Long before millions knew Mariska Hargitay as Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, she was a little girl growing up inside one of Hollywood’s most extraordinary homes.
There was pink shag carpeting. Pink walls. Cherubs. Gold fixtures. A heart-shaped bathtub. And outside, a spectacular 40-foot-wide heart-shaped swimming pool with a declaration of love written across its bottom in gold mosaic.
It was called the Pink Palace, and it belonged to Mariska’s mother, 1950s Hollywood bombshell Jayne Mansfield.
The house was extravagant even by movie-star standards. But behind the glamorous photographs was a childhood that would change abruptly when Mariska was just three years old.
On June 29, 1967, Mansfield died in a devastating automobile crash at only 34. Mariska and two of her brothers were asleep in the back seat and survived. Architectural Digest
More than half a century later, the photographs of their life before that night feel almost like fragments from another world.
The Pink Palace began as a love story
When Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay married in 1958, they moved into a Mediterranean-style mansion on Sunset Boulevard in Holmby Hills.
The property cost $76,000, but there was nothing particularly pink about it when they arrived.
That changed quickly.
Mansfield had adored pink since childhood, and the couple transformed the property into a fantasy built around her larger-than-life public image. The exterior was painted a sparkling shade of pink mixed with quartz grains that caught the California sunlight. Architectural Digest
Hearts appeared everywhere.
So did cupids, fur, elaborate furniture and intensely feminine details.
The house became so closely associated with Mansfield that it was soon simply known as the Pink Palace.
And Mickey helped create perhaps its most famous feature himself.
Her husband built her an enormous heart-shaped pool
Before becoming Mr. Universe and eventually an actor, Hargitay had worked with his hands, including as a carpenter and plumber.
At the Pink Palace, those skills were put to memorable use.
He constructed an enormous heart-shaped swimming pool for Mansfield. At the bottom, gold mosaic tiles spelled out a romantic message to his wife.
Two heart-shaped islands supported fountains, while a smaller heart-shaped children’s pool completed the design. Architectural Digest
Photographs of Mansfield beside the pool became some of the most famous images of her private life.
But they weren’t always glamorous solo portraits.
Some of the most touching photographs show her children playing around the same pool.
Mariska was one of them.
Inside was even more outrageous
The pool was only the beginning.
Mansfield’s bathroom became legendary in its own right.
Pink shag carpeting covered the room from floor to ceiling. At its center sat a heart-shaped pink marble bathtub surrounded by gold-leaf tiles and elaborate gilded fixtures shaped like swans. Architectural Digest
Elsewhere, the house featured thick carpeting, a tiger-skin rug, a copper ceiling and an enormous Steinway piano decorated with cherubs.
Even the home’s exterior shimmered.
Nothing about the Pink Palace was designed to disappear quietly into the neighborhood.
Mansfield understood publicity extraordinarily well, and her house effectively became an extension of her celebrity persona.
Reporters and photographers were frequently invited inside.
The result is an unusually extensive photographic record of the home — and of the family who lived there.
Then Mariska arrived
Mariska was born on January 23, 1964.
One surviving photograph shows Mansfield holding her daughter when Mariska was only about six weeks old.
The contrast between the two is striking: Mansfield, already one of America’s most photographed women, cradling a tiny baby who would eventually become far more famous to later generations than anyone could have imagined.
At the time, though, Mariska was simply one of the children growing up amid the extraordinary surroundings her mother had created.
Mansfield’s family life was complicated. Her marriage to Mickey was ending around the time Mariska was born, and Mansfield later married filmmaker Matt Cimber. Architectural Digest
But Mariska’s memories of her mother would ultimately be extremely limited.
She had only three years with her.
June 29, 1967 changed everything
Mansfield was traveling through Louisiana after performing at a nightclub in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Mariska was in the vehicle with her brothers Miklós and Zoltan.
The three children were asleep in the back seat.
Their car collided with a truck on the highway.
Mansfield, her companion Sam Brody and driver Ronnie Harrison were killed. The three children survived. Architectural Digest
Mariska was only three.
For decades afterward, that loss existed as one of the defining facts of her life — yet the mother at the center of it remained someone she barely had the opportunity to know.
