“I’ve always been a dreamer of good dreams,” Veronica Lake once wrote. “Any bad dreams are turned away in mid-air.”

One of the defining sex symbols of the 1940s, Lake’s life at first glance does seem like  the stuff dreams are made of: The beautiful blonde beauty queen. The extra plucked from obscurity and turned overnight into a Hollywood star. The otherworldly girl with the famous peekaboo hairdo. The star of film classics, including This Gun for Hire, The Blue Dahlia and Sullivan’s Travels. 

But for the temperamental, troubled Lake nothing was as it seemed. In Veronica: The Autobiography of Veronica Lake, her searing 1969 memoir (co-written by Donald Bain), Lake tells the story of her painful, epic life in a style both tawdry and heartbreaking, tough but tender, frank but at times fantastical. 

As with other pulp tell-alls of its day, Lake’s book wallops you with truth while holding ultimate answers back, giving readers the sense they are being played by a master escape artist. “Nothing really hurts you except people and old-age deterioration of the cells,” she writes. “And since people can’t do anything to curb the cell thing, they really don’t seem to serve much of a useful function at all.” 

Battle of Wills 

Constance Frances Marie Ockelman was born November 14, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York. Her pushy, competitive mother, also named Constance, had married Harry, a seaman, when she was only seventeen. It was a pattern her daughter would repeat. 

A tiny, doll-like beauty, little Connie was raised between Florida, New York and Montreal. In her autobiography, Lake presents her middle-class childhood in a remarkably unemotional way, rare for memoirs. Her father’s death in a shipboard explosion when she was 12 is given scant attention, in keeping with her tough little loner persona, which she claims to have developed early: “I was a tom-boy. I remember that and so do some of the little boys in our neighborhood who… felt the sting of a left hook from the toughest broad on the block.”

At Catholic boarding school in Montreal, the self-professed class “kook” was constantly getting into trouble. However, the kindly Mother Superior saw through her act: “I’d walk into her austere quarters, look at her through the top of my head, always bow, and mumble some form of apology. Her face would be set in firm resolution. And then the corners of her mouth would begin to crack… and soon she’d put back her head and laugh with great gusto. “Constance, Constance, Constance. What are we going to do with you? What a sense you have for finding trouble and entering into it.” 

Lake greatly needed this kindness. In the at-times mean-spirited Peekaboo: The Story of Veronica Lake by Jeff Lenburg, her bitter mother claims Lake’s problems were much more serious than that of a truant teen. According to Constance, Lake was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 15.

However, that didn’t stop her mother from setting her sights on Hollywood after a judge in the Miss Miami contest said Lake had the makings of a star. “A gleam came to her eyes,” Lake writes, “and if it weren’t so confusing back there, I’d swear she turned and looked westward with a long and promising sigh.”

The Mouse that Roared 

By 1938, the family was in Hollywood. By 1940, 17-year-old Connie was rechristened Veronica Lake by producer Arthur Hornblow Jr. That year she also got her big break as a femme fatale in I Wanted Wings and married the much older art director John Detlie. “I was frightened to death of everything… What I did was to develop a shell, a very cocky and snippy shell that seemed to work,” she writes. “I was trying to act thirty and usually ended up acting fifteen.”

Although Lake looked like a pint-sized pixie, her defiance in the face of Hollywood’s misogyny and hypocrisy was evident from the start. In Veronica, she recalls a meeting with a lecherous producer early in her career. “I didn’t really see him reach down to unzipper his pants, but the next thing I knew he’d stood up and laid his penis on the desk,” she writes. “He stood there, a large smile on his face and his half-erect penis lying there like a sausage on display in the local supermarket.”

In a passage that makes the reader want to jump up and cheer, Lake recalls that she grabbed a dictionary and threw it at his penis “He was really pretty lucky when you think about it,” she writes. “It was a thin little dictionary I’d thrown. Think if it had been the Random House Dictionary.”

On the set of I Wanted Wings, things weren’t much better. According to Lake, she was verbally abused by the director until she broke down in tears. Her co-star, Ray Milland tried to comfort her: “‘Hey shorty,’ he whispered in my ear… ‘Never let them see you cry. They spot one chink in your armor and they’ll never let up. Walk away—but never cry!’ I did what he suggested. I walked to my dressing-room. And then I walked out the door, drove out the studio gate and went home…”

But Lake didn’t stop there. Still in full-make up, she took off for Gallup, New Mexico, where her new husband was working on a film. In her rush, she drove her car off a cliff, breaking her toes in the process. “It took Paramount three days to figure out where I’d gone,” she writes smugly. “I’m sure Ray Milland or the studio never thought I’d walk that far.”

“Moronica” Lake 

Almost despite herself, she was soon Hollywood’s newest sensation. “Veronica Lake was a star,” she writes. “Paramount knew it. My mother knew it. And I knew it.” 

Her status only grew when she was cast in 1941’s Sullivan’s Travels. Director Preston Sturges, a fellow rebel,  recognized her enormous gift for comedy. Although she was pregnant during filming (which she had failed to tell Sturges when he cast her), she felt she thrived on the warm, light-hearted set. (Her co-star Joel McCrea would disagree. He said he would never work with her again: “Life’s too short for two films with Veronica Lake.”) 

She also recounts happy memories of filming her next comedy, 1942’s magical I Married a Witch. But in typical Lake fashion, she seems most proud of the pranks she pulled on her hated co-star Fredric March, who she felt demeaned her. For a scene where March had to carry her, Lake and a cameraman rigged a 40-pound-weight under her dress.  “I could hear March grunt under his breath as he valiantly carried out the script’s directions,” she writes. “He put me down for the final time and scowled at me. ‘Big bones,’ I said and walked away.”

