Margaux Hemingway

The surname alone connoted fortune, wealth and creativity, but Portland-born Margaux Hemingway worked hard throughout her career to carve her own niche in the Hemingway saga. Raised in Ketchum, Idaho, Margaux worked various jobs in the Sun Valley area before traveling to New York City in the mid 1970's. With her striking beauty, she quickly made a name for herself as a model. She was the first model to be paid one million US Dollars to front a cosmetics line and appear on dozens of fashion magazine covers. Her work for the Faberge fragrance 'Babe' led to nationwide recognition, so it was no surprise that Hollywood came next.

In 1976, the rape melodrama Lipstick (1976) was released. Margaux had the starring role, and at her suggestion, her younger sister Mariel Hemingway was cast in a supporting role. Though the film had its merits, it found no favor among Hollywood critics, who were quick to slam her performance. Mariel, however, won praise and went on to appear in a number of high profile film projects in the late 70's and early 80's. In spite of her downfall, Margaux continued to work as a model and occasional actress, appearing in the low-budget horror Killer Fish (1979) opposite 'Lee Majors' and Karen Black. Margaux began attracting more attention from her turbulent social life, frequenting Studio 54 in New York and attending numerous glamorous parties and events. It was in this period that alcoholism began to come into play, a fact she later put down to her nervousness amongst the high profile celebrity crowd of New York.

In the 1980's she appeared in a couple of movies, most notably Over the Brooklyn Bridge (1984), a movie that she later mentioned as her favorite. Margaux spent much time traveling and spending time with her by now second husband Bernard Foucher. In 1984, Margaux was spending much time in Miami, Florida, and embarked upon the making of Hemingway: Winner Take Nothing (1998) (V) in Cuba. The documentary chronicled the work of her famous grandfather Ernest Hemingway, and involved her traveling around Europe and the USA. Her marriage to Foucher ended in the mid 1980's and the documentary hit the cutting room floor until its eventual release in 1998. Margaux next hit headlines by spending time at the Betty Ford Clinic to deal with her alcohol problems. She had gained weight, her career had dried up, and her second, childless marriage was over.

In 1988, Margaux emerged from the clinic with positive energy. She sold her tale to People Magazine and began to work on her film career again. The French movie Messe en si mineur, La (1990) was filmed in 1989, with her in a leading role, and in mid 1990, she appeared in the pages of Playboy Magazine. This move certainly attracted attention, and it was not long before she joined erotic thriller bandwagon of the early 1990Fred Olen Ray cast her as 'the other women' in the video rental store hit Inner Sanctum (1991), a role that required nudity. She was overshadowed by Tanya Roberts revealing performance in the movie, and went to be cast in a series of small roles in Love Is Like That (1993) (Bad Love), Deadly Rivals (1993) and a lead in erotica aficionado Joe D'Amato 's Donna di una sera, La (1991). Margaux changed the spelling of her name to Margot to serve as an official reminder of her sobriety in 1993.

In 1994, Double Obsession (1994) was released. Filmed in Boulder, Colorado, Margaux had split lead credit with English actress Maryam d'Abo, and she reprized her role as Anna Rawlins alongside Michael Nouri, Sandahl Bergman and Tracy Brooks Swope in Inner Sanctum II (1994). In 1995 her film career was struggling, and she was dogged by rumors of depression, something that she divulged all too often on celebrity chat shows like 'Geraldo Rivera'. In Vicious Kiss (1995) Margaux played opposite feisty Monique Parent in a throwaway role that was unflattering to her image and career.

More rumors abounded when a trip to India was cut short in 1995, sparking a frenzy over her mental health as she recovered at the Hemingway family home in Idaho, and despite her excitement to be narrator and moderator for an Animal Planet documentary 'Wild Guide', she seemed to be struggling. In July 1996, Margaux was found dead in her new Santa Monica apartment. A friend had become concerned after not seeing her for a while. The death was ruled as suicide by overdose sometime later, a ruling that her popular actress sister disagreed with.

