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Atlantic
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
She Was More Than the Next Marilyn Monroe
When a chestnut-haired starlet named Jayne Mansfield first arrived in Hollywood in 1954, a casting executive for Paramount Studios told her she was wasting what he termed her 'obvious talents'—meaning her body. A single mother in her early 20s, Mansfield was game for anything that would get her foot in the door and allow her to eventually become a serious actor. So she dyed her hair the color of popcorn butter. She tightened her dresses to accentuate her buxom, hourglass physique. She affected a coquettish purr in her first acting roles and televised interviews, drawing each syllable out into an exasperated coo. Mansfield had grand creative ambitions, having been raised by a mother who enrolled her in singing, dancing, and music lessons as a child. But despite her other talents—she was also an accomplished pianist and violinist—her sexually suggestive persona became her meal ticket in a period when studios were itching to replicate the success of Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood's resident bombshell. This experiment in engineering a star earned diminishing returns, and as Mansfield's screen career waned in the 1960s, her image became more albatross than asset. Hollywood saw her as lacking any substance, thinking the costume of the atomic blonde was all she had to offer. By the time she died in 1967, from a car crash, at just 34, she found herself exiled to nightclub appearances. Taken at face value, Mansfield's life might seem like the tragedy of a woman who struggled to break away from her reputation. The recently released HBO documentary My Mom Jayne, directed by her youngest daughter, the actor Mariska Hargitay—who was 3 when her mother died and would become a household name as the hard-boiled Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit —invites viewers to reconsider that framing. Although the film acknowledges the injustice of Mansfield's unfulfilled artistic potential, it also dignifies Mansfield as both actor and mother. The result is an affectionate tribute to a woman often impugned as Monroe's dime-store variant; it also doubles as a portrait of Hollywood's studio system in a state of free fall. Mansfield was a shrewd navigator of the industry's politics—until they changed so drastically that she could not keep pace with them. In 1954, the year of Mansfield's Paramount screen test, Hollywood was in crisis. Theater attendance had plummeted by a full 50 percent from its zenith in 1946, when 90 million people had hit the movies every week. Television, still a technological novelty, provided convenient entertainment without the hassle of a car ride. The House Un-American Activities Committee had been busy sniffing out suspected Communists within Hollywood's ranks, thereby encouraging a conformist monoculture of directors, screenwriters, and performers who behaved themselves. These accumulating pressures led Hollywood to a moment of existential desperation—which had unfortunate consequences for female actors. The 'woman's films' that had once been popular, providing actors such as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis with meaty dramatic material, lost favor to testosterone-heavy films. Throughout the 1950s, the mold of female stardom became more homogenized. The industry still abided by the Hays Code—a series of censorious enforcements that forbade films from depicting forms of 'sex perversion'—which began to feel illogical as filmmakers grew eager to pursue more rebellious material. This created an uneasy ecosystem in which studios promoted female stars, such as Monroe and Doris Day, who seemed 'all about sex, but without sex,' as the film critic Molly Haskell contended in her groundbreaking 1974 study, From Reverence to Rape. Those conditions gave a young woman like Vera Jayne Palmer, as Mansfield was born in 1933, a narrow path to thrive on screen. After marrying and bearing her first child in her teens, Mansfield—keeping her first husband's surname even after their divorce—took acting classes and migrated to Hollywood. She patched together an income through modeling, teaching dancing, and even selling candy outside a theater until her persistence got her proper attention from an agent. Mansfield would spend the following years acquitting herself well in B movies and supporting parts in big-ticket studio fare (along with a detour to Broadway in 1955, when she was just 22) before the director Frank Tashlin immortalized the Mansfield persona in a pair of comedies, The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. These films, with their candy-hued Technicolor canvases, were monuments to Mansfield's charisma and comic flair. Playing two similar roles—a reluctant singing star in the former, a fluttery movie goddess in the latter—she took the Monroe archetype to its most parodic end point, flouncing about in fabulous stoles and bedazzled dresses while delivering each line as if it were wrapped in quotation marks. In real life, too, Mansfield showcased a refreshing willingness to laugh at herself. She made herself a fixture of Hollywood's gossip pages and fan magazines, and had no compunction about strategically exploiting her own 'pin-up publicity,' as she called it. 