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“If I’m in an auto accident . . . if any terrible mishap happens, my children will always be cared for”. So vowed the Hollywood actress/sex symbol Jayne Mansfield in a grimly prophetic interview conducted at her Sunset Boulevard home not long before a car crash would end her life at 34. Six decades later, her daughter Mariska Hargitay wanders around the rubble of the long-demolished house where she had spent the first, little remembered years of her childhood. What she inherited — besides the debts that forced her family to sell off Mansfield’s estate — she says, was “loss and secrets” and a “hole” in her heart.
Having spent much of her life ashamed of Mansfield’s public “dumb blonde” persona and reeling from the consequences of the troubled star’s turbulent private life, Hargitay has lately tried to become acquainted with her mother, as it were. The culmination of these efforts is My Mom Jayne, a poignant and deeply personal new HBO documentary directed by Hargitay (an actress in her own right) that tries to untangle the individual from the icon; the parent from the pin-up.
While the feature is decidedly a family affair — all three of Hargitay’s older siblings appear, providing loving memories of Mansfield at home that the filmmaker herself is too young to recall — it avoids letting intimacy get in the way of honesty. What emerges, through raw reflections, frank conversations and illustrative archive clips of Mansfield herself is a revealing portrait of a woman who was beautiful, sharp-witted and warm but also enigmatic and inaccessible; her true character buried beneath layers of performance and branding. If Hargitay didn’t really know her mother, then neither, she suggests, did anyone else.
Part of the tragedy of Mansfield’s truncated life is that few (in the entertainment industry at least) were interested in looking beyond her looks. While she knowingly played up to the bombshell image — posing for Playboy, greeting troops, opening stores — we see how she was chronically underestimated because of her sex, and sex appeal. Attempts to showcase her intellect, with virtuoso musical performances and wry interviews on late-night shows, were largely met with chauvinism and condescension from the male hosts.
Mansfield, her children recall, grew increasingly distant and depressed in the early 1960s and prone to drinking. A stable marriage to Hungarian bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay broke down due, in part, to Mansfield’s infidelities. One affair resulted in a child: Mariska.
Where the first two-thirds of the film asks “who was Jayne Mansfield?”, the final section sees Hargitay movingly grapple with the question of “who am I?” — which has consumed her ever since learning that Mickey wasn’t her father in her twenties. Sitting with her biological father, a rueful man named Nelson Sardelli, she not only tries to make sense of the “mess” Mansfield had left her with, but interrogates her own feelings towards her mother and both fathers.
The process is painful but ultimately cathartic. “I have such maternal feelings for you now,” she says towards the film’s end, addressing her mother — the hole in her heart filled with affection and empathy.
★★★★☆
On Sky Documentaries on July 12 at 9pm and streaming on NOW. Streaming on HBO Max in the US
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