in the 1950s and 60s. Her mansion was called "The Pink Palace" and was decorated with cupids, a fountain that shot pink champagne, and had a heart-shaped swimming pool. She died in a car crash "...on the road to New Orleans" with her daughter Mariska Hargitay ("Law & Order") in the backseat.

Kathy Griffin wrote about Hargitay in her autobiography, Official Book Club Selection. Griffin used to teach classes at the Groundlings in LA and at the start of the season her mother was looking over the student list.

"Hargitay! Mickey Hargitay's DAUGHTER? Holy Mary mother of God, JAYNE MANSFIELD'S KID?"

So anyway, on the first day class they did one of those trust-building exercises you've seen a thousand times on sitcoms where one person falls backwards and everyone else is supposed to catch them. When it was Mariska's turn, somehow everyone was distracted and she fell "like a ton of bricks".

That night Griffin told her mother who said, "As if she hasn't been through enough".

Kiss Them For Me got me into Siouxsie & the Banshees and I bought their Superstition LP, and later, Peepshow and Twice Upon A Time: The Singles.

And that's where it ended. I did buy the cassingle for "Face to Face" from the Batman Returns soundtrack. I didn't buy their next album, even though I liked the lead single "O Baby".

By the way, the cassingle had a cool B-side: "Return". I used to love listening to it when I'd take my nightly walks around town with my walkman. Year later I got the CD single which had a lame remix, but also an extra B-side called "Staring Back". It wasn't as good as "Return" but the cool thing was, "Staring Back" faded into "Return" so they were almost like the same song. I like that, especially on Kristin Hersh's Strange Angels album when "Stained" goes right into "Shake". The perfect mix.



Note: Above is a well-known photo of Mansfield and Sophia Loren.

Note 2: I'm going to try to post a link to the music video but I don't know how. Wish me luck.

Note 3: The top two pictures are just that: pictures. No, I wasn't able to post a youtube link. Some (all?)of you are reading that and thinking I must be pretty dumb. Yeah.