'I use it as a means to an end,' Mansfield said to the television host Joyce Davidson. 'I don't know if I should say I liked it. But I felt that it would do me some good, being put into a position where I could project myself to what I really wanted to attain.' What she wanted to attain, My Mom Jayne asserts, was respect. 'She just had that desire to be a serious actress,' her eldest daughter, Jayne Marie Mansfield, says early in the film. 'And she was totally determined to do that.' The Wayward Bus, from 1957, gave her a fair shake. Scaled-down and somber with its black-and-white palette, the drama was a departure from Mansfield's comedies. She would tame her signature squeak in order to play Camille, an exotic dancer haunted by her stained reputation, and whose personal life is fodder for tabloids. Camille's desperation for a life where men will respect her for who she is, rather than her physical endowments, is moving, and Mansfield makes the viewer root for her character to find happiness even when she fears it might evade her. The film, perhaps her finest dramatic hour, suggests an affecting presence whose capabilities were underutilized by short-sighted producers. 'Why didn't she do more of those roles?' Hargitay asks her sister after a scene from The Wayward Bus is shown, to which Jayne Marie responds bluntly: 'Because the parts didn't come in.' As the 1950s came to a close, Mansfield found herself in the same rut as so many other Hollywood blondes. Today, many film scholars tend to group Mansfield with Sheree North and Mamie Van Doren, two other studio products groomed carefully to mimic the Monroe template. Only occasionally were such women able to escape the typecasting of studio brass. Even Monroe herself had dramatic aspirations that a mere few films—namely her swan song, 1961's The Misfits —gave her the chance to realize. In My Mom Jayne 's telling, Monroe's death in 1962 registered as a wake-up call for Mansfield, who began to fear that she would be forever doomed to cheesecake roles—that the 'whole blonde persona was a box,' as Jayne Marie remarks. This initiated a conscious attempt to change her image: 'I've been someone else for a few years,' Mansfield said to the talk-show host Jack Paar that year. 'And I'm ready to be myself.' But press skepticism followed, as did box-office flops. Her brand of studied, bashful flightiness began to seem more passé than winkingly subversive. 'In the fifties, Jayne was a demonstration of what to do and how to do it, when female sexuality was a come-on, a taste, a broken promise,' Martha Saxton observed in her book Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties. 'Take a good look, she said, but don't touch.' In the 1960s, a decade with newfound openness toward sex, her evasions had less mileage. It would be wishful thinking to assume that Mansfield fared much better in 1970s American cinema. The Hays Code ended in '68, but despite the forward strides of the American movie industry, Hollywood could remain an unkind place for women. In a decade when Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, and Al Pacino got the lion's share of audience attention, Barbra Streisand was the only woman to maintain a steady place on the 'Top Ten Money Making Stars' poll, one of the industry's barometers for measuring an actor's drawing power. Only in recent years has it become more common for once-dismissed female actors to enjoy gratifying second acts, which makes My Mom Jayne an ideal film for this moment. See Pamela Anderson's acclaimed and sincere turn in Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl as a working-class performer at a Las Vegas revue, cocooned by her own delusions of grandeur. A critical class that once may have sneered at Anderson's perceived prestige grab instead welcomed her. Had she been born a few generations later, a performer like Mansfield may have had an easier time revising her reputation as a pinup. My Mom Jayne openly—and justly—laments that she seldom had the opportunity to do that. 'The public pays money at the box office to see me a certain way,' Mansfield once told Groucho Marx. 'So I think it's just all part of the role I'm playing as an actress.' She understood the nature of the game she was playing while knowing, deep down, that its rules were fundamentally unfair. My Mom Jayne positions her as less a hapless victim of Hollywood circumstance than a savvy operator who gave the industry exactly what it asked of her, even if she wanted more than it could grant her in return.
