In the summer of 1975, the most photographed face in America belonged to a six-foot woman from Portland, Oregon, named after a French wine bottle. Fabergé paid her one million dollars to promote a perfume called Babe, a sum no model had ever commanded before, and the fashion industry decided in a single season that she represented an entirely new kind of beauty.
Time magazine put her on its cover that June. Vogue followed in September with the phrase "the new supermodel of New York," and Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Harper's Bazaar lined up behind them.
What almost no one mentioned that summer was that she had suffered her first epileptic seizure at eight, that she was dyslexic, and that the family whose name opened every door in Manhattan had already lost three of its members to suicide within two generations.
She was five years old when her grandfather died at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, on a July morning in 1961. Thirty-five years later, friends who had not heard from her over a long holiday weekend drove to her studio apartment near the beach in Santa Monica. The calendar took care of the rest.
Margaux Louise Hemingway was born in Portland, Oregon, in February 1954, the second of three daughters of Jack Hemingway, Ernest's eldest son, and Byra Louise Whittlesey, whom everyone called Puck. Her parents drank a bottle of Château Margaux the night she was conceived, a detail they cheerfully passed on to their daughter, who as a teenager responded by changing the spelling of her first name to match the label.
She arrived in New York in the early 1970s with a face that photographed like architecture, thick eyebrows the industry would spend a decade plucking out of existence, and a six-foot frame that made most of her contemporaries look like figurines. Bookings came quickly, covers came faster, and Fabergé concluded she was worth a million dollars as the face of a perfume called Babe, the largest sum ever offered to a model. She was 21.
Time placed her on its June cover among what it called the new beauties. Vogue gave her the entire opening of its September issue, and the trade press stopped bothering to explain who she was. That same June she married Errol Wetson, a New York restaurateur, and the wedding photographs show a young woman who appeared to have arranged her entire life within 12 months.
Hollywood arrived a year later with Lipstick, in which she played a model attacked by a rapist opposite Anne Bancroft and her 14-year-old sister Mariel. The reviews went almost entirely to the younger sister.
Studio 54 claimed her early, which the fashion press treated as glamour while her doctors would have counted it as a scheduling problem.
Behind the Fabergé campaign and the Studio 54 photographs lay a medical history the fashion press had no vocabulary for. Seizures since the age of eight, dyslexia, bulimia, teenage drinking, and a depression in her father's family as fixed as inherited property.
Within four years, the perfume contract ended, the marriage ended, and the film industry quietly reclassified her from discovery to curiosity. The reclassification was never announced.
Ernest Hemingway ended his life in Idaho in 1961, and his father had done the same in 1928 after a physical decline that biographers later linked partly to a possible hereditary condition. America bought the perfume, the covers, and the wine-colored name without ever asking what came inside the bottle.
She was born into a family rich in reputation and poor in money, a dynasty in that sense only because strangers assumed otherwise. Her father, Jack, was Ernest's eldest son by Hadley Richardson, a man who fought in World War II, was taken prisoner, and organized his later life around fishing in Idaho rather than literature in Havana. He worked for a time as a stockbroker and later as a conservation officer, and his homes in Portland and then Ketchum were comfortable without ever approaching the scale the surname suggested to outsiders.
The three girls—Joan, whom everyone called Muffet, then Margaux, then Mariel—grew up in a house where their grandfather was a national monument who had died before the youngest could remember him. Mariel would later describe the marriage that produced them as unhappy and abusive, statements she made publicly in the documentary Running from Crazy, directed by Barbara Kopple and produced by Oprah Winfrey in 2013.
At eight, Margaux had her first seizure, a diagnosis that in the early 1960s carried a stigma close to shame and a treatment regimen built on sedatives. She was also dyslexic in an era that usually misunderstood the condition as laziness. She carried the surname of the most famous prose writer in the English language while struggling to read a single page of his work aloud. Those two facts collided for 30 years and together explain much about why she chose a career that required no reading at all.
