Margaux Hemingway

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"IT HURTS SO MUCH"

Monday, Jul. 15, 1996 By KIM MASTERS/LOS ANGELES

In a 1992 therapy session, model and actress Margaux Hemingway had a conversation with herself. "Why don't you let your guard down and let somebody help you?" she asked. And then gave the answer: "Because I don't know how to do it, and it hurts so much. Because there's so much inside, and...sometimes I'm afraid that it's so full that it might kill me

It is sad but not entirely surprising that Hemingway, constantly seeking to revive her career, allowed this anguished session to be taped for a BBC triumph-over-adversity program called Fighting Back. Hemingway had been invited to talk about her successful battle with bulimia. But the eating disorder was only one of many afflictions that she suffered--and it was far too soon to declare victory over her demons.
Last week Hemingway's decomposed body was found in her one-room Santa Monica, California, apartment. There were no signs of foul play. Many wondered whether she had taken her own life, since her famous family has been plagued with suicides. Indeed, she died just before the 35th anniversary of the day that her grandfather Ernest put a shotgun to his head. The author's brother, sister and father also died by their own hand.
The Los Angeles County coroner's office said it would take two weeks to determine the cause of Hemingway's death at 41. But whatever killed her, she has already become another entry on the roster of celebrities whose lives began in a swirl of glamour and ended in relative obscurity and pain. Defined by her beauty and her family's celebrity, Hemingway struggled to establish an independent identity as her looks and fame faded. In her final days, says a friend, Gigi Gaston, "she was back on her feet, and she looked beautiful. But I felt she was incredibly lonely."
Hemingway burst onto the modeling scene in the mid-'70s as a fresh-faced, 6-ft. 19-year-old from Ketchum, Idaho. In 1975 she appeared on the cover of TIME to illustrate a story on new beauties. Fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo says she was such a natural beauty that he would have made her a star even without her famous surname. "You could put her out in the sunlight in the middle of the day and she looked like an angel," he recalls. But others credited her rapid ascent to the Hemingway mystique. "As celebrity became aristocracy, it became inheritable," says former Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello, who knew Hemingway as part of the crowd at the now legendary Studio 54. "She inherited this fame and this position." Hemingway later said she felt like an imposter in that world and started drinking "to loosen up."
Her descent came quickly. Scavullo suggested her for a starring role in Lipstick, a movie about a r*pe victim that co-starred her younger sister Mariel. The film bombed, and when Mariel went on to star in Woody Allen's Manhattan and Bob Fosse's Star 80, a lasting strain developed between the siblings. Mariel declined to comment on her sister's death.
 
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Stuart Sundlun, a former lover and friend who went to the Bahamas with Hemingway in June, says she grappled with a raft of difficulties: "fundamental middle-child syndrome...dyslexia, bulimia, epilepsy." And there was alcoholism. In 1987, following a severe seizure during which she nearly bit her tongue off, Hemingway admitted herself to the Betty Ford Clinic. "I decided that had been a message to get well or I would die," she told an interviewer. But she did not confide to her therapists that she also was bulimic. Hemingway always struggled with her weight. In 1990 she slimmed down and posed for Playboy in one of many efforts to jump-start her career. But the following year she filed for bankruptcy, citing more than $815,000 in debt.
She sought spiritual guidance in a visit to the Dalai Lama in 1994. After returning, she spent several weeks at a state mental hospital in Blackfoot, Idaho. Sundlun says she suffered "a psychotic event" brought on by her epilepsy. She had difficulty separating fantasy from reality and was hearing voices.
Recently Hemingway was reduced to taking parts in low-budget pictures, making guest appearances at European conventions and even endorsing the Psychic Friends Network. But she also acted as host of a nature series to be aired on the Discovery Channel this fall. Friends hoped she was rallying. "She didn't get a fair deck of cards," Sundlun says sadly. "But she handled it with incredible grace and dignity. She was a light touch in a dark world."
 
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mooninthegutter.blogspot.com

Lipstick (1976)



Here is the last of those exculsive articles that I wrote for Moseby Confidential.