Miami Herald
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Fans stunned over Peter Hermann surprising Mariska Hargitay with mom's old piano
Several days after actress Mariska Hargitay debuted the documentary she produced about her famous mom, Jayne Mansfield, a specific clip from the June 27 documentary is making its rounds on the internet. The clip from HBO's 'My Mom Jayne' shows Hargitay learning that her husband, actor Peter Hermann, managed to track down the beautiful piano her mom used to own that sat in the house Hargitay lived in as a small child. It was a surprise for her 60th birthday. In that same clip, Hermann tells Hargitay that not only did he find the piano but that he purchased the piano. 'Happy Birthday,' Hermann told his wife as she broke down in tears. Hermann and Hargitay met in 2002 on the set of 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.' Hargitay leads the show as Detective Olivia Benson. Hermann has played a reoccurring role as defense attorney Trevor Langan, according to NBC. They later married in 2004. Hargitay embraced Hermann telling him, 'Thank you, thank you, thank you,' as their kids, August, Amaya and Andrew, joined in on the hug. 'I can't believe you did this,' she continues. Fans have since applauded Hermann for his kind gesture. 'I can genuinely say I have never cried at a documentary like I did at this one… and especially at this part. Peter SEES Mariska so deeply and that is a gift,' one fan wrote. 'May this kind of love find its way to me one day,' another fan wrote. 'Peter Hermann is such an incredible, supporting and loving husband!' added another. During a sit down with the 'Today' show, Hargitay was asked what her mom would say about the 'My Mom Jayne' documentary. 'I think she'd be really happy that we got to make a movie together,' Hargitay responded. Hargitay added that she think Mansfield would have also been happy about 'being seen for all her facets and not just one way.' Hargitay was just 3 years old when Mansfield died on June 29, 1967. Mansfield died as a result of a car accident alongside her then-boyfriend, Sam Brody, People reported. Hargitay and two of her siblings were also inside the car and survived the crash.
Time Magazine
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
In My Mom Jayne, Mariska Hargitay Seeks Answers About Her Mother
When Mariska Hargitay was 3, she and two of her brothers survived the car accident that killed their mother, bombshell movie star Jayne Mansfield. The kids were asleep in the back seat; the three adults in the front—Mansfield, her companion at the time, and the car's driver—were killed instantly. Mariska's two brothers, injured, were carried away from the scene. It wasn't until later that one of them, 6-year-old Zoltan, realized Mariska wasn't with them: she was pinned beneath the passenger seat, with a head injury. If Zoltan hadn't spoken up, Mariska might not have been found until it was too late. That's just one of the details revealed in Hargitay's touching documentary My Mom Jayne, in which the actor, now 61, summons scraps of facts and remembrances to piece together the truth about her own identity, and in the process make peace with the mother she never knew. Hargitay has known since her 20s that the man who raised her, and loved her deeply—actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay—was not her real father. Only now is she reckoning with the scope of that truth. My Mom Jayne hopscotches through Mansfield's early life and career: She became a mother at age 16, and lived in Texas with her young daughter and her first husband until she could stand it no longer—she wanted to be a movie star so badly that she was drawn to Hollywood, where she eked out a living with small film parts. Then, in 1955, she landed a starring role on Broadway, in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? That opened the door to bigger film roles, but like the star she obviously emulated, Marilyn Monroe, Mansfield wanted desperately to be considered a serious actor. With her moonbeam-colored hair and exaggerated, breathy speaking voice—which her children recall as seeming strange and upsetting, so different from the mom they knew at home—she settled, somewhat unhappily, for being a curvaceous sex symbol. Hargitay, who would build her own career as an actor on TV's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, never felt comfortable with either her mother's persona or her life choices. Mansfield was only 34 at the time of her death, in 1967. She and Mickey had divorced shortly after Mariska was born, though he and the woman he married after the divorce, Ellen Siano, would end up raising Hargitay and two of her brothers after Mansfield's death. (Hargitay's two other half-siblings also appear in the documentary, helping her cover some gaps that her research couldn't fill.) Though Hargitay makes it clear that the life her father and stepmother made for the family was a happy one, she also explains how unsettled she had felt for most of her life, unable to comprehend her mother's motivations and feeling resentment about truths that were hidden from her. Yet by the end of My Mom Jayne—by which time we've also met Hargitay's biological father, onetime Las Vegas entertainer Nelson Sardelli, in a sequence that's not likely to leave a dry eye in the house—Hargitay's catharsis is complete. When Hargitay finally, and tenderly, tells her mother, 'I see myself in you for the first time,' we, too, know more about this charming, ambitious performer whose star never burned as brightly as she'd hoped. She wasn't our mom. But her unruly secrets reflect the uncomfortable truths that are so often hidden in our own histories. Families are made of fallible humans. That's their tragedy, and their glory.
