She was a blonde beauty who knew how to make the most of her fantastic hair. Veronica Lake became so famous that girls in the 1940s not only copied her hairstyle—wavy platinum hair that covered her right eye—from her, they also named it after her, peekaboo. They all wanted to have her hair, they all wanted to be like her.
Lake, whose real name was Constance Ockleman, landed at Paramount at a very young age. Some director of the studio saw her photos, signed her up and made her a contract for eight years. In 1941, at just 22 years old, she had supporting roles in two very successful Mitchell Leisen films, Flight of Eagles and If the Morning Was Not. The first protagonist of her came that same year.
Preston Sturges has just succeeded with the wonderful The Three Nights of Eve and was looking for stars for his new project, Sullivan’s Travels. He had no problems for the main male role, which he immediately awarded to Joel McGrea, but it was difficult for him to hire Lake, because Paramount preferred other better-known actresses such as Ida Lupino or Lucille Ball.
In the end, Sturges got his way and Lake led the cast of the film in which McGrea plays Sullivan, a film director who lives in cotton wool but wants to explore the real world to bring it into his work. He meets a small-town aspiring actress (Lake) who accompanies him on his journey through an America, that of the Great Depression, full of misery and hunger. Sullivan’s Travels was not a great success at the time, although over the years it became a cult movie.
But it served so that Paramount already saw Lake as one of its stars and looked for a suitable location for him. He found her next to Alan Ladd. A very handsome actor, with millions of fans, who was very short. Lake, 1.51 tall, was her ideal match. They began their collaboration with a very black film based on a novel by Graham Greene, The Raven (Frank Tuttle, 1942), and since things worked out well, they continued along those lines and that same year they shot The Crystal Key (Stuart Heisler, 1942) based on the novel of the same title by Dashiell Hammett.
The Ladd-Lake duo became very famous and met again in The Blue Dahlia (George Marshall, 1946), another noir genre film, this time with a script by Raymond Chandler, where Ladd is a man cheated on by his wife. The woman is found dead and Lake helps her find the killer. Veronica was already one of the most popular faces of the noir genre, but in the midst of so much shooting and deceit she had the opportunity to shoot a comedy.
In I Married a Witch (René Clair, 1942) the actress was the witch of the title who took on human form to take revenge on Fredric March, but ended up falling in love with him. The film was a success and is considered to be Lake’s best work. But from that moment her career began to go downhill. It was because of her hair. It happened to Lake like Samson.
According to the chronicle published by La Vanguardia at the time, the young woman had to “give up her famous hairstyle” in the film Stop That Blonde (George Marshall, 1945) “in order to fully adapt to the interpretation of her role”, because becoming the “confidante of some thieves, closely chased by the police, she can not be conspicuous, but try to go unnoticed among the people like any other young woman”. That was the official version.
The unofficial was somewhat different. The United States War Department asked Paramount to ban Lake’s famous peekaboo hairstyle, because all the girls imitated her and those young women had started working with one eye covered in the war material factories, which was causing many accidents. labor. With the hairstyle gone, the star faded.
Lake disappeared from the world of cinema. Years later, a woman recognized her as a hotel bar waitress and the press echoed the news. Although there were several versions, it was also said that she was a clerk in a store and that she served in a hamburger restaurant. Some placed it in Florida and others in New York. In any case, the dazzling platinum blonde star was no more. Lake ended up in a sanatorium suffering from paranoia and she died in her early 50s as a victim of her alcoholism.
