Margaux Hemingway

[Jeanne]

In the picture right above the bottom one, I suddenly had the feeling it was Michelle Phillips I was looking at, so I went to her thread. There are some pictures where they look alike, others where they are entirely different. Michelle had a much softer look, although that Vanity Fair article described a life of turmoil. Margaux generally looks tougher and their build is obviously different. Margaux has this great capacity to convey pain, distress, anguish, with her eyes. I don't know whether Michelle ever had highly dramatic roles, but she generally looks so sweet. Her looks belie her toughness. Anyway, with the same hairdo, they can look remarkably similar. Boomer, I didn't know Michelle Phillips was your big adolescent crush. She did look fantastic, almost unreal. But Margaux moves me more, once you get past the looks. Alicia, thanks for the pictures, as always.

 

[Boomer]

I don't know whether Michelle ever had highly dramatic roles, but she generally looks so sweet. Her looks belie her toughness. Anyway, with the same hairdo, they can look remarkably similar. Boomer, I didn't know Michelle Phillips was your big adolescent crush. She did look fantastic, almost unreal. But Margaux moves me more, once you get past the looks. Alicia, thanks for the pictures, as always.

^Thanks for all of the pictures! Yes, Michelle had a hypnotic effect on me as well as half of the people who met her and many of the biggest stars in Hollywood! I doubt if anyone has every figured out what it was that led a rather short, slight, little hippie girl to raise havoc in the lives and marriages of so many rich and famous men!

As you say, Margaux always seemed to have that vulnerability to her, always looking like she was one minute away from breaking down in tears…No doubt a lovely young woman, but carrying some very serious personal problems… ​

 

[Boomer]

^ Ugh- Studio 54...The very last place she ever should have been going...

 

[Jeanne]

I hope I am not being tiresome, but in the last picture you posted, alicia, Margaux now reminds me of Charlotte, especially with your avatar next to it. You are right, Margaux has the tragic etched into her face. Not hysterics, not melodrama, something very real and intense. It almost makes you believe in a sense of destiny, as if she were marked from birth with the knowledge she would follow in her grand-father's footsteps.
I try to see similarities and differences in powerful actresses and think of the roles they could have played. Even though Margaux also reminds me of Monica Vitti, who also has a tragic face, (or Liv Ullman, for that matter), hers is very different. Not lean and aristocratic like Monica in La Notte or L'Aventura, not wholesome yet tortured like Liv according to Bergman, no, Margaux' face is quintessentially American and the epitome of the eighties, the decade of living dangerously. As beautiful as Emmanuelle Beart in Chabrol's "L'Enfer", ("Hell"), but doomed, doomed, doomed. In "L'Enfer", Beart's face remains whole, as it is her husband who projects his own hell onto her, but Margaux's hell is her own creation and her face is, as you say, Boomer, "one minute away from breaking in tears", one minute away from betraying her dark side. She wears her secrets not on her sleeve but on her face, and looking at her is almost painful. Looking at Michelle, by contrast, is always soothing, always a pleasure, she really looks like an angel at times, although according to you, Boomer, it might be more of an angel of temptation.

 

[Boomer]

^ Yes! But she has really changed, so together and into helping others these days- in that classic Vanity Fair article it was so wonderful, to see how Michelle has moved on from her crazy days...Poor Margaux never really got past her demons...

 

[Jeanne]

I agree. I guess what struck me in your sentence was the word "breaking". There is something fractured about Margaux's face, which comes across clearly in some pictures. As for Michelle, you are right again. I read Joan Collins's beauty book, "My friends' secrets" which has an excellent chapter on Michelle. She has weathered all the storms, building a stronger and stronger sense of her own self. She could be one of the role models in the series "What would 'Michelle' do?", like Audrey and Jackie. As a human being she is very impressive. As a figure standing for something else, more primitive, more human in her frailty and capacity for fall, Margaux touches on something elemental, recessed about us and as the definition of tragedy states, she evokes both horror and pity. Michelle had the free spirit of the sixties and seventies, where the turmoil was everywhere in the culture, Margaux with her fame, beauty, money, pedigree, fell into the narrower fringe bent on self-destruction. I am simplifying, but that's broadly how I see things.

