Reatha Watson (Barbara La Marr) is most famous as one of the first drug-related deaths in Hollywood, but she is notable for many other reasons. Born in Yakima, Washington, her parents moved to the Imperial Valley in California, where Reatha began her explorations of Los Angeles as a teenager. After several disastrous marriages she worked as a burlesque dancer until she married vaudeville actor Ben Deeley. They moved to New York, where Reatha (under the name Folly Lytell) wrote six scenarios for Fox. She made the successful leap from writer to actress in Douglas Fairbanks' L'excentrique (1921), and her career skyrocketed under her new name of Barbara La Marr (she adopted the alias because of a scandal when she was arrested in the late Teens, and called by the judge "too beautiful to be alone in a big city"). Barbara Marr lived extravagantly. After an affair with John Gilbert, her career went into a decline and her contract with Metro was terminated. She went to New York, where drugs and alcohol brought on tuberculosis, from which she died in January of 1926. The official studio press release blamed her death on "vigorous dieting". Her adopted son, Marvin, was adopted by La Marr's best friend, Zasu Pitts.
