My Mom Jayne begins in haunting and evocative fashion. Its director/narrator Mariska Hargitay is shown visiting the site of her mother Jayne Mansfield’s sprawling, Xanadu-like Sunset Boulevard mansion, the “pink house,” which was demolished over 20 years ago. This footage of the long-deserted family home is intercut with black and white archive material from an interview Mansfield gave on the Merv Griffin TV show in the mid 1960s with her children, including the dimple-chinned two-year-old Mariska, alongside her.
Mansfield, a huge pop culture celebrity, pin-up and star of films like The Girl Can’t Help it and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter, died in a car crash aged 34 in 1967, when her youngest daughter was only three years old.
Hargitay’s Oscar-contending HBO-backed documentary is a deeply personal and clearly cathartic venture in which the filmmaker tries to make sense of her relationship with someone about whom she has only the most fleeting recollections.
“My whole life, I didn’t watch her movies. I didn’t want to watch her movies. I just wanted to know her as a human,” the director reflects. “As you know, memory gets fragmented, what is real and what is not. One of the things I have struggled with my whole life is that I have only two memories of her, and I don’t know if they were from something I made up, or a photo I saw, or a real memory. That has been a bit of a ghost for me.”
Now 61, the director has her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame right next to that of her mother. Thanks to her performance as detective Liv Benson in NBC long-running series ‘Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,’ she is a household name with US TV audiences. She has also made some ground-breaking documentaries about women’s rights issues. For example, she initiated and produced I Am Evidence (2017), which explored the scandal of the rape kit backlog, and how that has meant that many victims of sexual assault have never received justice.
Over the years, people would often ask if she might consider making a film about her mother. “I immediately shut it down because I knew I wasn’t ready.”
That changed during the Covid period when she had time to herself, “to sit and think and feel” and “take inventory” of her life.
Hargitay’s career had been “go go go” for many years. She was working on new series after new series of Law & Order: SVU while immersing herself in her philanthropic activities, and somehow also finding time to make documentaries like I Am Evidence. Now, she had the chance to think deeply about her mother and also to go through the many letters that friends and fans of Jayne Mansfield had written to her over the years, telling her about everything from her mother’s random acts of kindness to her prowess as a violinist.
“There was this treasure trove of memories, of photographs, of moments that these incredibly generous people had taken the time to write a letter and share with me.”
Mansfield may have been a sex symbol but, as the documentary reveals, she was a cultured and sophisticated woman who could speak many languages and had a natural flair for music.
After Mansfield’s death, a huge hoard of her cuttings and family memorabilia laid untouched for many years.
“We were sitting on all this gold but when she died, because of the fracturing of the family, the emotion and the pain, everything stopped. Nobody wanted to deal with it,” the director says of the boxes that have been stored out of sight for half a century. “I believe it was 1969 when they were all packed up.” In the film, Hargitay is shown painstakingly going through the boxes.
The director’s siblings give interviews in the film. Several look apprehensive before the cameras begin to roll. “But ultimately they all said we trust you…not only did they trust me but, at the end, they all shared how healing and how cathartic it was for them. I told them I am making this movie for us,” Hargitay recalls.
This wasn’t an easy movie to structure. There were still so many mysteries both about Mansfield’s career and her relationships to unravel. “The one thing I knew is that I always wanted to open the film with the Merv Griffin footage because that is something that, I think, speaks volumes and sets the whole story up.”
Years ago Hargitay had “run into Merv Griffin” when she was on holiday and the legendary TV show host had told her he had something for her.
“I thought what can he possibly have for me – but he gave me this piece of footage which I had never seen. It was one of the great gifts of my life because it felt as if he was giving me a piece of myself, and also a piece of the narrative back. It tells the story of all my siblings in such an incredible way. It shows who we were and who she was…”
The ruined mansion, meanwhile, served as the perfect metaphor for “this family left in shambles, this family left in destruction.”
Hargitay and her producer Trish Adlesic first met on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Adlesic worked as a location manager on the show for 14 years. “We knew each other there for many years. It was just a straight-up friendship,” Hargitay remembers.
The friendship blossomed into a creative partnership. “When she approached me to tell her mother’s story through her own experiences, I was elated…I couldn’t get there fast enough,” Adlesic states.
My Mom Jayne proved very straightforward to finance. The moment she heard about it, Nancy Abraham, Executive Vice President, Documentary Programming for HBO, was immediately keen to back it.
The film premiered in Cannes in May to a standing ovation. Since then, it has screened at the Tribeca Festival and went out on HBO in the summer. The film is now a leading Oscar contender.
The director’s admiration for her mother has continued to grow. “I am so proud to talk about my mother. I am so proud of who she was, what she accomplished and what she navigated at that time…that has been a very beautiful process,” the director says of a film that has touched audiences wherever it has shown. “This is a family story. Although it’s packaged up in a story about a 50s iconic sex symbol, it is really about mother and daughters, memory, identity and forgiveness…People leave thinking about their own family and family secrets. That has been the connective tissue at every screening.”
Hargitay’s sister called her a few days ago and said: “I feel like I have my mom back.” That, the director confides, is the best compliment she could ever have hoped to receive.
