There is a lot to learn from this 1969-era autobiography of a once-beautiful actress who Hollywood created, chewed up, and then spit out.
Veronica Lake was manufactured into a star during 1940s-era Hollywood, to the point that books written 30 years later would still remember her, not for her acting, but for her world-famous "peek-a-boo" haircut. She went from a forgettable middle-class life in Brooklyn, to riches, and then to rags. She couldn't find work. She drank. And she aged, badly.
[A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site Casual Kitchen, I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!]
You'd think the author would harbor a lot of anger--toward herself, toward her ill fortune, or toward the movie industry star system that created her. But interestingly, she's sanguine about her journey, at times even grateful. She has enough horse sense to look back on her acting career and recognize that she wasn't all that talented in the first place, and that in a lot of ways she was lucky just to get to do what she did.
Unfortunately this awareness--uncommon enough for a young starlet--did not translate into her capably managing her career, her money or her personal life. Her movie career dried up just a few years after it began[1], and she literally disappeared from show biz. She quickly blew through three husbands and she openly admits not having much contact at all with her children. She appears never to have been stable financially, or for that matter psychologically. And so she spent much of the rest of her life drinking and being evicted from apartments.
She has a mix of curiosity and revulsion at Hollywood. She found it thrilling, especially as a young person, to be "on the inside," but at the same time she was disgusted by the movie industry's intrinsic artificiality, how fake everything--and everyone--was. In a way this reminds me a bit of my (also brief) Wall Street career. Everybody has mixed feelings when they really see how the sausage is made.
Veronica Lake's life ended early: by her own admission she was a heavy drinker, and while beautiful young, by the time she co-wrote this book she was an aged-looking 48 year old, as can be seen from her appearance on The Dick Cavett Show to promote her book. Two years later, she was dead from alcohol-induced hepatitis.
One brief final thought. It's an interesting cultural experience to read a celebrity autobiography from nearly sixty years ago. You get to see what things the reader is expected to know: which people, which events and what kinds of things were the substrate of pop culture at the time. The experience is both humbling and a relief.
It's a relief because you realize that none of this stuff really matters. Knowing who ate where, who wore what, and who seduced whom all seems ridiculous in retrospect. Especially when we can clearly see how all this ersatz "information" is quickly forgotten as the cultural substrate changes, and we are buried under a new generation of mass-produced celebrities.
But it's humbling too, once you realize how much of our heads are filled with the same ersatz information today. It's the same stuff, we never needed to know it, and twenty years from now no one will remember. Such is pop and celebrity culture. You and I are the product!
Footnote:
[1] All this is a major takeaway for all of us living in W-2 hell, whatever your income level: by definition, having a job means that a company can shut off 100% of your income, with hardly any notice, any time it wants! Get ready for your income to get turned off at random times in your career. Expect it.
[Readers, as always, what follows are my notes and reactions to the book--they are here to help me order my thinking and better remember what I read. Feel free to stop reading right here.]
Notes:
9 "Veronica Lake is a Hollywood creation. Hollywood is good at doing that sort of thing. Its proficiency at transforming little Connie Ockleman of Brooklyn into sultry, sensuous Veronica Lake was proved by the success of the venture. And the subject, me, was willing and in some small ways able." [Nice lede right there.]
9 On her identity: she's still "Veronica Lake": she signs her checks and lists her telephone under that name. [But when Hollywood makes you into "somebody" who are you? And when you go back to being a regular person after your career is over, who are you then? I suppose we all ask these questions once we leave our careers--I certainly did.]
10 Also interesting to hear her expose right away the fundamental falsity of Hollywood (and of celebrity culture in general) as she compares the reality to the glitzy impression that captured her imagination as a young girl going to her first movie. "Of course, it isn't that way today, with shared knowledge that the leading mailbox office idle is really homosexual, and the top siren of the screen is asexual and smokes pot - alone."
11 her mother was banking on a film career for her only child. Over the course of the book the reader can see that her mother was a high-functioning narcissist; likely Veronica Lake was too judging by her life path.
12 Interesting to hear comments about herself if she developed a full figure early on and made sure to "jiggle and jounce" and she puts it. "I knew the boys enjoyed this sort of thing, and I enjoyed their enjoyment."