Los Angeles Times
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘My Mom Jayne' led Mariska Hargitay to see her mother ‘like a superhero'
'See the pink roses?' Mariska Hargitay says as she shuffles outside her home. We're on a video call, and when asked whether she feels the presence of her late mother Jayne Mansfield any more vividly since directing the documentary that explores her life and legacy, Hargitay swings her laptop around to give me a peek at the lush greenery of her New York home. Hargitay points to blooms a shade of pink that her mother — who famously lived in the Pink Palace, a Mediterranean-style L.A. mansion — would surely appreciate. 'I call it my Snow White balcony. I sit here and squirrels and butterflies and birds come up,' she says. 'I was talking to somebody this morning, my friend, who told me the most beautiful analogy for the movie. And as she said, 'Your mother would be so proud of you,' these roses, right at that moment — a whole bloom fell off. It can't be a coincidence. It's just not.' The 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit' actor also mentions visiting a spa recently and noticing the robes were by the Mansfield brand. 'Crazy stuff is happening all the time to me ... She's with me in a new way. I've never felt her presence more.' 'Oh, look at this! You want to cry?' Hargitay jolts up, this time lugging the laptop into an en suite bathroom. 'This was a whole scene. It's not in the movie — I wanted it to be. But there are my mother's sinks.' She pans down to show double sinks that feature a cherub motif. 'I just redid this bathroom because my brother, when they were tearing down the pink house, he got the sinks,' she says. 'He gave them to me. I just ripped out our whole bathroom and had them put in with that pink marble. I'm living with her now, with pink roses and her sinks and my pink quartz hearts. She's with me now.' It can all be felt in 'My Mom Jayne,' the emotional and revealing documentary about Mansfield, an actor who epitomized the blond bombshell archetype of the 1950s, that premieres at 8 p.m. Friday on HBO and Max. Hargitay was 3 years old and asleep in the back seat of a car with two of her siblings when their vehicle collided with a truck in 1967, killing Mansfield, who was born Vera Jayne Palmer. In Hargitay's debut as a documentary director — a role she sometimes juggled while portraying Capt. Olivia Benson on NBC's long-running crime procedural — she confronts and heals her complicated relationship with a mother she barely knew. As part of the journey, Hargitay reveals a family secret she's been keeping for more than 30 years: Her biological father is not Mickey Hargitay, the man who raised her, but rather Nelson Sardelli, a former Las Vegas entertainer. From her home, wearing a pastel blue hoodie that said 'New York or Nowhere,' Hargitay discussed what it was like unpacking her mother's story. Here are edited excerpts of the conversation. How did you come to the decision that you wanted to share this story and this journey as a documentary rather than as a book? And why now? I think I'm a better filmmaker than writer. I'm very passionate about documentaries. It's a very visceral way of grokking a story for me, and I've had such powerful experiences with them. One of the things that was so important to me in this was to have everyone's own words in the story because it's their story as much as it is mine. It just felt like the most authentic way to approach the storytelling. Why now? Because I was finally ready. Over the years, there've been so many times when various people asked me if I was going to do a doc about my mom, especially after my first one, 'I Am Evidence' [the 2017 documentary Hargitay produced about sexual assault survivors whose rape kits went untested for years]. I don't know if you know this, but I was obsessed with 'Hamilton'; I saw it probably 27 times. One night, somebody said, 'Oh, I'm friends with Ron Chernow [the author whose biography of Alexander Hamilton served as the inspiration for the musical] and I would love you to meet him.' We went to this dinner, and Ron and I ended up alone in a corner talking because he had seen 'I Am Evidence.' He said, 'Why haven't you done a documentary, Mariska, about your mother? I think you should do a documentary.' I said to him, 'Well, Ron, I don't think I could. Everyone's dead.' He said to me, without irony, 'I think I could help you with that.' In this moment, I realized who I was talking to — this historian, this titan of books. [He was] one of the people who just gently urged me, eased me off the the cliff. But I had so much internal