The little girl eventually became Olivia Benson
The trajectory that followed could hardly have been predicted from those old Pink Palace photographs.
Mariska eventually became an actress herself.
Then, in 1999, she was cast as Detective Olivia Benson on a new NBC crime drama called Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
The role changed her life.
What began as another television character became one of the longest-running performances by an actor in American prime-time television.
And while her mother had become famous partly through a deliberately glamorous public persona, Mariska built her career playing almost the opposite kind of woman.
Benson was serious, empathetic and defined by her work rather than glamour.
For years, Mariska also kept a certain emotional distance from her mother’s image.
Then she decided to confront it.
More than 50 years later, Mariska went searching for her mother
In 2025, Hargitay made her feature directing debut with the deeply personal HBO documentary My Mom Jayne.
It wasn’t simply a conventional celebrity biography.
It was a daughter trying to understand a mother she’d lost before she was old enough to truly know her.
Hargitay examined Mansfield beyond the familiar blonde-bombshell caricature and explored the intelligent, ambitious and complicated woman behind it.
“Everybody wants to be seen for their true self,” Hargitay explained while discussing the film. “And no one saw her.” Architectural Digest
The project also led Mariska back toward physical pieces of the childhood she had lost.
And remarkably, some pieces of the Pink Palace still existed.
She recovered something from her mother’s famous bathroom
The original Pink Palace is gone.
The property passed through several owners after Mansfield’s death and the house was eventually demolished.
But when it came down, Mariska’s brother managed to save something incredibly personal:
their mother’s sinks.
Years later, he gave them to Mariska.
Her response wasn’t to put them into storage or display them as museum pieces.
She redesigned her own bathroom around them.
“I just ripped out our whole bathroom and had them put in with that pink marble,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2025. Los Angeles Times
She surrounded them with pink roses, quartz hearts and reminders of Mansfield.
After spending much of her life distancing herself from the larger-than-life Jayne Mansfield mythology, Mariska had literally brought a piece of her mother’s home into her own.
The family piano came back too
Another extraordinary artifact resurfaced while Mariska was making her documentary.
The Pink Palace had contained a nine-foot Steinway concert grand piano decorated with cherubs. Mickey had reportedly given it to Mansfield for her 26th birthday.
Mariska eventually obtained that piano as well.
She described the moment as one of overwhelming emotion — as though recovering the instrument meant recovering something of the mother she’d lost. Yahoo
Suddenly the Pink Palace wasn’t simply a strange celebrity mansion preserved in vintage photographs.
Pieces of it were coming home.
The rare family photos look different knowing what happened next
One particularly poignant series of photographs shows Mansfield beside the pool with her children in 1967.
They look like ordinary family snapshots captured in extraordinary surroundings.
Children play.
Their mother watches them.
California sunlight reflects from the water.
According to Architectural Digest, those photographs were taken only about two months before Mansfield’s death. Architectural Digest
Nobody in the photographs could have known what was coming.
That knowledge changes the way the pictures feel today.
Mariska finally found a new relationship with the mother she lost
For much of her life, Mariska’s connection to Mansfield was defined by absence.
She remembered little.
Other people remembered everything.
The world knew Jayne Mansfield as the blonde bombshell, the pinup, the woman with the outrageous house and impossible proportions.
Mariska had to discover the person underneath that image.
Making My Mom Jayne became part of that process.
The old photographs, possessions and stories allowed her to reconstruct pieces of a childhood she could barely remember.
And eventually she reached a striking conclusion.
“She’s with me in a new way,” Hargitay said while discussing the documentary. “I’ve never felt her presence more.” Los Angeles Times
That may be why the RARE PHOTOS of Mariska’s early life inside the Pink Palace carry so much more weight today.
At first, they look like spectacular glimpses into old Hollywood: the blonde movie star, the pink mansion, the heart-shaped pool and the glamorous fantasy surrounding them.
Look closer, though, and they’re something much simpler.
They’re among the few surviving pieces of a little girl’s brief life with her mother.
For more stories about incredible women and their unique lives, check out how Joan Rivers’ daughter begged her to stop having plastic surgery and see Bianca Censori’s striking new blonde look.
