Margaux Hemingway: A Life of Glamour and Tragedy
Updated: Oct 6
“I was a potato from Idaho,” Margaux Hemingway once said. It’s a funny line from a woman who, at 21, had a million-dollar perfume contract and her face on magazine covers around the world. It also hints at the odd thing about her fame. She never quite seemed to believe it belonged to her.
Her story is often told as a curse, the fifth Hemingway to die by suicide in four generations. That’s true as far as it goes, but it flattens her. Margaux was funny, restless and fiercely spirited, and she spent much of her life trying to work out who she was underneath an enormous name.
Quick Answers
• Who was Margaux Hemingway? A model and actress, born in 1954, and the granddaughter of the novelist Ernest Hemingway.
• Why was she famous? In 1975 she signed a $1 million deal to front Fabergé’s Babe perfume, which The New Yorker called the largest advertising contract ever involving a female personality.
• When did she die? She was found in her Santa Monica apartment on 1 July 1996, aged 42.
• What did the coroner say? That she died of acute phenobarbital intoxication, a drug she took for epilepsy. Many friends believed it was accidental.
• Where is she buried? In Ketchum, Idaho, in the shadow of a memorial to her grandfather.
A Hemingway from Idaho
Margot Louise Hemingway was born on 16 February 1954. Her parents named her after the Château Margaux wine they’d been drinking around the time she was conceived, and as a teenager she changed the spelling to match. It was the first sign of a habit she’d keep all her life: she took the family mythology and decided to live in it.
She grew up in Ketchum, Idaho, where her grandfather Ernest had died by suicide on 2 July 1961, when Margaux was seven. Her first epileptic seizures appeared the following year. Psychology Today later wrote that the family was still reeling from the shock and the 'stigma' of suicide, and that her diagnosis may have left her parents pulling back from her.
Margaux herself said she’d grown up thinking her family had forgotten about her. She was the middle daughter, with Joan (known as Muffet) older and Mariel, born prematurely four months after Ernest’s death, younger.
Dyslexia made school hard and she never finished high school. She didn’t get round to her grandfather’s books until late in life. She wasn’t particularly close to her mother, Puck, who died of a long illness in 1988, and her father Jack was, by his own admission, someone who went fishing when things got difficult. The people who knew her best would later describe a woman searching for family support and never quite finding it.
The Plaza Hotel and the cover of Time
At 19, Margaux went with her father to New York on a business trip and checked into the Plaza Hotel. There she met Errol Wetson, founder of the Wetson’s hamburger chain. Four months later she’d left Idaho to live with him in Manhattan.
What happened next was extraordinarily fast. Through Wetson she was soon meeting the people who could make her a star, and Vogue put her on its cover. In 1975 Fabergé signed her to front Babe for $1 million, and The New Yorker called the deal the largest single advertising contract ever involving a female personality. Time put her on its cover that June. She married Wetson the same year.
Six feet tall and full of energy, she was hard to miss. Psychology Today recalled that when she went to a club without her purse, she’d reassure her companion that she didn’t need ID because she had her eyebrows. If you want the earlier chapter of this story, when a woman became the world’s first supermodel long before anyone used the word, we’ve covered Lisa Fonssagrives.
Studio 54 and the slide
Fame arrived faster than Margaux could absorb it. She became a regular at Studio 54, where she was, in her own words, in awe of the Halston and Liza Minnelli crowd. She told People in 1988 that she felt like a girl from Idaho among the real celebrities, and drank to loosen up. She didn’t think it would become a problem.
In 1976 she made her film debut in Lipstick, a rape and revenge thriller. She’d suggested her 14-year-old sister Mariel for a role in it, and it changed both their careers. The film was poorly received. Critics were unkind to Margaux and dazzled by Mariel, who went on to an Oscar nomination for Woody Allen’s Manhattan in 1979, the same year Margaux appeared in Killer Fish.
Two marriages ended in divorce. The roles got smaller and stranger, from They Call Me Bruce? in 1982 to Inner Sanctum in 1991. In 1987 a bad seizure, brought on by alcohol and epilepsy, left her nearly biting off her tongue and she contacted the Betty Ford Center. She spent time there in 1988, and later said that for a while she’d been living Ernest’s life. Her mother was dying in Idaho at the time and the two never got the chance to become close.
