CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Hollywood starlet's legacy of sadness, regret... and one final shocking twist
Most people, if they recognise her at all today, know Jayne only from a single photograph, as the blonde in the low-cut dress, under the withering sidelong gaze of a contemptuous Sophia Loren.
My Mom Jayne, a biographical portrait by her daughter Mariska Hargitay, with the help of her numerous half-siblings, was a reminder that, for a few years around 1960, the starlet was a mega-celebrity — bringing up her family in a pink Beverly Hills mansion with its own zoo and jungle in the grounds.
Today, there's literally nothing left of her fame. Mariska's two-hour film opened amid bulldozed rubble. The house, sold to pay Jayne's debts after her death aged 34 in 1967, has been demolished. Even the heart-shaped swimming pool is gone.
Her second husband, Mickey, a Hungarian circus performer and bodybuilder, adored her. But she carved a trail of wreckage through the lives of everyone she loved, and the predominant mood of the recollections was not of celebration but of sadness, regret and loss.
Three of her children — including Mariska, who was fortunately too young to remember it — were in the back seat of Jayne's car when she was killed in a head-on collision with a truck. Her latest boyfriend, the lawyer who handled her third divorce, died with her.
Mariska, herself a successful actress and star of the long-running Law And Order: Special Victims Unit crime serial, insisted she'd spent her life avoiding lurid gossip about her mother's life. But Jayne was addicted to the lurid, revelling in it.
As a 21-year-old hopeful in Hollywood, she realised her dreams of serious acting were holding her back when she auditioned as Joan of Arc for the head of casting at Paramount Studios.
Mariska Hargitay at the 'My Mom Jayne: A Film By Mariska Hargitay' premiere during the 2025 Tribeca Festival at Carnegie Hall last month in New York City
'He just seemed to think that I was wasting my 'obvious talents',' she giggled, and soon she was posing topless for Playboy.
Success did come, with a Broadway stage role and a couple of hit movies. But when her career hit the skids, she was willing to do anything to stay in the public eye — including nude scenes and seedy nightclub shows.
This two-hour biography didn't attempt to analyse why Jayne so craved attention. Her father died when she was three, which helps to explain why she first married at 17, but patently she was trying to fill a deeper void.
In the final half-hour, the film took a shocking twist as Mariska revealed that Mickey Hargitay wasn't her biological father. In fact, she was born after Jayne's brief fling with a Vegas crooner, Nelson Sardelli.
Mariska confronted her mother's former press secretary, 99-year-old Rusty Strait, implying he has exploited her memory. But surely Jayne wouldn't have it any other way.
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The Guardian
37 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘There's New Orleans before and after': revisiting Hurricane Katrina in a new docuseries
Earlier this year, NFL fans from across the country descended on New Orleans for the Super Bowl. But even as the Big Easy rushed to put its best face forward for the big game and quickly turn the page from a New Year's Eve attack on its famed tourist district, there was no way of concealing the derelict homes, watermarked buildings and other ravages of Hurricane Katrina. 'On the surface, New Orleans is still the New Orleans of our imagination, where there's Bourbon Street, the French Quarter and you're drinking in the middle of the day outside,' says the Oscar-nominated director Traci A Curry. 'But for the people of this place, the people who know it, there's New Orleans before Katrina and after Katrina. A lot of us who experienced it as spectators think of it as something that happened to America – and it wasn't.' Curry's solo directorial debut, Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, re-examines the epic storm 20 years later. The five-part series, which was made for National Geographic and counts Ryan and Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian as producers, isn't a requiem in the vein of When the Levees Broke – Spike Lee's superlative series that was just one of many works that informed this project – Curry says. Rather, it's a tragedy thriller told through forensic analysis. The biggest jump scares come in the hindsight revelations. The first episode provides a refresher on Hurricane Pam – the multi-agency, worst-case scenario planning exercise that was conducted a year before Katrina and essentially predicted everything that would happen, down to the reports of violence breaking out across the city. In Race Against Time, the clock runs down quickly while counting down the hours until the storm makes landfall, and then ticks slowly on for days as storm victims and lifesavers wait for 'the cavalry to come'. While bingeing the five-hour series, a two-year production effort, I found myself edging from horrified to heartbroken to furious as opportunistic politicking and rashes of misinformation sabotaged rescue efforts time and again. With a mix of home video and archival video footage (Curry is a former cable TV producer), the docuseries confidently stitches together a range of perspectives on the mushrooming calamity – from city leaders to emergency managers to residents who saw their lives and loved ones washed away. 