Margaux Hemingway proved to be another in an unfortunate line of Hollywood tragedies, in spite of trying so hard in her last few years to keep her career fueled. Her husky voice and trademark eyebrows will only be remembered positively in the fashion world, not by her days as a leading lady. Backroads to Vegas (1996) (TV), her final film, was released in 1999, and a scheduled biopic was shelved. Margaux had been an avid environmentalist and traveler, and that was the path her career was taking. Over a decade later, her memory has been laid to rest, but her high profile personal problems may serve as a bitter reminder as to how hard playing the fame game can be.

time
"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 rape 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.

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."

people
July 15, 1996
A Life Eclipsed



By Karen S. Schneider
Margaux Hemingway Burned Bright in the '70s as a Model, Actress and Club-Hopper, but in Her 41 Years She Never Broke Free of An Inner Pain





From PEOPLE Magazine

NEIGHBORS AND FRIENDS SENSED SOMETHING WAS wrong. One woman was struck by a troubled tone she heard when she chatted with Margaux Hemingway on June 26 outside her Santa Monica studio apartment. Hemingway's longtime friend, chiropractor Caren Elin, says she "felt a sense of urgency" when the actress and former model paged her two days later. "It turned out it was a minor question," Elin says, "but she doesn't usually page me with 'help me.' " Another neighbor did a double take when he passed the statuesque beauty on the street the next day. "She looked disturbed and haggard," says 32-year-old screenwriter Peter Osterlund. "I thought it was sad, and then I forgot about it."

But Judy Stabile couldn't forget. Her good friend had much to be happy about: Hemingway loved the small but sunny apartment she had moved into just three weeks earlier. And she had real hopes that her stint hosting Wild Guide, an outdoor adventure series scheduled to air next fall on the Discovery Channel, would kick-start her acting career. Still, for the past few weeks, when Stabile and other friends went out to dinner with Hemingway, or to a local club to hear music, or just talked on the phone, she seemed strangely forlorn. "What's going on?" her friend, talent agent Sandy Mirisch, would ask. "Oh, I'm not feeling so good," Hemingway would respond quietly.

When Hemingway didn't return her phone calls last week, Stabile drove to the former model's home. Outside she saw Hemingway's white Ford Bronco—with Idaho plates and a parking pass from the Pritikin Diet Center—parked on the street. After Stabile's knocking went unanswered, she found a ladder, climbed it and looked in the window. There was her friend, lying on the bed, her hands folded over her nightgown. Stabile then asked two construction workers to go inside. "They broke in through the door and quickly came out," Stabile recalls sadly. "They said, 'She's gone.' "

Just what went wrong in the last moments of Hemingway's life was initially unclear. Visions of the violent death of her famous grandfather, Ernest—who 35 years ago this month put an Abercrombie & Fitch shotgun to his head in a hallway of his Ketchum, Idaho, home and pulled the trigger at age 61—hover uncomfortably in the thoughts of some friends suspecting another Hemingway had committed suicide. The Santa Monica police found no signs of forcible entry or foul play. As of press time, the results of an autopsy were inconclusive, but some close friends believe Hemingway must have suffered a fatal attack of epilepsy, a disease she had struggled with since childhood. Says Elin: "I hope she died a natural death in a peaceful way."

For much of her life, though, peace had eluded her. The spirit of her great and troubled grandfather flickered in the headstrong little girl fly-fishing in the mountains near her home in Ketchum 30 years ago—just as it did in the strapping six-foot woman who squealed with delight on a Ferris wheel in Santa Monica only a few weeks ago. Margaux had the true Hemingway highs and lows—winning a million-dollar contract as the fresh-faced image behind Fabergé's Babe perfume in 1975, then losing it—along with a lot of sleep and dignity—as a perpetually sloshed member of Manhattan's quasi-decadent Studio 54 set.

Like her grandfather, too, Hemingway suffered from bouts of clinical depression, one of which landed her in an Idaho psychiatric hospital in late 1994. And she carried on another family tradition—carrying on with her family. She "couldn't stand" her mother, Puck, for most of her life, she told PEOPLE in 1994. (They had reconciled by the time her mother died of cancer in 1988.) She admitted feeling intense competition with her younger sister, the actress Mariel Hemingway, 34. And when several years ago she went public with the statement that her godfather had molested her as a child, both her father, Jack, and her stepmother, Angela, 47, all but stopped speaking to her. "Jack and I did not talk to her for two years," Angela told PEOPLE last year. "She constantly lies. The whole family won't have anything to do with her. She's nothing but an angry woman."