 

[Boomer]

^ Yes many good points! Unfortunately, this is the picture I think of when I hear Margaux's name...so sad, both she and Halston- how many wonderful people were lost through the disco world and Studio 54, which at the time we all thought was so wonderful and glamorous...

cocoandemma.blogspot.com

 

[Jeanne]

Indeed, what a pathetic picture, the pose, the posture, the limp wrist too weak to hold the glass steady. She could be a homeless drunk. It's a beautiful picture though, in the journalistic sense. You can sense the decadence all around her, the utter pointlessness of it all.

 

[Boomer]

I wonder if she was sorry she did "Lipstick"? It was sort of a disgrace after it came out- I can't imagine it did much for her career, unless you want to count the many soft core p*rn films she did afterwards...

 

[Jeanne]

I loved "Lipstick"! I thought both she and her sister were great in it. I could never understand why the critics hated it.
I understand Mariel never wants to talk about her sister, the memories are too painful.

 

[alicia753]

I loved "Lipstick"! I thought both she and her sister were great in it. I could never understand why the critics hated it.
I understand Mariel never wants to talk about her sister, the memories are too painful.

Me too! It was such a great and powerful movie in my opinion! And I don't think that Margaux looks haggard in it; her acting is kind of decentred, almost indifferent sometimes, but it emphasizes her character's traumas, and she's good to expresses them, the sadness, the suffering, the shame, and also a desperate need of 'saving' revenge and redemption...

 

[Jeanne]

I like her in the turban worn as a head band under "fashion that's good for beauty", the black and white. She looks feral. Underneath, she looks like a highly disturbed Grace Kelly.
I agree with you, alicia, about her acting being decentered yet intense. I remember all the buses and bus-stops in NY had the advertisement, just those beautiful lips gorgeously painted. You couldn't go through New York without lips passing you by. I went to see the movie and was blown away. That's how I discovered Miss Margaux. I read an interview where she said her name was given in honor of a bottle of Margaux her parents consumed before conceiving her. Well, maybe they should have tried another name...

 

[alicia753]

I agree with you, alicia, about her acting being decentered yet intense. I remember all the buses and bus-stops in NY had the advertisement, just those beautiful lips gorgeously painted. You couldn't go through New York without lips passing you by. I went to see the movie and was blown away. That's how I discovered Miss Margaux. I read an interview where she said her name was given in honor of a bottle of Margaux her parents consumed before conceiving her. Well, maybe they should have tried another name...

True... It's incredible, but, in her case, the initial choice of her name was already a sign of fate, a sign of her own future tragedy... I think that's why, in the late years of her tourmented life, she changed it into 'Margot'. But this change was inadequate for chasing all her demons... So sad... But I find her really so fascinating and captivating, she's got such a persistent aura of inner drama, and was always, in one sense, so true to herself and so full of soul, even if or because of she couldn't escape to her inner fate, as if she was a woman who could reach the stars, but was consumed by them,and who, finally wasn't able to dream more...
Hope it makes sense...
Posted via Mobile Device

 

[Jeanne]

It does. And it's fun to try to articulate our fascinations for stars, as if we could capture the scintillating sparkles as they slip through our fingers. It's also the least we can do, as fans, to try to pay homage to them, team work to create a visual and verbal memorial that endures.
Thanks again for the pictures, I never tire of looking at Margaux, as if each new picture will deliver a new piece of the puzzle.

 

[Boomer]

Thanks! Love the one with the hat, except for the wine... I think one of the saddest things is how sweet she evidently was and how she tried for so long to get it together...

 

[glitterpeacock]

^ What I would give for those eyebrows...

 

[tigerrouge]

As I have no scanner, I'm typing out a feature I found in the October 1996 issue of US Vogue... here's the first part, more to follow...

A Model Hemingway

Was Margaux Hemingway really destroyed by the limelight or only a little burned? Her sister Mariel and her friends search for the true story.

