Barbara La Marr: The actor who was tragically prescribed cocaine and morphine
Dear reader, I believe that people fundamentally have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies. However, it’s difficult to look at the things people in Hollywood have been doing to their bodies and not get worried, especially when they already have horror stories like that of Barbara La Marr to warn them.
Because, yeah, none of this is new. A modern phenomenon is the very last thing that this wave of malnourished, skeletal Hollywood stars with bulbous, plastic faces is. It does feel a lot more extreme than before, though. Especially when contrasted with the body positivity movement that seemed to be gaining some real traction a few years ago. One can only despair at the thought that none of these people is as stupid as we want them to be; they know the risks they’re taking with their bodies and just don’t care about them.
These aren’t just risks they’re taking with their mental and physical health, but their very lives. The story of Barbara La Marr shows this, and, depressingly, it’s one that is over a century old. La Marr was, for a period of time in the 1920s, one of the most popular actors in Hollywood. She had been spotted working as a screenwriter for United Artists and was told by actress and producer Mary Pickford that she was “too beautiful to be behind a camera”.
Pickford wasn’t kidding either. ‘The Girl Who Is Too Beautiful’ became her very brand, La Marr finding work playing femme fatales in a number of pictures in the early 1920s. However, her move to Hollywood also saw her embrace the nightlife that Los Angeles had to offer. She took to partying with a vigour that bordered on pathological, constantly being seen at nightspots every night of the week and, in one infamous interview, smirking that she never got more than two hours of sleep a night.
This may have been part of her marketing, but the truth wasn’t far off.
How did this contribute to the downfall of Barbara La Marr?
While La Marr was undeniably talented, her lifestyle began taking its toll. She became erratic and unreliable on set, leading to regular on-set visits from production coordinator Irving Thalberg to check on her. Now, a large part of this was her developing alcoholism and traumatic personal life, but a major part of this that didn’t come out until many years later was also the lengths that La Marr was going to in order to combat a supposed issue with her weight.
This was, like all “weight issues”, completely made up, but it didn’t stop La Marr from taking several drastic measures to correct it. These stemmed from crash diets to one unconfirmed, yet long-standing rumour that ingesting a tapeworm head in a pill in order to lose weight. La Marr’s final years are filled with rumours like this, including that she developed a cocaine and heroin addiction after being prescribed the drugs by her studio to rehab and the sprained ankle she received on set. Yet there’s no proof that this ever happened, and the only addiction her friends and family claim she ever had was alcohol.
The strain this lifestyle put on La Marr’s body saw her contract pulmonary tuberculosis, a condition which worsened when she collapsed on set in 1925 and was diagnosed with nephritis, a severe inflammation of the kidneys. When she was hospitalised as a result of this, she reportedly weighed less than 80 pounds. Barbara La Marr, born Reatha Dale Watson, died mere months after her hospitalisation, at the age of 29.
People have the right to do with their bodies what they wish. Yet they should know that everything that happened to Barbara La Marr is also what they’re doing to their bodies, whether they know it or not.