She spent much of her adolescence in Ketchum, Idaho, the place where her grandfather died and was buried, which gave her childhood geography an unusual density. The house was a short drive from the grave. Visits were made. She knew how he died long before she had any framework for understanding it.
By her late teens she was tall, striking, bored with school, and possessed of a bluntness adults found either charming or alarming depending on the hour. She was drinking by then, according to her own later account of her history, and she understood that her surname worked as a passport into rooms far from Idaho. So she went east without training, without a portfolio worth mentioning, and with an introduction or two her name provided.
New York was in the middle of replacing its beauty ideal, and its photographers were tired of small, pretty, symmetrical faces. She was none of those things, and that turned out to be the whole commercial proposition.
The fashion business in 1973 was still run by a handful of photographers, editors, and agency owners who could make a career over lunch and end another over coffee. Margaux entered that system through a side door, via social connections rather than the usual round of tests and test shoots.
Physically, she had the height, the wide-set eyes, the jaw, the eyebrows she refused to groom, and the shoulders that made clothes look exactly as the designers had drawn them. Commercially, her family gave her a name that guaranteed a magazine cover line before the film was developed and let an art director sell a booking to a client in one sentence.
Timing helped too. A decade of "waif" girls had left the country hungry for an athletic American beauty, and she had grown up outdoors. She learned the rudiments of the profession quickly: she arrived on time, held a pose, took direction, and treated the camera as a colleague rather than an audience. Photographers described her as a personality who warmed a room, and in a business built on long hours and short tempers, that was a genuine commercial asset.
Editors chose her because she looked in photographs like weather—changeable and slightly suspect. Clients requested her because her surname moved copies. Shoots became covers, and covers gave her the status journalists had recently begun calling supermodel.
Her first Cosmopolitan appearance put her in front of the largest readership in the country. Elle and Harper's Bazaar followed with their own versions of the same face. By 20 she was earning heavily and spending it in a city designed to make that easy. She rented an apartment in Manhattan, traveled constantly, and began appearing in gossip columns as a fixture of a nightlife that would soon find a permanent address at 54 West 54th Street.
What was missing from all of it was any professional apparatus designed to protect a young woman with epilepsy, dyslexia, and a family history of depression from the pressures of that specific life. No one at those magazines asked to see her medical history, and she was not about to volunteer it.
She began drinking, and according to her later account, using drugs at the social gatherings that were part of the work. The work rewarded her presence regardless. Her seizure disorder made the equation worse, since the medication that controlled it and the alcohol that calmed her nerves were not meant to mix in a bloodstream. Idaho was 2,000 miles away. Her father had his own life, and her sisters were still children or barely older. She was, in the literal commercial sense, an unaccompanied minor asset in a business that had no reason to slow her down.
Fabergé was about to make her the most expensive face in the history of the profession, and neither the company nor the model understood how short the deal would run.
The Fabergé contract rewrote the economics of the entire industry with a single signature. The company offered her one million dollars to be the face of Babe, a sum no model had ever been paid for an advertisement. The trade press covered it as the start of a new era rather than a single transaction.
Until then, a model worked for a day rate that was constantly renegotiated, with no minimum and no share in the campaign that made her famous. Babe replaced that system with something closer to the studio contracts of movie stars.
The campaign itself was built around athleticism and a kind of tomboy confidence, marketing the scent as something for a woman who was already in motion rather than waiting to be. Fabergé knew exactly what it had bought: a face, and behind the face a literary family name that lent a commercial perfume a quality of American seriousness. Perfume in that decade sold on association rather than ingredients, and a scent linked to Idaho rivers and a Nobel Prize could price itself accordingly. Fabergé had bought a biography.
The advertisements ran heavily, the fragrance sold, and Margaux's name escaped the fashion pages into general circulation. The June 16, 1975, Time cover presented her among what the magazine called the new beauties, and such placements turn a working model into a public figure overnight. Vogue followed on September 1, calling her the new star of the New York shows, a phrase later applied to half a dozen women but first given to her.
At 21, she had reached a peak her family had not occupied since her grandfather won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The comparison was raised constantly by journalists who could not resist it, and by Margaux herself, who spoke of her grandfather with an ease suggesting she had never found him frightening.