'Initially our team combed through the hundreds of hours of archival material, identifying Katrina survivors who we found compelling, in the hopes that we might track them down,' Curry says. 'There were quite a few people we were unable to find, and some we found only to realize they had passed away.' Viewers will be heavily invested in the plight of Shelton Alexander – a spoken word poet who rode out the storm inside the Superdome and recorded the entire experience; a lot of his digicam footage made the final cut. 'I was fully equipped, with three batteries charged up,' he says. 'It was one of those things where I was like, I don't know what's about to happen, but I do know the water is going to come.' Race Against Time is not a story told from the top down. Former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, who was made a scapegoat for the Katrina aftermath, was one high-level authority figure that the production team pursued for the film – but ultimately he declined to be interviewed. Also left out is Kanye West's George W Bush slam or other impressions from pop culture that might reframe the disaster through that lens. Any digression in that direction, tempting as it surely must have been, probably would have distracted from Race Against Time's central thesis: that Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath were born from a series of compounding failures, starting with the failure to protect Louisiana's coastline. Ivor van Heerden, a respected marine scientist who warned the public and government officials about the region's potential for a devastating hurricane long before Katrina hit, blames the booming oil and gas industry for hollowing out the wooded wetlands that once gave New Orleans some natural cover. That left the city's levee system, the slapdash work of the US army corps of engineers, to absorb the brunt of the wind and storm surge. But long before those barriers gave way to river and lake water that wound up submerging 80% of New Orleans, Nagin could have helped himself and so many others by not waiting until the 11th hour to evacuate the city – essentially leaving New Orleans' many elderly, infirm and poor residents scrambling. And yet: as shockingly bad as Nagin was in the moment, he still has nothing on Mike Brown, the smug face of the inept federal response. In one damning email chain unearthed in the series, it's revealed that Brown was literally dining out in Baton Rouge while storm victims and first responders went hungry. Worse, Brown had the nerve to relate his frustrations about New Orleans evacuees contributing to long restaurant wait times and local traffic. Twenty years on, there's still no forgiving Brown – but Race Against Time does extend a measure of grace to some Katrina crisis managers. Police superintendent Eddie Compass certainly didn't help the situation by telling the media that snipers were shooting at rescue helicopters. But even that huge blunder becomes somewhat easier to appreciate once you see Compass himself as storm victim who was only reacting to the game of telephone that disrupted the information chain when the storm knocked out power throughout the city. 'One of the things I said to the team early on is that we really want to make sure we approach everyone as a human being in the series,' Curry says. 'By the time we get to episode four, there's a lot of state abuse of force and violence against citizens.' Curry also goes to lengths to show how the Katrina narrative became perverted. Many TV news outlets covered the fallout from Bourbon Street and waited dutifully for the scenes to snap into focus. When their cameras picked up on people breaking into stores for food, clothes and other supplies, Katrina went from being a human story about an unfathomable crisis on American soil to an excuse for Brown and right-leaning commentators to scold Black New Orleanians for looting businesses and damaging property. Desperation that seemed so palpable to those watching from afar was somehow lost on the actual news gatherers who should know it when they see it. 