Saturday, April 23, 2011

Actress Spotlight: Veronica Lake

Actress Spotlight: Veronica Lake

So I was watching I Married a Witch last weekend and trying unsuccessfully for the past few days to write a review before I realized that what I really wanted to do was talk about Veronica Lake. 

I have a fondness for Veronica Lake that goes well beyond her merits as an actress.  It's always a pleasure to see her. Even when you know that offscreen her costars were gnashing their teeth over working with "Moronica Lake," as Raymond Chandler called her, Lake always seems to be having a lot of fun, playing hide-and-seek behind her famous hair, smiling knowingly, and pouting when things don't go her way.

In my Hollywood alternate universe, Howard Hawks takes Lake on as he did that other husky-voiced blonde Lauren Bacall and injects a little more wit and maturity into the Veronica Lake persona. The difference between Bacall and Lake is that Bacall, given the right role, seemed like someone who'd been round the block and had the smarts to prove it. Lake didn't; there was always something a little unreal about her vamping. 

In Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, in a role that was purportedly intended for Barbara Stanwyck, Veronica Lake's pose of being the street-smart girl, far more experienced than Joel McCrea's pretentious director, is obviously just that, a pose. In Stanwyck's case, we would have believed it. It doesn't hurt the film, though; it just shifts the dimensions. Sturges seems to take a mischievous pleasure in pitting the 4'11'' Lake against the 6'3" McCrea; she's perpetually clambering into his lap or leaning into him or pushing him into pools. McCrea's grumpiness is in fine contrast to her girlishness. His attraction to her is played like a guy falling for a friend's annoying kid sister.

Veronica Lake's pairing with Alan Ladd was famously because she was the only actress on the Paramount lot that could make him look tall. But their personas matched well too. Ladd, the gruff and rough guy with the face of an "aging choirboy," was like a teenage boy playing at being the tough guy and the sulky Lake was a teenage girl's idea of the femme fatale. She strikes the poses, she looks and talks like a bad girl, but she never feels truly dangerous.



Veronica Lake has earned a legacy as a style icon, but her popularity as an actress burned itself out at an amazing rate. Lake couldn't even last out her decade; she was truly "in" by 1941, skidding by 1944 (after a disastrous turn as a Nazi spy in The Hour Before the Dawn), and completely totaled by 1949, at the ripe old age of 27.  Time is rarely kind to "It Girls" and Lake's particular brand of pouty, girlish charm probably wouldn't have aged very well even if her career had been better handled and her personal problems not gotten in the way. 

The last fifteen years of her life were one slow decline into alcoholism, mental illness, and poverty and she died at age fifty, looking (based on her appearance in the 1970 exploitation film Flesh Feast) twenty years older. Lake was self-deprecating in interviews ("You could put all the talent I had into your left eye and still not suffer from impaired vision"), but she still had her pride. During Lake's latter-day stint as a cocktail waitress, her former lover Marlon Brando sent her a check for one thousand dollars. Lake had it framed.



Part of my fascination with Veronica Lake comes from hearing story after story by her frustrated costars; she seemed to have an incredible ability to spark the dislike of even the most easygoing costars. After Sullivan's Travels, McCrea refused to work with her again, saying that "Life is too short for two films with Veronica Lake." During the filming of I Married a Witch, she and March openly despised each other. March on Lake: "a brainless little blonde sexpot." Lake on March: "a pompous poseur." Lake would play pranks against her costar like hiding a weight under her dress for a scene where March had to carry her. She would also take revenge on Brian Donlevy, another disparager of her talent, in The Glass Key. When it came time for her to punch him in one scene, she almost knocked him out. In her autobiography, Lake would attribute this burst of pugilism to growing up in Brooklyn.  Eddie Bracken, her costar for Star-Spangled Rhythm, said once that "She was known as 'The Bitch' and she deserved the title." Even her screen partner Ladd reportedly never warmed up to her, though I can't find any quotes from him on the subject. 


It's hard not to feel some sympathy for someone so miserably unpopular. Marilyn Monroe drove her costars up the wall too, but they forgave her because well, she was Marilyn Monroe. Maybe Lake was as bitchy as her costars gave her credit for; it's difficult to tell where bitchiness left off and real mental illness began. Unlike other stars who died the slow, painful death of the addict, like Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland, Veronica Lake didn't seem to inspire the same feelings of protectiveness and affection. It's a fair bet to say that she made others as miserable as she made herself. However, she did not deserve her eventual fate: alcoholic, forgotten, estranged from her children and loved only by her nurses. 

Whatever she was offscreen, onscreen she radiated warmth and charm. There was an iciness to her beauty and to the world-weariness her characters often affected, but Lake herself didn't play it cold. Some femme fatales could maneuver men via lust or manipulation. Lake melted them. One of the pleasures of her movies with Alan Ladd is waiting for the moment when the grim Ladd suddenly breaks out in a boyish smile, dropping his cool persona under the influence of Lake. Fredric March may have hated Lake on the set of I Married a Witch, but it sure doesn't show in the film. The more his character, the stuffy Wallace Wooley, tries to tell Lake's witch that he doesn't love her, the more he finds himself stroking her hair and gazing into her eyes. In the aforementioned Sullivan's Travels, McCrea learns affection for her as he learns tolerance for other people. The image of McCrea's arm stealing around Lake is as tender as anything ever directed by Preston Sturges.