She married Errol Wetson, a New York restaurateur who had helped manage her early career, that same June. The marriage inserted her into a social world of restaurants, nightclubs, and nonstop publicity, and it coincided precisely with her busiest year of work. Friends at the time described a woman moving at a speed that left no room for a seizure medication schedule, or sleep, or the quiet her doctors had recommended since childhood.
She was also, at 21, the highest earner in any room she entered, which reshaped her relationships in ways she was too young to manage. Independence, status, and a public identity all arrived while she was still 21. She spent her earnings the way any 21-year-old spends a fortune: on an apartment, on travel, and on people who were happy to be near her.
From the opposite coast, Hollywood concluded that a face that sold that much perfume could probably sell movie tickets. The script they sent her included a model, a rapist, and a supporting role for a girl who happened to be her younger sister.
Lipstick was released in 1976, directed by Lamont Johnson, and designed from the first shot as a vehicle for a famous face rather than a trained actress. Margaux played a successful model who is raped by her younger sister's music teacher and then seeks justice through a legal system that treats her beauty as evidence against her. Anne Bancroft, an Oscar winner, played the prosecutor, lending the project a legitimacy that the film's subject matter destroyed within two weeks of release.
Mariel Hemingway, 14, played the sister, cast because Margaux suggested her as a favor to a schoolgirl stuck in Idaho. The film arrived amid a cultural argument about violence against women on screen and lost that argument immediately, drawing criticism as exploitation wearing the mask of a courtroom drama. Critics who disliked the film agreed on one point: the younger sister was the only performer who seemed entirely natural on camera.
Exploitation cinema in 1976 operated as a business sector with its own economics, and Lipstick sat awkwardly between that genre and the legal drama it wanted to be. Mariel earned a Golden Globe nomination for her role, and within three years she was working with Woody Allen in Manhattan and receiving an Oscar nomination for it.
Margaux received the reviews of a model asked to act, and she received them publicly at 22 in a film she had brought her sister into. Her modeling work continued, while the acting career she had hoped to build now needed rehabilitation rather than a launch. A single cycle of harsh reviews could reset a career in that era, and hers was reset in the direction of the sister whose name appeared beneath hers in the credits.
Margaux discussed it publicly with a generosity friends found characteristic, praising Mariel's performance and refusing to treat the comparison as an insult. Privately, according to her family's accounts after her death, the reversal wore at her and deepened a depression that had been present since adolescence.
Her marriage to Errol Wetson began collapsing in the same period and ended in divorce in 1978 after three years. Her drinking increased through the late 1970s, much of it at Studio 54, where she was one of the faces the door staff knew well. The club rewarded exactly the behavior her medical history could not tolerate: consecutive nights, free of charge, with photographers waiting outside.
Fabergé, meanwhile, belonged to a moment in advertising that was nearing its end as the business moved toward younger, cheaper faces. Killer Fish, shot in Brazil and released in 1979, was a piranha thriller no one involved claimed was art.
On New Year's Eve 1979, she married a French filmmaker named Bernard Faucher, whose surname also appears in records as Foucher, and left the country. Europe gave her a second chance, and for a while it looked as though she might actually take it.
Bernard Faucher moved her life across the Atlantic at the moment her American career needed somewhere else to be. He was French. He made films, and he stayed away from the New York publicity machine that had spent five years documenting her nightlife with unhelpful precision. They married on the last night of 1979, and the arrangement gave her a European base, a partner in the film business, and thousands of miles between her and Studio 54.
In the early 1980s she lived largely between France and the United States, working in both and appearing far less often in American gossip columns. France gave her a language she did not speak and a calendar no one photographed, and both helped for a while. Her scripts, however, kept arriving from the lower end of the market, where the Lipstick reviews had followed her across the ocean.
