She was six feet tall in her bare feet—five foot twelve, she'd say—with such a remarkable face and such a radiant presence and such an alluring name that when she walked into a room, conversation left it. If she shook your hand, you might think your wrist was going to snap. If she knew you well enough she might call you "boopsie" and haul you off on a hike, or a trip to India; of course, with her long legs came great lungs, and you didn't hike with her, you gasped for breath behind her. When she laughed, it came out big and childlike and innocent. Her looks were so distinctive that when she went to a club and left her purse at home, she could reassure an exasperated companion, "But I don't need any I.D. I have my eyebrows."
She started right at the top with the first million-dollar contract ever awarded a model. She wasn't even out of high school. She asked for none of it. She was just a wide-eyed bronco-riding speed-skiing adventure-loving kid from Idaho who was spotted by Errol Wetson, an entrepreneur who became her first husband, who knew someone who knew people. "No one," her father said, "could take a bad picture of her."
On July 6, 1996, her ashes were buried in Ketchum, Idaho, in the shadow of a memorial to her grandfather Ernest Hemingway, arguably one of the twentieth century's most celebrated literary figures. Like her famous forebear, Margaux Hemingway took her own life--the fifth to do so in four generations of Hemingways, and on the eve of the thirty-fifth anniversary of her grandfather's death.
The coroner's report ascribed her death to "acute phenobarbital intoxication." Her many friends have publicly voiced their disbelief. They contend that any overdose had to have been accidental; that she took the drug for her epilepsy, with which she had been afflicted since age seven; and that it would be just like Margaux to forget she had taken one dose and then down another. But the bottle of drugs found by her bedside was not prescribed. And the coroner's report put her body's level of the drug well beyond the therapeutic range.
What made Margaux Hemingway take her life is a great mystery to those who knew her. Hours before she died she was with a longtime friend, standing at a microphone in front of 500 people and singing her well-toned lungs out at one of Hollywood's hippest restaurants, Cicada; she longed to sing the blues like her friend Millie Kaiserman. After two decades during which her career had plummeted she was forced to declare personal bankruptcy, take on sexually kinky B-movie roles, and endorse a psychic hotline--it seemed to be on the rebound. She was doing work that was socially as well as personally meaningful as moderator of Wild Guide, a TV series about endangered animals. (The 13 episodes she shot can be seen on the Animal Planet cable network.)
But the kinds of things that make people commit suicide are not always visible to the naked eye. Like an underground spring, a vein of vulnerability can run through a life and claim it in a bad second. Families, too, have unspoken ways of designating members to live out their legacies, and no one could dispute that a legacy of doom hovered over the Hemingway clan the way the Sawtooth Mountains dominate the Idaho landscape where three generations of Hemingways frolicked, where Ernest blew his failing brains out, and where Margaux's father, Jack, the oldest of Ernest's sons, set up house, just down the road from Sun Valley.
By all accounts, Ernest Hemingway was a tormented man, much like his father before him, never at ease with himself. Drinking, insomnia, violent outbursts, a sense of dread, perpetual movement and traveling, and great guilt over his own roguish behavior--four wives, many liaisons--marked his personal life. Biographer Kenneth Lynn reports that by the late 1940s, when Papa, as he had long called himself, was in his late forties, "fantasies of suicide thronged his mind, intermingled with fears of insanity."
Helped by his huge physical presence, Hemingway had concocted the myth of his own toughness. "What is more likely the truth of his own odyssey," Norman Mailer has written, "is that he struggled with his cowardice and against a secret lust to suicide all his life, that his inner landscape was a nightmare." Although his own depression wasn't formally diagnosed until his last, paranoid days, because getting professional help went against the Hemingway persona, mental instability and manic-depressive personalities inhabit virtually every branch of the family tree; indeed, Margaux's older sister, Joan, whose nickname is Muffet, has been in and out of mental institutions since age 16.
It is undoubtedly a mistake to let a final act speak for a whole lifetime, but the death of Ernest Hemingway still unconsciously reverberates, despite the family's avoidance of the subject. Margaux could almost never be engaged in a discussion of her family history, friends said. Above all, the Hemingways are people of action; they do not give themselves over to introspection or emotions.