work to do. I had to really shore myself up and and heal myself to make sure that I could come at it in an open, curious and objective way. It was during the pandemic that I was out in my house in Long Island, and I just had time to sit and think and go through things that I hadn't [before]. I'd found boxes of letters that I'd received from people over the years while I was on 'SVU' that I actually couldn't even take in. If it was a letter, and it started with, 'I knew your mother...,' 'I knew Jayne Mansfield...,' I'd sort of go, 'Ahhhh,' and put it in a box — literally, put it in a box. This is a story of opening boxes, physically and metaphorically. You were in the early years of your career when you found out this secret about your father. What do you remember about that period, trying to navigate this career while maybe feeling disconnected or untethered to an identity? It was so disorienting. If I think about it, I can feel it in my body. It felt like the melting of my identity. It felt like I didn't have footing anymore to stand on. The one thing that I did identify with — being my father's daughter — was erased. And on top of it, the layers of it being secret, I couldn't even process. I was so alone in it — because of shame, because of loyalty; I didn't want to betray him. I remember it being the moment that I became an adult. Obviously, your life is irrevocably changed when we lose that connection with mother, as mother is everything to a child. But also because so much of it was at a time of being pre-verbal, I had all these feelings in me that I couldn't process, couldn't metabolize, couldn't speak about. I was just this child of locked-in pain. One thing I didn't say in the movie that I wish I did, which is such a beautiful metaphor — when I left Sabin's [Sabin Gray operated the Jayne Mansfield Fan Club and alluded to the secret during a meeting with Hargitay] and I went up to see my dad, my father was literally building me a house. How about that for a metaphor? I walked in and I was hysterically crying. He's like, 'What's the matter?' I said, 'Why didn't you tell me? You lied to me! How could you lie to me?' To see this superhero, strong man, my mentor, my everything be undone and to see him go into such extraordinary denial that even me, as a 25-year-old, went, 'Oh, I can handle this. He's in too much pain. I don't want to hurt him' — that was the moment that I remember going, 'I'll shoulder this myself. I can handle it.' Something that fascinated me as I entered adulthood was how curious I became about my parents as I became the age they were when they had me. You talk about feeling motherly about your mom now and giving her grace. Tell me more about that. I think that as little girls, we all want our parents to be this certain way. For me, I wanted a normal mom that stayed home and baked cookies and didn't run around in heels, in a bikini. I was like, 'Why can't you be normal?' So not understanding and having that myopic view or wish now, being 61 — I have three children, I have a career, I have a foundation, I have a husband. There is so much to manage, and it is hard to do it all with grace and elegance and love. I don't know how I do it sometimes, other than I have a lot of help and an amazing husband. I got married at 40. I had my first child at 42. I was cooked; I was an adult. I had learned so much. I had so much life experience. As I say in the film, she [Mansfield] was a baby. She was 16 years old when she got pregnant, and I will never know the story of how she got pregnant. But what she had to navigate alone with a child — I'll tell you this, if I was pregnant and living in Dallas, Texas, I don't know that I would have gone to L.A. by myself. I wanted to go to New York for 10 years before I left, and the reason I left is because I had a job. And this girl got in the car with her 3-year-old [Hargitay's sister, Jayne Marie Mansfield] and said, 'We're going to California.' And the husband said, 'I'm out.' But she said, 'I'm doing this.' I look at her a little bit like a superhero and go, 'I don't think I could have done that.' The process of making this film has been so extraordinary to me and totally reframed the narrative for me. I was wrong to go into this film feeling one way about Nelson and thinking he abandoned me, he left my mother, he knew she was pregnant. And after all of that, to be left with: He did the right thing. He made the ultimate sacrifice for me. How did you talk about this experience and this journey with your own kids? First of all, they watched the whole journey. They also watched me go from being hazy — like, they'd say, 