By Rebecca Johnson

“No Hemingway ever dies a natural death.”
Ernest Hemingway
​

You can almost discern the arc of her short, unhappy life in her name. Born Margot Byra Hemingway in 1955, grand-daughter of Ernest, she was named after the wife in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” his unsettling portrait of a withered marriage between a coward and his ruthless wife. Margot Macomber was an “extremely handsome and well-kept woman of the beauty and social position which had, five years before, commanded five thousand dollars as the price of endorsing, with photographs, a beauty product which she had never used.”

Twenty-one years after she was born, Margot Hemingway commanded $1 million for endorsing, with photographs, the perfume Babe, by Faberge. It was an unheard-of amount at a time when models were still more tabula rasa than full-blown characters whose personal lives would one day prove as compelling to the gossip machinery as any other celebrity's, but it was an infelicitous choice of namesake in other ways: Margot Macomber had a face “so perfect that you expected her to be stupid” (you can see why Hemingway got in trouble with the feminists), but she cuckolded her husband on safari and then shot him when she realised he was planning to leave her.

At sixteen, while drinking a bottle of champagne and packing for boarding school, Margot Hemingway changed her name to Margaux. In honour, she would say, of the wine her parents drank the night she was conceived. (Her father never adopted the new spelling.) Fifteen years and many bottles of wine later, after a stint in the Betty Ford Centre for alcoholism, and at a time when her once great beauty had begun to wane, Margaux changed her name back to Margot. “I think,” said her friend Milan, an interior designer who had known her since the late seventies when he planned parties for Studio 54, “the glamour she had created with the x became a burden.”

It was, however, the x (and that last name) that kept her in the public eye so long. So long, in fact, that she eventually became less known for her magazine covers than for her battles with alcohol, weight and depression. When she was found dead last July at 41, in a studio apartment in Santa Monica, her body so bloated it was unrecognisable, in a room where you could hear the ocean but could not see it, she was Margaux with an x once again.

The name, the meteoric career as a fashion model, and the suddenness of her death guaranteed lurid headlines, like the one in the National Enquirer – TRAGIC LAST DAYS OF MARGAUX HEMINGWAY: HOW THE GIRL WHO HAD EVERYTHING LOST IT ALL. Though there was no note, and though the autopsy results would not be released for seven weeks, the reports hinted of suicide, mentioning that she died the day before the thirty-first anniversary of her grandfather's death by his own hand.

But when I spoke with the people who knew her best, her sister Mariel and close friends like Ali MacGraw, Beverly Johnson, and Maryam D'Abo, they were certain her death was accidental. They remembered her not as a victim, but as a sweet, vulnerable and caring friend; a woman who may have been injured by a too early brush with the limelight but was not destroyed by it; someone who struggled, as all of us do, to overcome our disappointments and find meaning in the ordinary events of our lives.

“We, as a society, assign certain moments as the apex of your existence,” Ali MacGraw said about Margaux, “but it's not the truth of your life. Anybody who lives in the fast lane gets knocked hard, but she stayed unspoiled.”

“Margaux had depressed moments, as we all do,” Mariel said, “but she wanted to be well and happy. Nobody struggled harder than she did to make life better for herself.”

“I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.”
Ernest Hemingway
​

Margaux Hemingway did not plan in becoming a model or an actress or anything else, for that matter. She was an indifferent student who dropped out of high school to bum around the country and find herself. An old boyfriend from her hometown of Ketchum, Idaho, told a reporter about a trip they took around that time (and set an early precedent for men commenting on her weight “Margaux was probably 40 pounds heavier than she is now, so she was not too happy with herself – she didn't look too foxy... She would walk into a second-hand clothing store and say, 'Hi, I was wondering if you were hiring any salesladies today.' I would say, 'Margaux, what are you doing?' and she would say, 'I don't know what I'm doing. I know I want to do something, but I don't know what it is.'”

After doing some public-relations work for Evel Knievel, she and a friend went to New York, where they stayed at the Plaza hotel because her father had once told her, “To meet interesting people, you have to go to interesting places.” To a nineteen-year-old self-described “little **** in cowboy boots,” 34-year-old Errol Wetson, the founder of a chain of hamburger restaurants, who spied Margaux at the Palm Court restaurant, must have fit that bill. Maybe it was his experience judging beauty contests on Colombia, but Wetson had no trouble recognising the extraordinary beauty of Margaux's high, angular cheekbones (inherited from her half-Shoshone mother), her perfect little nose, and her wide, sensual mouth that had a funny way of turning down, even when she smiled.