When Hemingway's former agent David Mirisch telephoned her father and stepmother with the news of her death on July 1, "they didn't say much," he says, but sister Mariel, who starred in TV's Central Park West last season, "cried quite heavily." "Obviously," says Steve Crisman, Mariel's husband since 1984, "everyone's very depressed." There were problems, like in any family, Crisman says, "but there was a lot of love too. She was a very sweet, full-of-life woman," he adds. "She was on a search of some sort, and it was not always easy."

But it was rarely dull. Hemingway's story begins one night in Portland, Ore., when, in an amorous mood fueled by a bottle of Château Margaux wine, Puck and Jack (Ernest's oldest son, then trying to make a living as an investment counselor) conceived their second child. More than a decade later, the family—including Margaux, her older sister Joan, now 46, and Mariel—moved to the then-sleepy town of Ketchum (pop. 2,500), where Jack became a Fish and Game Commissioner.


But as Margaux told PEOPLE in 1988, the turning point of her life came at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1974, when the 19-year-old high school graduate, working for a Ketchum-based PR firm, tagged along on a business trip to meet a boxing promoter. "I was basically a little s--t in cowboy boots going 'Yippie skippie' and 'Yahoo' with a big grin," she recalled years later. The small-town routine—and perhaps her big-time name—worked wonders on one Errol Wetson, a hamburger-chain heir and marketing entrepreneur 14 years her senior, who spied her sipping tea in the hotel's Palm Court. "He knocked on the door of my suite with a rose and a bottle of champagne," she said, "and I fell in love."

Four months later, Margaux moved to Manhattan—and into Wetson's apartment. "He started thinking of himself as my Svengali," she said. "He told me what colors to wear and to cover my legs because they were too heavy." He took her to the right parties and, most important, introduced her to the folks at Fabergé. Within a year, Hemingway was on the covers of Vogue and TIME magazine—and hanging out with Halston, Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger.

Back in Ketchum, her family was taking Margaux's rapid rise in stride. Her big sister, nicknamed Muffet, declared her intention to move to Manhattan and try a little modeling herself. (Nothing came of the plan.) Her mother declared the hullabaloo "exciting." Mary Hemingway, Ernest's fourth and last wife, reveled in Margaux's free spirit. "I shacked up with Ernest for years before we were married," his widow, who died in 1986, told Newsweek in 1975. And, in the same article, Margaux's father chided his blossoming daughter: "Any fatheadedness will not be tolerated."

But fatheadedness wasn't the problem; insecurity was. "I was in awe of that whole Halston-Liza Minnelli crowd," Hemingway told PEOPLE in 1988. "To me they were the real celebrities, and! was just a girl from Idaho." She turned easily to alcohol and marijuana to loosen up. "In my grandfather's time it was a virtue to drink a lot and never show it," she said. "And like him, I wanted to live my life to the fullest, with gusto. I always thought alcohol would give me the strength and courage to do whatever I wanted."

It didn't. Hemingway married Wet-son in 1975, but their relationship soon crumbled. "He never seemed to be able to hold a job other than advising me on important issues such as my wardrobe," she said. Her life took another difficult turn the next year, when she landed a role in Lipstick, a thriller about a model who gets raped by a music teacher. The critics panned her and the movie but praised Mariel, then only 14, whom Margaux had suggested for the role of her sister. "It was as if people were tired of me and gave her all the attention," she said. "I buried my feelings because I was taught it was Hemingwayesque to take your blows and walk stoically through them."