'Who's Nelson?' I'd be like, 'Well, he's like family. He's like a second father.' And they're like, 'What do you mean?' But it was quite extraordinary for them, I think, to see this journey and to see their mother go, 'Hey, guys, there are a lot of secrets in my life. I don't want you to have secrets.' I felt like I deserved to know the truth, and I felt very betrayed finding out at 25 that my life, this person I wanted to emulate, was not my biological father. Now that also has changed because now I go, 'It doesn't matter, and nothing can change the fact that Mickey Hargitay is my father.' But I wanted my children to know that I don't want secrets to hold them back. There's the moment where you speak with your mother's press secretary, Raymond 'Rusty' Strait. He had written a book that revealed the truth about your father. You ask him whether he thought it was his story to tell, and he said yes. What was that experience like for you? It was a very difficult interview compared to the rest of the film. I felt a lot of feelings, a lot of anger. I wanted to protect her [Mansfield] from him because he did not protect her. He said that he loved her, then right after she died, he wrote this book ['The Tragic Secret Life of Jayne Mansfield']. Those were two very difficult things for me to reconcile still. What's hard for me is that there are many things in the book that are not true that I know for a fact. I think if you're going to write a biography about somebody, do your work. That [interview] was very painful to me because I never really got the response I was hoping for. It's my job to give people the benefit of the doubt and to try to understand, and that's what I did. But he betrayed my mother and he betrayed my family. Yet the beauty of this is that even though it was in the world, somehow the story was protected and I got to tell it. That is extraordinary. I can't believe that this was written in a book and that I found out when I was 25; I met him [Nelson] when I was 30. All the people — his family that knew, my sisters that knew, my friends that knew, Jayne Marie and Tony — my older sister and my younger brother — and it still never got out. And to me, that is divine intervention. I was very concerned when I saw the crane hauling your mother's piano into your Manhattan home. What's it been like to have that piano in your possession? It was the happiest day of of my life. It felt like I was reclaiming something. I was actually getting a piece of my mother back. Then there was another part of me that was like, 'Who did I marry? What kind of awesome human being did I sign up for? I can't even comprehend that I was first in line when God was handing out the husbands.' Then I'm like, 'You guys, this cannot be good, just on a physics level.' I kept saying, 'Marish. Marish. People do this all the time. This is not their first barbecue.' I've never been on edge that much, but it was absolutely glorious. Do you think you'll see your mother again? When I go to heaven? Assuming I get in? Wherever. Yes. I didn't put this in the movie, and my editor wanted to kill me because I told him too late — you never know when memories come. I had this beautiful dream. I never dreamt about her, except one time. I was still living in my house that my dad built for me on Warbler Way. I dreamt that she came to my house, and I was like, 'What? Hi!' I said, 'I'm so happy you're here. I can't believe I get to meet you.' Then I said, 'Listen, I need you to come downstairs so you can see [the photos],' because I had a whole wall of photos of her in my house. But she never came downstairs. And I just remember going, 'Please, I really want to show you.' She's like, 'I can't, I have to go.' I just remember how happy I was that she came over and then I got to meet her. But it's also very telling that she didn't come downstairs. Maybe I'll start to dream about her again. I hope. I'm curious what all this means, if anything, for Olivia Benson. Do you feel like you're bringing a renewed Mariska to that role? Yes. I do. I've been saying that. Kelli Giddish is one of my closest friends, and she was so moved. The 'SVU' people lived it with me because I was shooting while I was [working on the documentary]. The last two years, I've been flying back and forth and editing at night and on the weekends. Kelli said, 'I can't wait to act with this Mariska.' What I feel is that I have more internal space because I've been carrying [this] — I can't express to you how heavy the load was to carry everyone's story and my own. There's a huge sense of deep and profound peace and renewal. Your closing remarks in the film