Released in the spring of 1976 to near universal disdain and almost killing off the film career of Margaux Hemingway before it even had a chance to truly begin, Lamont Johnson’s LIPSTICK remains one of the best, if most under-appreciated, revenge flicks of the seventies. An exhilaratingly seedy film propelled by Johnson’s stylish direction, Hemingway’s electric screen presence and an incredibly off kilter score by legendary French musician Michel Polnareff.
Lamont Johnson is probably best known as a television director for such series as The Twilight Zone but a quick glance over his filmography will show some real surprises, like the bone-chilling Patti Duke thriller YOU’LL LIKE MY MOTHER (1972) and the winning Robby Benson-Annette O’Toole romance ONE ON ONE (1977). Johnson lent a sure hand to all of his projects (his television film MY SWEET CHARLIE (1970), also starring Patti Duke, is one of the real lost treasures of the period) and his work on LIPSTICK is no different as it is an exceedingly well-directed and confident film.

LIPSTICK was the brainchild of mega big time producers Dino De Laurentiis and Freddie Fields. It began to take shape in the mid seventies and it was first offered to award winning British director Michael Winner in 1974. Winner, no stranger to revenge thrillers, as he had just come off the smash hit DEATH WISH with Charles Bronson, turned down the project and it ended up with Johnson and screenwriter David Rayfiel. Rayfiel had spent much of his career touching up quality screenplays like JEREMIAH JOHNSON (1972), THE WAY WE WERE WERE (1973) and THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1974) and it is a pity that he didn’t have some back up on LIPSTICK as his formulaic script is easily the weakest thing about it. The much-maligned Margaux Hemingway is actually very good in the film when she is asked to react and express emotion, but Rayfiel’s wooden dialogue consistently lets the inexperienced actress down.

LIPSTICK marks the first feature film by Fields where he is granted sole production credited. De Laurentiis is listed as executive producer and LIPSTICK does indeed feel more like a Freddie Fields production than one of Dino’s works as it shares much in common stylistically with Fields later monster hit, Paul Schrader’s AMERICAN GIGOLO (1980). It can be argued that the look and feel of LIPSTICK had more of an effect on American cinema in the early eighties than the several uber-hits of the period that get most of the credit.
Fields got the idea to fill the role of the lead in the film, a super-model named Chris McCormick, with an actual big time model of the period early on in the film’s planning stages. After juggling around a few possibilities with De Laurentiis the named that kept popping up was a young model who was quickly becoming one of the most in demand and influential of the period.

Margaux Hemingway was born in Portland, Oregon in the winter of 1954. She grew up on her father Jack’s farm in Ketchum, Idaho and was scarred at the age of seven with the news that her legendary Grandfather, literary giant Ernest Hemingway, had killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. Her Grandfather’s legend and tragic death would haunt the young Hemingway for the rest of her life as she consistently battled her own personal demons until her untimely demise in 1996.



In the mid seventies though, tragedy seemed very far away from Margaux as she made huge headlines by being the first model to ever get a million dollar contract, for the Faberge fragrance 'Babe'. The just past twenty year old Hemingway’s face was every where and she can lay legitimate claim to being one of the first genuine ‘super-models’ in history and she would influence everyone who followed from Gia Carangi to Adriana Lima.
Movies seemed a logical step for Margaux and she accepted Fields offer to star in the very difficult role of a McCormick, a model very much like herself who is brutally raped by an assailant and then the judicial system before brandishing her own form of justice on them both. In hindsight it is easy to see that the part was too much for a first time actress with zero experience, but everyone at the time thought LIPSTICK would be a major hit and Margaux would become one of the key stars of the late seventies.
Joining Margaux in the cast were Chris Sarandon as the twisted music teacher who rapes McCormick and Anne Bancroft as the prosecutor who signs on to her case. Both Sarandon and Bancroft were coming off recent Oscar nominations and the two were really in peak form when they filmed LIPSTICK, with Sarandon’s performance proving to be one of the most chilling of the period. Other cast members included future television star Perry King, and famed top fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo playing, appropriately enough, a photographer named Francesco. His rather astounding work as a photographer can be seen throughout the film in the form of some of the most unforgettable images of Margaux ever shot.
The key role in the film though is undoubtedly that of Chris’ younger sister Kathy, which would turn out to be the debut role for Margaux’s younger sister Mariel. Margaux herself suggested the fifteen-year Mariel to Fields and it would begin one of the most notable film careers of the late seventies and early eighties. Whereas Margaux seemed to having trouble shifting into her new role as an actress, the younger Mariel took to it immediately and she would end up getting the films one Golden Globe nomination as best supporting actress.