As her marriage to Wetson unraveled (they divorced in 1978), and her sister's career took off (Mariel won raves for her role as Woody Allen's teenage mistress in 1979's Manhattan), Hemingway turned even more to alcohol and drugs. In 1979 she married Venezuelan film director Bernard "Baron" Foucher, whom she had met and fallen for while still married to Wetson, and moved her fast-lane life across the Atlantic. The couple lived for more than a year in Paris, often staying at the flashy Nova Park Hotel. A Paris socialite recalls that "Margaux would talk very loudly about things you don't normally hear in polite society, about her sex life with Bernard." She spent money like a drunken sailor too. "I had no sense of finances," Hemingway said, "and was deeply in debt."


In 1981 she got the idea of making a documentary with Foucher about her grandfather. But after several trips to Cuba to interview the writer's friends and acquaintances, she realized the project was in a chaotic state. "I became very depressed," she said years later. "No one was interested in what I had to say, and everything seemed like it was out of control." In 1985 she called off the project, divorced Foucher—and dived head-first into despair. "I drank more and more and was slowly killing myself with alcohol," she recalled. "My thoughts were erratic, and I had trouble with my memory. I thought about suicide periodically, especially when I was drinking heavily."

The previous year, Hemingway had injured herself skiing in Austria; during her nine-month recovery she gained 75 pounds and sank deeper into depression. A 28-day stay at the Betty Ford Center in 1987 probably saved her life. Emerging trim and looking healthy, she devoted herself to running, yoga, painting, singing and to cooking dinners in the Manhattan apartment she shared with Stuart Sundlun, a businessman she had met on a blind date before entering rehab in 1987. But she was also anxious to resume her acting career, and when her role in the 1990 French movie Love in C Minor failed to gain Hollywood's attention, she did what many a struggling actress has done: posed nude for Playboy.

Her centerfold helped pay off the $900,000 in back taxes she owed the IRS but led nowhere. After she and Sundlun broke up in the early '90s, Hemingway turned her attention to what she called healing her spirit. She consulted with a Cheyenne Indian medicine man. She learned about the shamanic art of the Northwest Coast Indians. She had training in the huna philosophy of the Hawaiian kahunas. And in 1993 she began working with a network of chiropractors to treat her lifelong battle with dyslexia, her epilepsy and her bulimia, a problem from her modeling days. "I needed to go inside and clear the blockages," she told PEOPLE in 1994, "because nothing was coming to me, no jobs, no work."

In some ways, Hemingway did seem at peace. "She was a real phenomenal person," says Sundlun, who remained a friend. "She had a light touch on a heavy life." Model Cheryl Tiegs, a friend since the high times of the '70s, warmly remembers, "She was totally into the great outdoors. That was her main interest. She would come out to my house in Montauk [N.Y.] and sit on the beach, communing with the sea gulls. Everyone would come in the house and whisper and think it was kooky." Her unusual ways got a similarly affectionate reaction just two months ago at the Doral Saturnia spa in Miami, where she was the celebrity guest at a PEOPLE magazine function. "We'd all be yapping, and all of a sudden you'd address a question to Margaux, and she'd have her head down and her hands together, praying over her food," says PEOPLE editorial projects manager Louise Lague. "There was something spiritual going on."

In 1994, in pursuit of even greater spirituality, Hemingway took a trip to India, where she spent two months visiting holy sites. But according to Dr. Elin, the trip went badly. "Some sort of a breakdown happened over there," says Elin. "We don't know if she had a [epileptic] seizure followed by a breakdown or what. But whatever happened, the people there were unaccustomed to her condition, and she supposedly spent some time in jail. We eventually got her back, and she was hospitalized."

According to the Toronto Star, it was her father who consulted a psychiatrist and was instrumental in getting her treatment at a private clinic in Twin Falls, Idaho. But the crisis did not break the family impasse. "She's blaming Mariel or me or Jack [for her hospitalization]," Angela told PEOPLE soon after Hemingway was released early in 1995. "It's everybody else's fault. She's 40 years old and she's got to take responsibility for her life."

