IT HURTS SO MUCH

In a 1992 therapy session, model and actress Margaux Hemingway had a conversation with herself. "Why don't you let your guard down and let somebody help you?" she asked. And then gave the answer: "Because I don't know how to do it, and it hurts so much. Because there's so much inside, and...sometimes I'm afraid that it's so full that it might kill me."

It is sad but not entirely surprising that Hemingway, constantly seeking to revive her career, allowed this anguished session to be taped for a BBC triumph-over-adversity program called Fighting Back. Hemingway had been invited to talk about her successful battle with bulimia. But the eating disorder was only one of many afflictions that she suffered--and it was far too soon to declare victory over her demons.

Last week Hemingway's decomposed body was found in her one-room Santa Monica, California, apartment. There were no signs of foul play. Many wondered whether she had taken her own life, since her famous family has been plagued with suicides. Indeed, she died just before the 35th anniversary of the day that her grandfather Ernest put a shotgun to his head. The author's brother, sister and father also died by their own hand.

The Los Angeles County coroner's office said it would take two weeks to determine the cause of Hemingway's death at 41. But whatever killed her, she has already become another entry on the roster of celebrities whose lives began in a swirl of glamour and ended in relative obscurity and pain. Defined by her beauty and her family's celebrity, Hemingway struggled to establish an independent identity as her looks and fame faded. In her final days, says a friend, Gigi Gaston, "she was back on her feet, and she looked beautiful. But I felt she was incredibly lonely."

Hemingway burst onto the modeling scene in the mid-'70s as a fresh-faced, 6-ft. 19-year-old from Ketchum, Idaho. In 1975 she appeared on the cover of TIME to illustrate a story on new beauties. Fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo says she was such a natural beauty that he would have made her a star even without her famous surname. "You could put her out in the sunlight in the middle of the day and she looked like an angel," he recalls. But others credited her rapid ascent to the Hemingway mystique. "As celebrity became aristocracy, it became inheritable," says former Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello, who knew Hemingway as part of the crowd at the now legendary Studio 54. "She inherited this fame and this position." Hemingway later said she felt like an imposter in that world and started drinking "to loosen up."

Her descent came quickly. Scavullo suggested her for a starring role in Lipstick, a movie about a rape victim that co-starred her younger sister Mariel. The film bombed, and when Mariel went on to star in Woody Allen's Manhattan and Bob Fosse's Star 80, a lasting strain developed between the siblings. Mariel declined to comment on her sister's death.