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.  “Barbara La Marr...