For a good portion of Mariska Hargitay’s life, strangers knew more about her mother than she did. So it’s fitting that when Hargitay first appears onscreen in My Mom Jayne, her exquisite and gripping documentary, she’s surrounded by demolition-site rubble, the remains of the Sunset Boulevard mansion that was her first childhood home. The film she’s made traces a years-long process of excavation, sifting through not just movie-star memorabilia but Hargitay’s conflicted feelings about Jayne Mansfield, the blond bombshell who was a mother of five when she died in a horrendous car crash at 34.
Fascinating every step of the way, My Mom Jayne builds toward the public revelation of a secret that Hargitay held close for 30 years, and which was already a 30-year secret when she became aware of it. As the actor turned director declares in the film’s final minutes, making the doc was an act of “reclaiming my own story,” an achievement that’s doubly poignant because this is precisely the kind of reclamation her mother yearned for.
A classical musician who spoke five languages, the Pennsylvania native made the trek to Hollywood with serious actorly ambitions, and was promptly corralled by a studio casting director into tight dresses and a peroxide-lightened do. She was only 22 when she starred on Broadway opposite Walter Matthau in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, essentially playing a sendup of Marilyn Monroe (a few years her elder, and at the apex of the showbiz fame factory). She reprised the part in the 1957 movie of the same name, the second of two Frank Tashlin comedies she toplined, the first being the 1956 musical The Girl Can’t Help It. Mansfield had key roles in the courtroom drama Illegal, starring Edward G. Robinson, and an adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus, but it was the far lighter fare, spoofy and concerned with showing off her famous measurements, that put her on the map.
She embodied a hyperfeminine ideal particular to the ’50s and ’60s, almost cartoonish in its soft and weightless voluptuousness — and a distinct contrast to the grounded levelheadedness of Hargitay’s signature role, the crisis-defusing police detective she’s played on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit for a quarter-century. It’s bracing to hear Hargitay, in the candid and compelling first-person voiceover that guides some sequences, admit to youthful feelings of shame about her mother’s professional profile as a sexpot. In conversation with one of her siblings, she’s endearingly direct about how Mansfield’s breathy public voice — a key element of the Monroe-esque arsenal — sounds gratingly fake to her.
Interview clips make painfully clear that Mansfield was aching to cast off the sex symbol stuff, that it had become a kind of prison, even as she was grateful for the career it afforded her. “I use it as a means to an end,” she tells one TV host, an amiable smile on her lips and a burning intelligence flashing in her eyes. “I’m ready to be myself,” she tells Jack Paar in another, later small-screen appearance. It turns out, though, that however eager she might have been to break out of the screen-siren routine, Hollywood was not so ready for that change in the game plan. And so she took the bombshell shtick out on the road as a nightclub performer, a sad concession to the industry on the one hand and, on the other, an exuberant new go at life from another angle.
At the helm of a film for the first time (she’s directed nine episodes of SVU), Hargitay deploys an exceptionally rich and incisive selection of vintage stills and footage. With sharp editing by J.D. Marlow, My Mom Jayne moves between past and present, public and private, pop-culture surfaces and family mysteries with clarity and a steadily building undercurrent of emotion.
A key figure in the archival mix, besides Mansfield herself, is her second husband, Mickey Hargitay, a Hungary-born athlete, dancer and actor, and onetime holder of the Mr. Universe title, who died in 2006. They were divorced at the time of her death, but it was with him that the thrice-married Mansfield apparently enjoyed her most stable and fulfilling relationship. As Mariska’s beloved father, he’s a strong presence in the doc, which includes publicity glimpses of family life at the villa on Sunset, complete with heart-shaped pool and exotic animals.
The new interviews are heart-to-heart sit-downs between the director and people who knew her mother, among them Mansfield’s longtime press secretary, Raymond Strait, and Mariska’s stepmother, Ellen Hargitay. A younger half-brother, Tony Cimber, who was raised by his father, appears briefly, and the topic they address is not an easy one. It’s with Mariska’s three older siblings — Jayne Marie Hargitay, Mickey Hargitay Jr. and Zoltan Hargitay — that the documentary hits its most affecting notes, faces crumbling with feelings long unspoken. These three also, crucially, fill in missing pieces for Mariska, who was only 3 when her mother died — and who, along with her two brothers, was in the back seat of the ill-fated car on that June night in 1967.
With impressive economy, My Mom Jayne lays forth a vivid picture of midcentury glamour and domesticity through the complex figure at its center, who was still a teenager when she first married and became a mother. Away from the nonstop publicity machinery, Mansfield is revealed to be a ferocious romantic who sometimes suffered the abuse of domineering and violent men. Her whimsy, attentiveness and devotion as a mother also come through, although by the time Mariska was born, she was distracted, too, by marital and career woes.
Hargitay approaches these intertwined stories — chiefly hers and her mother’s, but other people’s too — with compassion and insight, peeling back the interwoven layers of regret and grief, secrets and reckonings, longing and love that make this saga piercingly specific yet somehow, at its core, relatable. As with many families, there are keepsakes and tchotchkes for Hargitay and her siblings to tackle. It isn’t every storage unit, though, that yields a forgotten Golden Globe statuette. Jayne Mansfield was awarded the prize as the Most Promising Female Newcomer of 1957. Nearly 70 years later, her daughter pays tribute.