Killer Fish, a martial arts comedy released in 1982, was a job an agent accepts for the fee rather than the film. Over the Brooklyn Bridge, released in 1984, was a step up in cast and a modest step in screen time. The Kill Machine, from the same year, was distributed in markets where her name still drew on a poster. Direct-to-video films did not carry the stigma they later would, though they were already a destination for performers whose fame outpaced the quality of their reviews.
The films kept coming, but the audiences kept shrinking. Each one moved her further from where she had been in 1975, and the modeling contracts dwindled at the same rate. Fashion had discovered a new generation. Perfume had moved to different faces, and a woman in her thirties in that profession was classified as history.
Her seizures continued, her depression deepened, and the bulimia that began in adolescence continued without a single public word of acknowledgment. Then came a skiing accident in 1984. The injury stopped her work and her training, and the weight she gained afterward, roughly 75 pounds, stripped her of the one professional advantage the industry had valued in her.
For a woman whose market value was calculated in inches and images, it was a catastrophe that unfolded in front of an audience. The press coverage was merciless in the way the 1980s reserved for the bodies of famous women, with photographs arranged in pairs to maximize the contrast.
Accounts from those years describe her depression worsening markedly. The marriage ended in divorce in 1985, and she emerged at 31 with two failed marriages behind her and a career that had stopped advancing. She returned to the United States without a contract, without a husband, and without the face that had once fronted Time. The family name remained, and she was about to learn its price in a decade that developed an appetite for confession.
American celebrity culture invented the public recovery story in the late 1980s, and Margaux Hemingway was among the first to walk through it. In 1987 she entered the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, for treatment of alcohol addiction. She did not try to hide it. Concealment had never been her nature, unlike the careful reticence her grandfather's later wives spent decades perfecting.
Treatment produced periods of sobriety friends described as genuine, punctuated by relapses the press reported in the tone usually reserved for sports results. Rehabilitation in that decade came with a media cycle, and that cycle rarely brought work with it.
At some point in that period, she agreed to tape a therapy session about her struggle with bulimia and broadcast it on television. The decision is hard to explain decades later; it reads as courage about a stigmatized illness and also as a woman selling her only remaining asset. What is documented is that she spoke about seizures, drinking, eating disorders, and depression while no one else in her field acknowledged any of it. Television had learned that illness makes compelling daytime programming, and it paid guests in exposure. Exposure does not pay rent.
Her family's approach to disclosure ran in an entirely different direction, toward denial, distance, and the maintenance of a legend built on physical courage. Ernest underwent electroconvulsive therapy at the Mayo Clinic in December 1960, in a series of sessions his biographers put at between 10 and 15. He objected to the treatment in a conversation with his friend A. E. Hotchner, telling him that erasing his memory amounted to destroying his capital and putting him out of business. Three more treatment sessions followed in 1961, after which Rochester released him at the end of June, and he reached Ketchum on the 30th. He died two days later, and his family spent years describing it publicly as a gun accident.
Margaux, 35 years and a full generation later, was describing her own illnesses on television by name. The honesty did not earn what she hoped, because the entertainment business of the late 1980s rewarded recovery stories with sympathy rather than employment. She took roles wherever she found them, appeared on talk shows, and relied on shrinking income in a profession that does not remember anyone absent for more than 18 months.
She was 33, and the phrase most often attached to her name in the press had become "former model."
If the field intended to discuss her body publicly, she decided by 1990 that she would at least set the terms of the discussion. The magazine she chose for that argument was the one her grandfather's generation considered a scandal in itself.
Playboy put her on the cover of its May 1990 issue, and she negotiated the terms with unusual precision. She asked the magazine to hire a spiritualist named Zachary Selig as creative director of her feature, a request no one who had appeared on the cover had ever made. The photographs were shot in Belize by Arny Freytag in an environment of water and jungle that matched her old preference for open air over studio. The location was her choice rather than the magazine's, and the pictures reflect it.
At 36, the excess weight was gone and the photographs presented as evidence of a reclaimed body, not a surrender of a career. A family that had spent decades curating an image suited to bullfighting, marlin fishing, and war correspondence now had a granddaughter posing for a men's magazine. Some relatives were reportedly displeased, though the details of those conversations remained private and were never published by anyone involved.