Searching for something
The 1990s were a blur of reinvention. She posed for Playboy in 1990. She declared personal bankruptcy. She took work as a psychic hotline endorser and made personal appearances at a store opening in South America, a film festival in India and a talk show in Italy. She spoke publicly about her epilepsy and her bulimia and worked with epilepsy organisations to reduce the stigma, an act of real courage.
Underneath, she was searching. Friends said she was drawn to healers and gurus, from a healer in Hawaii to teachers in India and the Agape Church of Religious Science in Santa Monica. One friend called her the hardest person to ground. Another put it more simply: what she wanted was family support.
She was also trying, in her own way, to understand the family she’d come from. In the mid-1980s she began filming a documentary that retraced her grandfather’s steps. Footage from it survives, including a trip to a bullfight in Spain and, as Slant noted, a conversation with her father about growing up under the shadow of the man everyone called Papa. It later became part of Mariel’s documentary about the family.
The last weeks
By early 1996 things were looking up. Margaux was moderating a TV nature series called Wild Guide, and the thirteen episodes she shot can still be seen. In June she spent several days at the Playboy offices signing 2,000 collectable cards, and a spokesman said she was looking forward to reviving her career and had a lot of irons in the fire.
Her living situation was unsettled. She’d just moved from a Marina del Rey flat she disliked to a small apartment in Santa Monica with an ocean view, only to be told by her landlady to leave a matter of days later. On the day she died, one friend said, she put down a $3,000 deposit on a new place. Psychology Today reported that in the hours beforehand she’d been singing the blues at Cicada, a Hollywood restaurant, in front of about 500 people.
But her friends also noticed something. In the last week or ten days, her agent said, she hadn’t been the up, bubbly Margaux everyone knew. A neighbour saw her on the street on the Saturday and remembered that she seemed upset and sad. One acquaintance told Psychology Today that Margaux left a message that Friday saying she needed help, which her friends said she’d never asked for before.
What happened
Margaux was found on Monday 1 July 1996 in her Santa Monica apartment. She was 42. The Associated Press reported that police found no sign of foul play and no suicide note. The body had been there for some days, so the coroner’s office said it could be weeks before a cause was known.
When it came, the coroner’s report attributed her death to acute phenobarbital intoxication. She’d taken the drug for her epilepsy, but the bottle found by her bed wasn’t prescribed to her and the level in her body was well beyond therapeutic range. Many of her friends insisted it must have been an accident. Her agent had suggested early on that a seizure was possible.
Psychology Today, writing that December, concluded that she had taken her own life. It came just days short of the 35th anniversary of her grandfather’s death.
Her ashes were buried in Ketchum on 6 July, in the shadow of a memorial to Ernest. Mariel was in seclusion with their father and stepmother at the family home in Idaho.
A single cause, or none
People have wanted a simple explanation ever since, and the people who knew her best mostly resisted one. Psychology Today’s writer argued that no one thing killed Margaux. Instead there was a pile-up: an approaching anniversary that may have pulled at her, a career that had faded, the fear that her looks were going and that she had no other skills, a family she felt distant from, a lifetime of rootlessness and the fresh sting of a forced move. Suicide is rarely explained by one cause, and Margaux’s story shows why.
It’s also worth remembering what the story usually omits. In the 2013 documentary Running from Crazy, Mariel said that their father Jack had sexually abused her sisters, according to The Guardian’s review. Jack died in 2000, so the claim can’t be tested now. It’s a reminder that the word curse can hide a more complicated family story.
Beyond the curse
The Hemingway family’s history across four generations is one of the most documented in public life. Ernest’s father, his brother and his sister all took their own lives, and we’ve written about Ernest’s own final hours. Margaux’s story has some of the same shape as that of Audrey Munson, another famous beauty whose fame outran the support around her.
But Margaux was more than a warning. She was the girl from Idaho who ended up on the cover of Time, who sang the blues in front of 500 strangers and who talked openly about epilepsy and bulimia. One friend said she was working hard to be Margaux, and not just a Hemingway. That may be the most human thing about her.
If this story has brought anything up for you, the Samaritans (UK and Ireland) are on 116 123, and in the US you can call or text 988.
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