Sadly, now, she will never get that chance. Whatever the cause of death, Hemingway seemed confused in her final hours. At around 4:30 on Friday, June 28, she called Elin and left a message on her answering machine. "She didn't sound okay," says Elin. "She was slurring. She was just rambling. Her last sentence to me was, 'God loves you, God loves you, and I love you too.' " She had tried valiantly to climb back from the depths of depression, but clearly the former million-dollar model—whose most recent gigs included making infomercials for home-improvement products, promoting the Psychic hotline and filming straight-to-video films for a relatively measly $35,000 or so a pop—still had a way to travel. Last week the door to the Santa Monica apartment Hemingway hoped would be home to happier times swung open after the police had left. On the balcony a potted fern was blowing in the breeze. Unpacked boxes still stood on the floor. "It's very difficult when people don't want you anymore," says Elin. "She was just a gentle loving soul who got lost in fame and fortune."

time.com
Monday, Jun. 16, 1975

Nine months ago, Margaux Hemingway stepped off a plane at New York's La Guardia Airport. Like other immigrants to the Big Apple, she was a little green. She had the blessing of the folks back home in Ketchum, Idaho, a happy disposition and a waiting boy friend. As a "hotdog skier" and sometime soccer player, and with only a year of odd jobs behind her, she did not have the exact skills suited to Manhattan's job market. But her grandfather had been Ernest Hemingway, so she had a well-known name. And though some of the guys in Sun Valley used to call her "Pigpen," she was tall and blonde. Anyway, a girl can dream, can't she?
Within a month, Margaux's name was popping up all over the place. Within two, she was picking up top-scale fees for modeling gigs ($100 an hour). By the time her 20th birthday came round in February, Margaux had posed for a Vogue cover, was starring at celebrity-jammed parties, and had announced her engagement to Boy Friend Errol Wetson. On the pop scales, Margaux was beginning to outrank even Mick Jagger. Clearly, something big was about to happen to Margaux. Sure enough, in the middle of May, just 249 days after her arrival in Manhattan, she landed the biggest advertising contract ever given to a woman: $1 million from Fabergé to promote a new, unnamed scent. Said Margaux simply: "It's the best, you guys."
Why Margaux? Well, the boys back home must have been short or myopic. Margaux is the American Sex Dream incarnate, a prairie Valkyrie, 6 ft. tall and 138 lbs. "I never saw such a big, marvelous, wide-eyed, warm girl," recalls Fashion Artist Joe Eula, one of her first mentors. "She just made me feel so good." Effortlessly, Margaux stands out in a gallery of fresh young faces, newcomers who are making their names in modeling, movies, ballet and in the exacting art of simply living well. They add up to an exhilarating crop of new beauties who light up the landscape in the U.S. and abroad.
Their chief distinction is variety. It used to be that every few years yielded a different image. In 1960 it was Jackie Kennedy's finishing-school polish, later Twiggy's innocent charm and the tomboyish Ali MacGraw. But increasingly women refuse to accept anyone else's beauty package. Today the one standard left is the camera's unblinking eye. Margaux is a photographer's ideal, and despite the trend to diversity, hers is the face of a generation, as recognizable and memorable as Lisa Fonssagrives and Jean Shrimpton. When Margaux has her hair wet and slicked back, Photographer Francesco Scavullo thinks she looks Etruscan. Says Designer Halston: "She has all the components to become a modern young superstar—openness, infectiousness, beauty and the ambition to follow through."

