In 1925, starlet Barbara La Marr was mounting a comeback with a new film, and then everything went heinously wrong. She was the girl that everyone wanted to know more about, but if they could have peered inside her life, they would have been shocked to their core. At first glance, Barbara La Marr’s origin story is as classic as they come. After all, she was going to break into the fantasy realm of Hollywood.
Only, La Marr didn’t realize her world was about to transform into a real-life nightmare. In 1913, Barbara La Marr’s life turned upside down for all the wrong reasons. Still an impressionable 16-year-old, La Marr said yes. It was one of the worst mistakes of her life.
Before she could find a way to escape though, her captors made a chilling discovery. We’ll never know exactly what Barbara’s half-sister and accomplice were planning to do with her. This all proved to be a turning point for Lamar of the worst kind. When the press got a hold of Lamar’s story, they went wild.
Barbara’s response however was disturbing. Then, after she ran out of the truth, she began telling the journalist lies to keep their attention, even pronouncing that she was adopted. And still, that’s not all. According to the police reports from the time of this kidnapping, Lamar may have exaggerated her road trip kidnapping from the get-go.
From here on out, Barbara La Marr made sure she was never without drama. She claimed that while visiting the state, a rancher named Jack La Tell had happened upon her riding a horse and fell in love at first sight. Then, it took a huge twist. Then, La Tell tragically perished of pneumonia just 3 weeks later.
By this time, La Marr’s life was already such an intense blend of sensational fact and dramatic fiction that we still don’t know if La Tell was real or a figment. Lamar’s first provable marriage was in July of 1914 to a man named Max Lawrence, but days after walking down the aisle, Lamar uncovered his jaw-dropping secret. His entire life was a lie. For all that, Max got a quick and brutal comeuppance.
The authorities were obviously already on to this Max Lawrence because the very next day after Barbara became his unlawful wife, officers arrested him for bigamy and sent Lamar back home to her parents. According to reports, Max said that Lamar’s beauty was so dazzling, he simply had to have her. Despite all obstacles. Although Lamar’s family tried to force her back into calm domesticity, there was one more shock to this story.
Three days after his arrest, Lamar’s bigamist husband perished from a blood clot to his brain. Yes, Barbara Lamar lived through more in a week than most people do in a lifetime, but she wasn’t close to slowing down. Lamar wasn’t really a woman who stuck by her man, and they were done with each other within a year of the wedding. Then, Lamar’s life took another strange turn.
Around her split with Ainsworth, a startling rumor followed Lamar, and somehow this one beat all the whispers that came before. Lamar was never one to sit around and mourn a relationship, and she moved on characteristically quick from her check-forging husband Philip Ainsworth. Before the ink was dry on their divorce, she took up with another dancer, Ben Deeley, marrying him two years after her last wedding. Only with Deeley, Lamar had no idea what she was in for.
With her new husband, this went into overdrive. Except this period of Lamar’s life also offered a surprise. Lamar had always stalked around the edges of Hollywood, but with Ben Deeley, she finally made a crack at a real career in entertainment. It just took another star to turn it into a supernova.
While working as a writer for the United Artists Production Company, Lamar got an enormous break. It all happened quickly from there, too quickly. True to form, her Hollywood image in films like The Prisoner of Zenda and Trifling Women was of a beautiful man-eater stuffed to the gills with dark secrets. Still, all her audience could see was one thing.
With the rise of her fame, Lamar’s life took on a new intensity. For one, she knew just how to spin her PR to the most attention. She frequently refused to let people call her a star, knowing that it would add to her mystique. She often accidentally leaked her own poetry to the public.
Yet, everything that goes up must come down. In 1921, Lamarr’s life fell apart. For the first time in a long time, Lamarr was single, and this also meant she had a chance to learn some lessons about herself. Only, that is not what she did.
More famous than ever, she proceeded to run her life into the ground. In the wake of her divorce, Lamarr threw herself into even more partying, gallivanting around town at all hours, always with a bottle in hand. She once said, “I never sleep more than 2 hours a day. I have better things to do.
” But, for all of her adventures, she was about to enter an entirely new frontier. Only this time, it wasn’t with a man. According to her story, she’d been visiting an orphanage for the PR, naturally, when she suddenly fell madly in love with one of the babies there. Reportedly, she was so mad over this little boy, she cut through all the red tape and adopted him that same afternoon, naming him Marvin.
There were still a lot of questions about this, but Lamarr knew just what to do about that. By 1923, her divorce from Deeley still hadn’t gone through. After all, she now had another mouth to feed in the form of little Marvin, and another husband would surely help with that. So, instead of following the letter of the law, she went ahead and married Dougherty before her divorce from Deely was even official.
This is where Lamar’s life got truly messy. The same year Lamar married Dorothy, fate dealt her a brutal hand. While working on the film set of Souls for Sale, she sprained her ankle badly. Although these accounts are highly disputed, rumors quickly went around that Lamar had become addicted to opiates while trying to recover and that she even kept a container of them to keep her energy up.
Sadly, this was not the only way her demons chased her. Lamar didn’t know who she was if people weren’t looking at her. To add to all the drama Lamar was dealing with, an old ghost came back to haunt her. He even had some of his lawyers try to extort the actress for money saying she should pay up or else Deely would reveal all of her affairs and dirty secrets to the world.
Her late nights and constant partying were still clearly doing her no good. Then again, she was under extreme emotional distress thanks to Deely’s suit. She had never stuck around long in a rocky marriage and Jack Dorothy appeared to feel the same about her. Still, we can’t blame Deely for everything.
But in the end, she knew there was only one thing she could do. While filming the movie, La Marr’s happy life came to a shocking halt. She was weakened from all that had happened to her. She collapsed on set and went into a coma.
At this point, La Marr must have known there was little hope, because she made a gut-wrenching decision. In the end, this was for the best because the little boy known as Marvin would never see his mother alive again. Incredibly, despite the intense life she had lived, she was only 29 years old when she passed. The press wanted nothing to do with Barbara La Marr at the end of her career, but now they couldn’t wait to swoop in once she was only a memory.
That’s right, she first had the baby, then sent him to an orphanage, also she could find him and adopt him. She never, ever gave away the man’s identity, and no one ever came forward after her passing.