Years later, Margaux would call Wetson a “jerk” in print, but even back then, nobody had much good to say about the man she married a year later. “[He] is aesthetically as wrong for Margaux Hemingway as that fellow in The Philadelphia Story, the one who preened himself over Katharine Hepburn when we knew all the time she was predestined to make it up with Cary Grant,” James Brady wrote in Esquire.

“She always preferred guys who weren't that attractive,” Milan explained, “because she thought they'd be more into her.”

 

[Boomer]

^ You're amazing!!
Does anyone know if Andy ever did a portrait of her?

 

[tigerrouge]

Some more of the story...

Wetson did, however, introduce Margaux to Zachary Selig, a socially well-connected Texan. He introduced her to Frances Stein, an editor at Vogue, and Marian McEvoy at Women's Wear Daily. “The whole thing snowballed in the course of a month,” Selig said of those days. “I gave a party for her, Marian wrote a story about her, and that was it. A lot of people did say, 'She's too big' or 'She doesn't shape her eyebrows' or 'She's a country bumpkin,' but the fashion industry at that time was in a very big transition. They were looking for a new, fresh image; She was very natural. She's the one who led to Brooke Shields.”

When Francesco Scavullo saw her at that party, he said, his first thought was My God, she's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. She's got to lose 100 pounds.

In retrospect, Mariel said: “She did have too much too fast: She was on the cover of Time; she was the highest-paid model for that time; she was the great Western American dream woman.” It happened so quickly, she didn't have time to call home. Mariel found out about her sister's new life by seeing her photo on a magazine cover.

“Everything came so easily in the beginning,” Milan remembered. “She never had to work for it, so she missed out on getting those inner resources. She never had the ambition to be a star.” Or, to be frank, the talent to be an actress, the next phase of her career.

It's hard to imagine what Dino De Laurentiis was thinking when he cast Margaux in the leading role of Lipstick, a film that bombed spectacularly. Or what he thought the first time he heard her speak in that husky, strangely babyish voice that has been compared to Carol Channing's, Jimmy Cagney's, and, most mysteriously, the sound of gravel being poured from a truck. “I heard that Mariel had the same lisp,” a friend said, “but she took lessons to get rid of it.”

“She was just hammered for Lipstick, and it was horrible,” said Mariel, who played Margaux's little sister in the movie. Mariel is still outraged that the movie became, for Margaux, a career-killer. “Big deal. One movie doesn't do well. But with a name like ours, people expect a lot. We're Hemingways, granddaughters of this great and wonderful person, and we're supposed to be flawless. If you're not, then you're a ****-up.

“After that, everyone decided there was a big thing between us,” Mariel continued. “There never was. One of us would say in an interview that we had the usual problems that sisters have. All of a sudden, the story was that we never got along, we never spoke.”

Margaux felt unable to return to modelling, partly because the world expected her to move on. “I think she knew that she wasn't a really good actress,” Mariel said. “Margaux couldn't find what was a right job for her.”

Maryam d'Abo, probably best known as the Bond girl who skied down a mountain on a cello case, became friends with Margaux when they worked together on a small movie in 1991, and said she might have been a good actress if she'd ever had any formal training. But when I asked d'Abo if she thought Margaux was cast for her name, she answered, “Of course; that's how the business works.”

“She didn't really see herself as an actress,” said Linda Livingston, an executive at Broadcast Music Incorporated in LA and the last of her friends to see her alive. What, then, did she see herself as? Livingston sighed. “I guess,” she said, finally, “she was still searching.”

 

[tigerrouge]

Final part...

Someone once asked Ernest Hemingway if he had a happy life. “I have never heard a happy life defined,” he answered, “Personally, I am happy when I work hard and love someone.” After the debacle of Lipstick, Margaux went for love, leaving Wetson for Bernard Foucher, a Venezuelan filmmaker and the man whom friends say she probably loved best.