feel like a letter to your mother. What do you remember about writing those words? Did they come easily? They did because it was the truth. It was about giving myself space and permission to have those feelings. I just went in the [recording] room by myself, started talking. I didn't know what I was going to say. It wasn't something that I wrote. The movie is very much like that. One of my favorite documentarians is Davis Guggenheim. I was feeling different people out, like, would they want to direct it? I was so taken with 'Still' [which chronicled the life of actor Michael J. Fox]. He had shared with me that he had Michael J. Fox's book and that he thought I should write the book first. I was like, 'Thanks so much. It's not happening.' I said, 'Mariska, you're on your own on this one. You're doing it your way.' It wasn't a book to be written, which is interesting because I think I am going to write a book. In telling this story, so much has begun to bubble up about other stories where I'm starting to ... connect thoughts of, like, 'Oh, that's what that is. Oh, this is why that happened.' There's so much stuff that didn't make it. I could make five more movies. I might make some shorts.
Los Angeles Times
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘My Mom Jayne,' Mariska Hargitay grapples with a secret and her mother's choices
That Mariska Hargitay is the daughter of Jayne Mansfield is one of those things everyone who knows anything about either of them seems to know — in some cases maybe the only thing. Even Hargitay — who was only 3 years old when, in 1967, her mother died in a road accident, which she and two brothers survived — had much to learn about her, and she spent most of her life not learning it. Now, in her inquisitive 60s, she has put that belated search 'to know her not as the sex symbol Jayne Mansfield but just as Jayne, my mom, Jayne' into a sad, sweet, generous documentary film, appropriately titled 'My Mom Jayne,' which comes to HBO Friday. Other than a few photos and contextless clips, Hargitay does not turn a spotlight on her own career, perhaps assuming that 26 seasons of 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit' speak for themselves. (In 2024, she was the highest-paid actress in television.) A quarter of the way through the 21st century, Mansfield will be mostly known to connoisseurs of mid-century tabloid culture and fans of Frank Tashlin, who directed her in the relatively big-budget films 'Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?,' in which she had appeared on Broadway, and 'The Girl Can't Help It,' from which Paul McCartney learned Eddie Cochran's 'Twenty Flight Rock,' impressing John Lennon enough to let him into his group. Many will have seen a much-reproduced photograph of Sophia Loren giving side-eye to Mansfield pouring out of a dress at a Hollywood function without being able to identify either of them. Such are the sorrows of passing time. Documentaries in which the director uses film as a way to approach some unknown aspect of family history are not uncommon. There are, for example, Sarah Polley's 'Stories We Tell,' which, like 'My Mom Jayne' deals with late-discovered questions of parentage; Carl Colby's 'The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby'; 'Bright Leaves,' Ross McElwee's film about his family's involvement in the tobacco business; and '2 or 3 Things I Know About Him,' in which German director Malte Ludin unpacks the story of a high-ranking Nazi father. There's nothing that dark in Hargitay's family history, but there is trauma and tragedy: for the actor, who wanted to be taken seriously, and did try, finally, to course-correct her image; for the person, who suffered from what was probably depression, turned to alcohol and pills, made some bad choices in men and died young, at 34; and for the children she left behind, trying to make real a person they barely knew, or don't remember at all — to fill 'this little hole in my heart,' says Hargitay. Mansfield, who moved from Texas to Hollywood in hopes of becoming a dramatic actor was instead remade in the image of Marilyn Monroe, the age's signature big-breasted blond bombshell. Auditioning for Paramount casting head Milton Lewis, she said, 'He just seemed to think that I was wasting, as he said, my obvious talents. And he lightened my hair and tightened my dresses, and this is the result.' A willingness to pose for cheesecake pictures, at a time when movie magazines proliferated and men's magazines were coming on, sealed that deal: 'I used my pinup-type publicity to get my foot in the door. … I use it as a means to an end.' That