last hurrahs

That’s a face that launched a million peek-a-boo hairdos, belonging to one Veronica Lake, stunning star of one of my favorite films, “Sullivan’s Travels,” perhaps the best film ever made about making films.

When Veronica was 10, her father died in an industrial explosion, in Philadelphia, no less. What a place to blow up.

She was expelled from an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Montreal, not the worst fate that can befall a girl, but she was likely schizophrenic, and you know how reticent those schizos can be about admitting that.

Through her mother’s second marriage, Veronica ended up in Beverly Hills (of all places) and got work at RKO as a teen. She made it big in 1941 by stealing almost every scene in “I Wanted Wings.” She was 19, married an art director who was much older, and had the first of her 4 children.

Lake was frequently paired with Alan Ladd because he was 5’5″ and she was 4’11″. During WWII, Veronica Lake’s sex appeal made her a favorite pinup girl among soldiers, along with Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable.

Her drinking and erratic behavior earned her a rotten reputation in Tinseltown, where the sultry blonde began to rust like so much war surplus. Joel McCrea turned down a second film with her, saying, “Life’s too short for two films with Veronica Lake.”

During filming of the Nazi spy drama “The Hour Before the Dawn,” she fell on a cable while pregnant and began hemorrhaging. She recovered, but the child was born prematurely and died a week later of uremic poisoning.

Noir scribe Raymond Chandler began calling her “Moronica Lake.” She married Hungarian horror director Andre de Toth and had two more kids. It was rumored that one of them was Alan Ladd’s. Her mother sued her for support. It was 1944, and Veronica was earning $4,500 a week… the equivalent of $56,684 in today’s dollars.

Here’s a couple of minutes of her magnetism, a few stills and some footage, with a cornball song I love. Oh, and there’s more to this story…

She got a pilot’s license and was able to fly solo coast-to-coast, and turned 24.

By 1951 she was divorced again, and her assets were seized by the IRS for unpaid taxes. How did stars blow all that dough?! She managed to get some work on TV and the stage, and remarried in 1955, this time to a songwriter, divorcing him in ’59. She broke her ankle and was arrested for public drunkenness. The big sink from the drink and red ink stinks.

A reporter discovered her working as a barmaid in a Manhattan hotel, and wrote up the story, and as a result she got some work on TV. For a brief time in 1966 she was a TV hostess in Maryland. Have you been to Maryland? She moved to Hollywood… Florida, where her paranoia kicked in; she believed she was stalked by the FBI.

Her autobiography was published in 1972. She used the money from it to finance her last film, “Flesh Feast,” a low-budget horror flick with some kind of Nazi storyline. She moved to England and was married a fourth time — to a sea captain. That didn’t work out either. She filed for divorce and returned to the US in 1973, age 50.

She was immediately hospitalized with hepatitis and renal failure (alcoholics get that) and died, in Burlington, Vermont on July 7, 1973. Her ashes were scattered off the Virgin Islands, per her request. This is a pic of her near the end…

Below is the original trailer for “Flesh Feast,” in which she plays a mad scientist, uttering the classic line, “What’s the matter, don’t you like my little maggots?!”

And that’s today’s Friday Face, with a peek-a-boo ‘do. Happy Friday, everyone! I love you all!

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