Although she never talked about it—her friends say she was always vague about a lot of her personal life, yet she would go on Geraldo Rivera and talk about her bulimia or epilepsy—Margaux had few options other than to hammer away at a performance career. Like Mariel after her, she never finished high school. Dyslexia made reading and math difficult, and at 17 a modeling career probably looked even bigger than the Idaho sky. Her parents modestly protested. Her father, after all, had never completed college and felt that the lack of a degree kept him from earning a living at anything other than sales, for which he felt ill-suited; he has spent most of his adult life fly-fishing, supporting his family on income derived from foreign rights to his father's works. Nevertheless, her parents did little to stop her from pursuing a modeling career.
If her father believed that the lack of a college degree was what kept him from succeeding, what must his daughter have felt about career alternatives given her lack of a high school diploma? Such a deficiency would matter little in an acting career that was well established or deemed to be based on exceptional talent, but that's not the position Margaux found herself in. At 41, with the years beginning to make visible dents in her looks, the perceived lack of other options must have weighed heavily on her. "I think that's what she was searching for in these last few years," one of her close friends, Gigi Gaston, a screenwriter, says. "A way to leave Hollywood. To find something else to do."
* Her family. Like everyone in her family, Margaux was a fabulous outdoorsperson. Like them, she could ski, fish, and shoot. But she felt little sense of emotional connection to her family Her mother, Puck, died in 1988 after a long illness. Jack remarried, and there was not much communication between father and daughter, many friends said. Of all her family members, she was closest to Mariel, and she wanted more contact with her.
Margaux's epilepsy, and especially its timing, may have played a subtle role in distancing her from her parents. Her seizures first manifested themselves in 1962, when she was seven, shortly after her grandfather died. The family was still reeling from the tragedy and the stigma of suicide. Make no mistake about it, suicide was a stigma—the family had to settle for giving Papa, in the words of his youngest son, "a semi-Christian burial, omitting some of the service as is required for those who still have an option."
It's possible, family therapists suggest, that Margaux's epilepsy burdened the family in a new and terrifying way; more than 30 years later, epilepsy still carries with it significant shame. It's a mark of Margaux's courage that as an adult she publicly revealed her affliction and worked with epilepsy organizations to remove the stigma. Perhaps as a result of the diagnosis, her parents were awash with humiliation and guilt, and that unwittingly led them to emotionally detach themselves from their middle daughter.
Or perhaps Margaux's highly unpredictable condition caused her parents to withdraw their emotional investment in her. They had already lost one child, a son, before Margaux's birth and they may have needed to protect themselves against further disappointment. Besides, there were other things for them to contend with.
On the day of Ernest's funeral, Margaux's father received another shock: he and his brothers had been cut out of the will; no one knows why. Yet Jack's existence depended on his expected inheritance. A legal challenge was now being mounted.
And Mariel had just been born. She arrived prematurely, four months after the suicide. The pregnancy had been a potentially dangerous Rh-incompatible one, Puck's fourth, and each successive pregnancy increased the risk of harm to the baby. Margaux's father was preoccupied with what he felt was the "delicate" health of his wife. Mariel, her father recalls, "soon became the focus of everyone's attention."
Margaux's father is, by his own description, a veritable model of emotional detachment. He's the first to admit that when the going gets tough, he goes fishing, often disappearing for days on end. Moreover, around the time Margaux developed seizures, her father had still another preoccupation. He was deeply involved in trying to recover for his mother, Ernest's first wife, a beloved painting, Miro's Farm, which he'd grown up with. His mother had received it as a gift from her husband and later lent it to him. It had, through devious means, fallen into the possession of Papa's widow, his fourth wife, the one least liked by all of his sons.
Margaux once told an interviewer that when growing up, she thought her family had forgotten about her. She ascribed it to being the middle child.
Unable to feel connected with her family, she tried like hell to connect with God. Her intense need for a sense of belonging became a spiritual quest. "She was trying to fill this enormous hole inside of her," one friend recalled. "She'd go off to Hawaii to study with a healer. She'd go off to India and study with different gurus." And in Santa Monica she continued to search at the Agape Church of Religious Science. This, indeed, was her own movable feast.
Her spiritual preoccupation made her, one friend says, "the hardest person to ground. She was out there. Half of her mind seemed always to be elsewhere." Unfortunately, her friend reports, "so many of her spiritual gurus were charlatans. She was a bit gullible. There was a side of her that was a little too desperate to get spiritual fulfillment."
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