It’s always kind of bothered me that her character in Sullivan’s Travels doesn’t get a name. Sure, there are plenty of people in the movie whose characters don’t have names, and the only character with a full name is the eponymous John L. Sullivan, Lake is second-billed. There’s an uncredited character with a name, and while I don’t remember if twenty-fifth-billed “Bud” is a name or just something he gets called, that’s still frustrating. You could argue, I suppose, that “The Girl” is significant to her role in Sullivan’s life, but still. She’s a delight in the movie, and she deserves a name.
I don’t know if there’s any evidence for her mother’s claim that the woman born Constance Frances Marie Ockelman was schizophrenic. It’s certainly true that she had a short and troubled life, dying of cirrhosis and hepatitis at age fifty, by which point she was already by her own admission estranged from her four children. But plenty of people are troubled and don’t connect well with their children without the added burden of a major psychological illness. I don’t want to diagnose her simply on her mother’s claims. But it does seem further true that a lot of people found her hard to work with, and while that was largely because of her drinking, she wouldn’t be the first person to self-medicate.
I kind of feel as though Lake was one of those starlets acquired in the hopes of finding the next Betty Grable or Ginger Rogers whose studio never quite found a niche for. I find her a delight, as I said, in Sullivan’s Travels. She’s wry and witty; she’s passionate and compassionate by turns when it’s what the script calls for. She’s a great foil for Joel McCrea. The role is full of promise, but it’s a promise that seems to have gone unredeemed by the rest of her career.
She was repeatedly cast opposite Alan Ladd because they were both short—she was about 4’11”. (Well over a foot shorter than McCrea!) She did noir and musicals and comedy and melodrama. And while it’s true that some people are just good enough to merit such varied casting, in Lake’s case it feels more as though Paramount was looking for her niche. Director René Clair seems to have believed it was at least in part because she did not have confidence in her own talent. McCrea, however, clearly resisted working with her more than once, insisting that life was too short to make two movies with her.
Probably the best known fact about Veronica Lake is that hair, hair later borrowed for Jessica Rabbit. It was lovely and glamorous, and a lot of women imitated the look. Unfortunately, this was also World War II, when women were working in defense factories. Lake famously had to do a campaign encouraging defense workers to at very least put their hair up at work instead of letting it get caught in machinery.
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