Most people know Mariska Hargitay from her starring role as Olivia Benson on Law and Order: SVU. And many people know that Mariska’s mom was the movie star Jayne Mansfield, who died tragically in a 1967 car accident when Mariska was only three years old.
But the vast majority will not know the shocking truth of Hargitay’s life until they see her new documentary, My Mom Jayne.
That’s because Hargitay kept a deep, dark secret for 30 years, a secret both tragic and moving as revealed in the HBO Max documentary.
The man she knew and loved as her father, Mickey Hargitay, was not her biological father.
Mickey was Jayne’s second husband. She’d already had a child, a girl also named Jayne, at the age of 17 with her first husband, Paul Mansfield. With the Hargitay marriage, there were three more, two boys, Mickey Jr. and Zoltan and then Mariska. With the revelation of her real biological father, there are two additional half-sisters.
Mariska interviews all of them during the documentary as she dissects the difficult emotional journey with her mother, who was a blonde bombshell sex symbol in the mold of Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s and 1960s.
With extensive film and television clips that bring her to life and dozens of photographs, Mariska traces Jayne’s quick rise to fame after starring on Broadway in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. It was then adapted into a hit film, and Jayne Mansfield became an internationally known name—and face and body.
Early in her career, Mariska made sure she did not follow the sex symbol route her mother had taken. She was embarrassed about it, as well as the gossip that surrounded her mother’s romantic life. Her father Mickey had told her not to read any of the books about her mom because they were filled with lies, so she didn’t.
The way she initially found out about her true parentage was from the head of a Jayne Mansfield fan club, who showed her a picture of Nelson Sardelli, whom Mariska said she immediately saw as the male version of herself.
It turns out that he had impregnated Jayne while she was in Europe for several months on a nightclub tour and separated from Mickey, and on the road to divorce. Despite her torrid, months-long affair with Sardelli, Jayne returned to Mickey and their home in Los Angeles, even giving a television interview about how they were soon to welcome a new baby into the family. (Their divorce came soon after and she later married a third time, to Matt Cimber, whose son Tony is another half-sibling of Mariska’s.)
When Mariska confronted Mickey about not being her biological father, he vehemently denied it and became more upset than she was and asked her to never bring it up again. Out of loyalty, she did not, while still confronting a huge identity crisis left in the wake of the revelation.
Mariska had actually tracked down Sardelli in Atlantic City when she was 30 and confronted him after a concert he performed there. “He looked at me and basically burst into tears, and he grabbed my ear, and he said, ‘I’ve been waiting 30 years for this moment.,” Mariska recalls in the documentary. “That was 30 years ago, and I’ve kept it a secret ever since.”
Until now, in My Mom Jayne.