13ff Her father dies when she was 12; her mother re-marries to a stepfather that she loved and who she was close to; the family moved to Hollywood; her mother enrolls her in an acting school; she says openly that contrary to her mother's dreams for her, she was convinced she would never become a movie star at all. Note the discussion here of the kinds of things she at this acting/finishing school, like practicing their accents, walking with a book on their head, and talking in time with a metronome. [This last item, a totally parenthetical offhand comment, sent me down a whole rabbit hole, this is actually a thing! And it helps explain the timing and speech conventions of English as a "stress-timed" language compared to syllable-timed languages like Spanish or Italian. Holy cow you never know what you're going to find reading a random book...]
15 Here's the millionth example of how nobody remembers celebrities that we used to think were important: Lake talks about the first movie that she was in (as an extra): Sorority House, with James Ellison, Barbara Read, Adele Pearce and Ann Shirley, and directed by John Farrow. Today nobody will know who these people are. It's liberating.
17 It seems clear early on in the book that this woman has decent horse sense, at least in retrospect: she knows her lane, she knows she's not that talented, she is aware of and mourns her lack of formal education.
19 A funny blurb here about the birth of her so-called "peekaboo hairdo": how it wasn't anything she did on purpose, she just could not control her hair! It was unruly and it kept falling in front of her eyes, and she at times found herself in dangerous situations, sometimes hardly able to see. And while trying to do a scene in a movie while trying to shake the hair out of her eyes, the director told her to leave it, saying, "It distinguishes her from the rest."
20ff Also interesting to see both her revulsion at the artificiality of Hollywood but also how she enjoyed being "on the inside" walking around the studio lot. She gives an interesting analogy here, describing the old radio shows where listening put you in this wonderful imaginative place, but once she actually watched one of these radio shows being produced--seeing the bored expressions on the actors and actresses as they waited for their turn at the mic, seeing the sound effects man waiting for cues to shake sheet metal and wrinkle cellophane--she felt cheated. [In a way this happened to me during my Wall Street career, I loved being on the inside, but at the same time it was kind of gross to see how the sausage is made.]
21ff She gets "noticed" on the lot by director Freddie Wilcox, who wants to have her in for a screen test, she's suspicious of him, she's actually suspicious of all men in Hollywood: she thinks they all want to get into her pants. But also this blase suspiciousness probably helped her, she doesn't come across as too eager.
23 "I did automatically adopt a pessimistic shell as protection against possible failure."
29ff She talks about producers who are mostly interested in banging actresses, including one example of a 1940's-era adult film maker, she mistakenly went to do a test in his office and then ran away in terror once she found out what this guy did; then another example of a well-known director who, with Lake sitting in his office, pushed a button under his desk to lock all the doors, and pulled out his penis and laid it on the desk, saying, "Let's have fun and then we'll talk about silly things like making movies." She grabbed a dictionary off of his office shelves and threw it at him, hitting him right in the penis. [!] She was 16 or 17 at the time. [Of course the stuff Harvey Weinstein did was nothing new. Even the wormy Matt Lauer from Good Morning America--also disgraced after sexual assault allegations--had just such a button under his desk. It just goes to show that every creepy thing that creepy media people do has already been done, sadly.] Interestingly, she doesn't reveal who he was, even now, decades later, because they later became close friends: years later she teasingly asked him if he called his secretary in "to help inspect the damage," and it turned out the secretary had run into his office when she heard him moaning in pain and started laughing like hell at him.
36ff [It turns out the famous peekaboo hairdo was just an accident]: Lake auditions for a minor part in the major movie I Wanted Wings; while she's trying to do her scene hair gets in her eyes; she kept trying to do the scene while shaking her head to get her hair out of her eyes, and it made her so mad she stormed off the set after the screen test was over. "This goddamn shitty hair!" The producers actually liked it, while she was confused why they wanted her: she thought they were trying to rewrite the part into some sort of "low comedy role for an ugly starlet with unmanageable hair." Later she learns: "Something I always considered a detriment to my appearance became my greatest asset. That's Hollywood, folks."
39 The film's producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr. didn't like the name Constance Keane; he calls her in for a meeting: "'Connie, picking a name involves coming up with something that associates in the fan's mind the person attached to that name. The name has to... Well, it has to be the person, or at least what the fan thinks that person is. You know what I mean?' 'Yes.' I didn't, but that was irrelevant." He gives her the name "Veronica Lake" and then she realizes her mother--who she can't stand--was sometimes called Veronica, and also she and her family had spent many summers at Saranac Lake while her stepfather recovered from tuberculosis, so the name had all kinds of associations for her. "Of all the goddamn names in the world to choose," she says, and then she bawled like a baby right there in his office.
42 Terrified in her first movie, she develops a cocky and arrogant shell to survive: "I knew I had no professional business being there in that role. It was the Hollywood star machine that had ground me out like a product on an assembly line, and I knew my lack of confidence would ruin me."
