Margaux Hemingway: A Life of Glamour and Tragedy

Jul 2, 2024
6 min read

Collage of three Margaux Hemingway portraits, with title text A Life of Glamour and Tragedy.

On 1 July 1996, a friend grew worried after Margaux Hemingway stopped answering her phone. She asked a worker at the Santa Monica apartment building to fetch a ladder so they could get in through the balcony. What they found inside was a body so badly decomposed that identifying it right away was difficult. The coroner could only confirm she had been dead for several days. When the toxicology report came back a month later, it showed phenobarbital levels so far above the therapeutic range that her body hadn't even digested all the pills before she died. She was 42. It was one day before the 35th anniversary of the suicide of her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway.

Close-up black and white portrait of a blonde woman looking left. — Hemingway in 1976

The Hemingway Curse

Margaux was the fifth member of the Hemingway family to take her own life. Her grandfather Ernest killed himself with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho in July 1961. His father Clarence had shot himself in 1928. His brother Leicester took his own life in 1982. His sister Ursula did the same in 1966. The tabloids called it the Hemingway curse. Margaux herself once said she was "genetically programmed" for disaster.

She grew up in Ketchum, on her grandfather's farm, in the long shadow of his name and his death. Her father Jack, Ernest's eldest son, was a conservationist and fisherman, and the family moved repeatedly, tracing the same geography Ernest had inhabited: Cuba, San Francisco, Idaho. Margaux had a difficult adolescence, struggling with depression, bulimia, epilepsy, and dyslexia from her teenage years. She self-medicated with alcohol. Due to her dyslexia, she never read many of her grandfather's books. "I am not a Hemingway aficionado," she once admitted.

She also had a tense relationship with her mother Byra, and in the 1990s alleged that her father Jack had molested her as a child. Her father and stepmother denied it, stopped speaking to her, and her stepmother told People magazine, "She constantly lies. The whole family won't have anything to do with her." Her younger sister Mariel later confirmed in the 2013 documentary Running from Crazy that both Margaux and their older sister Muffet had been sexually abused by their father. None of this made it into the obituaries when Margaux died.

Ursula Andress smiling outdoors, blonde hair, silver earring, confident expression.

The Name

She was born Margot Louise Hemingway on 16 February 1954 in Portland, Oregon. When she found out, as a teenager, that her parents had named her after the Chateau Margaux wine they were drinking the night she was conceived, she changed the spelling to match. It was a small, telling gesture: the name was a piece of family mythology she decided to inhabit fully rather than escape.

From Idaho to the Cover of Time

She dropped out of high school and was working at a local PR firm in Idaho when, at 19, she accompanied her father on a business trip to New York and checked into the Plaza Hotel. There she met Errol Wetson, founder of a fast-food hamburger chain, who was immediately taken with her looks, her six-foot frame, and her husky voice. Four months later she had moved to New York to live with him, initially staying in an apartment on East 72nd Street owned by heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. Through Wetson's connections she was introduced to Francesco Scavullo, Halston, and Marian McEvoy at Women's Wear Daily. Within months, her face was on the cover of Vogue.

Fashion artist Joe Eula said in 1975 that Margaux had "the face of a generation, as recognisable and memorable as Lisa Fonssagrives and Jean Shrimpton." In June 1975, just turned 20, she signed with Fabergé as the face of Babe perfume for one million dollars. It was the largest advertising contract ever awarded to a model, and it made her the highest-paid model in the world at the time. The New Yorker called it "the largest single advertising contract ever involving a female personality." She and Wetson married in Paris that same year.

In June 1975, Time magazine put her on the cover, dubbing her "The New Beauty." Over the following eight months, articles about Margaux Hemingway appeared in Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, People, and Vogue. It was a level of saturation that owed as much to the famous surname as to anything else, and it wouldn't last.

