In the summer of 1975, the most photographed face in America belonged to a six-foot-tall girl from Portland, Oregon, named after a bottle of French wine. Fabergé paid her one million dollars to promote a perfume called Babe, a sum no model had ever received before. The industry decided in a single season that she represented an entirely new kind of beauty.
*Time* put her on its cover that June. *Vogue* followed in September, calling her the new New York supermodel. *Cosmopolitan*, *Elle*, and *Harper’s Bazaar* lined up behind them.
Almost no one mentioned that she had suffered her first seizure at age eight, that she struggled with dyslexia, or that the family name that opened every door in Manhattan had already lost three 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 hadn’t heard from her all weekend drove to her studio apartment near the beach in Santa Monica.
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, known to everyone as “Puck.” Her parents drank a bottle of Château Margaux the night she was conceived, a detail they happily passed on to their daughter, who responded as a teenager 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 had spent a decade plucking out of existence, and a height of six feet that made most of her contemporaries look like miniatures. Bookings came quickly. Covers came faster. Fabergé decided she was worth one million dollars as the face of a perfume called Babe, the largest sum ever offered to a model. She was 21 years old.
That June, she married Errol Wetson, a New York restaurant owner. Wedding photos show a young woman who appeared to have arranged her entire life within 12 months. Hollywood came 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 critical reviews went almost entirely to the younger sister.
Studio 54 absorbed her early, which fashion journalism considered glamour. Her doctors would have called it a scheduling problem.
Behind the Fabergé campaign and the Studio 54 photographs was a medical history that fashion journalism had no vocabulary for. Seizures since age eight. Dyslexia. Bulimia. Teenage alcoholism. Depression that ran through her father’s family as steadily as the family inheritance. Within four years, the perfume contract ended, the marriage ended, and the film industry quietly reclassified her from discovery to curiosity.
Ernest Hemingway ended his life in Idaho in 1961. Ernest’s father had done the same in 1928 after a physical decline that may have had a genetic cause. America bought the perfume, the covers, and the wine-colored name without ever asking what came inside the bottle.
At eight, Margaux had her first seizure, a diagnosis that in the early 1960s carried a stigma close to shame and a treatment regimen based on sedatives. She also had dyslexia in an era when the condition was usually misunderstood 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 thirty years and explain much about why she chose a profession that required no reading at all.
She spent much of her adolescence in Ketchum, Idaho, where her grandfather had died and was buried. A short drive separated the house from the grave. Visits were made. She knew how he died long before she had any framework for understanding it.
In her late teens, she was tall, striking, bored by school, and possessed of a frankness adults found either charming or unsettling, depending on the hour. She was drinking by then. She realized her family name 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 provided by her surname.
New York was in the middle of replacing its beauty ideal, and photographers were tired of small, pretty, symmetrical faces. She was none of those things, and that turned out to be the entire commercial pitch. Idaho had produced a girl who read with difficulty, drank early, and photographed like no one in Manhattan.
The fashion industry 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 the side door of social connections rather than the usual cycle of tests and test shoots. Physically, she had the height, the wide-set eyes, the jaw, the eyebrows that refused taming, and the shoulders that made clothes look exactly as designers had drawn them. Commercially, her family gave her a name that guaranteed a magazine a headline before the film was developed.
Photographers described her as someone who brought charm to a set. In a profession built on long hours and short tempers, that had real commercial value. Editors chose her because she photographed like weather: changeable and slightly suspect. Clients requested her because her family name lifted newsstand sales.
At 20, she was earning serious money and spending it in a city designed to make that effortless. She rented an apartment in Manhattan, traveled constantly, and began appearing in gossip columns as a permanent fixture of a nightlife that would soon have a permanent address on West 54th Street.
Missing from all of this was any professional apparatus designed to protect a young woman with epilepsy, dyslexia, and a family history of depression from the pressures of that particular life. No one at those magazines asked to see her medical history. She was not about to offer it. She began drinking, and by her own later account, using drugs at the social gatherings that were part of the job. The work rewarded her presence regardless. Her seizure disorder made the equation worse. The medication that controlled it and the alcohol that calmed her nerves were not meant to mix in the bloodstream.
Fabergé came with a contract that rewrote the economics of the entire profession with a single signature. One million dollars to be the face of Babe, a sum no model had ever been paid for an endorsement. The trade press covered it as the beginning of a new era, not merely a business deal. Until then, a model worked for a daily rate that was constantly renegotiated, with no minimum wage and no share in the campaign that brought her fame. Babe replaced that system with something closer to movie star studio contracts.