The issue sold as such issues do, very well for the magazine and fleetingly for its subject. Professionally, it changed nothing, because the industries she wanted back had already classified her, and the photographs confirmed the classification. No one in that press cycle seemed interested in the contract she had signed 15 years earlier, the largest ever for a model.
The modeling industry she had helped invent had by then become a vast operation, with contracts far larger than hers and an established hierarchy of names. Its stars worked within the structure the Babe campaign proved viable, protected by management, lawyers, accountants, and long-term brand relationships. Margaux, who arrived first without any of those supports, was appearing in films that went straight to video shelves.
In a Sanctum, released in 1991, was a lurid thriller of the kind the home rental market consumes in volume and forgets on the drive back to the store. Los Angeles, France, and Idaho each held her for stretches during those years, and friends interpreted the restlessness as a search for somewhere she functioned better.
Alternative medicine, spiritual practices, and wellness absorbed more of her attention, and she discussed all three in interviews with genuine conviction. It is easy to mock that outlook from a distance, but doing so obscures what she was actually attempting, which was to live with epilepsy, depression, an eating disorder, and addiction simultaneously. Medicine in the 1990s offered her limited options. Psychiatry carried a stigma her grandfather had encountered at Mayo, and the family record was itself intimidating.
At 37, she stayed sober for stretches, worked whatever job was available, and looked for an adult pattern of life that did not depend on being photographed.
The list her name would later join began in Oak Park, Illinois, in a doctor's house during the winter of 1928. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway practiced medicine in Oak Park, a man of religious conviction and considerable local standing who taught his son to hunt and shoot. In 1928, facing financial difficulty and a physical decline that biographers later attributed partly to a possible case of hereditary hemochromatosis, he ended his own life.
The news reached Ernest on December 6 of that year in New York, where he was with his eldest son, the boy who would become Margaux's father. Accounts from that week suggest he responded to the news with a sentence that now reads like prophecy. He said he would probably go the same way.
Thirty-three years later, in the early hours of July 2, 1961, he did, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. Medical records published in 1991 confirmed what no one outside the family had known. The diagnosis of hemochromatosis was made in the first months of 1961. It was surrounded by decades of heavy drinking, several serious head injuries from car and plane accidents, paranoia, and a depression that defeated every treatment then available. He left the Mayo Clinic convinced the treatment had taken his memory and therefore his profession. For a time afterward, his widow described the death publicly as an accident, and the family's official position took years to align with the coroner's reports.
Later, Ernest's sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also took their own lives, bringing the toll in a single family to four across three generations. Within that family, the deaths were separated by decades rather than centuries, and there were people still alive to remember each one.
Margaux grew up amid all of it in Ketchum, a short distance from the grave, and spoke of her grandfather warmly and without visible awe. Mariel, born after Ernest's death, was the more outspoken, describing a household in which alcoholism, mental illness, and unspoken harm were ordinary conditions of childhood.
Her documentary Running from Crazy, directed by Barbara Kopple and produced by Oprah Winfrey, was built around that argument and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013. The film contains footage Margaux shot years earlier, meaning some of its most direct material about the family came from the sister who died before it was made.
The clinical vocabulary for what was happening in the family arrived far too late to help most of its members. What existed instead was a dictionary of legend. The story the family told itself was about brave men and full lives, and it had no room for a psychiatric ward.
Of everyone who carried the name into the 1990s, Margaux was the most publicly specific in trying to break the pattern. She also spent 20 years demonstrating how hard the pattern was to break.
Being Margaux Hemingway in the 1990s meant managing four conditions that each obstructed the treatment of the other three. The epilepsy diagnosed at eight required regular medication and regular sleep. Alcohol disrupted both, and her freelance film work guaranteed neither. The depression that had accompanied her since adolescence was worsened by the drinking she used to calm it. The bulimia she discussed on television was rooted in a profession that had measured her body since she was 19.