Studio 54 and the Fall

At the peak of her modelling career, Margaux became a fixture at Studio 54, partying with Bianca Jagger, Halston, Liza Minnelli, Grace Jones, and Andy Warhol. It was there that the drinking, already a problem, accelerated into something else. She eventually lost her Fabergé contract, in part because her public image as a perpetually drunk figure at the club had become difficult to separate from the fresh, aspirational appeal the brand needed.

In 1976, she made her film debut in Lipstick, a rape and revenge thriller directed by Lamont Johnson, in which she played a fashion model terrorised by a rapist. She had suggested her 14-year-old sister Mariel for a supporting role. The film was dismissed as exploitation. Critics were harsh about Margaux's performance. They were not harsh about Mariel's. Press attention that had been fixed on Margaux shifted almost overnight to her younger sister, who went on to a successful film and television career while Margaux struggled to find roles.

She divorced Wetson in 1978. On New Year's Eve 1979 she married French filmmaker Bernard Faucher and moved to Paris. That marriage lasted six years before ending in divorce in 1985. The 1980s were a succession of low-budget films, Killer Fish with Lee Majors, They Call Me Bruce?, Over the Brooklyn Bridge, and continued appearances in the gossip columns for the wrong reasons. In 1984 she suffered serious injuries in a skiing accident. In 1988 she was treated at the Betty Ford Center.

Searching for Something

In 1990, she appeared on the cover of Playboy, an attempt to generate heat around a flagging career. It didn't change much. Through the 1990s she made infomercials, appeared at store openings and film festivals in South America, India, and Italy, and endorsed a psychic hotline. She was rootless and perpetually in motion. Friends described her as "the hardest person to ground," spiritually searching and gullible about it, drawn to gurus and healers and the Agape Church of Religious Science in Santa Monica.

In 1994 she went to India and suffered some kind of breakdown, and was treated at a private psychiatric clinic in Idaho, from which she was released in 1995. She moved to California and was working towards hosting a wildlife adventure series for the Discovery Channel called Wild Guide. People who saw her in the final months said she seemed happier than she had in years.

She had also allowed a video recording of a therapy session about her bulimia to be broadcast on television. She made the sexual abuse allegations against her father public. She was, in her way, trying to deal with things.

The Death

In the last days of June 1996, she made phone calls to several friends, leaving what were described as rambling messages. Nobody thought much of it at the time. She had just moved to a new studio apartment in Santa Monica with an ocean view, evicted from a previous place she hated because it overlooked a car park. The new flat was small but she was pleased with it.

When her friend Judy Stabile couldn't reach her over the weekend and grew concerned, she and others arranged to get in through the balcony. The coroner estimated Margaux had died on the night of 28 June or the early hours of 29 June, several days before she was found. The toxicology report, released in August, listed cause of death as "acute phenobarbital intoxication." The bottle found by her bedside was not prescribed. The drug levels in her body were, in the coroner's words, "well above therapeutic levels."

The coroner ruled it suicide. Mariel's then-husband told People that Margaux had seemed better than she had in years. Mariel herself disputed the ruling for years, believing it could have been an accidental overdose of the epilepsy medication she'd taken since childhood. On Larry King Live in 2005, she said she had come to accept it was suicide.

Margaux was cremated. Her ashes were buried in the Hemingway family plot at Ketchum Cemetery in Idaho, a short walk from the memorial to her grandfather. She was the fifth Hemingway to die by suicide, after her grandfather Ernest, his father Clarence, his brother Leicester, and his sister Ursula.

Legacy

The Hemingway family's record across four generations is one of the most documented examples of inherited trauma and suicide in public life. Audrey Munson, often called America's first supermodel, spent decades in a psychiatric institution after a similarly sudden fall from extraordinary early fame. Margaux's story is different in its specifics but recognisable in its shape: the name that opened every door, the career that peaked before she'd had time to understand what she wanted from it, the substances that filled the gap, and the sense that the story was already written.

"I'm a Hemingway," she once said. "I know all about addiction. We all have the curse of alcoholism." And separately, asked about the family's shadow: "You can't escape the Hemingway curse." She said both things matter-of-factly, without self-pity, which might have been the saddest part of all.