What killed Margaux Hemingway?

What makes the life and death of Margaux Hemingway so compelling is that this beautiful woman had many serious problems and she met them all with a brave face. She came from a family whose struggles, both public and private, belong to us as much as to her because her grandfather shaped many of us, too--influencing not only the way we write but the way many men see themselves and act. Generations of Americans (and especially Papa's three sons) grew up hoping to be Hemingway heroes.

What Margaux Hemingway inherited in her genes and what vulnerabilities—styles of coping, unspoken beliefs about the future—she acquired in more subtle ways, perhaps even through a kind of emotional abandonment, will never be known for sure. This much can be said: it must have been an awful burden because it overtook a lifetime of personal bravery. In this she was truly Ernest's granddaughter.

More likely no one thing killed Margaux Hemingway but, as with her forebears, suicide exerted a lifelong tug and triumphed in a dark moment that might have passed had it not presented itself toward the anniversary of the Big Death, when its gravitational pull is greatest. Here are some of the many factors that may have weighed her down:

* Her age. At 41, Margaux was at the stage of life when people begin to take stock of themselves, to confront their own expectations. Twice married and twice divorced, living solo, she was still, in many ways, in an unformed, unsettled phase of life.

Much speculation holds that she envied and resented her younger sister Mariel for her success, most recently as a TV star. But siblings always measure themselves against each other. Margaux, her friends say, didn't have a resentful bone in her body Most likely, she didn't begrudge Mariel her success—not just as an actress but in marrying stably and having a family of her own. Rather, Mariel's success was a reflecting pool in which she saw only her own deficiency, and felt disappointment in herself for failing to meet her own, and perhaps others', expectations.

"She knew her name was Hemingway," says close friend Stuart Sundlun, a New York financier and her ex-fiance. "It was more other people's trip than hers. She was working hard to be Margaux. She needed to do a good job for herself."

Moreover, Margaux was aging at the margins of a profession that applauds women for what they look like and tends to ignore them after they reach their forties. She was not an accomplished enough actress who could switch to character parts. She had once tried to make a comeback by posing nude for Playboy. She was still trying to obtain roles that capitalized on physical appearance. And hers was inevitably, visibly changing.

"When your looks begin to change and that's primarily what you were known for, what else do you have to base your self-esteem on?" observes psychologist Vivian Diller, Ph.D., of New York, herself a former model. "When your friends, and your younger sister, seem to be filling their lives up with career and family, and you don't have either, you can't blow yourself up anymore by how pretty you look or by going to the next party. You need to find something inside." Sadly, like many models, "her inner self probably never developed that much."

If she couldn't hold back the clock, she could try to exert fierce control over her body. What better proof is there that a model-actress isn't "losing it" than if she at least remains thin. The bulimia that Margaux had battled on and off since adolescence seems to have staged a comeback. "Weight was something she was always concerned about," a close friend says. "She went up and down." The same friend says she had recently noticed Margaux's body: "When she was standing in my kitchen; it seemed she was a little too thin."