When Mariska Hargitay was 3, she and two of her brothers survived the car accident that killed their mother, bombshell movie star Jayne Mansfield. The kids were asleep in the back seat; the three adults in the front—Mansfield, her companion at the time, and the car’s driver—were killed instantly. Mariska’s two brothers, injured, were carried away from the scene. It wasn’t until later that one of them, 6-year-old Zoltan, realized Mariska wasn’t with them: she was pinned beneath the passenger seat, with a head injury. If Zoltan hadn’t spoken up, Mariska might not have been found until it was too late.
That’s just one of the details revealed in Hargitay’s touching documentary My Mom Jayne, in which the actor, now 61, summons scraps of facts and remembrances to piece together the truth about her own identity, and in the process make peace with the mother she never knew. Hargitay has known since her 20s that the man who raised her, and loved her deeply—actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay—was not her real father. Only now is she reckoning with the scope of that truth. My Mom Jayne hopscotches through Mansfield’s early life and career: She became a mother at age 16, and lived in Texas with her young daughter and her first husband until she could stand it no longer—she wanted to be a movie star so badly that she was drawn to Hollywood, where she eked out a living with small film parts. Then, in 1955, she landed a starring role on Broadway, in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? That opened the door to bigger film roles, but like the star she obviously emulated, Marilyn Monroe, Mansfield wanted desperately to be considered a serious actor. With her moonbeam-colored hair and exaggerated, breathy speaking voice—which her children recall as seeming strange and upsetting, so different from the mom they knew at home—she settled, somewhat unhappily, for being a curvaceous sex symbol.
Hargitay, who would build her own career as an actor on TV’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, never felt comfortable with either her mother’s persona or her life choices. Mansfield was only 34 at the time of her death, in 1967. She and Mickey had divorced shortly after Mariska was born, though he and the woman he married after the divorce, Ellen Siano, would end up raising Hargitay and two of her brothers after Mansfield’s death. (Hargitay’s two other half-siblings also appear in the documentary, helping her cover some gaps that her research couldn’t fill.)
Though Hargitay makes it clear that the life her father and stepmother made for the family was a happy one, she also explains how unsettled she had felt for most of her life, unable to comprehend her mother’s motivations and feeling resentment about truths that were hidden from her. Yet by the end of My Mom Jayne—by which time we’ve also met Hargitay’s biological father, onetime Las Vegas entertainer Nelson Sardelli, in a sequence that’s not likely to leave a dry eye in the house—Hargitay’s catharsis is complete. When Hargitay finally, and tenderly, tells her mother, “I see myself in you for the first time,” we, too, know more about this charming, ambitious performer whose star never burned as brightly as she’d hoped. She wasn’t our mom. But her unruly secrets reflect the uncomfortable truths that are so often hidden in our own histories. Families are made of fallible humans. That’s their tragedy, and their glory.