44 "I was trying to act thirty and usually ended up acting fifteen." If you actually look at footage from this movie, it's hard to believe she's only seventeen years old; yes, she acts wooden, but certainly nothing like a terrified teenager.
51ff After doing the on-location work in Texas, Lake returns home and marries John Detlie: he's 33 and she's 17.
54ff She gets verbally abused by the director Mitch Leisen, and decides to drive all night to New Mexico to go see her new husband who's working on a picture there, and en route she hits ice and drives off a cliff near Flagstaff; a few days later the studio tracks her down and finds her; she is establishing a reputation as a temperamental little brat, but there was so much of the film shot by then that replacing her would cost too much; also they had made a major promotional photo of her for the movie already. The film made her into a star, and everybody knew it. She then gets a raise from $75 a week to $300 a week--after she asked for a thousand.
60 [A good example here of a sentence that Veronica Lake would never have written]: "The first eight years of anyone's life are bound to be dull, unless you've been forced into Faginish activities or illicit, pre-puberty concubinage. I suffered nor enjoyed neither."
68 Quite a striking story here where Lake is briefly molested by a priest as a young teenager, right in his family's living room while her mother had gone out to run errands; she ran away from him and he left the house.
69 On going to public high school in Miami; it was a ball; she talks about the boy she had an unrequited crush on who was the football quarterback; and then on a homely and fat boy that she dated because she felt sorry for him. He taught her how to drive. "He was a wonderful guy. Just unattractive." She ran into him many years later and he had become tall and handsome. "If only girls in high school could look into the future and see beyond the baby fat and acne."
75ff She comes in third in the "Miss Miami" beauty contest, and the host persuades her mother to have her try out in Hollywood. "A gleam came to her eyes." Then she goes on to the Miss Florida beauty contest and actually wins it--but the organizers discover she was underage and took away her title. "I didn't mind. Being disqualified after you've won something is a pretty good way to lose. All my losses should be that winning."
80ff [The book jumps around from one period of her life to another; now we are back to the release of the film I Wanted Wings: the movie did really well and her hairstyle became a huge thing. She self-effacingly shares some of the jokes and mockery she experienced: the Harvard Lampoon voted her the worst actress of 1941; Bob Hope made a joke about how Veronica Lake wears her hair over one eye because it's a glass eye; also a joke from Fred Allen about being stopped by a cop for driving with one headlight out--the cop says "what are you trying to pull, a Veronica Lake?"
85ff She is cast in another major movie, Sullivan's Travels, a comedy, and over the studio's objections; nobody actually thought she could act, much less be in a comdey. She's also pregnant at this point, and gets into an argument with her mother about throwing her career away, and then gets angry at her husband for not defending her. She considers the movie to be the best film of her career; she felt at home doing comedy. She finds she does much better if instead of actually learning her lines, she just looks at her lines just before shooting the scene, she's more natural and less wooden this way.
93f On the birth of her daughter Elaine; and then being hired for the movie, This Gun for Hire, with Alan Ladd. Also the Pearl Harbor attack happened during the filming of this picture, and the US War Manpower Commission asked her to refrain from wearing her hair long for the duration of the war because so many female defense plant workers were wearing their hair styled the same way, and getting their hair caught up in machinery [!] As preposterous as this sounds, she then writes, "It's all in the Congressional Record. Alan laughed for days over this unexpected request from our government. I must admit I was flattered to think I had become that crucial to our war effort. The last thing I wanted was to have caused a workforce of one-eyed women fouling up the defense machinery."
99ff A good example of day-to-day work in Hollywood here: Lake had to do a magic act with a monkey, and couldn't get the scene right. They ended up doing 64 takes, taking the entire day until 10:00pm. And then the director ends up using the fourth take. "It looks great. Don't you agree?"
103ff This Gun for Hire received mixed reviews at the time, but later became a minor film classic. "Today's film buffs look for things in films that we didn't when I was making films."
104ff She's cast in another film with Alan Ladd, The Glass Key, based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett; a cute story here on how Lake was supposed to fake punch Brian Donlevy in the jow, but she didn't know to pull a punch and hit him for real. He stood there glassy-eyed with his mouth hanging open.
106ff She comments on the failure of her first marriage: she was still a child, her husband couldn't deal with her success, she says that she didn't understand at the time, "I do today, and wince whenever I think of the unfortunate spot John had been placed in when he married Veronica Lake."
