Mariska Hargitay was at home, and she was sprinting up the stairs, bounding between the corners of her very full life. I had to hustle to keep pace.
She checked in with her oldest son — tall, polite, home from his first year at Princeton — and supervised the setup of an engagement party she was hosting for her goddaughter. Gardeners buzzed about the terraces of her Manhattan penthouse. She apologized, superfluously, for the noise.
Her latest obsession, a family heirloom grand piano that had recently entered her apartment via crane, dominated the living room, with a custom “M” bench, courtesy of her husband, the actor Peter Hermann (“Younger”). “That’s my next thing — I’m going to learn to play soon,” Hargitay vowed.
Another dash and we were on the floor below, a warren of cozy offices, painted in jewel tones, with overstuffed couches and muscular art by Annie Leibovitz. Tucked on a bookshelf were some of Hargitay’s awards. She has earned Emmys for playing Olivia Benson, the beloved “Law & Order: SVU” hardass, and for producing the 2017 documentary “I Am Evidence,” about the backlog of rape kits.
This is where Hargitay had conceived, edited and even shot some of her newest and perhaps most life-altering project, the documentary “My Mom Jayne.” It’s at once an unflinching portrait of her mother, the 1950s star and pinup Jayne Mansfield, who died when Mariska was 3; a homage to her father, the bodybuilder and actor Mickey Hargitay; and an investigation into her own clouded and secretive origins. Directing the film, which will air June 27 on HBO, and proclaiming her story has unlocked something profound for Hargitay, 61.
“I am so clear now about the truth,” she said. “This big haze came off — a veil of fear. And now I just feel so much at peace. It’s like a miracle to me to feel this way. I never thought I could.”
“You know, there’s so much pain left in the unsaid. And I just wanted to say it,” she added. “I’m not scared. I can be more Olivia Benson now.”
The documentary turns the lens on what Hargitay called her “bumpy ride” as she literally unpacks her history, uncovering decades-old fan mail and opening dusty storage units. Almost in real time, she unearths family mysteries and constructs a relationship with a parent she has no memory of, even as Mansfield’s traumatic end — a fatal car crash that Hargitay and two brothers survived — and foiled Hollywood ambitions defined her daughter’s path.
FIGURING OUT HOW to be a woman in the public eye; grappling with celebrity, industry and motherhood; fighting expectations; facing the shame and release that overlaid, somehow, with her portrayal of Olivia Benson and her work as an advocate for survivors — all of that ended up onscreen. She wove it into a “Law & Order”-esque narrative that ends with the public revelation that Mickey Hargitay, who died in 2006, is not her biological father.
“Sometimes keeping a secret doesn’t honor anyone,” she says in the documentary. “And it took me a very long time to figure that out.”
Folded into her plush furniture, dressed in dark pants and a sweater, with enviable hair, Hargitay came prepared with notes to speak with me one afternoon last month. She didn’t need them. Her story was still bursting forth. Normally, she’s a big-picture person, Hermann, her husband of over 20 years, told me later. “And it was amazing to watch her get into the most granular detail of this movie. It’s like watching someone speak a love language.”
In our conversation, Hargitay was voluble and quick to zero in on delight — in the new connections she’s made with family, in the spectacular view from her apartment (which, she gleefully noted, had once been Barbra Streisand’s pied-à-terre). But she was grave and teary, too; her life was laced with trauma. And sometimes her voice dropped to a whisper.
She has known Nelson Sardelli, a singer whose brief relationship with her mother led to her birth, for some 30 years. But she had never asked him the kind of pointed questions she did when she flew to his Las Vegas home for her very first interview for the film. She shot on breaks from “SVU,” and more than a touch of Captain Benson’s steely-jawed scowl comes out onscreen, when she asks him: Why didn’t you acknowledge me when I was a child?
Benson is the longest-running character on the longest-running primetime drama in TV history. Since she first appeared on the procedural in 1999, as a relentless but empathetic detective who’s driven to seek justice for the mostly female victims of sexual violence, she has inspired a fan legion (and one famous cat). Women have sought out Hargitay to share their own experiences of abuse and assault, with details that have sometimes left her shaking.
Olivia Benson’s fictional story line — she is the result of a rape, and has a complicated relationship with her mother — overlapped emotionally with Hargitay’s life offscreen, she said. “I did feel like I was the product of something hurtful.” The role is her signature achievement. “Maybe that’s why I was so right for it, and understood it.”
