Steel-gray clouds threatened rain that would hold off as Frank Ferruccio and friends paid their respects in a rural Pennsylvania cemetery Saturday.

They gathered at the grave of someone they’d never met, but who visitor Nicci Guiseppe, from Lebanon, Pa., said means “everything” to her.

Jayne Mansfield was laid to rest in the quiet Fairview Cemetery outside Pen Argyl in 1967, following death 57 years ago Saturday in a car crash en route from Biloxi, Mississippi, to New Orleans.

It’s truly a labor of love that draws Ferruccio to Mansfield’s grave twice each year — once for her birthday in April, and once for the day she died. Since first visiting her resting place in the early 1980s, he’s written three books on Mansfield. His latest, a coffee-table book he’s selling on eBay called “Jayne Mansfield Unpublished,” is crammed full of photos of the starlet — many of which Guiseppe colorized from the black-and-white originals. His first on Mansfield, “Diamonds to Dust,” he had made into a 2014 feature film of the same name.

Mansfield was born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19, 1933, and spent her early years in Phillipsburg, prior to her father’s death and the surviving family’s move to Dallas, Texas.

Her second husband, Mickey Hargitay, honored her wishes to be buried in the family plot in Plainfield Township, part of Northampton County’s Slate Belt, according to Ferruccio.

“I’ve loved it,” Ferruccio said of his years honoring Mansfield’s life and making sure her grave is freshly decorated with flowers in her favorite color, pink. “I’ve hung out here. I’ve spent hours here at a time. People are always like, ‘You’re such a freak’ — I’ve laid on her grave and I’ve read her biographies and I would be like asking her, ‘Is that true?’ And then I wrote my own book so I know that it’s true.”

Ferruccio found his love of Mansfield through another stunning blonde contemporary of hers: Marilyn Monroe. He was by far the youngest of three children, with a sister 17 years his senior and brother a decade older, and he grew up “basically an only child.” Old movies were his comfort.

“And I loved Marilyn. Something got me with the blonde and the wiggle,” Ferruccio said. “And every time I researched Marilyn I found something on Jayne, and I was like, ‘Who is this Jayne? What is she about?’”

Ferruccio would devour his first details of Mansfield’s life in a library book he picked up in Edison, New Jersey — a four-town bike ride from his home outside Princeton where he grew up and has returned to live after spending time in New York, Los Angeles and Pennsylvania’s Delaware River-side New Hope.

“They always talked derogatorily about Jayne when it came to Marilyn, that she was an imitator, she was the truck driver’s version of Marilyn — they belittled her image, put Marilyn up on this big pedestal,” Ferruccio said Saturday. “So I became very curious.”

In 1982, at age 14, his brother drove him to Pen Argyl, and Ferruccio began his commitment he maintains today to keep Mansfield’s gravestone flowers worthy of her memory.

It’s where, two years later, Ferruccio met and befriended Mansfield’s mother’s sister Helen Milheim.

“I was here in 1984, kneeling on her grave,” he said Saturday. “I had brought flowers like that and I saw a white Cadillac convertible, which was Jayne’s forte, with the top down, come in with my peripheral vision. She came around and she parked. And I saw a pink scarf and blonde hair, which really freaked me out.

“She came up, she stood right behind me, practically touching me,” Ferruccio recalled, the flowers offering the opening into the new friendship. “She’s like, ‘Do you bring them?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ She’s like, ‘Did you know her?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I’m just a really big fan.’ I didn’t even look at her face, but then I turned around: She had platinum blonde hair, pink scarf, pink suit. I’m like, ‘Did you know her?’

“‘That was my niece.’”

Both sets of Mansfield’s grandparents are buried in the family plot, as is Milheim, who died 2005. So is Mansfield’s mother and the man she married after the death of Mansfield’s father, who is buried in the same cemetery but at a different plot from the rest of the family.

“But Jayne’s maternal side is all around her here, and that’s why she’s buried here,” Ferruccio said.

Mansfield got her start in Hollywood with a cold call to Paramount Studios, Ferruccio said: “‘Hi, I’m a really sexy blonde, my measurements are 42-18-35 1/2, and I would like to be a movie star,’” he said of her introduction. “And that got her a screen test, her ballsiness, and because of that she became within two years of moving to Hollywood from Texas … one of the No. 1 stars in the world.”

With an IQ of 163, Mansfield spoke German, Spanish, French, Italian and English and was a piano and violin virtuoso, Ferruccio said.

“She was going to become a star in some way no matter what,” he said. “And it turned out after all that she became a star by being known as a dumb blonde. That was the irony of it. Sadly, because she instilled that image so intensely in the public eye, it was also her downfall. Because when the ‘60s came she wasn’t given those opportunities that other actresses got to play serious roles. They only thought she was like a one-trick pony.”

Mansfield appeared in Playboy in 1955. It’s considered her first big break, according to a retrospective at legacy.com, and came the same year she signed on with Warner Brothers to begin making the movies that would wow generations of fans on the silver screen.

Ferruccio is quick to rattle off more of the numbers that helped define Mansfield: 29 movies, five children, three marriages.

Toward the end of her life, she was doing nightclub appearances earning her $2,500 a night — like the performance June 28, 1967, before her fateful ride.

The Biloxi venue owner borrowed his wife’s Buick and assigned as driver for Mansfield and her family a teenage employee who’d been working a 24-hour shift at a nearby airbase. Approaching New Orleans, they came to a stretch slick from the mist of mosquito spray applied minutes earlier, and the car slammed into the back of a tractor-trailer at 80 mph.

Mansfield, boyfriend Sam Brody, and driver Ronald Harrison were killed. Her children in the back seat, 8-year-old Miklós, 6-year-old Zoltán and Mariska, 3, survived with minor injuries. Mansfield was just 34.

Ferruccio credits Mariska Hargitay’s own acting career with helping to reignite interest in Mansfield, and counts two new books in the works on the starlet’s life. Hargitay stars as Capt. Olivia Benson in the NBC property “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” whose 26th season is set to premiere in fall.

Ferruccio said his intense investigation into Mansfield’s life has included years of defending her children from macabre speculation she’d been decapitated in the crash 57 years ago into the rear of the truck, which peeled back the Buick’s roof. A look back at Mansfield published on the crash’s 50th anniversary by nola.com explained that a (New Orleans) Times-Picayune crash-scene photo fueled those rumors by showing her wig tangled in the car’s windshield. According to that report, federal highway regulations that took effect in 1998 required trucks to be equipped with a Rear Underrun Protection System to prevent such devastating effects of rear-end truck collisions, but which took on a more colloquial name.

“It was because of Jayne that it became a federal regulation that they have the Mansfield bar on the back of the trucks so that you can’t easily go under the back of the trucks,” Ferruccio said.

The family knows of Ferruccio’s dedication and appreciates it, he said. Two years ago, Ferruccio said, Mansfield’s family had the grave power-washed and glazed, with the relatives’ nearby markers restored, as well.

Ferruccio’s purchased his own burial plot a few feet from Mansfield’s, but expects to have plenty to do before it’s used.

“It’s been my mission to keep the grave nice,” Ferruccio said.

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Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com.