The campaign itself was built around athleticism and a kind of tomboy confidence, marketing the perfume as something for the woman who acts rather than waits. Fabergé knew exactly what it had bought: a face, and behind that face, a literary family name that gave a commercial fragrance an air of American seriousness.
The *Time* cover of June 16, 1975, presented Margaux among what the magazine called the new beauties. *Vogue* followed on September 1, calling her the star of New York’s new shows. At 21, she had reached a peak her family had not occupied since her grandfather won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The comparison was constantly raised by journalists who couldn’t 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 that same June. The marriage inserted her into a social world of restaurants, nightclubs, and relentless publicity. It coincided precisely with her busiest working year. Friends at the time described a woman moving at a speed that left no room for seizure medication schedules, sleep, or the calm 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.
Hollywood concluded that a face selling that much perfume could probably sell movie tickets. The script they sent her featured 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, designed from the first frame to showcase a famous face rather than a professional actress. Margaux played a successful model raped by her younger sister’s music teacher, then seeking justice through a legal system that treated her beauty as evidence against her.
Anne Bancroft, an Oscar winner, played the prosecutor. Mariel Hemingway, age 14, played the sister, cast because Margaux suggested her as a favor to a schoolgirl stuck in Idaho. The film arrived amid a cultural debate about violence against women on screen and lost that debate immediately, criticized as exploitation wearing the mask of courtroom drama. Critics who disliked the film agreed on one point: the younger sister was the only actress who looked entirely natural on camera.
Mariel received a Golden Globe nomination for her role. Within three years she was working with Woody Allen on *Manhattan* and receiving an Oscar nomination for it. Margaux received reviews for a model asked to act, publicly, at 22, in a film she had brought her sister into.
Her modeling work continued while her hoped-for acting career now needed rehabilitation rather than launch. One cycle of harsh reviews was enough to 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 spoke about it publicly with a generosity her friends found characteristic, praising Mariel’s performance and refusing to treat the comparison as an insult. Privately, according to family accounts after her death, the reversal affected her deeply and worsened a depression that had existed since her teens.
Her marriage to Errol Wetson began collapsing around the same time, ending in divorce in 1978 after three years. Her alcohol consumption increased through the late 1970s, much of it at Studio 54, where she was one of the faces the doors knew well. The club rewarded precisely the behavior her medical history could not tolerate: endless nights, free drinks, photographers waiting outside.
Meanwhile, Fabergé belonged to a moment in advertising that was ending as the industry moved toward younger, cheaper faces. *Killer Fish*, shot in Brazil and released in 1979, was a piranha thriller no one involved claimed as art. On New Year’s Eve 1979, she married a French filmmaker named Bernard Fauché and left the country.
Europe gave her a second chance, and for a while it seemed she might actually take it. The marriage gave her a European base, a film industry partner, 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, appearing far less often in American gossip columns. France gave her a language she didn’t speak and a calendar no one photographed, both of which helped for a while.
Still, her scripts kept arriving from the lower end of the market. *They Call Me Bruce*, a martial arts comedy from 1982, was a job an agent accepts for the fee, not the film. *Over the Brooklyn Bridge*, from 1984, was a step up in cast and a modest step in screen time. *Killer Instinct*, from the same year, was distributed in markets where her name still had pull on posters.
The films continued, but audiences shrank. Each one moved her further from where she had been in 1975, and modeling contracts shrank at the same rate. Fashion had discovered a new generation. Perfume moved to different faces. A woman in her thirties in that profession was classified as history.
Her seizures continued. Her depression deepened. The bulimia that began in her teens continued without a single public acknowledgment. Then came the skiing accident in 1984. The injury stopped her work and training, and the weight she gained afterward, about 75 pounds, took away the only professional advantage the industry had valued in her. For a woman whose market value was calculated in inches and images, it was a catastrophe witnessed by an audience. Coverage was merciless in the way the 1980s reserved for famous women’s bodies, with photos arranged in pairs for maximum contrast.
Accounts of those years describe her depression worsening noticeably. The marriage ended in divorce in 1985. She emerged at 31 with two failed marriages and a career that had stopped advancing. She returned to the United States with no contract, no husband, and no face that had once graced the cover of *Time*. The family name remained, and she was about to learn its price in a decade when the public appetite for confession was growing.
American celebrity culture invented the public recovery story in the late 1980s, and Margaux Hemingway was among the first to go through it. In 1987, she entered the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, for alcoholism treatment. She did not try to hide it. Secrecy was never her nature. Treatment produced periods of sobriety her friends described as real, punctuated by relapses the press reported with a tone usually reserved for sports scores.
