Mariska Hargitay’s New Jayne Mansfield Doc

It just so happens that June 29 is the anniversary of Jayne Mansfield’s fatal 1967 car crash. My 2013 article on Mansfield is one of my top posts, the fifth highest in popularity out of 9,000! It’s mostly because I used a naughty photo I fear, but still I admire the actress greatly, so I was excited to watch her daughter Mariska Hargitay’s new documentary My Mom Jayne on Max last night. It made a perfect double bill withEnigma(the subject of our previous post). I contemplated bundling them together into a single post, but since each is pegged to a different occasion (Pride and Mansfield’s death) it seemed best to give them each their own spotlight.

To my shock, I can’t say enough good things about Hargitay’s film. There was every reason for trepidation, given the avalanche of recent self-produced indulgences by the likes of Val Kilmer, Robert Wagner, and Andrew McCarthy. And when I’ve seen Mariska in interviews about Law and Order: SVU the pungent musk of self-regard can be maximally off-putting. But in this movie she did everything right.

Three years old at the time of the accident, Hargitay has a lifetime of questions about the mother she never knew, and she approaches the quest for answers in the spirit of a humble supplicant. She is a daughter here, and a detective, if you like, but in no sense does she come off as an “actress” or a “star”. She generously steps back and shares the spotlight with family members and friends who knew her famous mother in order to bring her portrait into better focus. Scrapbooks and archives, some of which hadn’t been seen in over 50 years, are dug up. Stories are told. It’s an amazingly intimate process, and Hargitay did an incredible job of keeping it real and non-performative. And though it doesn’t ignore Jayne’s professional career (how could it?) the doc is mostly about her personal life, which was fascinating from beginning to end.

There are numerous revelations in the film, the most important of which I won’t spoil for you today, although I will divulge that it will necessitate my altering my present posts on Mickey Hargitay and Matt Cimber, and will occasion the addition of a new post on an Italian-Brazilian crooner named Nelson Sardelli. (For much more detail on this, see Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It, by the estimable Eve Golden).

I was also intrigued by Mariska’s attitude toward her mother, which one always sensed but never heard articulated. It reminds me a lot of feminist Alan Alda’s attitude towards his father, the burlesque “tit singer” Robert Alda. With Mariska, you get a sense that her entire career was a repudiation of her sex symbol mother’s. She has played a cop who busts sex crimes on tv for 26 years! To date, she has spoken of her father many times, but her mother rarely. In the credits to this movie, she even thanks Gloria Steinem. But the movie is like a grand reconciliation of some kind, and she strikes every note of it just right. It’s really a wonderful experience.

Also– Groucho is in it!