For so many, the character has stood as a source of strength. That Hargitay’s performance was based in her own shadows is a bombshell, too. Last year, she disclosed that a man had raped her when she was in her 30s — a fact it took her years to acknowledge, even to herself. “We portray finding the truth and going to these dark places,” said Christopher Meloni, who for 12 seasons played her “SVU” partner Elliot Stabler, in one of TV’s most indelible, and still emotionally charged, duos. Deep discoveries happen “when you’re close to the flame. And it’s a real flame for her.”
Watching the documentary, he was “super-proud” of how she’d undertaken the exploration. “I felt a once-removed catharsis,” he said. She has “a well-honed gut.”
HARGITAY DIDN’T LEARN THE TRUTH about her parentage until she was an adult. But growing up, she said, “I just always knew something was up.” She didn’t look like her siblings or Mickey. She was “tormented,” she said, by the fear of “not belonging anywhere.”
Mansfield, who was only 34 when she died in 1967, had five children from three marriages. The most notable husband was Hargitay, a Hungarian-born athlete who, like an early Arnold Schwarzenegger, parlayed his Mr. Universe muscles into movie roles. He and Mansfield wed not long after they met, in a pink-hued ceremony that was very open to fans and press. In their heyday, they were an accessible It Couple, frequently performing together, with Hargitay enacting feats of strength using her bikini-clad body.
Mansfield was a classically trained musician — she played violin and piano; spoke four languages and studied acting in college and conservatories before her breakout role on Broadway in “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” She reprised it for the 1957 movie, and went on to a few more high-wattage parts, including some that featured her singing.
But her acting talents were overshadowed by the entertainment world’s interest in her buxom figure. (The image of Sophia Loren’s side-eye at her décolletage has become a celebrity photo classic.) Playing up a breathy voice, she was marketed as a Marilyn Monroe-dupe and was a repeat Playboy centerfold, eventually making her living with a sometimes tawdry nightclub act.
Mariska Hargitay observed these choices with some disdain. “Do you think she could have done it a different way?” she asks her older sister in the documentary. Footage of Mansfield trying — performing violin and defending her intelligence on talk shows, only to be met with leers from hosts — answers that question.
Still, Hargitay actively went in another direction: her résumé is remarkably light on throwaway girlfriend parts — even before “SVU,” she played a detective or a lawyer in at least a half-dozen projects. She’s not a glamourpuss (“I’m, like, a flat shoe and a jean,” she said), or a pushover.
“She’s a baller,” Meloni affirmed. “You can’t knock her back on her heels.”
After Mansfield’s death, her family rarely told casual stories about her, Hargitay said. No Christmas memories, or favorite foods. There was the occasional anecdote that left her father laughing, she said, like what happened when one of Mansfield’s omnipresent dogs had an accident in front of royalty. (It involved a pillow as camouflage. She was a joker.)
Mostly, though, what her father imparted was that Mansfield “listened to the wrong people, and that they tried to mold her and make her,” Hargitay said. She absorbed that lesson fully. When the head of casting at a network told her, early on, that she needed a new name (hers was, of course, “too ethnic”) and a nose job, she blew him off with a few choice retorts. It hardly fazed her.
“The reason that I’m like the way I am is because I learned from her,” Hargitay said of her mother. “I learned what not to do. I learned to not let anyone tell me — that I decide.”
HER STEELY WILL also came from Mickey Hargitay, who had an immigrant’s sense of tenacity and purpose, and a dedication to his family. “He showed up at my swim meets,” she said. “He practiced gymnastics with me in the living room every night before we did dinner.” She took a pause, so she wouldn’t cry. “He’s the one that taught me about perseverance.”
Her parents had split before she was conceived, then reconciled when Mansfield was pregnant, then split again. When her mother died, Hargitay and his wife, Ellen Siano, raised her, alongside her older brothers Mickey Jr. and Zoltan, his biological children with Mansfield. Mansfield’s relationship with Sardelli was public in the ’60s; there was gossip, and some of her siblings were aware of her split parentage, Hargitay said. But they never discussed it.
She and Sardelli are now close; they spent Father’s Day together, and he wept as Hargitay told him she was ultimately grateful for the choices he’d made decades ago.
