The Girl Too Beautiful & The Woman in the Pool: Barbara and Vera
Hollywood doesn’t bury women; it disposes of them. Sometimes in silk-lined caskets, sometimes in swimming pools, sometimes in stories so carefully polished that the truth slips off like cream. Two names, two endings: silent film actress Barbara La Marr, sold to the world as “the girl who was too beautiful,” and Vera West, a costume designer who spent her career dressing danger and ended it face-down in cold blue water. Different decades, same machine.
Barbara La Marr: The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful
Before the studio men rebranded her for the marquee, she was Reatha Watson from Yakima, a restless girl with legs for vaudeville and an appetite for risk. She ran early and often—out of towns, out of marriages, into rooms where decisions were made and faces were sold by the yard. She wrote scenarios in her teens under borrowed names. By the time she arrived in Hollywood proper, she had already practiced being someone else. The industry only asked her to be better at it.
On screen she burned slow—languorous, feline, a danger you invite. The Three Musketeers put her beside Fairbanks, and the biblical epics draped her in metallic veils and shadows. She didn’t play innocence; she played the thing innocence is warned about. Off screen she matched the studio’s appetite—champagne for breakfast, a private calendar that looked like a torn deck of hearts, five marriages before thirty, rumors of a nightstand that rattled with bottles.
She wasn’t just an actress; she wrote, too. Her screenplays — like 1920's "The Land of Jazz" and 1924’s "The White Moth" — were said to be ripped straight from her own ‘wild’ life, as if she were selling her diary to the studio in reels. Hedda Hopper sharpened pencils on her name; columnists drew arrows between her and whatever man looked combustible that week.
People called her reckless; she called it living. “I want to live a thousand years in one,” she said, a line that sounds like a dare when you have lungs and time. She had the first. The second ran short. Tuberculosis and morphine made a pact her will couldn’t break. The schedules stayed brutal. There are stories—oxygen between takes, red lipstick applied as if rouge could bluff blood into a body that was done negotiating. The studio didn’t put it that way. The studio never did. “Overwork.” “Exhaustion.” Words that shift the responsibility from system to woman and make a tragedy look like bad planning. That’s the Hollywood dialect: euphemism as branding, fatalism as copy.
La Marr died in 1926, only a year before sound came in with "The Jazz Singer" in 1927. The talkies arrived; she missed them by a breath. A silent star who never got the chance to speak. The city finally gave her the blackout she could not give herself. The city drew the drape she could not draw for herself. Ten thousand stood shoulder to shoulder to measure the quiet.
In the casket, she was alabaster perfection; even the silence looked coiffed. The funeral doubled as a press event, which is a nicer way of saying spectacle. Flowers, mink, a muffled sob for the cameras. The machine loves full circles. Barbara’s story was packaged as morality in sequins. “Too fast.” “Too much.” “Too beautiful.” The implication being: choose less. Choose safety. Choose the kind of life that doesn’t interest columnists. But the industry didn’t offer her less. It offered acceleration and applause and a mirror big enough to live in until it breaks. That isn’t a prophecy; that’s a workflow.
The aftermath got tidied up the way the industry likes it: a boy adopted (ZaSu Pitts did the carrying and the caring; Tom Gallery gave him his name), a star turned into a paragraph in fan magazines, an aftertaste of perfume in a studio corridor where a prop man swore he still smelled her. Memory can be treacherous. But paperwork is not. The credits remain. So do the stills—the danger glare, the sloped shoulders under heavy jewels, the angle of a mouth that reads like a verdict.
Call it beauty; call it bait—same line item on the ledger.
Beauty was the product; Barbara was the packaging and the proof of concept, the showroom sample with the ribbon pulled tight. When the product moves, the seams give, the cardboard scuffs, the tape splits. The conveyor belt doesn’t blink; the machine simply queues the next.
Vera West: The Woman in the Pool
If Barbara was the face you could not forget, Vera West did the thing Hollywood forgets on purpose: she made faces into characters. She was Universal’s architect of silk and suggestion through the horror cycle, the woman who dressed panic. When an actress ran in chiffon down a corridor pursued by something with teeth, Vera had built the wind in that skirt. When a heroine met a laboratory light in a gown that made terror look stylish, Vera’s hands had coaxed the fabric into a mood.
Design is story. She understood that. The wrong hem ruins tension; the right neckline can make innocence look like an invitation to danger. She wasn’t the only designer in town; she was the one whose work is still in your head when you picture a frightened woman framed by a door. The monster gets the poster, the dress gets the history.
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| Designed by Vera |
You don’t hear much about her parties. You don’t hear much about her at all. Costume designers were expected to be microscopes trained on the stars’ bodies: precise, invisible, always right. Vera did the job too well to be famous for it. Then came June 1947. The maid found her in the pool. Face down. Floral housecoat. Police found not one, but two suicide notes. Both spoke of years of blackmail. Her husband waved it off as ‘imagined.’ He also happened to be out of town on business that night — after a ‘big fight’ the evening before. Later, he had their home completely demolished, as if erasing the scene itself. Suspicious doesn’t begin to cover it.
Who was the someone? The notes didn’t say. Conjecture did. Theories multiplied—an old affair turned violent, a grifter who smelled a lifetime of fear, a man with connections who knew that some women will pay forever to keep a thing contained. Hollywood had a network of fixers around that time; they were fast and thorough and not choosy about methods. You didn’t need to be a star to meet one. You just needed to be inconvenient.