107 A cynicism-inducing blurb here where she talks about receiving over a thousand pieces of mail a week, and at first she tried to answer one out of every five, signing them "Mrs. John Detlie," but then her letter-answering chores were turned over to the studio. "Every major studio had a letter-writing staff and usually one person, in most cases a female, who was expert at signature forging. She could sign anyone's name as well as they could, and I wonder how many millions of people all over the world have cherished photographs supposedly signed by their screen favorite."
108 Interesting here to hear her discuss how her husband was hired to do "camouflage design" for the US military during the war; she helped him with his work and was amazed at how talented he was... and this stabilized their relationship for a while. [It just goes to show that when a woman looks up to her man they can get along. When she doesn't... they can't.]
112ff Her husband then officially joins the Army and moves up to Seattle; she doesn't want to live on an army Major's salary; again he suffers from being "Mrs. Veronica Lake." Comments on other movies she was in, including So Proudly We Hail, which was about nurses serving in Bataan and Corregidor.
110ff A funny scene here where she's working on the film I Married a Witch with Fredric March: the two of them hated each other, she felt like he treated her like a no-talent Brooklyn blonde, he was cruel to her doing filming; so she pulls a prank on him to get back at him, having a cameraman rig a 40 pound weight under her dress before a scene where he was supposed to pick her up. He can barely lift her and he gets weaker and weaker with each take. "Big bones" she says to him and walks away.
123 This next section isn't quite clear to the reader, but Lake become pregnant again, later we will learn that her husband didn't think the baby was his, but she denies this; and then while pregnant she trips and falls badly, and then delivers the baby two months early, and then it dies a week later. They divorced soon after.
128 Intriguing discussion here of the culture of Hollywood: on the movie subculture that more or less "invaded" Hollywood to the dismay of the old-money elites who were already there; movie people were looked down upon by Los Angeles natives; its interesting to hear about this early snubbing. But there was so much money coming into Hollywood, and so many newly wealthy directors, studio executives and major actors who started buying up and building beautiful luxurious homes all over the city, that a new Hollywood elite more or less replaced the old elites.
133ff Gossipy comments here about how Errol Flynn hit on Veronica Lake but she turned him down; also on her odd friendship with Howard Hughes: she tells a weird story where he calls her up in the middle of the night and asks him to drive her to Burbank where he has his personal TWA plane waiting for him; also on Howard Hughes pretending he was deaf at parties as a ploy to not interact with anybody; Lake claims they were never romantically involved; also she was offered $100,000 to marry Tommy Manville for three days and then get divorced; and also that Aristotle Onassis kept sending her perfume, steaks, wine and nylons. Also a story here about going from dive bar to dive bar in Chicago with Gary Cooper, Rita Hayworth and some other Hollywood people, and they all ended up at a strip joint together.
147 Lake starts running low on money, and starts taking work on lower and lower quality films. [At this point it's obvious her career management skills were not good: she was a difficult actress when she was a star and the biggest studios wanted nothing to do with her soon after.]
148 She remarries right away after her divorce with John Detlie was finalized, to Hungarian director Andre de Toth; right away she makes an allegation that during their courtship he beat her up. "I made a lot of mistakes in my life."
149ff Quite a striking story here about a luncheon with Eleanor Roosevelt in January, 1945; Lake asks Mrs. Roosevelt for a spoon from the White House: Roosevelt laughs and discreetly hands one to her, telling her most people would have just taken it but you asked. Later that day, Eleanor Roosevelt confesses, strangely, to Lake in a private moment that the President is ill, dying of prostate cancer. This is actually a fascinating and touching scene; FDR had just left for the Yalta conference, and then of course in April, 1945 Roosevelt dies of a massive brain hemorrhage. "I never repeated what Mrs Roosevelt told me. Never. I don't know why." And then, stuck right in the middle of this story in an orphaned couple of paragraphs, Lake makes an offhand comment about how she had a chat with then-Vice President Harry Truman and his daughter Margaret, and Truman said he felt the press was unfair to him in the way they photographed him and quoted him out of context. "I agreed, of course, but wanted to say that perhaps if Margaret and [Truman's wife] Bess dressed a little better, the press might be more kind. I've never seen any mother and daughter dressed in such bad taste. They were nice people, though, and I was pleased to see the press treat Mr. Truman a little better after he became President."
154 Holy cow, here we can see that no man can make her happy: her first husband was too nice when her stardom overshadowed him, and when her stardom overshadowed her second husband, he was too mean.
159 Her new husband De Toth and Lake are running low on money... so they buy a plane, take flying lessons and get their pilot's licenses.