The alcohol addiction itself had been treated at the Betty Ford Center in 1987. It then reappeared in the pattern doctors expect and tabloids describe as weakness. Any one of those conditions would have complicated any career. Combined in a woman whose income depended on her appearance and her availability, they came close to disqualifying her from the only work she knew.
She kept working anyway, a fact that tends to disappear whenever her life is retold as a straight line toward the abyss. Through the early 1990s she accepted film roles, gave interviews, attended events, and pursued projects in a new field: travel and outdoor television.
Her finances contracted over the decade, since the Fabergé money had been earned in the 1970s and spent on a life designed for someone still earning it. Friends described a woman who remained generous with money she no longer really had and who refused to ask for anything from her family's estate. Her movements between Los Angeles, France, and Idaho grew shorter and less expensive as the decade went on.
Her spiritual interests intensified, ranging from nutrition and yoga to the kind of alternative practitioners Los Angeles supplies in abundance. Interviewers found the subject amusing, and their amusement concealed an obvious fact: conventional medicine had not done much for her father's family across three generations. Her grandfather's encounter with psychiatry cost him his memory and then his life. That outcome was part of her inheritance as much as her eyebrows were.
Throughout, she remained one of the few people who carried that name and dared to say publicly that the family had a problem. The candor cost her professionally in a business that prefers its damage old and orderly, and it may also have kept her alive longer than silence would have.
Meanwhile, Mariel's career continued at the level Margaux had briefly occupied and then lost, a fact around which two sisters find it hard to plan a birthday.
In 1995, at 41, living modestly in Santa Monica, she began working on a plan to become a television host. The plan was serious, the employer was reputable, and the content suited a woman who had grown up among rivers and mountains rather than runways.
She began her final year sober, with a promising job and 30 years of medical history that no job could amend.
Margaux Hemingway was scheduled to host Wild Guide, an outdoor adventure series for the Discovery Channel, in 1996. For a woman whose professional identity had frozen in 1975, the program offered something rare: work that paid for competence rather than youth. She had grown up hunting in Idaho beside a father who built his entire life around it, and the subject required no acting and no runway. Discovery wanted a host who could stand in a river and explain it, a description that might fit four people in Los Angeles, and she was one of them.
People who saw her in the first half of that year described someone in better shape than they had witnessed in years. Mariel's husband told People magazine after her death that it had been the best year he had seen her have in years and that she had regained her balance. That assessment came from inside the family and was published immediately after her death, which gives it a weight later accounts lack.
She was also dealing with the ordinary financial reality of a career in its second decade of decline. Her home was a studio apartment in Santa Monica a short walk from the sand, and it contained a woman living carefully rather than lavishly. Friends visited, phones rang, plans were made, and her life that spring had the shape of a life moving toward something.
The series was to be filmed that year, but it never happened, at least not with her standing in the river.
None of the medical facts had changed, and neither had the medication, the seizures, or the depression that had accompanied her since adolescence. Equilibrium in the presence of untreated depression is a fragile arrangement, as doctors understood then and understand far better now. Nothing in the public record suggests she received the kind of sustained psychiatric care her circumstances required.
Over a weekend in late June, the phone stopped being answered, unusual enough that several people grew worried at once. Her friend Judy Sapella went to the apartment on Monday, July 1. What she found there was carried the next morning by every wire service in the country.
No precise date of death could be established, so the autopsy report and California records settled on July 1. Ernest had died on July 2, 1961, which made the date she was found one day short of the 35th anniversary, according to contemporary reports. Some later accounts placed the discovery on the anniversary itself, and the discrepancy was never fully resolved in print. Either way, the coincidence of dates led most newspapers with the covers, the contracts, and the career.
The coroner declined to rule on the cause that week, and the family entered the particular limbo an open investigation creates. News about famous names travels fast, and this news reached an America that had largely stopped following her career.
Wire reports on July 2 identified her as the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway before mentioning that she was a model or an actress, and that she had lived in the public eye since she was 19. Obituaries recalled the Fabergé contract, the Time cover, Lipstick, Studio 54, and the Betty Ford Center, usually in that order, within four paragraphs. Some of those papers gave her age as 41, others as 42, a discrepancy traceable to a disputed birth year and never definitively settled.