One version has Vera trying to cut the wire that tied her to the drain. Another version has someone else doing the cutting. The autopsy gave the case a stamp and a shelf. The studio sent flowers and kept making pictures. Because that is the point. The pictures must go on, and the bodies around them become anecdotes, if that. No one turns out the boulevard for a designer. There is no casket rehearsal, no hush in a viewing line that circles a block. There are colleagues who know what she did and a couple of producers who will miss her eye when a neckline looks wrong in dailies. There is a husband who goes to sleep in a quieter house. There is a pool that refuses to say anything useful.
It matters that she spent years dressing women for fear. It matters that headlines always prefer actresses to artisans, and murder to suicide, and glamour to motive. Vera’s ending is not cinematic; it is administrative. Stamped, filed, reported in six sentences, and almost lost. Which means it tells you everything you need to know. What do we do with a woman who had information and a bank account and the bad luck to be harassed long enough? We let her pay until she can’t. We name it despair and call it done. We protect the machine.
A neat ending does not undo a messy method. The notes exist. The money was gone. She is at the bottom of a page in a book about another era’s scandals, and if you blink, the line vanishes. But go back and look at the photographs of the gowns, the stills of a woman in a satin bias-cut dress sprinting down a hall with something awful behind her. That movement—that exact, timed, camera-hungry movement—is a designer’s calculation. It is Vera’s. You can see her intelligence in the way fear moves.
Put them side by side, and the trick becomes obvious. Barbara’s ruin looks operatic; Vera’s looks clerical. That’s how the industry prefers it. Make the star’s fall look like a morality play and the artisan’s disappearance look like a paperwork conclusion. Either way, the system remains a neutral backdrop in its own fable—never the agent, always the weather.
But look harder. Barbara asked for velocity and got it, with interest. There is agency there, absolutely. There is also a studio strapped to a dying woman like a jockey to a collapsing racehorse, flogging for one last sprint. To label that exhaustion is a kind of elegance; it keeps the fingerprints off the furniture. You can hear the language: “The poor girl. Couldn’t slow down.” Notice how the subject of that sentence makes the studio the victim of her pace.
With Vera, the vocabulary hardens: “Distressed,” “troubled,” “self-harm.” The blackmail gets one sentence if that. The questions don’t get even that much. A closed case is a tidy case, and no one has ever lost a job for being tidy. Real power is the ability to decide which stories don’t need telling. What connects them is not melodrama; it’s logistics. The industry had a blueprint for women. It drafted Barbara into myth and fed the myth until it chewed through bone. It drafted Vera into silence because silence makes the scaffolding disappear. One woman was consumed in public; the other was managed out of sight. Both endings were useful to the factory floor.
If you’re looking for villains, the faces change depending on which corner you’re standing in: a publicist who knits sin into a label, a doctor with the wrong cocktail and the right bedside manner, a man who dines out on extortion for years, a cop with a form to fill. The point isn’t the person; it’s the permission. Systems write the alibi in advance.
And yet, the work survives. It always does. Barbara on a silver nitrate afternoon, the light taking her profile as if silver is the only element strong enough to hold it. The way her eyes read as dare and damage in the same frame. She wasn’t playing at being lived-in; she was. Vera, in the negative space of a dress, every dart and drape choosing what the camera finds first: skin, fear, movement, will. She wasn’t filming horror; she was engineering its look.
We keep pretending these are stories about the past. We keep pretending that the contracts are cleaner now, that the men talk differently, that a studio won’t put a busted body in front of a lens if it can squeeze a day more out of her face, that a woman being shaken down won’t be told to “be smart, be quiet, and let us handle it,” which means “absorb the damage yourself.” Progress marched. The costumes changed. The method kept its shoes.
What does it mean to write about them without lighting candles? It means staying with the evidence and refusing to romanticize why. Barbara wanted to devour life; the studio wanted to package that hunger and sell it back to her for a price she couldn’t afford. Vera wanted to build frames around women’s bodies that made fear legible; a man wanted her money and the rest of the town wanted her to stop making it awkward. There is no ritual that fixes that. There is only the record, and whether we add to it or allow it to be redacted by habit.
This isn’t a plea for purity; Hollywood never had any. It’s a request for accuracy. Do not say she “faded.” She didn’t fade; she was ground down. Do not say she “was troubled.” Tell me who troubled her. Do not say “the girl who was too beautiful.” Say: a press office learned to turn a face into a loaded gun and then blamed the woman when the recoil broke her ribs.
Barbara La Marr died at twenty-nine, with a city lined up to look at what was left. Vera West died at forty-seven with a file folder and an impatient coroner. Both did the work. Both paid the bill. If the industry had kept its ledger honestly, the balance sheet would show two lines in thick red: extraction and erasure. Noir isn’t mystical. It’s a lamp with a narrow beam, pointed exactly where someone doesn’t want you to look. Point it at the contracts, the call sheets, the fixer’s phone book, the tailor’s chalk marks on a bodice adjusted for panic. Point it at how a phrase—too beautiful—turns from a compliment to an indictment and gets repeated until people forget it started life as a slogan.
On a Friday, when the week has used you up and the city hums like a projector, spare an hour for two women who were not metaphors. One lived fast because the room rewarded velocity. One kept quiet because the room punished noise. The screen took everything they gave and sold it to us gorgeously. We can at least be honest where they couldn’t afford to be.
Barbara La Marr. Vera West. Not legends. Not warnings. Not ghosts. Just names attached to a system that still prefers its women glossy, grateful, and easy to file.
Here’s the inconvenient version.
photos: blogs, tmblr, gravesite blog
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