The heat in the Santa Monica studio had done its slow, merciless work by the time the maintenance worker’s ladder reached the balcony. Inside, the body of Margaux Hemingway, 42, lay alone, a bottle of phenobarbital empty on the bedside table, the air thick with the stillness of a life that had ended days earlier. The Los Angeles County Coroner would later rule her death a suicide, a massive overdose of the epilepsy medication she had taken since childhood.
The date of her estimated death, July 1, 1996, fell on the eve of the 35th anniversary of her grandfather Ernest Hemingway’s shotgun suicide in Ketchum, Idaho—a coincidence so precise it seemed scripted by the very tragedy that had haunted her family for generations.
Margaux Hemingway was not merely a model; she was a meteorological event in the mid-1970s, a six-foot-tall blonde from the Idaho wheat fields who seemed to have been minted by the gods rather than born. At just 20 years old, she signed a $1 million contract with Fabergé for the fragrance Babe, the first model in history to command such a sum. Time magazine put her on its cover in June 1975, coining the term “supermodel” in the process, and the world—still reeling from the disco dawn—anointed her as the face of a new era of glamour.
She married fast-food heir Errol Wetson, danced at Studio 54 with Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol, and seemed to embody the reckless, glittering promise of the decade. But beneath the burnished hair and the quarter-inch-wider eyes, there was a fracture that ran deeper than the cameras ever captured.
The fragility was present from childhood. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1954, Margaux was the granddaughter of the Nobel laureate, a name she carried like an inheritance and a sentence. She suffered grand mal seizures beginning at age eight, was dyslexic in an era when that meant humiliation in the classroom, and developed bulimia and depression as a teenager.
Her father, Jack Hemingway, took her to New York, where she was launched into the orbit of photographer Francesco Scavullo and designer Halston, but the glittering ascent was built on a foundation of profound instability. She admitted later that she drank to loosen up, never imagining alcohol would become a master, and she described the people who surrounded her as “professional leeches” in the dry voice of someone who had learned the cost of naivety the hard way.
Hollywood came calling, as it always does, and the results were catastrophic. Her 1976 film debut, Lipstick, a rape-revenge thriller, was savaged by critics—Roger Ebert called it a “nasty little item”—and her younger sister Mariel, then just 14, was cast in a pivotal role and stole the picture. The casting decision, insisted upon by Margaux herself, would haunt the sisters for two decades, marking the beginning of what Margaux called “a rough downhill slope” in her personal and professional life.
The marriage to Wetson dissolved by 1978, and a second marriage to French filmmaker Bernard Faucher ended in 1985. The work dried up, the weight came on—75 pounds in a single year—and the industry that had worshipped her silhouette abandoned her with brutal speed.
The 1980s brought a public unraveling. She allowed a television crew to film a therapy session about her bulimia, a confession broadcast before such admissions were routine, and she checked into the Betty Ford Center in 1987. She emerged claiming she had conquered the demons that drove her grandfather to suicide, telling People magazine, “I was living the life of Ernest Hemingway.
I think alcohol drove my grandfather to suicide, but I’m still alive because I did something about it.” But the recovery was an illusion. By 1991, she filed for bankruptcy, listing over $815,000 in debts, and the roles she could find were direct-to-video erotic thrillers like Inner Sanctum and Vicious Kiss.
She posed 𝓷𝓾𝓭𝓮 for Playboy in 1990 in a desperate attempt to remind the industry of her beauty, but it only confirmed the trajectory of her decline.
The deepest wound was private. In the early 1990s, Margaux told her family that her father, Jack, had molested her as a child, an accusation that tore her from the family and was only publicly confirmed in 2013 through Mariel’s documentary Running from Crazy. The revelation reframed the “Hemingway curse”—the suicides of Clarence, Ernest, Lester, and Ursula—as a story not merely of bad genes but of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 and its long, corrosive aftermath.
Margaux was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years, and in 1994, a spiritual journey to India to seek an audience with the Dalai Lama unraveled into a psychotic break, leaving her hospitalized in Idaho for weeks. A therapy tape from 1992 captures her speaking in the third person, asked why she wouldn’t let someone help her: “Because I don’t know how to do it, and it hurts so much. Sometimes I’m afraid that it’s so full that it might 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 me.”
In her final months, she moved into a small studio near the beach in Santa Monica, working on a documentary about her grandfather and narrating an Animal Planet outdoor series, returning to the fishing rivers of her childhood as one returns to a place of safety. Friends said she looked beautiful again, but they also noted an overwhelming loneliness. She had been ordered to vacate the apartment in the days before her death, a final indignity for a woman who had once commanded a million dollars for a single contract.
When her friend Judy Stabilito climbed the ladder and found her body, the coroner estimated she had been dead for days, the heat accelerating decomposition. She was the fifth Hemingway in four generations to die by her own hand.
The legacy she leaves is a paradox. She helped invent the word “supermodel,” a noun now monetized beyond anything she ever saw, yet she is remembered less for what she made than for what she was made into—a symbol of beauty destroyed by the very forces that created it. Her openness about her illnesses, which felt like weakness at the time, was a form of bravery the culture only later learned to recognize.
As her sister Mariel, now an advocate for mental health, said she made peace with what Margaux did, the story stands as a tragic testament to the weight of a name, the cost of fame, and the quiet, devastating power of a family’s unresolved pain. Margaux Hemingway was the first of her kind, and in the end, she was also the loneliest.
