Hedy Lamarr’s 1966 May Co. Wilshire Shoplifting Case Sparked a National Media Frenzy
In 1966 a department store stop turned into something that felt like a national drama. The person being stopped was Hedy Lamarr.
The allegation was small on paper at roughly $86 worth of merchandise shoplifted.
The setting was pure mid century Los Angeles: May Company Wilshire, the gleaming retail palace with a gold cylinder on the corner that once served as the Miracle Mile’s showpiece.
After the cameras, the quotes, and the crowded courtroom energy was over there was an acquittal that only made the story linger longer.
This is the kind of case that lives on because of the contrast: Hollywood glamour colliding with the blunt mechanics of store security, booking, bail, and a jury.
Los Angeles retail glamour, built like a movie set
If you wanted a building that could hold a spectacle, May Co. Wilshire was perfect. Built in 1939, it was designed to catch the eye of drivers rolling down Wilshire. Black and gold, Streamline Moderne, “new Los Angeles” made visible.
Today, that same landmark is part of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. In 1966 it was where people went to shop, to be seen, and to bump into the city’s idea of celebrity.
That’s why the moment hit so hard: the setting wasn’t some anonymous storefront. It was an L.A. icon.
$86 worth of ordinary things
According to later reporting and archival photo catalog descriptions, Lamarr was accused of taking about $86 in merchandise. Items described as including things as mundane as greeting cards and bikini underwear.
That ordinary list is part of what makes the story so hauntingly memorable. This wasn’t a jewel heist headline. It was a small pile of everyday goods, made enormous by the name attached to it.
Stop, booking, bail
The story’s tone shifts fast once you leave the sales floor.
Archival captions note Lamarr was released on $550 bail after being held at the Sybil Brand Institute.
In the photos, you can feel that mid 60s press scrum energy: the flashbulbs, the journalist questions, the defensive posture. Fame trying to reassert control in a place where fame doesn’t run the rules.
When a petty theft case becomes theater
This is where it stops being a “store incident” and becomes a cultural moment.
A retrospective account describes the courtroom phase producing the kind of lines newspapers love, turning a fact pattern into a story with villains and heroes.
The prosecutor, Ira Reiner, argued the theft was done “systematically and methodically.”
The defense attorney, Jordan M. Wank, attacked store security as heavy handed, using the phrase “Gestapo tactics.”
Whether you read those lines as persuasion or performance, they show how large this shoplifting case had become.
The verdict: Not Guilty.
It felt “national”: the fame factor and the echo chamber
Even if you’ve never read a single line of testimony, you probably understand why this story traveled.
It had everything that makes celebrity news spread:
a household name and face,
a retail setting everyone recognizes,
a charge that feels “too small” for the person,
and a trial that produced dramatic language.
But the clearest proof that it didn’t stay sealed inside Los Angeles is what happened next: it became raw material for pop culture.
The Andy Warhol aftershock: turning the scandal into art
Only months after the arrest and trial, Andy Warhol and his circle folded Lamarr’s situation into their ongoing obsession with fame, collapse, and media loops.
The Museum of Modern Art describes Warhol’s noir satire Hedy as being inspired by Lamarr’s arrest and shoplifting trial “only months before.”
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art similarly frames the film as Warhol recasting her as a “scandal ridden” version of Lamarr, recently arrested and tried for shoplifting.
And Artforum explicitly refers to Lamarr’s “highly publicized shoplifting trial” while discussing Warhol’s broader set of celebrity inspired works.
That’s when you know the story broke containment: when it leaves the news pages and shows up in the art world as a symbol. Fame turned inside out.