164ff Then a crazy story where Lake just ups and takes her secretary on a multi-stop flight from California to New York, piloting in her own plane... while she's five months pregnant. Somehow the press starts showing up at refueling stops, then they get lost (!) but then they buzz a water tower to read the town's name, and then find it on the map to locate where they are. Then they land in Pittsburgh and a tornado hits. (!) Finally they make it to New York after an errant landing in New Jersey. The secretary decides to take the train home.
173 Lake then is put on bed rest for her pregnancy, and learns her mother sued her.
180 She stops getting film offers, starts drinking more and more and she and her husband Bandi De Toth start running into problems with creditors. "I was no alcoholic." she writes. [Note that she is dictating this book about three years before she ends up dying of alcoholism-induced hepatitis.] She and De Toth declare bankruptcy in 1951 "after the income tax people seized our home in April to satisfy over 60 thousand dollars in unpaid taxes." She and De Toth divorce and suddenly scripts start coming her way again. She learns the reason nobody was sending her scripts was because De Toth was rejecting them all.
183 Lake then takes off to the Sierras alone for three months, then confesses, strangely, "I did miss the children, although I was surprised at how little I miss them. There's a shame to be felt in my lack of concern for them. I felt that shame and still do, the intensity of it varying with the successes or failures of Elaine, Mike and Diana." She leaves Hollywood for New York, only going back once to finalize her divorce from her second husband. "'The hell with you, Hollywood,' I said to myself. 'And fuck you too.'"
184ff She gets some work in television, does some theater and summer stock work, and then goes on the road working some minor plays; in some cases she answers phones, helps paint sets, etc. "I loved every minute of it." She feels guilty about not raising her kids all that well, for having to work; the reader can obviously see she doesn't have much contact at all with her children.
190ff She gets a stage role in a traveling production of Peter Pan; gets herself into shape, cutting out drinking entirely, doing calisthenics every morning. Also a description of a mishap mishap with the stage cabling when the play opened in Baltimore: the actors got all tangled up during a flying scene.
197ff She gets married again: to Joseph Allan McCarthy, son of the famous songwriter Joe McCarthy. "It didn't take Joe and me long to begin not getting along. In fact, it was almost immediate." [If a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, what then is a third marriage?]
204ff On behavior problems with Lake's son Michael; he chases her husband Joe with a knife after Joe had kicked Veronica, also he gets picked up wandering in Chicago in the middle of the night; she can't cope with him and sends him to LA to be with his father Bandi De Toth, and De Toth literally puts him on the next plane back.
209ff She breaks her ankle, gets evicted, drinks, her luck is getting worse by the years as she seems to make her own bad luck. Then she tells the story of how she was "re-discovered" by a reporter while working at the bar of the Martha Washington Hotel in Manhattan. She claims she liked working there. People from all over the country sent her money, and she returned it all out of pride.
214ff A cute, mournful story of a sailor, Andy, who she falls in love with here: it reminds the reader of the Hemingway novel To Have and Have Not. The two of them drank. A lot. And he drank himself to death. And then a few years later she did the same. The family purposely tells her the wrong date of the funeral.
248 She's left reeling from Andy's death, and while she does manage to find some stage work here and there, she appears to be drinking still more, living with friends, and talking about how she's happy and at peace. It comes off to the reader sounding more like denial.
257 More comments here about how she hardly ever sees her children, and is upset by her one son Michael, who will show up randomly and then leave. "I seldom see any of my children." Note also the mention here of the Subud religion: her daughter Elaine and her husband Maynard embrace this religion and send her a book about it. "I read it twice. I didn't understand a word."
260 The last twenty or thirty pages of the book seem scattered--scattered to the point where even the book's ghostwriter can't organize things into a thread. She does two horror films, saying in the late 60s/early 70s it became fashionable to put older stars into horror movies. The last movie she was in, which is called Time Is Terror in the book--but actually was released as Flesh Feast--is atrociously bad, like campily bad: you can find footage of it on YouTube.
270 "People who haven't experienced fame tend to think of it as wonderful. They secretly wish they would be recognized wherever they go... But it becomes terribly old after you've gone through it for a while. You find yourself dreading a shopping trip or dining out. It's all so flattering in the beginning but so dreadful and bothersome in the end..."
To Read:
Beirne Lay, Jr.: I Wanted Wings
Dashiell Hammett: The Glass Key
Herman Wouk: Slattery's Hurricane
W. Somerset Maugham: The Hour Before the Dawn
J.G. Bennett: Concerning Subud
Hedy Lamar: Ecstasy and Me