The actress Mariska Hargitay is beloved by discerning television watchers the world over. As the no-nonsense cop Olivia Benson on Law And Order: Special Victims Unit, she has stood up for the abused and the neglected for over two decades. She’s such a righteous badass that Taylor Swift named one of her cats after her.
And no one dares, or even thinks to, call her a “nepo baby” — even though her mother was one of the most famous screen stars in the world for much of the late 1950s and early ’60s. In part it’s a matter of style: Jayne Mansfield and Mariska H. have almost radically different styles of presentation, both on screen and off. Mariska seems to always be sporting a spiffed up-form of business casual, jeans or slacks accompanied by t-shirts or sweatshirts. On the other hand, image search Jayne Mansfield and you’re hit with a slew of shots of a busty platinum blonde with a cinched waist dressed in a variety of elaborate albeit very low-cut gowns. There’s that infamous shot of Sophia Loren, herself no slouch in the bustline department, giving a dirty look to Jayne’s décolletage while seated together at a table at some event or other. (The photo is so infamous that Vanity Fair published a whole feature about it in 2014, outlining the series of events in quite some detail.)
At the beginning of her engaging, fascinating and frequently genuinely moving (I teared up more than once) first-person documentary My Mom Jayne, Hargitay speaks of her mother as “a person whose career made me want to do it differently.”
Mariska, along with her brothers Zoltan Hargitay and Mickey Hargitay, Jr., survived the grisly automobile accident that claimed her mother, driver Ronald Harrison, and Mansfield’s attorney Sam Brody; the group was en route from a nightclub engagement in Biloxi to New Orleans, where Jayne was scheduled for a radio appearance. Mariska was only three years old at the time. One reason she wanted to make this picture, she says early on, was that she felt she had no real memory of her mom; she remembers Jayne stroking her hair but also admits that she’s not sure if that’s a real memory or an invented one.
That admission speaks to a really outstanding feature of this documentary: the rigorous honesty with which Hargitay approaches her subject, and the way she, interviewing various relatives and friends, coaxes genuine revelations out of them. She’s not an interrogator in the mode of her SVU character; rather, she approached everyone by leading with her core integrity, compelling them to respond likewise.
The publicity for the movie has given away one of the family secrets that she makes public; that is, that the bodybuilder and sometimes screen actor Mickey Hargitay, who was married to Jayne in the ‘50s and who appears as Mansfield’s boyfriend in the farce Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, was not her biological father. Hargitay speaks of how this revelation, which she did not speak of for 25 years, was heartbreaking for her because of her strong attachment to Hargitay, whose memory she continues to honor. Throughout the movie, though, she faces up to a lot of tough information: “Reclaiming my own story. That is what this is about for me.”
That being the case, one can’t blame Hargitay for giving Mansfield’s unusual career short shrift. But her work ought to be spoken up for. Hargitay goes to pains to show that the breathy, high-pitched voice that Mansfield used in her most famous pictures was a put on. She also included footage of her multi-talented mom playing both the piano and the violin.
The conventional wisdom holds that Mansfield’s most credible attempt to show “real” acting chops was in the 1957 drama The Wayward Bus, in which she and Joan Collins share their troubles while on the title vehicle. They’re interrupted by a male passenger, played by Dan Dailey, who tells Mansfield’s character, who’s headed to San Juan for a gig at a burlesque club, that she is “probably the most fabulously attractive girl I have ever spoken to” Her character is a portrait of a woman whose looks are a (in several respects self-perpetuated) trap, and she does well with it; too bad the movie itself isn’t better.
Her two best films are — unfairly to her, we have to admit — those in which she plays something of a cartoon. When she started at 20th Century Fox under the aegis of dirty-minded mogul Daryl F. Zanuck, his concept was a “King Size” version of Marilyn Monroe. Hargitay’s doc contains a still photo of Jayne sitting in a director’s chair whose back proclaims her improbable measurements: 40-21-35 ½. In two farces directed by Warner Brothers cartoon guy Frank Tashlin — who brought the antic humor of Looney Tunes into live action pictures to thrillingly surreal effect — Mansfield plays a figure who revels in the “trap” that he looks have gotten her into. In The Girl Can’t Help It, she plays the bombshell cohort of a blustery gangster who wants to make her a singing star — the movie is an ace comedy that’s also an incredible jukebox musical highlighting Little Richard (and was beloved by the Beatles). And in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, based on the Broadway comedy in which Mansfield also starred, she plays a kind of self-parody, parading around with a pink-dyed poodle and doing that squeal even more loudly than in her other pictures.
She’s a delight in both; one wishes she might have done more in the noir department. She’s superb in 1958’s The Burglar, as the half-sister of heist mastermind Dan Duryea. She reteamed with her Rock Hunter co-star Tony Randall in 1962 for a striking episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour called “Hangover.”
Mariska’s treatment of her mom’s final marriage, to Italian director Matt Cimber (born Matteo Ottaviano), is harrowing. Cimber was an abuser, and Mansfield’s child with him, Tony Cimber, bravely submits to an interview but tells Hargitay that he would prefer not to talk about…well, pretty much anything. About Mansfield’s movie with Cimber, Single Room Furnished, well, the less said the better. Mansfield puts her best dramatic foot forward but the utterly turgid material defeats her. (Speaking of turgid, Cimber went on to direct the notorious Pia Zadora vehicle Butterfly.)
At the end of the picture, Hargitay puts up a credit page reading “Deepest thanks to all those who wrote to me over the years to share your memories of my mother.” I’ve never done such a thing myself, but Mansfield figures in my family lore: as a teenager, I was told that my own parents, who’d just had their third child, Michael, were taking us kids (I would have been about four at the time) to the Central Park Zoo, and that Mansfield was there with her brood, and my mother and she compared infants in a friendly manner. I have zero recollection of this event; nevertheless, it’s a non-memory I continue to cherish.
My Mom Jayne premieres on HBO and HBO Max at 8 p.m. ET on Friday, June 27.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.
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