The paint by numbers storyline of r*pe and revenge in LIPSTICK is radically simple. What makes the film special is how it teeters between being a stylish and serious attempt to look at the legal consequences of r*pe in this country and a down and dirty exploitation thriller. Considering that the film does drag in the middle a bit during the legal proceedings, it does finally work better as a stylized big budget thriller as there are few things more exciting in a seventies film than seeing Margaux Hemingway decked out in an unbelievably cool red dress yielding a shotgun during the film’s electric and unforgettable climax.
The more campy and exploitative elements aside, LIPSTICK does in fact make some good points along the way about the legal system and the way r*pe was perceived in this country in 1976 and to a certain extent today. One of the film's most telling moments is indeed that only 1 out of every 5 rapes is reported and only two out of every 100 prosecuted r*pists serve time. Now I am sure those numbers, at least I hope, have changed in today's society but the film does a good job in alering viewers to some disturbing facts.
The film received a lot of criticism at the time for the prolonged r*pe sequence between Sarandon and the older Hemingway. It is curious to me that Gaspar Noe’s IRREVERSABLE was attacked for the same reason several years back as the two films present r*pe as a very violent and ugly act. There isn’t anything erotic about the sequence in LIPSTICK; it is an extremely ugly scene about the ugliest of crimes. I have a lot more trouble with films that don’t show how horrifying the act is and LIPSTICK has always been unfairly abused over what is actually an extremely effective and well-handled sequence. Hemingway is particularly good here with the trauma and fear she is experiencing seeming totally real.
The film’s not perfect by a long shot. Several scenes just don’t play at all, especially a couple involving the usually reliable Bancroft, who comes off too over the top throughout the film. When it does work though, it does so splendidly and LIPSTICK is finally a hard film to shake.
Two things that help the film immensely are the photography and music. Oscar nominated director of photographer Bill Butler should be a household name with works ranging from Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (1974) to Stallone’s ROCKY 2 (1978) on his resume and he gives LIPSTICK a sexy dripping exotic sheen that is hard to look away from. It’s an ultra slick and masterfully shot production that is among the best looking of the period.
Even better is the strange and powerful score by legendary French composer and musician Polnareff. Always under the radar in this country, Polnareff is one of the major figures in French music and his LIPSTICK soundtrack is one of his greatest creations, a weird mix of experimental electronica and dance that propels the film to greatness even when the script and certain scenes fall totally flat. The out of print album is one of the best soundtracks of the seventies.

Finally, one can't help but watch LIPSTICK without some sincere melancholy in knowing what happened to Margaux Hemingway. The critical community really took their time in burying someone who might have turned into a talented actress. Instead of labeling her as awful as many of them did, they should have passed it off to her obvious inexperience and let up a bit. It would take her three years to make another feature, Antonio Margheriti’s KILLER FISH (1979), and she would only sporadically work in mostly straight to video productions through the rest of her short life. There are some really chilling moments in LIPSTICK where one can recognize some real talent in the older and doomed Hemingway. It is tragic it was never allowed to be tapped into again.

Mariel would quickly become one of the major young actresses of the late seventies after LIPSTICK and would snag a well-deserved Oscar nomination just a few years later with Woody Allen’s MANHATTAN in 1979. She would call LIPSTICK a “fascinating experience” in her autobiography but noted that when it was released, “people said” she was “ the star, while Margaux’s acting was hurtfully panned” and that this “intensified her self destructive behavior and the distance” between them “began to take on adult dimensions.”



LIPSTICK collapsed at the box office almost immediately and was subjected to heavy cuts throughout Europe when it premiered a year or so later there. It appeared on Video in the eighties and then slipped out of print for more than a decade before Paramount surprisingly brought it back on a bare bones DVD a few years ago. Not even containing a trailer, this DVD at least features a sharp widescreen transfer and is still readily available for anyone interested.
 
