Latest news with #FilmNoirFoundation

Budapest Times

A defiant lady looks back with no real regrets

Doubtless, many people younger than Veronica Lake wrote autobiographies, with hers having been published in 1969 when she was only 47 years old. But by 1973 she was dead; as legend has it, a washed-up, bankrupt Hollywood beauty who drank to oblivion. It would seem reasonable to assume that she had accepted her glory days would never return and it was time to set the record straight. Even, perhaps, that she felt her remaining days were few. Lake looks back with honesty, acceptance and understanding on a 30-film career between 1939 and 1970, an occupation towards which she often showed ambivalence. And equally she recounts the tumultuous issues that life dropped in her path – the death of her father in an accident, an overbearing mother who sued her, three failed marriages, guilt over inattention to her three children, a child who died, money struggles and the bottle. She apparently dictated her story to American author and ghostwriter Donald Bain, and between the two of them they produced a compelling account that doesn't seem to hold back. It reads nicely, as though Lake is addressing you the reader personally. However, the book fell out of print, becoming rare for years, and Dean Street Press, which specialises in vintage fiction and non-fiction, seemingly had to strive to track it down for this 2020 edition. It has an introduction by Eddie Muller, an American author and founder of the Film Noir Foundation that is dedicated to preserving and restoring films noirs , and he compares Lake to similarly torn actor Sterling Hayden, both having been reluctant stars and natural-born rebels who turned their backs on Hollywood, swapping fame for life as nomadic free spirits. Muller points out that 'while the public has granted Sterling Hayden, a legendary boozer and hash-head, a legacy as a heroic, larger-than life iconoclast, it has branded Lake's life after Hollywood a steady downward spiral of abasement, worthy only of pity. Blame a cultural double standard that applauds reckless rebellion in men but shames it in women'. Well put. Constance Frances Marie Ockelman, known to legions of moviegoers as Veronica Lake, was born in Brooklyn, New York State, on November 14, 1922, and her mother once intimated to her that she was a mistake, a very unwanted child. Connie was a tomboy in a normal comfortable middle-class family living in a fair neighbourhood. She spent her pre-school years in Florida, her grade school years back in Brooklyn and her high school years in Florida and Montreal, New York State. She had a lead in a school play at age eight, and was third of 85 contestants in a Miss Miami beauty contest and won first place in a Miss Florida contest – flesh peddling, slaves markets, as she described these. Her father died in February 1932 when she was 10 and her mother remarried a year later. Connie, her stepfather, mother and a cousin moved to Hollywood in summer 1938 when Lake was 16. She daydreamed occasionally of becoming an actress but had no compulsion, though her dominating mother had different ideas and enrolled her in acting school. One of the girls there had a casting call at RKO for 'Sorority House' in 1939 and she asked Connie to accompany her. Both were taken on as extras. Connie had further bit parts in 'The Wrong Room' (1938) at RKO, 'Forty Little Mothers' (1940) at Metro and a couple of others. She did a screen test for director Freddie Wilcox at Metro but the result was awful. A producer unzipped his pants and put his half-erect penis on the desk 'lying there like a sausage on display in the local supermarket'. She threw a book, hit her target and left him howling. She says she never succumbed to that Hollywood staple, the casting couch. Her fine, blonde hair was hard to manage and she was always trying to stop it falling in her eyes. Director Busby Berkeley decided instead that it distinguished her. She also tested for Paramount producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., and kept shaking her head to get the hair out of her eyes. The famous 'peek-a-boo' one-eyed look was born. 'Something I always considered a detriment to my appearance became my greatest asset. That's Hollywood, folks.' She had her first featured role in 'I Wanted Wings' in 1941. Hornblow wanted to change her name and he spent a restless night thinking about it. He told her that when people looked into her navy-blue eyes they saw the calm coolness of a lake, and her classic features made him think of Veronica. (Just a whim? Who or why Veronica goes unexplained). Working on 'I Wanted Wings' frightened her to death and she developed a self-defence, being very cocky and snippy. Her aloofness enabled her to get through the role but didn't endear her to the people working on the picture and gave her something of a poor reputation. However, it made her a star and she got a modest raise in salary. She scored with 'Sullivan's Travels' (1941), upsetting director Preston Sturges by not disclosing she was six months pregnant. 'This Gun for Hire' and 'The Glass Key', both with Alan Ladd, and 'I Married a Witch', with Fredric March, were further successes, all in 1942. Beauty shops nationwide began advertising the Veronica Lake hair-do, but government officials asked her to change it so that women working in war factories wouldn't get their long hair caught in the machinery. She wore it up in 1944's 'The Hour Before The Dawn'. Lake's successful teaming with Ladd continued in 'The Blue Dahlia' (1946) and 'Saigon' (1948). 'Blue Dahlia' writer Raymond Chandler called her 'Miss Moronica Lake'. Others joked. Groucho Marx: 'I opened up my mop closet the other day and I thought Veronica Lake fell out.' Bob Hope: 'Veronica Lake wears her hair over one eye because it's a glass eye.' She writes: 'I decided it was time to make Hollywood a thing of the past. At this point, cynics will say that quite the reverse was true; Hollywood decided to make Veronica Lake a thing of the past… I set foot in Hollywood again in June 1952, to obtain my final divorce from [Hungarian film director] André [DeToth]. I've never been back since.' Like others, DeToth had problems being 'Mr Lake', husband of a movie star, pin-up girl, sex symbol. Lake moved to New York and made a precarious living doing television and theatre. She broke her ankle and was laid low for a time, paycheck to paycheck. A newspaper revelation that she was a cocktail waitress at a New York hotel caused world headlines, but she insists it was something she liked and not forced by debts. A long section of the book describes her years drinking in bars with her sailor boyfriend Andy, until he died from alcohol ailments. Lake is quite matter of fact about her so-called decline. This reader is reminded of Edith Piaf's signature song 'Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien' – 'No! No regrets. No! I will have no regrets. All the things that went wrong, For at last I have learned to be strong. No! No regrets. No! I will have no regrets. For the grief doesn't last, it is gone, I've forgotten the past.' The Hollywood rebel had simply left glamour behind and wanted stardom without the usual trimmings. The book, recall, was published in 1969. Before reading it I saw her on YouTube interviewed on 'The Dick Cavett Show' in 1971, two years from death, almost unrecognisable with shorter hair and aged face but perfectly content and throwing her head back in wild laughter a couple of times. And there is a rather sad photo on the internet of her standing outside the gates of Paramount Pictures that same year, the former beauty looking like a dowdy housewife in a cheap tracksuit. But she is giving a little smile and appears composed. It seems the sadness is ours, not hers. Peace at last. 'And the memories I had I no longer desire. Both the good and the bad I have flung in a fire. And I feel in my heart that the seed has been sown. It is something quite new, it's like nothing I've known.' No regrets. Rest in peace Constance Frances Marie Ockelman, sometimes 'legend' Veronica Lake.