In Ketchum, where the family had buried her grandfather, arrangements were made to reserve a plot in the family section of the cemetery. Jack Hemingway, who had spent his life declining to compete with his father's reputation, was 73 and burying his daughter. Mariel was 34, working in an industry that had made her the more successful sister, and has since spoken about how much that death reshaped her understanding of her family.
The public conversation that month did what it always did with this family, reaching immediately for the language of fate. Newspapers published the family history as a list with dates attached, and the word curse appeared in many headlines. The framing was understandable and also lazy, since a curse is a story, while hemochromatosis, alcoholism, and untreated depression are medical diagnoses. The Hemingway family history can be read as an inheritance, in both the genetic and environmental senses, which is how doctors have discussed it in precisely those terms since.
On August 20, seven weeks after the body was found, the Los Angeles County coroner's office announced its finding. The cause of death was acute phenobarbital intoxication, and the death was ruled a suicide, as the Los Angeles Times and wire services reported that week. Phenobarbital is a barbiturate long used to treat seizure disorders, a detail noted quietly in the coverage and almost never commented on.
By the arithmetic newspapers performed within the hour, she became the fifth member of the family across four generations to die by suicide. Her family received the ruling with dismay, and several of them objected to it publicly over the following months. Mariel was among those who resisted the finding for years, and in December 2005 she said on Larry King Live that she had accepted it. Nearly ten years separated the ruling and the acceptance, the most human interval in the entire record.
They buried her in the family cemetery in Ketchum, a few steps from the grandfather whose death had come when she was five. One cemetery in Idaho now holds two graves with the same recorded ending, 35 years and an entire cultural revolution apart.
What she left behind professionally was far larger than her filmography suggests, and all of it was established before her 22nd birthday. One decade turned modeling from piecework into a business with guaranteed income, brand value, and long-term terms. Every cosmetics deal a model signed in the decades afterward was an extension of the arrangement Babe proved workable, and the numbers rose quickly once the ceiling was gone.
Beginnings are rarely profitable for those who go first. The women who benefited most from that structure were the ones who came later, as were the agents who watched what happened to her and wrote protections into contracts. Culturally, the verdict is harder to settle, since Lipstick remains a contested film, attacked in its time as exploitation and studied since as an artifact of 1970s attitudes. It launched Mariel Hemingway's career rather than its star's, and it fixed the sisters in roles they carried through the remaining 20 years of Margaux's life.
The broader legacy lies in the public conversation her family has conducted since her death, which has moved steadily from legend toward medicine. Mariel has spent the following decades speaking about inherited mental illness, addiction, and suicide with a candor her grandfather's generation would have found incomprehensible. Running from Crazy, released in 2013, made that argument in a feature film, addressing the family's history with mental illness and five deaths attributed to suicide across four generations. The film uses footage Margaux shot herself, so her voice is present in the final accounting, even though she died 17 years before the film reached Sundance.
She was the first model paid like a movie star, the first member of the Hemingway family to discuss the family's illnesses on camera, and one of the first famous women of her era to speak openly about eating disorders. All of it came from someone simultaneously managing epilepsy, depression, and addiction within a profession that offered no support for any of them.
The word curse, printed in many headlines in July 1996, describes none of that and explains none of it. The records show a family with a documented hereditary condition, generations of heavy drinking, several members with severe depression, and a mid-century medical system whose best answers were sedatives and electroconvulsive therapy. She was born into that at a time when no one had assembled those patterns into a picture a doctor could treat.
She spent her adult life insisting the pattern existed, which was more than any Hemingway before her had dared to do.
Her last professional project was a television series about nature, filmed in the kind of country her father had taught her to love. The final entry in the film is a single sentence from her family, given to a magazine the week after her death. Mariel's husband, speaking to People immediately afterward, said it had been the best year he had seen Margaux have in years and that she had regained her balance. That came from a relative with nothing to sell, and it remains the most useful thing anyone said publicly about her final months.