'There's a clip I think in episode four that I remember watching in real time of Wolf Blitzer as images of masses of Black people [are on screen] and he goes, 'They're so poor. They're so Black.' And yes, there were a lot of poor, Black people – but it just felt so dehumanizing and just deindividuated Black suffering. I really wanted to dismantle that, like, no, these are individuals with a life, with a story, with family, with feelings, who experienced a loss.' Race Against Time doesn't turn away from strong imagery. There are shots of lifeless bodies and talk of dying babies, but none of it is ever offered up for entertainment's sake – hardly a given in the documentary game these days. 'NatGeo was mindful that staying through five episodes can be a big ask for viewers,' Curry says. 'But overall they were very supportive of my intention to tell the story in a way that did not feel exploitative of the Katrina survivors or sensationalize the story in any way.' Eerily, the clock doesn't stop running once Race Against Time is through. The final episode is careful to point out the welter of climate crises that have continued to strike the US since Katrina's passing, and even includes footage from the recent Los Angeles wildfires taken by a producer who lost her home. Each disaster is a reminder of not only how ill-prepared we are for such events, still, but also of how hesitant we remain to reckon with the root causes that are only going to make future weather catastrophes that much more devastating – especially in Black and low-income communities, which are still suffering in the aftermath of Katrina. 'I hope this series makes us realize the urgency of recognizing that these things are going to continue to happen,' Curry says. 'I know this is sort of a dirty word these days, but we need to think about equity in the way we approach preparation for disasters. Because if we center the needs of the most vulnerable people, it's going to help everybody.' Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time premieres on 27 July on National Geographic and will be available on Disney+ and Hulu afterward This article was amended on 28 July 2025 to correct the name of one of the film's producers. He is Sev Ohanian, not Alexis Ohanian as stated in an earlier version.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle jeans campaign hilariously spoofed by comedian amid 'woke' controversy
Sydney Sweeney 's American Eagle ad campaign has debuted to strong reactions from fans and financial markets, leading one comedian to spoof it to plaudits from his audience. Los Angeles-based comedian Michael Pavano owned the moment and parodied the promotion centered around the A-list actress, 27, in a new clip posted to his Instagram and TikTok pages, which have more than 1.1 million combined followers. Pavano, who has past donned drag ensembles for online comedy bits on his social media platforms, racked up more than 13,000 likes in two hours on Monday for his spoof of the Sweeney advertisement. Pavano, who appeared on the TV series Big Top earlier this year, captioned the clip 'gripping all the right places' adding emojis of jeans and a heart; and hashtags for phrases such as satire, parody and impressions. Pavano, a veteran of The Groundlings comedy troupe, donned a purple denim ensemble, a dark brown wig and of strategically placed a pair of balloons for comedic purposes. Pavano, who appeared in the 2023 short film Shatter, added a voiceover in which he made a series of pretentious nonsensical statements about genetics. Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad campaign has debuted to strong reactions from fans and financial markets leading comedian Michael Pavano to spoof it to plaudits from his audience In the voiceover, Pavano mocked the overt double meaning of the phrases jeans/genes in a parody of the American Eagle ad campaign. 'Jeans are passed down from parents to us, often determining traits like your hair color ... and even eye color,' Pavano said. 'My jeans are blue - so they're like, better than yours. They say people with blonde hair and blue eyes, their nature is favorite. I don't say it, but they do - but I buy it. The vapid and hypersexual monologue was a clear lampooning of the ad campaign centered around the A-list actress that had been garnering controversy in recent days over a potential double meaning of the phrase jeans. He continued: 'I mean, who wouldn't want my jeans? I know you do, you dirty boy. Let's be so real. Tight blue jeans from American Eagle is the only denim I'll put on my body - and it's not just the denim that's tight.' Pavano said in the skit, 'This pair of blue denim is clinging to me for dear life ... I like it when they stretch super wide and slide right in - I mean on. 