Alicia753, thank you for taking the trouble to bring us up-to-date with the trajectory of Margaux Hemingway' career and the beautiful pictures you post. It is so strange how some actresses "have it", and yet are not given a chance, are passed over, and they cannot or are not allowed to recapture their magic. Yet, Margaux is a haunting figure. All you have to do is look at her eyes, and you see such an abyss of feeling there, it is almost too much to bear. I saw the movie Lipstick when it came out and although I don't remember the details, I remember Margaux's performance. So how could her performance have been panned as it was if it leaves such an indestructible impression ?

On one of the pictures in your post 153, where she is posing in the water, her breasts half-exposed, looking at the viewer, isn't that a kind of cliche photograph ? I think Grace Kelly's picture on the cover of one of her biographies is a similar (much more modest of course) one, and I think there is one of Nasstasja Kinski like that too, and I think Emmanuelle Beart, Romy Scneider and probably dozens of others. It would be kind of fun to put them all together and make comparisons. At any rate, Margaux looks positively dangerous in this particular one, like a creature of the sea about to bite you. I don't mean it in a negative way: I mean she had a lot of personality and was no ordinary sex kitten. That mixture of strength (which is also physical strength, she was no waif) and vulnerability is fascinating because it works. I think any element of tension such as this is what captivates an audience and because of her physique, she had it. So add that inner anguish to that strong physique, and it creates the fascination.

What a loss ! Everytime I come to this site, I mourn her loss. No one has taken her place. Even, say, an Angelina Jolie, who is (or was) strong looking, plus had that look of anguish, always looked too glamorous. Margaux was from the country and it showed. She could have played some of the best literary characters who are rooted in the country. Charleze Theron in Monster, almost looked like she was trying out a Margaux character, but it was overly crafted in my opinion. The only actress who reminds me of Margaux, just a little bit, is Sissy Spacek, except that Sissy Spacek is fairly frail-looking and there her intensity is in contrast with her frailty.

Anyway, I didn't mean to ramble on that way, just thank you for all your beautiful and interesting posts.
 
Jeanne said:
Alicia753, thank you for taking the trouble to bring us up-to-date with the trajectory of Margaux Hemingway' career and the beautiful pictures you post. It is so strange how some actresses "have it", and yet are not given a chance, are passed over, and they cannot or are not allowed to recapture their magic. Yet, Margaux is a haunting figure. All you have to do is look at her eyes, and you see such an abyss of feeling there, it is almost too much to bear. I saw the movie Lipstick when it came out and although I don't remember the details, I remember Margaux's performance. So how could her performance have been panned as it was if it leaves such an indestructible impression ?

On one of the pictures in your post 153, where she is posing in the water, her breasts half-exposed, looking at the viewer, isn't that a kind of cliche photograph ? I think Grace Kelly's picture on the cover of one of her biographies is a similar (much more modest of course) one, and I think there is one of Nasstasja Kinski like that too, and I think Emmanuelle Beart, Romy Scneider and probably dozens of others. It would be kind of fun to put them all together and make comparisons. At any rate, Margaux looks positively dangerous in this particular one, like a creature of the sea about to bite you. I don't mean it in a negative way: I mean she had a lot of personality and was no ordinary sex kitten. That mixture of strength (which is also physical strength, she was no waif) and vulnerability is fascinating because it works. I think any element of tension such as this is what captivates an audience and because of her physique, she had it. So add that inner anguish to that strong physique, and it creates the fascination.

What a loss ! Everytime I come to this site, I mourn her loss. No one has taken her place. Even, say, an Angelina Jolie, who is (or was) strong looking, plus had that look of anguish, always looked too glamorous. Margaux was from the country and it showed. She could have played some of the best literary characters who are rooted in the country. Charleze Theron in Monster, almost looked like she was trying out a Margaux character, but it was overly crafted in my opinion. The only actress who reminds me of Margaux, just a little bit, is Sissy Spacek, except that Sissy Spacek is fairly frail-looking and there her intensity is in contrast with her frailty.

