Another bell tolls

She is Margot Hemingway on her birth certificate, but for the parties, premieres, people, and paparazzi of the celebrity circuit she was Margaux.

Last night she was found dead, and dental records ruled there was no question of the identity of the woman who never really knew herself. An autopsy was going on to determine the cause of death. She suffered from epilepsy. Was it a seizure? Was it suicide?

At 41, the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway was discovered alone in her apartment overlooking the Pacific in the Californian coastal town of Santa Monica west of Los Angeles. She had not been seen for three days.

Six-foot tall Margaux Hemingway lurched into victim status long before her body was discovered inside the cheerfully pink and burgundy painted apartment block. To her friends and agents it appeared that she had overcome a chronic alcohol problem after treatment at the Betty Ford Centre in the Californian desert eight years ago. She had also, they believed, recovered from bulimia.

She had seemed to be a survivor of overnight excess. She told her story and we learned that during two bad marriages and a stumble of a film career she had considered suicide - ``I wondered if life was worth living'' - and finally realised she was killing herself with drink.

There must have been moments during her short, difficult, and ultimately tragic life when she blamed not herself but her heritage.

The story of the Hemingway clan is one of bitterness, jealousy, mental illness, and of fame and literally fatal flaws. Her uncle Leicester, depressed and unhappy, shot himself to death in Miami in 1982. Her great-grandfather Clarence ``Ed'' Hemingway killed himself years earlier.

His famous son Ernest, who never forgave his father for his suicide, was three weeks shy of his 62nd birthday when he blew away the top of his head with both barrels of a 12-gauge Holland and Holland shotgun.

On the day of his funeral - July 5, 1961 - his three sons, Jack, Patrick, and Gregory (known as Bumby, the Mouse and Gig) found they had been disinherited. A lawsuit changed that, but not the memory of the father the trio had all wanted desperately to live up to. And of their foiled expectations.

In Islands in the Stream, the most autobiographical of his novels, Hemingway's hero Thomas Hudson talks of the love of his children, but the author kills all three of his fictional offspring while they are young. They go from the pages before they can disappoint - or challenge? - him.

When Hemingway discovered his son Gig was a transvestite - he walked in on the boy wearing nylons - he said: ``Gig, we come from a strange tribe, you and I.'' It is head-shaking to imagine the most macho author of the twentieth century and his troubled son.

Like his brother Patrick, who suffered ``a complete mental breakdown'' in 1947, he underwent courses of electric shock therapy. Their brother Jack, the father of Margaux, Mariel, and Joan (always known as Muffet), was wounded during the Second World War. His view was: ``The fatal word is fame. I don't think it's kind to people.''

The most famous of the Hemingways was blunt to a complaining F. Scott Fitzgerald with the advice: ``Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start.''

What comfort could he give his children today? Jack Hemingway lost an infant son in 1951. His eldest daughter Muffet, 45, has spent time in psychiatric hospitals. She claims an LSD ``trip'' when she was 16 turned her into a manic-depressive. ``I've been on lithium and Prozac and they've really helped.'' She told an American magazine: ``I'm an alcoholic. I started drinking red wine again six months ago to help me stop smoking. No kidding. I wound up in a rehabilitation.''

The pattern of self-destruction seems like a domino game in the Hemingway family. Mariel Hemingway is the rule-proving exception. She was born four months after her grandfather committed suicide. At age 14 her big sister Margaux did her a ``favour'' and got her a role in her film Lipstick in 1976. Mariel stole the film, Margaux was devastated by the reviews.

Mariel returned to the family home in Ketchum, Idaho, emerging in 1979 to star in and win an Oscar nomination for Woody Allen's Manhattan. Meanwhile, her older sister was playing the fame game in the fast lane. She met both her husbands in the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel in New York.

It began in 1974 when she was 19 and arrived in New York from the altogether differently wild spaces of Idaho. She was open, infectious, ambitious and beautiful. The jaded Manhattan set were enchanted by her unaffected and exuberant behaviour. Within a year - with the help of fashion photographers like Francis Scavlullo - she became an international supermodel. She landed a $1m contract as the image of Faberge's Babe perfume.

She had the world - well, certainly New York - at her feet.

She began drinking heavily after Lipstick flopped, but said: ``I drink to loosen up. I never thought that alcohol would become a problem.

``I never got heavily into drugs. I didn't like smoking pot. I tried coke but I never got caught up with it. I have epilepsy and deep down I had the feeling that certain drugs were not good for me because they could trigger seizures. I learned later that alcohol was just as dangerous, but at the time I told myself it wouldn't hurt.''

She wasn't hurting in 1983 when I arranged to interview her in New York. We were to meet on a Wednesday at lunchtime in a Russian Tea Room. She turned up on Tuesday - and waited. When the celebrity restaurant closed at 2am she went to the Plaza and returned at the correct time on Wednesday. She drank champagne like beer. Lunch ended around 6pm.

It seemed very Hemingway.

Sadly, finally, it was.

Later, in 1988, she said: ``For a time 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.''

She joined Liza Minelli and others as a victim of over-indulgence at Manhattan's Studio 54 and followed a string of famous faces like Elizabeth Taylor, Minelli, Tony Curtis, and Robert Mitchum to the Betty Ford Centre.

During her time at the rehabilitation centre her cousin Lorian Hemingway was undergoing similar treatment. ``By a very conservative count more than 75% of my family has been alcoholic,'' said Lorian. She added: ``This alcoholism passed along with the passion to write and the will to survive that passion, is as clearly a heritage to me as are my dark eyes.''

Margaux Hemingway appeared to have out-raced her heritage. She had completed the narration for a nature television series, The Wild Guide, and was planning other animal programmes.

However, there were some strange signs. She had moved into the apartment where her body was discovered only two weeks ago. Her agent David Mirisch was quoted last night as saying she had recently been unhappy: ``She hasn't really been the Margaux Hemingway we all knew as far as having that `up' personality.''

Of course, did anybody really know her.

Ernest Hemingway's stoic motto was Il faut (d'abord) durer - ``One must, above all, endure''. He couldn't, and arguably that is his family's legacy.