And she still refers to Mickey as her father. She initially worried that making the documentary would be betraying him, she said. Then she realized: “This is the biggest thank you. This is saying, ‘I am your daughter.’ I’m screaming it from the rooftops that you are the best dad and I’m loved, and everything that’s strong and good and moral about me — it’s because of him.”
She also relished meeting her family on the Sardelli side, which includes two half-sisters. They have been present in her life for years but hid their real link. When her children — August Hermann, 18; Amaya Hermann, 14, and Andrew Hermann, 13 — noticed her resemblance to Sardelli, now 90, she would say, “I know, isn’t that funny? He’s like, a really, really good family friend.”
“I didn’t want to perpetuate that anymore,” she told me. “I didn’t want to lie to my kids.”
Before she began filming, she flew to California and met with her stepmother and the siblings she grew up with — her brothers, and her older sister, Jayne Marie Mansfield, from her mother’s first marriage. Along with Tony Cimber, the son from her mother’s final marriage, she wanted their blessing to proceed. All are in the film; she and the California siblings viewed it together, intertwined in two chairs. Hargitay made a point to pull up a photo, so I could see them there, connected in the darkness. Watching their mother’s life and death unfold, with context — organizing a messy existence, as Hargitay described it — gave them a new sense of closeness. They sobbed afterward, she said, especially when Jayne Marie said, “I feel like we’re four people with one heart.”
Of her siblings, Hargitay is the only one who found her career in front of the camera. When she was a teenager, attending a Catholic girls school, excelling in swimming and cross-country, she used to get in trouble for talking in class. In 11th grade, her favorite nun suggested she try out for the school play. She got the lead and was hooked, studying theater at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“I was never higher than when I did a great scene,” she said. “It’s connection for me. That’s what ‘SVU’ is — it’s not just a show. It’s a conversation.”
BUT THE INTENSE, NEWSY SCRIPTS, and the onslaught of other people’s stories, took a toll. “I’ve had my fair share of secondary trauma,” she said. “I had to shore myself up” — with lots of therapy, and books like “The Body Keeps the Score” — “and learn how to sort of empty the glass.” She also felt, she said, a responsibility to help. Through a program at Mount Sinai Hospital, she trained to be a rape crisis counselor, and in 2004 started the Joyful Heart Foundation, which supports survivors.
“I always cite her as an example of a woman who inspires by her public role and presence,” said her friend Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon and an “SVU” watcher.
Another friend, the journalist Diane Sawyer, was in the audience when the documentary screened at Carnegie Hall, and was struck by how Hargitay’s bravery in excavating her family’s roots showed others a path into their own. “She just makes everything possible, because she’s strong and generous,” she said.
Also, she’s a blast. “She is the party,” Sawyer said. “It’s like some centrifugal miracle being around her, because she draws everyone in, and you know immediately she’s there for joys and sorrows, and fixing what needs fixing.”
Both Hermann and Meloni talked about Hargitay in the language of superheroes — her ability to pull people together, to listen tenderly and engage brazenly. All of that, and “this raw, profoundly funny, irreverent life force — and then, kapow! You have Mariska,” Hermann said.
Reflecting on the change in his wife as she made her film, Hermann quoted the poet W.S. Merwin. “I think that something she hadn’t done was following her,” he said. “Her own story didn’t exist in its entirety out in the world,” and it was momentous that she could tell it herself.
(Later, he wrote to me with one more thought to add: “I love Mariska so much. I do, and I tell her and write it to her, but it’s also nice for her to read it in the paper of record.”)
Perhaps more than at any other moment in her life, Hargitay does feel unambiguously empowered, and free. Her attitude, she told me with gusto, is “I can’t wait to see what I do next.”
That was one more thing that welded her to her mother, she realized — their appetite for a big, uncompromising life. Hargitay had always been in awe of Mickey, but now, especially as a working mother, she marveled at Jayne. “How are you a movie star, a sex symbol, the breadwinner, five kids, animals?” (Mansfield had a menagerie at home.)
“She was amazing,” Hargitay said in a whisper. “That’s been the gift: I got to see her. I got to have so many moments with her. And we got to make a movie together.”
“She didn’t get to do the kind of art she wanted. But we did it together. We made a piece of art together. I mean, come on,” she continued, smiling, her voice growing bolder. “I’m good now. Like, I am good now.”
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
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