Anyway, I didn't mean to ramble on that way, just thank you for all your beautiful and interesting posts.
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Thank you for your beautiful answer, Jeanne:flower:

Nice idea of pictures comparison I'll try to search photos.

Some finds from ebay:

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Alicia753, in your post 168, (your response to me), that picture you added, she reminds me of Jeanne Moreau. How can an actress who can remind you of the most established, revered stars have been so easily discounted as a lightweight ? I just don't get it. Maybe because she started out as a model ? (I think it is harder for them to be taken seriously. But Faye Dunaway, (whose early movies I love) for one, earned her credibitliy. Maybe Margaux just was not given enough time. It may be also be who the director is. I can just picture her in Bergman's Persona, playing the role Liv Ullman (who of course is wonderful) had. Any thoughts on the subject ?
 
Jeanne said:
Alicia753, in your post 168, (your response to me), that picture you added, she reminds me of Jeanne Moreau. How can an actress who can remind you of the most established, revered stars have been so easily discounted as a lightweight ? I just don't get it. Maybe because she started out as a model ? (I think it is harder for them to be taken seriously. But Faye Dunaway, (whose early movies I love) for one, earned her credibitliy. Maybe Margaux just was not given enough time. It may be also be who the director is. I can just picture her in Bergman's Persona, playing the role Liv Ullman (who of course is wonderful) had. Any thoughts on the subject ?
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I can easily understand your thoughts Jeanne.
I'm seriously persuaded that Margaux could have been a great actress, perhaps not all the time, but at least the time of one role, one character which would have revealed all the hidden strengh of Margaux's persona...

I wish she'd be directed by such great directors as Hitchcock, Visconti, W.Allen, Fassbinder (she reminds me 'The secret of Veronica Voss'), Kubrick or as you said Ingmar Bergman. I agree with you, IMO, she has the complexity and the deep ambiguity for playing in Persona, which is entirely based on the confusion of identity and also the major theme in Bergman's works of the human duality and so on...

Ebay:

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I totally agree with you, alicia 753. I've been thinking about what you said, about her needing to have a role or a director that can bring the best out of her. Fassbinder is indeed a good choice. It's kind of a morbid thought, since both are dead, but if one could reverse time...

I thought also of Farrah Fawcet Majors, who was only considered a Charlie's Angels chick until she made "The Burning Bed", where again the director, the story, showed she could be a gripping actress.

I collect vignettes, iconic pictures of actresses, and wondered if there'd be room on this website to display them, but I don't know where. Any ideas, from anyone, would be welcome. You can play a kind of Trivial Pursuit or parlor game with them, and I use them sometimes in my language/culture classes to get people to talk . The reactions can be quite interesting in terms of what these iconic pictures say about women, how they are portrayed through decades of films (or period movies of course). For example:

- the close-up of an actress driving a car : who is she ? who is the director ? what's the film ? where does it take place ? How do you know ? What do you think her emotions are ? Build a story around it. (For example : Grace Kelly , in To Catch a Thief)
- the close-up of a woman wearing a scarf, or a scarf and dark sunglasses
- the close-up of a woman by a window
- a woman sitting on a bed; or in a bedroom wearing a slip; or on the bed putting on her stockings : you'd be surprised at the change between Elizabeth Taylor in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and Catherine Deneuve in "Belle de Jour", or Romy Schneider in I forget what film: the body language, the expressions are so different. By the time Romy Schneider comes around, you can tell the feminist revolution has been by.

Anyway, to go back to Margaux, she was very modern, and even though she certainly didn't look European (I talked about European sixties actresses in another thread), I think European directors would have loved her.

In some of the pictures you have posted, she looks so much like her younger sister Mariel. But I don't know if Mariel can project that force; she is very good, but she's different. She has that combination of "little girl" and "intellectual" that can be quite endearing. Margaux is very raw by comparison, which is paradoxical because she was so used to always being so made up for the model shoots. It's as if those model shoots really hid what was inside and begged to come out, and all that paint, metaphorically speaking, suffocated her in the end. She was frozen, mummified, reduced to an image by all that gloss. How ironic that it seems to be actresses' ambitions now to be botoxed out of human recognition.
 
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