For anyone who merely knows Mariska Hargitay through the lens of the tough-as-nails and resilient detective Olivia Benson she has portrayed on LAW AND ORDER: SVU for more than a quarter-century, the self-reflective journey she takes us on in the documentary MY MOM JAYNE, released this weekend on(HBO!) MAX, can be a bit jarring. With only occasional exceptions, usually involving a serial rapist or her unrequited love for Elliot Stabler, we don’t see a vulnerable and needy version of the character, let alone the actress. And that was largely by both design and necessity.
While it was fairly common knowledge that she was the youngest child of the sadly brief celebrity marriage of the iconic Marilyn Monroe rival Jayne Mansfield and her Arnold Schwazenegger-esque bodybuilder husband Mickey Hargitay, it was not a topic Mariska embraced or encouraged discussion on. Being in the back seat of the car where your 34-year-old mother, her third husband and a chauffeur were killed in a car crash just outside New Orleans can leave permanent scars on any three-year-old child.
But as she explained to THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s Rick Porter in a piece he released yesterday, with the passage of time comes reevaluation–on a number of levels:
“It was really during COVID that I had all this time to process things that I had never processed before, and I started reading these letters from people who knew her…I was so moved by the generosity and thoughtfulness that people would send me what felt like these precious little pieces of her. This one woman said she used to drive to [Mansfield’s] house and sit in the driveway and listen to her play the violin, which piqued my interest but also made me think about, ‘Who was this person behind what we saw on this iconic level?’ I started really wanting to know who she was.”
Were this merely an examination of the complicated life of Mansfield, who bore the first of a total of five children as a 16-year-old growing up in Texas before she pursued a Hollywood career which she yearned to be broader and more varied than merely the sex symbol roles that her 40 1/2-21-35 figure the myopic and misogynistic moguls at studios insisted she fill, it would have been an intriguing enough exploration. But with the same sort of occasional curve ball that a sweeps episode of SVU might take, we learn that Hargitay herself has had a pretty complicated journey, not to mention a few secrets of her own. Continued Porter:
In the film, Hargitay reveals that Mickey Hargitay, Mansfield’s bodybuilder-and-actor second husband and who raised Mariska and her siblings after Mansfield’s death, was not her biological dad – and that she had kept that knowledge to herself for most of her adult life. Singer and entertainer Nelson Sardelli, who had a brief affair with Mansfield in the early 1960s and is also in the film, is Hargitay’s biological father. She also talks extensively with her siblings – brothers Mickey Hargitay Jr. and Zoltan Hargitay and sister Jayne Marie Mansfield – about memories of their mother, and uses plentiful archival footage to present the mother she never really knew.
And it is there that we see Mariska not a sixty-something mother figure to her extended SVU family but as a clearly wounded baby sister desperately looking for closure. With the help of her rarely-seen siblings–Marie Mansfield, technically a step-sister, bears a remarkable facial resemblance to both Jayne and Mariska–we see her find the courage to finally plow through and confront memories literally buried–in a storage unit–for more than a half-century. We meet yet another step-sibling that Mansfield had via the brief marriage she had to director Matt Cimber. And we get some insight as to why in one of the earliest credits to Mariska’s career–a 1966 cameo along with her other brothers on one of the first MERV GRIFFIN shows, both she and Mom use the name “Maria”, not the Hungarian one that her dad seemingly chose. Mansfield was choosing to identify more as Italian by this point, perhaps as a form of protest to her divorce from Mickey–or perhaps in slient acknowledgment to the biological father of her younger daughter.
Mariska invites us along on a journey that eventually takes her to the California desert, where Jayne’s nearly 100-year-old personal manager still resides and fills in some gaps, Las Vegas, where we meet the nearly 90-year-old Sardelli, and to Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where she uncovers in true Olivia Benson-like fashion via some microfilm studies that Jayne also lost a parent–her father–in a car crash when she was three years old. And it’s done with heart and inclusiveness, as SCREEN RANT’s Abigail Stevens opined:
My Mom Jayne isn’t anything groundbreaking in the way of filmmaking, but it demonstrates strong stylistic choices that pull everything together. Some beautiful filters and editing of old photos and footage render an ethereal ghost of Mansfield, which is how most of her children seem to remember her. Some moments are actually dazzling — when it’s revealed that Mansfield had become “the most photographed woman in show business,” it’s immediately followed by three camera flash sound effects, perfectly timed with the music and the three photos appearing.
To someone who only has known Mariska through her on-screen persona, a lot of this is surprising. To me, not so much.
You see, my first wife’s family lived a block away from where Mickey Hargitay and his third wife, Ellen Siano, settled deep in the Hollywood hills in what are locally known as “The Bird streets”, a series of winding, intertwined roads where mid-century modern estates lined the canyons that overlooked Sunset Boulevard. Mariska is the same age as my first wife, and they were among the few younger kids in an emerging neighborhood that provided a far less ostentatious but nevertheless extremely comfortable existence as compared to the garish mansion on Sunset itself which Mickey, Jayne and family–and later singer Engelbert Humperdinck–called home. While they were never close, Mariska was one of the few kids anywhere, including school, that were patient enough with my first wife to befriend her–something she dearly needed in a home where an abusive and arrogant father reigned supreme, incredibly frustrated that his wife let him down by not being able to produce a male heir he could be proud of. Ever a starf–ker, my one-time father-in-law frequently took Mickey and Ellen up on their barbecue invites and enviously eyed “Zolie” and Mickey, Junior as what could have–or, in his mind–should have been. My wife, fortunately, would be off in another room where Mariska showed off whatever new toy or record her truly adoring father and stepmother bestowed upon her. (Siano, still living, also appears in this film to shed still more light on the distant past).
So I already had a pretty good idea how much unlike Olivia Benson her portrayer really is. And if you’re smart enough to devote 1:45 of your holiday week to view MY MOM, JAYNE, now so will you.
Until next time…