Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay was only 3 years antique in 1967 when a horrendous car accident took the life of her mother, Jayne Mansfield
Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay was only 3 years antique in 1967 when a horrendous car accident took the life of her mother, Jayne Mansfield, as she and two of her siblings slept in the back seat. The chauffeur and Mansfield’s lawyer boyfriend also were killed that night, and Hargitay was found injured under the passenger seat. Now, nearly 60 years later, Hargitay, an Emmy-winning star in her right, is coming to terms with not only losing her mom at such a juvenile age but also getting to discover just who she was, a parent she says she has no memory of ever knowing.
To do this, she has directed and narrates a novel HBO Films documentary My Mom Jayne, which explores her very personal and highly emotional journey to meet the woman the public knew well as a blond bombshell movie star of the 1950s and ’60s but also a person very different behind the scenes, a mother of five over three marriages that the Mariska finally met during the process of making this film. It had its world premiere Saturday night in the Cannes Classics section of the Cannes Film Festival and will premiere on June 27 on HBO after a one-week theatrical release.
It opens with her walking the ruins and remains of the Beverly Hills home in which she lived with her mother and father, former Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay, and brothers Mickey Jr and Zoltan Hargitay and sister Jayne Marie Mansfield from her mom’s first marriage to Paul Mansfield. It had been torn down after the next occupant of the fabled pink mansion, singer Englebert Humperdinck, sold it for $10 million. For the film, Hargitay conducts interviews with all of her siblings separately, gets access to Jayne’s storage locker that had been untouched for decades and contains a treasure trove of memorabilia from her mother’s career as well as the lives of her kids, plenty of home movie and more. That includes a wonderful scene where Hargitay and her siblings find Mansfield’s long-buried 1956 Golden Globe, an award her daughter would eventually win decades later. They now sit side by side in her home.
Hargitay is more like a detective in piecing together the story of her mother and her own relationship to it, one that brings a startling and shocking revelation tardy in the film that Hargitay has carried secretly for the past three decades after learning casually at age 30 from one of Jayne’s superfans that Mickey Hargitay was not her birth father. Rather, it was Nelson Sardelli, an Italian singer with whom Jayne had a whirlwind affair in Europe while still married to Mickey.
But before that riveting blockbuster reveal, and interviews with Nelson and his two daughters (her up-to-then-unknown half-sisters), there is much to cover and tell including the details as tearfully remembered reluctantly and haltingly by Zoltan of that fatal car crash with their mother was on her way to performing a nightclub gig in Biloxi, Mississippi. Mansfield’s career is covered in biopic fashion for a bit, from her desire to leave Pennsylvania and head to Hollywood to Playboy playmate, performer, Broadway star in the hit comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? She also appeared later in the 1957 film version, when she was under contract to 20th Century Fox, which groomed her as their second-tier version of Marilyn Monroe in movies like The Girl Can’t Help It, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw and her uncommon dramatic role — she tried valiantly to be considered a sedate actress — with another Fox contract player, Joan Collins, in The Wayward Bus. Her short-lived major-studio stardom gave way to cheaper indies with nude scenes like Promises! Promises! and then a nightclub act to keep her working as the lights dimmed.
The Hargitay family, clockwise from top left: actor Mickey, Mariska, Jayne Mansfield, Jayne Marie (Mansfield’s daughter from previous marriage), Mikos and Zoltan
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She was not her dumb-blonde image, as she tried to point out in interviews with Jack Paar, Edward R. Murrow, Groucho Marx and others. In fact, she was fluent in several languages, played both violin and piano (the distinct piano she owned is the object of a wonderful surprise moment for Hargitay tardy in the film). There is great footage from appearances with Bob Hope and other interviews including one on Merv Griffin where Mariska (then called Maria) steals the show from her siblings and mom. There’s also a frank talk with her 100-year-old former publicity man, Rusty Strait, who later wrote a tell-all book about Jayne (Hargitay scolds him for sharing private stories), and a very poignant interview with Ellen Hargitay, her stepmother who married Mickey low after Jayne’s death.
But this film is less standard showbiz bio and more Mariska’s effort to apply the documentary format to uncover the past, to find her own place in her mother’s life and to move on in what is essentially a journey to healing — and that includes a very content ending that just might have you in tears. It is indeed quite a ride, quite a life and quite an extraordinary film.
Title: My Mom Jayne
Festival: Cannes (Cannes Classics)
Distributor: HBO Films
Release date: June 20 (theatres), June 27 (HBO)
Director: Mariska Hargitay
With: Mariska Hargitay, Zoltan Hargitay, Mickey Hargitay Jr. , Jayne Marie Mansfield, Nelson Sardelli, Rusty Strait
Running time: 1 hr 46 min
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