At some point during that period, she agreed to record a therapy session about her bulimia and broadcast it on television. Decades later, the decision is hard to interpret. It reads as both courage toward a stigmatized illness and 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.
Her family’s approach to disclosure ran in a completely different direction: denial, distance, and the preservation of a myth built on physical courage. Ernest had undergone electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic in December 1960, a series of sessions biographers estimate at 10 to 15. He objected to the treatment in a conversation with his friend A.E. Hotchner, saying that erasing his memory amounted to destroying his capital and putting him out of work. Three more sessions followed in 1961. Rochester released him at the end of June. He arrived in Ketchum on the 30th. He died two days later. His family spent years publicly describing it as a firearm accident.
Margaux, 35 years and a full generation later, was describing her own illnesses on television by their explicit names. Honesty did not pay as she had hoped, because the entertainment industry of the late 1980s rewarded recovery stories with sympathy, not employment. She accepted roles wherever she found them, appeared on talk shows, and lived on a shrinking income in a profession that does not remember those who disappear for more than a year and a half. She was 33, and the phrase most often attached to her name in the press was “former model.”
If the industry was going to discuss her body publicly, she decided by 1990 that she would at least set the terms of that discussion. The magazine she chose for the argument was the one her grandparents’ generation considered scandal itself. *Playboy* put her on the cover of its May 1990 issue. She negotiated the terms with unusual precision, requesting that the magazine hire a spiritualist named Zachary Selig as creative director for her feature, a request no cover subject had ever made. The photos were taken in Belize by Arny Freytag in an environment of water and jungle, matching her old preference for open spaces over studios. At 36, the weight was gone, and the photographs presented as proof of reclaiming her body, not surrender to her career.
A family that had spent decades cultivating an image suited to bullfighting, marlin fishing, and war correspondents now had a granddaughter posing for a men’s magazine. Some relatives were reportedly upset, though the details of those conversations remained private. Professionally, it changed nothing, because the industries she wanted to return to had already classified her, and the photos confirmed that classification.
In 1991, *In a Sanctum* was an erotic thriller of the type the home rental market consumed heavily and forgot on the way back to the store. She divided her time among Los Angeles, France, and Idaho during those years. Friends interpreted the restlessness as a search for a place where she worked better. Alternative therapy, spiritual practices, and wellness absorbed more of her attention, and she discussed all three in interviews with genuine conviction. It is easy to mock this from a distance, but it obscures what she was actually trying to do: live with epilepsy, depression, an eating disorder, and addiction simultaneously. Medicine in the 1990s offered her limited options.
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 respectable local standing who taught his son hunting and shooting. In 1928, facing financial difficulties and declining health that biographers later attributed partly to possible hereditary hemochromatosis, he took 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 later become Margaux’s father. Accounts of that week record his response as a sentence that now reads like prophecy. He said he would probably meet the same fate.
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. A diagnosis of hemochromatosis was made in the first months of 1961. That diagnosis 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 career.
For a time afterward, his widow publicly described the death as an accident. The family’s official position took years to align with the coroner’s report. Later, Ernest’s sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also died by suicide, bringing the number of victims in one family to four across three generations. Within this family, those deaths were separated by decades, not centuries, and there were people still alive who remembered each one.
Margaux grew up amid all of this in Ketchum, a short distance from the grave, speaking of her grandfather with warmth and no visible awe. Mariel, born after Ernest’s death, was the most outspoken, describing a home where alcoholism, mental illness, and unspoken harm were ordinary childhood conditions. Her documentary *Running from Crazy*, directed by Barbara Kopple and produced by Oprah Winfrey’s network, was built around that argument and premiered at Sundance in 2013. The film contains footage Margaux shot years earlier, meaning some of the film’s most direct material about the family came from the sister who died before its production.
The clinical vocabulary for what was happening in the family arrived too late to help most of its members. Instead, the available dictionary was mythology. The story the family told itself was about brave men and full lives, with no place for a psychiatric hospital. Of everyone who carried that name through the 1990s, Margaux was the most publicly specific in trying to break that pattern. She also spent 20 years proving how difficult breaking it was.
Being Margaux Hemingway in the 1990s meant managing four conditions, each of which interfered with the treatment of the other three. The epilepsy diagnosed at age eight required regular medication and regular sleep. Alcohol disrupted both, while her freelance film work guaranteed neither. The depression that had followed 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 evaluated her by body measurements since she was 19. The alcoholism itself had been treated at Betty Ford in 1987. Then it returned in the pattern doctors expect and headlines call weakness.
