The name Lamarr was taken, in one of those gestures of Hollywood mythology-making, from Barbara La Marr, a silent film actress who had died in 1926 at age twenty-nine, widely described at the time as “the girl who was too beautiful.” It was not a subtle choice. Mayer was packaging not just a name but an identity: the most beautiful woman in the world, now under MGM contract, now available to American audiences who knew nothing about her Austrian childhood, her Jewish family, her arms-manufacturer husband, or the film that had scandalized Europe.
She arrived in New York in late 1937 or early 1938. She was twenty-three years old.
## The Studio System and the Image It Made
The MGM that Hedy Lamarr entered in 1938 was in the middle of its golden decade. The studio had Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Joan Crawford, among others. It had production facilities that were, by the standards of any era, extraordinary. It also had a system for making stars that was as efficient and as inflexible as any industrial process.
Her first American film was Algiers, released in 1938. It was produced not by MGM but by Walter Wanger, who had borrowed her from the studio, and it paired her with Charles Boyer in a story set in the Casbah district of Algiers. Boyer played a French jewel thief. Lamarr played Gaby, a Parisian woman he falls for. The film was a polished romantic melodrama, and Lamarr’s performance, mostly reactive rather than expressive by the standards of the screenplay, was nonetheless transfixing. Her face in close-up was what most of the reviews talked about. She was described in the trade press as “the most beautiful woman in films.” The phrase followed her for the rest of her career.