Openness and a boggling spontaneity have made Margaux something more than a model, a pop personality. She may be too big for model clothes—her shoes are a size 9½—but she is so natural she makes soignée sound like a dirty word. Manhattan, which has made famous such gaudy eccentrics as Andy Warhol and Tiny Tim, is enchanted by the antics of a seemingly guileless hick. Even fashion's supreme arbiter, Diana Vreeland, renowned for her aphorisms ("Pink is the navy blue of India"), lapsed into hyperbole: "She has such energy of beauty—it just flashes out at you." Meanwhile, in her husky, baby-Carol Charming voice, Margaux was revealing that she had really been christened Margot. Then one night her parents told her she had been conceived after they had downed an exceptional vintage of Château Margaux. Voilà!
Nervous at her first interviews, Margaux snapped her fingers and came on with language and syntax baffling to anyone over 15. "You just keep snappin'," she would say. Growing more confident, she let out "Yippie-skippies" of pleasure and would growl "Rich, happy blues." As her bookings grew, Margaux cried, "Just t.c.b.—taking care of business!" Says Scavullo: "She talks a mile a minute. She chews gum until she gets in front of the camera; then we carry a silver spoon and platter to her and take the gum."
Margaux did pine for the great outdoors. "I saw The Four Musketeers and I wanted to fence," she said wistfully. She tried jogging around Central Park reservoir, but a band of urban guerrillas hounded her, yelling, "Hi, Shorty!" Yoga, she decided, was a suitably citified form of exercise. One evening she discovered a new position she thought would lengthen the lifeline in her hand. "I felt so energized," she beamed. "That's how I like to feel—healthy and energized."
That is how Margaux grew up in Idaho's spectacular Sun Valley, where her father Jack, Ernest's eldest son, settled down in 1967 after throwing over a career as a stockbroker. He is now a member of the state's fish and game commission. Jack and his wife Puck, a gourmet cook and an old friend of Julia Child's, brought up their three daughters—Margaux, Joan ("Muffet"), 25, and Mariel, 13—to hunt, fish, shoot and ski. Margaux had a prodigious appetite for Puck's meals too. As a result she suffers from "foodism." A plump bebopper, she felt the pangs of sibling rivalry when Muffet became the 1968 Idaho woman tennis champion and modeled some very sexy clothes in a local show. She was also an expert skier, who chose to become a ski clown, a reckless hotdogger. "Margaux never did like competition," says Jack, "and I think that's why she wasn't too interested in school."


Her parents encouraged her to try art school, but Margaux was too energized to buckle down and took off after a year for Europe. Her adventures were just as lively, if less genteel, than Lorelei Lee's. In Morocco, she was "sorta kidnaped" by a smuggling gang who made her into an unwitting hash courier. Fortunately, a friendly mechanic ("He was just snappin' ") sniffed out the fact that her car was mined with hash. Recalls Margaux: "It was really veggy" (translation: Margaux could not move or think).
"Margaux is neither domestic nor domesticated. She's a free spirit," says her father, now 51. Still, there was a stir last Christmas when, for the first time, Margaux brought a man home. He was Errol Wetson, 34, a second-generation entrepreneur, whose father ran a variety of concessions in the East. Errol's career has been bold but erratic. Since age 18, when he and his brother started Wetson's hamburger chain, he has bought and sold antique cars, run a trendy Manhattan restaurant called Le Drugstore, imported soft denim, and backed the TV show Kung Fu. One day last spring, he was sitting in his favorite place, the Plaza hotel's Palm Court, when he saw Margaux, who was in town for a skiing promotion gig. Their eyes locked. They have been in love ever since, and when Margaux arrived in New York last fall, they pooled their resources, rented a grungy Upper East Side pad and settled down to construct the Big Deal. Frequent reassuring trips to the Palm Court were necessary. "If things began to cave in or if we were confused, we would rush over there, sit at a table, and suddenly things became clearer," says Errol. Margaux says, "Errol has horns but he's an angel."
The Hemingways were at first cautious about Errol. But since that Christmas visit, Errol has been in close touch with Jack. Together with Margaux's agent Peggy Nestor, they set up the Fabergé deal, which runs until 1980 and may yield Margaux more than a million if she promotes other products for Fabergé as well.
She is hurt by the recurrent criticism that Errol has exploited her. "The other day," she says, "he came to me and gave me his share of the deal." When she got film offers, it was Errol who cautioned her to wait until she was ready. She plans to take acting lessons in preparation for a movie career, but first she and Errol are honeymooning in Europe and South America. Marriage may come later—or next week. Her younger sister Mariel is not so sure: "I don't know—Margaux is kinda crazy."

