Lewis J. Boies: a lawyer, married in 1963 and divorced two years later. The last marriage. She was forty-eight when they married, fifty when they divorced.
What the sequence shows, over thirty years, is someone who kept trying — who entered relationships with apparent optimism and exited them when the optimism could not be sustained. The popular psychological interpretation, offered by journalists and biographers with varying degrees of evidence, is that she was seeking the safety and respect that had been denied her in the first marriage and never quite found it. The simpler observation is that she made her own choices, lived with the consequences, and kept living.
Her children are less visible in the documented record than her marriages. James, her biological son with Loder, was close to her in later life and present at the EFF award ceremony in 1997. Denise and Anthony appear less frequently. Lamarr’s own accounts of motherhood, in interviews and in the autobiography, suggest that the demands of her career and the disruptions of multiple marriages made sustained domestic stability difficult to maintain. She appears not to have claimed otherwise.
## The Tabloid Chapters
The 1991 shoplifting arrest was not her first. She had been arrested for shoplifting in the 1960s as well, in an incident that received less coverage than the 1991 case because she was still, at that point, recognizable enough to generate sympathy as well as judgment. By 1991, at seventy-six, she was recognizable only to people of a certain age, and the tabloid framing was straightforwardly humiliating: the once-glamorous star, reduced to shoplifting at a drug store.