It also explains their long resistance to the coroner's finding, because the woman they saw that spring did not resemble the conclusion handed to them in August. Suicide in this particular picture often follows visible improvement rather than the bottom of a depression, a pattern clinical literature has documented for decades. Grief inside a famous family happens in front of an audience, which slows every part of the recovery process.
Public accounts wanted a straight line, so they drew one from a doctor in Oak Park to a novelist in Ketchum to a model in Santa Monica. They drew it as a curse. Curses require no explanation, which is precisely why the word outlasted the medical facts in coverage of famous families.
Those facts arrived over decades: hemochromatosis in her grandfather and possibly her great-grandfather, drinking across four generations, depression in several relatives, and a documented seizure disorder in Margaux herself. Add a career she prized at 19 and discarded at 30, two marriages that ended in divorce, a skiing accident, and a decade of working for little money. The remarkable thing is that she carried all of it publicly and still achieved what she did.
Her older sister Muffet lived with serious mental illness from early adulthood, something the family discussed openly in later years. Mariel spent the following three decades telling audiences that mental illness is a family matter in the fullest and simplest sense of the phrase. If any of this sounds familiar from your own family, local crisis and mental health services exist specifically to have that conversation.
Jack Hemingway died in 1999, three years after his daughter, having spent his adult life in the shadow of an enormous reputation and lived to see one of his children die. Several of them now rest in the Ketchum cemetery, which receives visitors who come for the novelist and leave having read the other headstones.
Changing how a global industry paid women for their images was the professional achievement, and she completed it at an age when most people are finishing college. The other achievement is harder to measure and may be more valuable: breaking a family habit of silence that had lasted three generations required saying the words on camera. She said them anyway, about seizures, drinking, eating, and depression, in a decade when saying such things ended careers. The career ended anyway.
What remains instead is a few thousand photographs taken over six years, and they turn out to explain her better than the coroner's file did. Those images are the part of her that survives without argument, and they explain the 1970s better than most documentaries manage. A tall young woman with thick eyebrows and a broad jaw, photographed outdoors, looking straight into the lens with an expression suggesting she is about to say something unhelpful to the client.
She is the reason a generation of American girls stopped using tweezers, and the reason a perfume called Babe sold the way it did for several seasons. Her peak ran roughly from 1973 to 1979, and the contract she signed during it restructured the economics of an entire profession, so that every model who followed negotiated from a floor she established without ever collecting a penny in royalties for it.
Her acting career gave her one film of cultural significance in which she was outshone by a 14-year-old, followed by a long record of work that covered her living costs. Two marriages ended without public rancor, and neither husband exploited her afterward. Her illnesses were present from adolescence onward and were treated piecemeal by a medical system that had no coordinated approach to any of them.
The Los Angeles County coroner ruled her death a suicide that August, after toxicology results for a woman found in a rented room near the beach. The coincidence of dates has overshadowed her obituary ever since, a strange fate for someone who consistently refused to be a symbol for anyone.
What that coincidence obscures is a woman who was working, recovering, and about to begin a job she wanted, and who was held in high regard by those close to her. Depression is a medical condition with its own timetable, and that timetable ignores the orderly sequence newspaper articles prefer. Her family arrived at that understanding late, as most families do, and the first to arrive were the women who spoke publicly.
Margaux was not the first of them on daytime television in the 1980s, describing an eating disorder while the fashion press still pretended the condition did not exist in their industry. Between them, the sisters turned America's most famous literary family from a legend of physical courage into a case study in inherited illness.
Six years at the top cost her 20 years of consequences. A girl named after a bottle of Château Margaux was paid a million dollars for her face at 21, before anyone in her profession was paid that way. She was 42 when it all ended in a rented studio overlooking the Pacific, in a city that had stopped calling.
The headstone in Ketchum records a name America once used to sell perfume, while the cemetery it sits in records four generations of the same conversation no one in the family knew how to have. Margaux Hemingway signed the first million-dollar modeling contract in history at 21 and spent the next 20 years being described as a former model.