“Bernard was a bohemian and an artist,” said Milan, “and I think she thought they were going to have a creative marriage, like Jean Paul Goude and Grace Jones, but after he got a taste of the high life, all that bohemian stuff went out the window.” By the time the bill came due, Margaux and Bernard had split and she was deeply in debt. When she filed for bankruptcy in 1991, she listed debts of $815,900 and assets of $6,765.

Her grandfather was famous for never seeking professional help for his demons. “My typewriter is my psychiatrist,” he once said. Even at the end of his life, when his suicidal impulses were obvious to everyone, his wife, Mary, refused to have him committed. She didn't want the bad publicity. Not Margaux. As the New Age dawned in the late eighties, she visited its gurus, healers, psychics, and spas, endlessly looking to heal whatever it was that was broken inside her. Afterward, she tried to turn those liabilities into assets by openly speaking of them in what was then the newly minted media of the confessional talk show. “She used the press as her therapist,” Zachary Selig recalled. “She wanted compassion from the world.”

“By the time Margaux died,” one news reporter wrote, “she had almost nothing at all. She lived alone in a studio apartment – no kids, no lover, only an agent/manager left to offer a lukewarm eulogy on CNN.” But these were the harsh pronouncements of a newspaper reporter on deadline. The people in her life were much more sympathetic.

“Modeling is a business where you really don't make friendships because everyone is in a different place all the time, but Margaux was different,” Beverly Johnson said. “She threw herself into you. When she'd ask, 'How are you?,' she meant it. We both knew it wasn't about us.”

“Los Angeles is not a nurturing place,” said Maryam d'Abo. “You have to be a survivor to be here, and it gets harder after 30. Margaux was warm and trusting; I don't think she was cut out for this town.”

Mariel had her own idea about how she might help revive her sister's career – by casting her in a TV sitcom. “She could be herself,” Mariel explained. “My sister was a big girl, bold and uninhibited. She had that presence. For drama, it was overwhelming. But in comedy, I think she could really have been amazing.”

One thing is certain – none of her friends believed she killed herself. Margaux, they reasoned, always liked to make a big statement. She would have left a note. “If she were going to commit suicide, everyone would have known,” said Mariel. “She would have made a big flipping deal out of it. I don't even mean that as a bad thing, but she let people know. She was not suicidal at all. She was never in a better place in her life. She was physically in great shape and getting herself together mentally. She was only going forward.”

Why, then, and how did she die? The Los Angeles County coroner's office ruled the death a suicide, saying the autopsy revealed levels of phenobarbitol “well above the therapeutic level.” Yet, somehow, those findings did not fully answer the questions. Margaux told friends she took phenobarbitol to control her epilepsy, but the vial found in her apartment contained no doctor's label, and it's hard to believe any doctor would prescribe a habit-forming barbiturate to someone with a well-known history of addictions.

What's more, the Santa Monica police investigator questioned the official death report. “Based on what I saw at the scene, I do not agree with the coroner's conclusion that this was a suicide,” said Detective Sargeant Ray Cooper. Hemingway seemed, he said, to have prepared for bed in the usual way, cleaning up after herself and propping her legs up on a pillow to ease pain from an old skiing injury, and had made doctors' appointments for the coming weeks.

“No matter what the coroner finds,” Stuart Sundlun, her last boyfriend and an investment advisor in New York, said, echoing all her friends, “it's a mystery. We'll never know what happened.” Then he, too, endorsed the “Margaux would have left a note” theory.

The last note she did write was to her friend Linda Livingston, in whose apartment she spent the night two days before she died. It read:

Linda,
Slept. Finally
slept.
Thank you!
I love you feel a bit
better.
Kisses
Margaux [smiley face] MM

The note seemed to sum up Margaux. She was a sweetly naïve optimist, albeit one trapped in a depressive's body. No matter how bad things got, she would always be the kind of woman who closed her letters with a smiley face. Maybe that's why she couldn't bring herself to leave a note explaining what happened last summer in that studio apartment where you could hear the ocean, but could not see it.