I was braced, I must say. My love for Olivia Benson and all 26 seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit that she has carried on her formidable shoulders knows no bounds. When I grow up I want to be just like her, especially if I can have the season nine haircut. But the prospect of Mariska Hargitay, the actor who plays her, directing and presenting a documentary about Hargitay’s late mother, the troubled film star Jayne Mansfield, who was killed in a car accident when her daughter was three? The spirit has to quail within, does it not? There are very few children and even fewer children-cum-actors who should be allowed to do this. The likelihood of a schmaltzy, hagiographic spectacle is in fact not a likelihood at all – it is a virtual certainty.
But My Mom Jayne is tender rather than schmaltzy, compassionate rather than hagiographic and an evident labour of love for all involved. Hargitay works pretty much chronologically, and – having only a memory of her mother touching her hair as she walked past while she was eating cereal – begins by eliciting some from her older siblings: Jayne Marie (her half-sister by Jayne’s first husband, Paul Mansfield); Mickey Jr (named after their adored father, and Mansfield’s second and best husband by far, the Hungarian actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, who brought them up); and Zoltan. All are articulate, thoughtful and – nearly 60 years after their mother’s death – still emotional. “Can you cut for a minute?” Zoltan asks his sister after the first question. “It feels more like I remember an essence, a nuance of the person, if that makes sense,” says Mickey. “I remember her presence and some of the feelings of that time … the feeling was good in those early days.” Whenever any of them talks about Mansfield, the shock and grief still write themselves across their faces. It is a powerful reminder of how deep some losses go.
Through a combination of Jayne Marie’s reminiscences and archive footage of her mother’s films and interviews, Mariska pieces together Mansfield’s early days. Pregnant at 16, she left Paul – a churchgoing Texan who did not approve of his young wife’s ambitions – a few years later, and took the little girl with her on all her jobs and auditions as she tried to make it in Hollywood. Intervention by Paramount talent scout Milton Lewis put her on the road to success as a sex symbol. He told her, according to Mansfield, that “I was wasting my obvious talents. He lightened my hair and tightened my dresses, and this is the result!”
Hargitay and her siblings are interesting and honest about how hard it was to listen to the fake, kittenish voice Mansfield used professionally and – in Hargitay’s case – how long it took her to forgive her mother for going down the “dumb blond” route. After Mansfield’s initial success, she tried to parlay it into the kind she really wanted. We see footage of her in a dramatic role – wholly convincing – and of her giving a violin and piano concert; she was an accomplished musician. Sitting down at the piano, she likens the situation to Samuel Johnson’s comment about a dog walking on its hind legs: “Which also goes to prove I don’t just play the piano but that I know who Dr Johnson is,” she says, with just enough bite to let the audience know she’s on to them without destroying the mood. It is a consummate performance in more ways than one, and makes you reflect on the incalculable number and depths of female talents that have been denied over generations.
Hargitay covers the rest of her mother’s career, depression, broken marriages and eventually death, but she does not linger on the fact that she too was in the car, trapped and unseen until Zoltan asked in the ambulance where she was. We move (briskly) on to Hargitay’s real paternity, where My Mom Jayne becomes that rarest of things: a testimony to decency. There is Mickey Sr, who took Hargitay absolutely as his own when Mansfield returned to him after an affair. There is her biological father, Nelson Sardelli, who stayed away from her thereafter. (“She has a father who loves her just like I love you,” he explained to his daughters, born later, when they found out. She was safe, he said, and he would not disturb a child who had just lost her mother and needed the good father she knew.) Hargitay has a loving relationship with them all. None of the Sardellis has ever said a word to the press. And there is Mickey Sr’s third wife, Ellen, who is open but generous about Mansfield and Mickey’s love, which in many ways endured. It is a sad but oddly beautiful story, and unexpectedly beautifully told.