she was more than a pinup was not even then a secret — a Life magazine cover story at the time of 'Rock Hunter' called her 'Broadway's smartest dumb blonde.' Appearing on Groucho Marx's TV show 'Tell It to Groucho,' the host — who had appeared in the film of 'Rock Hunter,' says, 'You're not the dumb blond that you pretend to be. I think that people ought to know that you're really a bright, sentimental and understanding person. This is a whole facade of yours that isn't based on what you actually are. This is a kind of act that you do, isn't it?' And yet it didn't matter whether she was smarter than the characters she played, or the character she played in public, or that she spoke multiple languages and could play the piano and the violin. ('Who cares? Kiss me!' said Jack Paar, interrupting her as she played the latter.) It made her seem like a contradiction in terms, a performing seal, rather than a complex human being. As to her daughter: 'At a certain point I began to carry a lot of shame about her image as a sex symbol and all the choices that came with that. So I pushed the idea of my mom further and further away from my life.' She decided that her own career would look very different. Mariska was born near the end of Mansfield's marriage to Mickey Hargitay, a Hungarian athlete and adagio dancer, who became Mr. Universe after moving to America; it seems to have been a loving relationship, even after their divorce. But in her 20s, Mariska became aware, independently, that her biological father was an Italian nightclub entertainer named Nelson Sardelli. She was angry, she says, at her dead mother 'for leaving me in this mess. And for hurting my father. And for leaving me feeling so alone and untethered.' At the same time, she wondered whether her biological father knew about her, and if he did, 'Why didn't he claim me?' At 30, she went to Atlantic City where he was performing, and said, 'I understand you knew my mother.' She told Mickey about the meeting — he was aware of the facts, which he had kept secret — and he was so upset that she never brought it up again. ('Don't read the books about your mother,' he had told her earlier. They're 'full of lies.') Ironically, her mother's wayward romantic life left Hargitay with a passel of siblings, all of whom are present here, and with whom she seems fairly to very close: older sister Jayne Marie Mansfield, from Mansfield's first marriage; brothers Zoltan Hargitay and Mickey Hargitay Jr., with whom she grew up; Tony Cimber, Jayne's son from her brief third marriage, to director Matt Cimber, when the family temporarily became 'Italian' and Mariska became Maria; and sisters Giovanna and Pietra Sardelli, from her biological father's marriage. ('I don't know how the hell you got me to do this,' says Mickey Jr., sitting for his interview.) Stepmother Ellen Hargitay fills in a lot of holes, without claiming to know everything about everything. (Mickey Hargitay — 'my rock' — died in 2006.) Although the substance of the film is not manufactured, there is art in the presentation. Clips representing Mansfield's rise to fame are scored darkly, as if to say, this was not the way to go. Because the director is an actor, she knows how to be on camera; her siblings are less … professional, but make strong individual impressions. Hargitay is careful to let everyone have their own say, or keep silent, but these discussions, seemingly had for the first time, are inevitably dramatic and often very moving. There are a few visual effects, to indicate hazy memories, and a through line built around a white piano decorated with cherubim, which ends the film on a happy note. One of Hargitay's themes is the toxicity of fame, especially when it's awarded not for your accomplishments but your attributes. (Edward R. Murrow describes Mansfield as 'the most photographed woman in show business,' a superlative she certainly encouraged.) But we get glimpses of a woman who, like her daughter, we'd like to know more of. Jayne Marie remembers accompanying her to visit wounded soldiers at Walter Reed hospital. She's great in the Tashlin comedies, playing off her public image, but also providing glimpses of the person inside it, while a scene from 'The Wayward Bus,' based on a John Steinbeck novel, demonstrates that given the chance, she could handle straight drama. With better management, or being born into a different time — actors nowadays indulge in cheesecake without being defined by it, as the talk shows and red carpets repeatedly demonstrate — she might have been taken as seriously as she had hoped to be. But that's a story for a different universe.
