Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Louise Brooks are silent-era names familiar to any film buff. But Barbara La Marr? The bright star of 26 silent movies was considered a seductress of “golden allure” and described by contemporaries as “a beautiful tigress.” She died in 1926 at age 29, working until the last. And then her reputation faded. La Marr’s greatest legacy might have been to inspire the stage name of a popular actress from a later era, Hedy Lamarr.
Sheri Snyder has more than passing interest in the fallen star, portraying her in a one-woman performance for the Pasadena Playhouse and now, reconstructing her lost life in an intriguing biography, Barbara La Marr: The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful for Hollywood. Snyder’s challenge is not just that La Marr was a fabulist who invented stories as she invented herself, but that many of the fantastic tales about her were true.
Born Reatha Watson, she was a bit player on stage in adolescence before becoming a professional ballroom dancer. Along the way she attracted headlines as the victim of mysterious kidnappings, a marriage to a scoundrel and another marriage to a man who might never have existed. At one point she was ordered out of Los Angeles by juvenile authorities because her beauty and assertiveness in nightclubs was deemed a public nuisance. She had a face of innocent sexuality that set men to dreaming. She had to leave town—but not for long.
According to Snyder, La Marr’s lurid escapades didn’t tempt Hollywood at first. The studios, under periodic pressure from moralizers and local censorship boards, were wary of her kind of scandal. And yet, she gained entry as a successful screenwriter for Fox. Before long, she was in front of the camera as a celebrated screen actress.
Pent-up and restless, her birth in 1896 coincided with the invention of motion pictures and the slackening of Victorian mores. Social conventions couldn’t restrict her, but ill health, aggravated by alcohol and a refusal to rest, finished her story.
Sorting through conflicting accounts and gaps in information (14 of her films are missing and presumed lost for good), Snyder has assembled a plausible account of a life that retains its fascination a century on.