It may have been stunts like these which caused Raymond Chandler to unkindly dub Veronica, “Moronica Lake.” According to Lenburg, her bad reputation was caused by the fact that she was a terminally late, rude, mentally ill alcoholic. There are also allegations that she was responsible for the death of her second child in 1943, who died a few days after his premature birth, which Lake claims was caused when she tripped on a cable on set. In Veronica, she recalls a famous visitor to her hospital room after the traumatic birth, another example of the oddities of Hollywood: 

I remember waking up from the anesthesia and seeing a mink coat. I blinked a few times and brought things into focus. Inside the coat was Katharine Hepburn. I’d never met her before. She smiled at me. “Don’t worry, Veronica. You’ll get over it. If there’s anything I can do, please let me know.” She got up and walked to the door. “Remember, Veronica, the calla lilies will bloom again.”

Highballs and Oddballs 

In Veronica, Lake readily admits to being an aloof, rebellious misfit in the Hollywood of the 1940s. “I wanted my stardom,” she writes, “without the usual trimmings.”  

Unwilling, or perhaps unable, to play the Hollywood game, Lake was attracted to other oddballs like herself. With her clear eye for the absurd, she adored the “handsome devil” Errol Flynn, and the equally hard-drinking Gary Cooper who she lovingly recalls often spotting slumped asleep in the saddle on Sunday morning horse rides in the Valley. One of Lake’s favorite friends was the eccentric socialite Lady Mendl, who took tea with her while standing on her head. 

After Lake’s first divorce, she also had her share of suitors (and according to Lenburg, rampant affairs) and was courted by director Jean Negulesco, the flashy billionaire Aristotle Onassis, and Howard Hughes. “I liked his rebellion against everything that was expected of him,” she writes. 

It appears First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was equally charmed by the mercurial misfit. According to Lake, she was chatting with the First Lady at a White House event when a sudden urge overtook her. “You know what I’d love, Mrs. Roosevelt?... A spoon. A spoon from the White House.” Roosevelt laughed, and discreetly gave her one from the table. 

Later, the two women were alone, and a wistful Roosevelt confided in Lake about FDR’s health and her admiration for Lake’s forthrightness: “I want you to know, Miss Lake, that I was very happy to give you that spoon. I was happy because you asked me for it. Most people wouldn’t bother asking. They would take them and walk out.”

The Barmaid 

In Lake’s telling, it was her financially disastrous second marriage to the controlling, abusive, often absent Hungarian director Andre De Toth that sent her into a spiral. “Off he’d go, leaving me in California with the children, animals, thoughts of a career obviously down the drain and, more and more, a bottle,” she writes. 

Matters weren’t helped when her estranged mother sued her for non-support in 1947, viciously attacking her daughter to reporters, claiming she had been left destitute after sinking all her money into Lake’s career. Lake was eventually reduced to pawning her jewelry. In 1951, her marriage over and movie career dead, she left for New York City.   “As corny and overly dramatic as it may sound,” she writes, “I actually did utter an official farewell to Hollywood as I stood ready to board the plane. ‘The hell with you, Hollywood,’ I said to myself. ‘And fuck you too.’”

Thus begins the saddest reading this reviewer has ever done for Old Hollywood Book Club (yes, more devastating than the tales of both Rita Hayworth AND Barbara Payton, if possible). Although she scored some success on television and the stage, Lake bluntly and bravely recounts her descent into chronic alcoholism (and according to Lenburg, untreated mental illness) and her neglect and occasional indifference to her three children. 

There were evictions, another drunken marriage, and violence. By the early 1960s, Lake was working at a factory pasting flowers on lingerie. In 1962, the New York Post discovered that the former movie star was living in NYC’s Martha Washington Hotel and serving as a barmaid under the name Connie De Toth. Although the public pitied her, Lake claims it was a place of refuge. “I liked the people there, the merchant marine seamen, the occasional hookers, the broken-heart guys and the problem drinkers,” she writes. “There was a TV over the bar and sometimes a movie of mine would light up the screen. You could hear a pin drop. Everyone watched so attentively, much to the dismay of the bartender; no one drank when my movies played.”

Return of the Sex Zombie 

While working at the Martha Washington, Lake met a rugged blond sailor named Andy, her “teddy bear” who became her beloved life partner and drinking pal. In pitiful and occasionally purple prose, she recounts their booze-soaked love affair—living together in flop houses, sneaking on ships—like some kind of Bowery version of Romeo and Juliet that she clearly wishes had never come to an end. 

But it did. Andy was slowly drinking himself to death despite his doctor’s warnings: “Why, Andy?” I asked him so often in the tiny room we shared. We would lie together on the bed, both drunk, and I would ask him why. He never answered the question and it really didn’t make any difference. I wouldn’t have known what to do with the answer.

In 1965, shortly before Andy’s death, Lake was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct after having a breakdown on the steps of a Catholic Church in San Diego. After nursing Andy through his final, harrowing illness, Lake would move to Miami and then England, appearing in plays and low-budget films. In 1969, Veronica was released, and—game but often drunk—she hit the publicity circuit, calling herself a “former sex zombie” and wryly quipping, “I’ve earned this face.” 

Lake died in Burlington, Vermont, on July 7^th, 1973, of acute hepatitis. In death, one hopes she finally found the peace she once imagined while sleeping on the beach.

“There were times I just stayed on the beach all night, heady with a belly full of lobster and gin,” she writes. “I’d just sleep right there and smile at the thought of the water sneaking in and carrying me away to a place where peace was always present and never interrupted by life.”

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