The case was eventually dismissed. The merchandise in question was, by all accounts, inexpensive. What the incident revealed — or what commentators claimed it revealed — varied by who was doing the claiming. Some saw diminishment: a woman who had once commanded the screens of the world’s theaters, now unrecognized in a Florida strip mall. Others saw something more complicated: a woman with a long history of impulsive behavior, substance use (the 1960s and 1970s had involved Dr. Max Jacobson and his amphetamine injections, which he administered to a wide roster of Hollywood clients under the nickname “Dr. Feelgood”), and financial difficulty that had begun with the auction of her possessions in 1968 and never fully resolved.
The auction itself, in which she sold furniture, jewelry, costumes, and memorabilia at Sotheby’s in New York, was covered with the tone that such events inevitably attract — the fall from grace, the woman selling off the artifacts of a glorious past. Lamarr’s own account of the period was characteristically oblique: she needed money, she made decisions, she moved on. The specific financial mechanisms that brought her to that point are not clearly documented.
What is clear is that after Mars Film Corporation’s productions did not re-establish her career in the late 1940s, and after Samson and Delilah’s success failed to generate the follow-up roles she needed, her financial position became increasingly precarious. By the late 1950s, she was making small roles in minor productions. By the 1960s, she had essentially retired from the screen.
The plastic surgeries of the 1970s and 1980s represent a particular kind of tragedy within the tragedy of the beauty trap: a woman who had been famous for a face that she eventually found intolerable to be seen with, who sought surgical solutions to the problem and found that the solutions made it worse. She withdrew. She used the telephone. She refused interviews for most of the last twenty years of her life.