'They hug all the right places - and some very wrong ones.' The viral clip was mocking American Eagle's autumn advertising rollout, which has the tagline, 'Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.' In a series of images, the Spokane, Washington-born beauty - who is set to play boxer Christy Martin in an upcoming biopic already garnering Oscar buzz - is seen modeling a variety of denim-based ensembles. In an accompanying video, Sydney is seen buttoning up her jeans as she muses: 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour... my genes are blue'. A second advert sees the camera pan down Sydney's chest as she models a plunging denim jumpsuit. She muses: 'My body's composition is determined by my genes...' before exclaiming: 'Hey, eyes up here' as the camera cuts back to her face. The advert has divided fans, however, with one critic calling the clip 'one of the loudest and most obvious racialized dog whistles we've seen and heard in a while.' The phrase 'great genes' is 'historically used to celebrate whiteness, thinness and attractiveness,' which it said made 'this campaign seem to be a tone-deaf marketing move,' a Salon report on the backlash read. Taking to social media, many expressed their shock at messaging - which they aligned to Nazi propaganda. Outraged fans penned: 'So Sydney (& American Eagle) somehow expect audiences to not interpret this visual as a euphemism for eugenics and white supremacy?' 'The Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad campaign is just modern day Nazi propaganda. Like it's wild how blatant it is. Things are weird right now, man.'; 'the most nazi part of the Sydney sweeney add for me was the use of the word offspring'; ''Jeans (Genes) are past down from parent to offspring' 'My jeans (genes) are blue' 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans (genes)' Nothing is ever a coincidence, this is eugenics'; TikTok named Angie under the handle @vital_media_marketing then reviewed the ad and pointed out what she felt were problematic elements with the underlying message. Angie said: As it's panning up her body and on her face and her features, she's literally talking about her family tree and the genetics that have been handed down to her, her blonde hair and her blue eyes, and how great they are.' Angie said that 'praising Sydney Sweeney for her great genes in the context of her white blonde hair, blue eye appearance' makes for 'one of the loudest and most obvious racialized dog whistles we've seen and heard in a while.' Many people panned the tone of the ad campaign on American Eagle's Instagram page, as one user quipped, It's giving "Subtle 1930's Germany."' Another user echoed, 'Close enough, welcome back 1930s Germany.' One person said the promotion 'is what happens when you have no [people] of color in a room ... particularly in a time like this. 'This ad campaign got so caught up in this 'clever' play on words and this stunt the ppl in the room missed what was so blatantly obvious to anyone not White. I'd expect this from Abercrombie… but not yall.' One user wrote of the promotion featuring the surging star, 'This is such a f****d up campaign' while another called it 'weird as hell.' Others vented about the message they felt the campaign inherently sent, as one said they were 'never shopping at AE again' while another asked the fashion house, 'What are you doing???' One Instagram user speculated, 'This has to be rage bait,' while another suggested the clothing retailer 'read the room…' in reference to the current campaign. Another user asked, 'Who on your marketing team said this was a good idea.' The advert has divided fans, however, with one critic calling the clip 'one of the loudest and most obvious racialized dog whistles we've seen and heard in a while.' Yet many were quick to defend Sydney, branding the backlash 'unhinged'. They shared on X/Twitter: 'I'm not sure how to say this nicely but if you think a jeans ad with a pun about Sydney Sweeney being pretty is a nazi dogwhistle you genuinely need to put the phone down for a while.'; 'everyone is seriously reading too much into this and y'all need to go take a hike or something because sydney sweeney is literally just promoting jeans, not 'nazi propaganda''; 'The claim that Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad is pro-eugenics because of a 'good genes/jeans' pun is genuinely unhinged. It's a denim campaign, not a manifesto. Not every blonde with blue eyes is a Nazi. Some of you need a history book — and a nap'; 'You guys don't have to like Sydney Sweeney or the ways she promotes herself but don't you think comparing those Jean commercials to nazi propaganda is a tad extreme?' Daily Mail has reached out to reps for Sweeney and American Eagle for further comment on the story. Sweeney said in a July 23 news release about the fall campaign: 'There is something so effortless about American Eagle.' She said of the clothier: 'It's the perfect balance of being put-together but still feeling like yourself.' Sweeney said in a July 23 news release about the fall campaign: 'There is something so effortless about American Eagle – it's the perfect balance of being put-together but still feeling like yourself' In terms of the charitable aspect of the ad campaign, American Eagle Outfitters is working with Crisis Text Line in an effort to provide grants for mental health support and crisis intervention The Euphoria star continued: 'Their commitment to creating pieces that make you feel confident and comfortable in your own skin is something that resonates with me. 