Crazy like Napoleon. Margaux has picked up the fashion world and wrapped it round her little finger; she has tamed the press and subdued Madison Avenue. "It's like a fairy tale," she agrees. "But blah blah, woof woof, as Jimi Hendrix used to say." Says Miss Mary, Ernest Hemingway's widow (and Margaux's step-grandmother): "She was such a nice healthy kid, I hope nothing spoils her, natch." About her publicity-hating grandfather, Margaux is admiringly respectful, exulting: "Grandpa's spirit's in my marrow." But she prefers people to realize that it is Margaux, not Ernest, who is the big name today. She is even getting over her fear of competition. When Joan came to New York recently to promote the movie Rosebud, for which she had helped write the original novel, Margaux talked up Muffet's forthcoming cookbook, Picnic Gourmet, to the press.
Now that she is rich and free, "the girl of the '70s," Margaux is moving from pop fame to superstardom. Her life seems to stretch ahead of her like a field of virgin snow. Margaux likes that terrain. Says she: "I love to ski in powder. Then I can look back and see my tracks alone—nobody else's at all."
Professional Beauties
Although Margaux is almost literally out of sight, she is not alone in the rather special world of professional beauties. Many make $100,000 a year or more from their looks. "You either have it or you don't," says Carrie Donovan of Harper's Bazaar. "A beauty must be able to project herself, be dramatic, an actress." Hollywood Starlet Deborah Raffin, 22, a lean blonde with almost cliché American looks, has projected herself with more effect on the covers of glossy magazines than in the movies. Picked at age 19 to play Liv Ullmann's daughter in 40 Carats, she also starred in the uproariously bad Once Is Not Enough. Deborah insists on being identified when she models. "She does it to build her name," says her husband-manager, Michael Viner. The Viners are a refreshingly naive couple in Beverly Hills. Deborah likes stuffed animals, and Michael, who is also a record producer, insists that no mention of hard drugs be made in any of the songs he produces. Deborah, too, has firm ideas. In Enough, she played January, the chick who matures with the help of alcohol and drugs, but she modified the role to a more normal adolescence. She also objects to nudity in films: "It violates my privacy." That stand prompted Co-Star Kirk Douglas to ostracize her on the set. He accused her of being frigid. "It seems funny now," says Deborah. "But at the time it took all my strength to hold back the tears. I never want anyone to think I'm one of the thousands of 'starlets' who will do anything to be in a movie."

Honeymooners Errol Wetson and Margaux Hemingway Have a Vintage Season




It was the perfect way to launch the perfect marriage. The bridegroom gave the bride a $24,000 beige Mercedes-Benz. The bride gave the bridegroom "lots of love." Thus began the honeymoon of million-dollar model Margaux Hemingway, 20, and hamburger baron/TV producer/soft-denim importer Errol Wetson, 34.

Three smoochy months have passed since the couple's town hall wedding in Paris (PEOPLE, July 7), but their moveable feast goes on. First, it was the Riviera and a tour through the South of France. "I love France," says Margaux. "The French respect your privacy. I feel at home there, but Errol said the Riviera was too expensive." So Margaux and Errol headed for her hometown, Ketchum, Idaho, where her granddaddy, novelist Ernest Hemingway, spent his last days and where her father Jack is Idaho's fish and game commissioner.

In and near Ketchum ("It's funky," says Margaux) the inexhaustible couple swam, fished, rode, backpacked, shot, camped, painted, collected herbs (wild basil, dill and garlic), danced and did gymnastics. "If you are at one with your body then you are at one with yourself," says Margaux, whose new five-and-a-half-year contract modeling for a Faberge perfume pays her about $9,000 a day for 30 days of work each year.

At their carpeted A-frame honeymoon cabin, Margaux cooked and cleaned while Errol, her manager, handled the flow of offers for his six-foot bride. "She is very creative," he says. "She can do everything well. Whatever she touches blooms." Margaux agrees. "I am just bursting with potential," she says. "And the best part of all that's been happening is just lying here in the sun, just letting those offers roll in."

Dino De Laurentiis has already announced that Margaux will have the starring role in Lipstick, which will begin filming in Hollywood in a few weeks. After that Errol and Margaux plan a visit to the Bahamas, a return trip to Ketchum where Errol is building a house, and another stop in France.

And, it's only the beginning. "Skiing was my first love and now it's Errol," Margaux says. "The honeymoon will never be over. For then it means the marriage is finished."

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.”


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.”


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.