Back in 1998, Kim Basinger won her only Oscar for her supporting turn as Lynn Bracken, the Veronica Lake look-alike prostitute in Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential. I saw that film for the first time only a few months ago and I liked it, but not nearly as much as others liked it. Some parts were great, some parts felt silly to me. Basinger's role was one of the lesser parts to me. Her entrance is great, an extended tease of the mysterious woman under the hood, like a true homage to old-style Hollywood glamor. But the character disappoints. In spite of Basinger's attempts to give Lynn Bracken some depth, she doesn't really rise beyond the hooker with the heart of gold type."You're better than Veronica Lake," her lover Bud White tells her at one point, trying to assure of her own worth. She is a real woman, not fantasy, not Hollywood.

In retrospect though, it's Basinger and Bracken that feel fake to me and Veronica Lake, stealing aboard a train, casting spells over Fredric March, kissing Alan Ladd before he goes off to risk death, the same Veronica Lake that would die young and alone, that haunts me.

12 comments:

  1. Great post, Rachel!! I think that she's one of the most underrated actresses ever. My favorite movie from her is "So proudly we hail!" (1943).

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  2. I very much enjoyed reading this. I've always felt that Lake perhaps got too hard a rap from people. She's never been one of my favorite actresses, but I do like her in Sullivan and I adore I Married a Witch.

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  3. Thanks for the comments. So Proudly We Hail is one film I haven't seen. I'm not trying to make a case for Lake as one of the all-time greats, but I always enjoy her and I think she might have had a pretty fruitful career in comedy, judging by Sullivan's Travels and I Married a Witch, if things had been different.

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  4. I adore Veronica Lake. She never blew me away with her acting talent, but she had such a slinky, sleepy way about her that I found hard not to love. She's also one of the most beautiful stars of old Hollywood, too, though a lot of people nowadays seem to think her looks overrated. I think they're nuts. She had this soft aura about her, combined with that gorgeous hair, that really drew you in. Great tribute to her!

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  5. Thanks, Laura. I didn't know people were saying that Lake's looks were overrated. If you look at pictures of her without her trademark bang, she's still gorgeous.

    http://www.demeterclarc.com/wp-content/uploads/images/2010/11/VERONICA-LAKE-WORKSUIT.jpg

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  6. I love Veronica Lake, and Alan Ladd is my favorite of her screen partners. Veronica had nothing but kind things to say about Alan in her autobio, and she was friendly with his wife, Sue Carol. At one point,in the late '50s, he wanted her and their mutual friend William Bendix to star in his television program, "Box 13" but it never happened. I highly doubt he disliked her as some have claimed (interestingly, as you noted, there are no direct quotes from him on the subject). As for Frederic March, Brian Donlevy, and Eddie Bracken, well, they certainly had their part in whatever dislike was going on, they made disparaging remarks about her, so that rarely invites kindness in return. It bugs me that Lake gets the bad rap for being "difficult" yet the men who worked with her don't get held in the same company.

    Joel McCrea did work with her again in "Ramrod" (1947) and Lake's husband at the time, Andre de Toth, was the director.

    I don't think Lake is overrated in looks and I think she was a better actress than she was given credit for. I wish more of her films were officially on DVD. This post is a great tribute to her!

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  7. Muirmaiden: Thanks a lot for your detailed comments on such an old post! I agree with you that there's just some alchemy between Ladd and Lake that she never had with another costar, talented as many of them were. And while I know very little of what Lake was like in real life, she just fascinates me.

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  8. I remember the first time I really looked at her, on T.V., in The Glass Key, and thinking something like--how complete the package was. Amazing voice, the face, the body, the hair, the looks expensive, that makes her look like a cold, hard bitch. I know about how her career spiraled downward, the mental illness, the alcoholism. My Veronica Lake phase educated me about 40's Hollywood, so that I recognize Eddie Bracken in Vacation, know Andre de Toth (who I met, and restrained myself from asking about her..).

    Fine Piece.

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  9. I admire Veronica Lake and also, I love the way you wrote this post. Personally, I have always been under the spell not only of her talent and beauty, but also, her greart hair style. Thanks for this post!

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  10. good article.... i think she was great in her movies, who cares what others say about her.

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  11. Nice read. Seems Veronica Lake was not greatly liked, while Raymond Chandler was similarly hard to know - and didn't much like her. Two unhappy souls who hit the bottle and booked out early, but both blessed with rare talent. I'm watching 'The Blue Dahlia' this evening and am captivated by her face mouthing his dialogue with a sort of casual care. A skillfully directed, well cast movie that never bores, sprinkled with Chandler's priceless acid: " She could have told me that herself." ... "Maybe she figured it'd sound worse coming from me."

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  12. Great article, I love her. I'm watching her movies one after another. My favourite one is 'That gun for hire', her performance in front of the villain, singing and making tricks, really took my heart.
    It's really a shame, that she was hurt by life so badly...

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