Any one of these conditions would have complicated any career. Combined in a woman whose income depended on her appearance and availability, they came close to eliminating her from the only work she knew. She kept working anyway, a fact that tends to fade 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 the new field of travel and outdoor television programming.
Her finances shrank over the decade. 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 refused to ask anything from her family’s funds. Her moves between Los Angeles, France, and Idaho became shorter and less expensive as the decade wore on. Her spiritual interests intensified, from nutrition and yoga to the kind of alternative practitioners Los Angeles supplies in abundance. Interviewers found the subject amusing, and their amusement hid an obvious fact: conventional medicine had not done much for her father’s family across three generations. Her grandfather’s encounter with psychiatry had cost him his memory and then his life. That outcome was as much a part of her inheritance as her eyebrows.
All along, she remained one of the few people carrying that name who dared to say publicly that the family had a problem. That frankness cost her professionally in an industry that prefers its damages old and tidy. It may also be why she lived as long as she did. Meanwhile, Mariel’s career continued at the level Margaux had briefly occupied and then lost, which is a difficult thing for two sisters to plan a birthday around.
In 1995, at 41, living modestly in Santa Monica, she began working on a plan to become a television presenter. The plan was serious, the employer reputable, and the content suited a woman raised among rivers and mountains rather than on modeling platforms. She began her final year sober, with a promising job, and 30 years of medical history that no job could modify.
Margaux Hemingway was scheduled to host *Wild Jaig*, an outdoor adventure series for the Discovery Channel, in 1996. For a woman whose professional identity had been frozen in 1975, the show offered something rare: a job that paid for competence rather than youth. She had grown up fishing in Idaho beside a father who had built his entire life around it. The subject required no acting and no runway. Discovery wanted a host who could stand in a river and explain it, a description that applied to perhaps 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 condition than they had seen in years. Mariel’s husband told *People* magazine after her death that year was the best he had seen her in years, that she had regained her balance. That assessment came from inside the family and was published immediately after her death, giving it weight that 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 within walking distance of the sand. It contained a woman living carefully rather than extravagantly. Friends visited. Phones rang. Plans were made. Her life that spring had the shape of a life moving toward something.
The series was scheduled to shoot that year. It never happened, at least not with her standing in the river. None of the medical facts had changed. The medication, the seizures, the depression that had followed her since adolescence all remained. Balance 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 ongoing psychiatric care her condition required.
Over a late June weekend, the phone stopped being answered. That was unusual enough to alarm several people at once. Her friend Judy Sabella went to the apartment on Monday, July 1. What she found there was reported the following morning by every news agency in the country. No exact date of death could be determined, so the autopsy report and California records settled on July 1. Ernest had died on July 2, 1961, making the date of discovery one day before 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 to lead with the covers, the contracts, and the career.
The coroner declined to determine a cause that week, and the family entered the particular limbo created by an open investigation file. Celebrity news travels fast, and this news reached an America that had largely stopped following her career. Agency reports on July 2 identified her as Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter before mentioning she was a model or actress, noting she had lived in the spotlight 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.
In Ketchum, where the family had buried her grandfather, arrangements were made for a plot in the family section of the cemetery. Jack Hemingway, who had spent his life refusing 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.
Public discourse that month did what it always did with this family: it reached directly for the language of fate. Newspapers published the family history as a list with dates attached. The word “curse” appeared in many headlines. That framing was understandable but also lazy. A curse is just a story. 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 exactly how physicians have discussed it since.
On August 20, seven weeks after the body was discovered, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office announced its finding. The cause of death was acute phenobarbital poisoning, 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 that appeared quietly in the reports and received almost no comment. By the calculations newspapers made 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 many of them objected publicly in the months that followed. Mariel was among those who resisted the finding for years. In December 2005, on *Larry King Live*, she said she had accepted it. Nearly ten years separated the ruling and the acceptance, the most humane period in the entire record.
They buried her in the family cemetery in Ketchum, a few steps from the grandfather whose death came when she was five. One cemetery in Idaho now held two graves with the same recorded end, separated by 35 years and an entire cultural revolution.
What she left behind professionally was far larger than her filmography suggests, and all of it was established before her 22nd birthday. One contract transformed modeling from piecework into a trade with guaranteed income, brand value, and long-term terms. Every cosmetics deal a model signed in subsequent decades extended the arrangement Babe proved viable, and the numbers rose quickly once the ceiling was gone. Beginnings are rarely profitable for those who make them first. The women who benefited most from that structure came after her, as did the agents who watched what happened to her and wrote protections into their contracts.
