From the age of six, Jayne Mansfield knew she wanted to be a movie star. The “working man’s Monroe,” as she later came to be known, was 21 when she moved to Los Angeles in 1954 alongside her husband and their three-year-old daughter. She immediately got to work making her superstar aspirations a reality—a scheme that gained more traction with each passing day. “Half of the time the dishes weren’t washed and the kitchen was dirty, for each morning I started out in full pursuit of my dream,” she said, according to biographer May Mann. Mansfield secured her first studio contract less than a year after her arrival in Tinseltown; within three years, she had won a Golden Globe for her starring role in the musical comedy The Girl Can’t Help It.

The actor’s bombshell image was instrumental in her rise to fame—though at first, studio producers didn’t bite. “If I couldn’t go through them, I figured I’d just have to go around,” she told the Saturday Evening Post of the powers that be in 1957. “Then, right at that moment, I made the greatest discovery of my life. I discovered publicity.” The Dallas-raised starlet bleached her naturally brunette hair, played up a comedic “dumb blonde” persona (despite her purported genius-level IQ), and was photographed as often as possible. Everything in Mansfield’s life, including her trademark feminine interior design style, aligned with a carefully constructed identity. Pink was her signature color, and she embraced an extravagantly girlish style when it came to the home: Faux fur, hearts, cherubs, and stuffed animals were incorporated in excess throughout the actor’s longtime SoCal dwelling she dubbed the Pink Palace, where she resided beginning in 1958.

Read on for a look at the larger-than-life star in her equally showstopping abodes.