'It's rare to find a brand that grows with you, the way American Eagle has for generations.' The Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood actress wrapped up in saying, 'They have literally been there with me through every version of myself.' American Eagle Outfitters president Jennifer Foyle opened up about the ad campaign, which is slated to raise money for domestic violence charities, in the news release. 'This fall season, American Eagle is celebrating what makes our brand iconic – trendsetting denim that leads, never follows,' Foyle said. 'Innovative fits and endless versatility reflect how our community wears their denim: mixed, matched, layered and lived in.' The fashion executive explained why Sweeney made for the perfect focal point of the promotion. 'With Sydney Sweeney front and center, she brings the allure, and we add the flawless wardrobe for the winning combo of ease, attitude and a little mischief,' Foyle said. In terms of the charitable aspect of the ad campaign, American Eagle Outfitters is working with Crisis Text Line in an effort to provide grants for mental health support and crisis intervention. Proceeds from a special edition of The Sydney Jean will be donated to the organization. Among the related grants include a $100,000 Signature Grant posted this past February 2025 in an effort to expand programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Joy Taylor breaks silence on claims she's quitting sports media after Fox Sports firing
Former Fox Sports analyst Joy Taylor has revealed whether she will continue working in sports media after being fired by the network. The host's nine-year stint at Fox came to an abrupt end after the network reportedly failed to renew her contract four months after she found herself embroiled in a bombshell sex lawsuit. The 38-year-old broke her silence on the matter last week and has now hinted at what the future will hold for her as she embarks on the next chapter of her career. In a snippet from an upcoming episode of the 'Let Her Shoot' podcast, Taylor said: 'I'll have a lot of announcements coming up. 'You know, as far as everything that happened, that's the business. Nothing is forever, as all these cliches, but that is what it is. You know, (I'm) grateful, I had nine years on a network and the next chapter will be equally as exciting. 'I'm not limiting myself. I've worked with a bunch of different people over the years, people I never thought that I would end up partnering up with. 'It might surprise people what the next move is... I'm not teasing anything, but we'll have announcements very soon.' Earlier this month, Fox Sports reportedly slashed its weekday lineup with a trio of shows axed, including 'Speak' which was hosted by Taylor. The former sports host had worked on a number of different shows in her nine-year stint with Fox, yet the company has decided not to renew her expiring contract this summer - just months after she found herself embroiled in a bombshell sex lawsuit . The network shortly announced a new deal with Barstool Sports and founder Dave Portnoy, while Kay Adams was rumored to be a leading contender to fill the void left at Fox. The decision from Fox came in the wake of lawsuit brought by former FS1 hairstylist Noushin Faraji, who listed Taylor as a defendant as well as top programming executive Charlie Dixon and Skip Bayless. Taylor was accused of using sexual relationships with colleagues, including Dixon and former co-host Emmanuel Acho, to further her career in the lawsuit filed by the ex-employee. The 38-year-old was also alleged to have told Faraji to 'get over it' when she confided in her about claims she was sexually assaulted by Dixon. Taylor has denied all allegations. The 38-year-old initially broke her silence on the matter last week, as she expressed gratitude for the opportunities she's had as a female panelist in sports media, but suggested that the events have left her feeling jaded towards the industry. 'Overall, like the saying 'it doesn't feel like work when you're doing something that you actually enjoy.' I think what happened to me this year took that away from me,' Taylor said on The Ringer's Higher Learning. 'I don't know if I'll get that back. I might — and maybe like when the callous forms over the wound and you get away from things you it doesn't feel, like the tremors go away, so we're not there yet — but right now, it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel exciting.