Culturally, the verdict is harder. *Lipstick* remains a controversial film, attacked in its time as exploitation and studied since as an artifact of 1970s attitudes. The film launched Mariel Hemingway’s career rather than its star’s, fixing the sisters in roles they occupied for the remaining 20 years of Margaux’s life.
The broader legacy lies in the conversation her family has conducted publicly since her death, which has moved steadily from myth toward medicine. Mariel spent the following decades speaking about inherited mental illness, addiction, and suicide with a frankness her grandparents’ generation would have found incomprehensible. *Running from Crazy*, released in 2013, made that argument at feature length, addressing the family’s history of 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 wages comparable to movie stars, the first Hemingway to discuss the family’s illnesses on camera, and among the first famous women of her era to speak publicly about eating disorders. All of that came from someone simultaneously managing epilepsy, depression, and addiction within a profession that offered no support for any of these conditions.
The word “curse,” printed in many headlines in July 1996, describes none of that and explains nothing about it. The records show a family with a documented genetic condition, generations of heavy drinking, several members with severe depression, and a mid-century medical system whose best solutions were sedatives and electroshock. She was born into that at a time when no one had yet assembled those patterns into a picture a doctor could work with. She spent her adult life insisting the pattern existed, which was more than any Hemingway had dared before her.
Her final professional project was a nature television series, to be shot in the kind of country her father had taught her to love. The last entry in the film is a single sentence from her family, given to a magazine in the week after her death. Mariel’s husband, speaking to *People* in the immediate aftermath, said that year had been the best he had seen Margaux in years, that she had regained her balance. That came from a relative with nothing to sell, and that testimony remains the most useful thing anyone has said publicly about her final months. It also explains the family’s long resistance to the coroner’s finding, because the woman they saw that spring did not resemble the finding presented to them in August. Suicide often comes precisely after an apparent improvement, not at the bottom of depression, a pattern clinical literature has documented for decades.
Grieving inside a famous family happens before an audience, which slows every part of the process. Public narratives 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 exactly why they persist in coverage of famous families long after medical facts emerge.
Those facts arrived over decades. Hemochromatosis in the grandfather and possibly the great-grandfather. Drinking across four generations. Depression in numerous relatives. A documented seizure disorder in Margaux herself. Add a profession that valued her at 19 and discarded her at 30, two marriages ending in divorce, a skiing accident, and a decade of low-paid work. The remarkable thing is that she endured all of it publicly and still achieved what she achieved.
Her older sister Muffet lived with serious mental illness from early adulthood, a matter the family discussed openly in the years that followed. Mariel spent the subsequent three decades telling audiences that mental illness is a family matter in every sense of the word. 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 bury one of his children. Many of them now rest in the Ketchum cemetery, which receives visitors who come for the novelist and leave after reading the other stones.
Changing the way a global industry paid women for their images was the professional achievement, completed at an age when most people are finishing college. The other achievement is harder to measure and perhaps 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, which turn out to explain her better than the coroner’s file ever did.
Those photographs are the part of her that survives without argument, and they explain the 1970s better than most documentaries. A tall young woman with thick eyebrows and a wide jaw, photographed outdoors, looking directly into the lens with an expression suggesting she was 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 lasted roughly from 1973 to 1979. The contract she signed during that period restructured the economy of an entire profession, so that every model who came after her negotiated from a foundation she laid without receiving a penny in royalties for it. The acting profession gave her one film of cultural significance in which a 14-year-old outperformed her, followed by a long record of work that paid the bills. Two marriages ended without public rancor, and neither husband exploited her afterward.
Her illnesses existed from adolescence onward and were treated piecemeal by a medical system with 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 dominated her obituaries ever since, a strange fate for someone who always refused to be a symbol for anyone. What that coincidence hides is a woman who was working, sober, and about to start a job she wanted, held in high regard by those closest to her. Depression is a medical condition with its own timeline, and that timeline ignores the tidy order that newspaper articles prefer.
Her family arrived at that realization late, as most families do, and the first to grasp it were the women who spoke publicly. Margaux was among the first in the 1980s, on daytime television, describing an eating disorder while fashion journalism still pretended the condition did not exist in their field. Between them, the sisters turned America’s most famous literary family from a myth 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 one million dollars for her face at 21, before anyone in her profession had been paid such a sum. 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. The cemetery that contains it 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.