The Barmaid
In Lake’s telling, it was her financially disastrous second marriage to the controlling, abusive, typically absent Hungarian director Andre De Toth that despatched her right into a spiral. “Off he’d go, leaving me in California with the kids, animals, ideas of a profession clearly down the drain and, an increasing number of, a bottle,” she writes.
Issues weren’t helped when her estranged mom sued her for non-support in 1947, viciously attacking her daughter to reporters, claiming she had been left destitute after sinking all her cash into Lake’s profession. Lake was finally lowered to pawning her jewellery. In 1951, her marriage over and film profession useless, she left for New York Metropolis. “As corny and overly dramatic as it could sound,” she writes, “I truly did utter an official farewell to Hollywood as I stood able to board the aircraft. ‘The hell with you, Hollywood,’ I stated to myself. ‘And fuck you too.’”
Thus begins the saddest studying this reviewer has ever carried out for Outdated Hollywood Ebook Membership (sure, extra devastating than the tales of each Rita Hayworth AND Barbara Payton, if attainable). Though she scored some success on tv and the stage, Lake bluntly and bravely recounts her descent into continual alcoholism (and based on Lenburg, untreated psychological sickness) and her neglect and occasional indifference to her three kids.
There have been evictions, one other drunken marriage, and violence. By the early Nineteen Sixties, Lake was working at a manufacturing unit pasting flowers on lingerie. In 1962, the New York Submit found that the previous film star was residing in NYC’s Martha Washington Lodge and serving as a barmaid below the identify Connie De Toth. Though the general public pitied her, Lake claims it was a spot of refuge. “I favored the individuals there, the service provider marine seamen, the occasional hookers, the broken-heart guys and the issue drinkers,” she writes. “There was a TV over the bar and typically a film of mine would gentle up the display. You possibly can hear a pin drop. Everybody watched so attentively, a lot to the dismay of the bartender; nobody drank when my films performed.”
Return of the Intercourse Zombie
Whereas working on the Martha Washington, Lake met a rugged blond sailor named Andy, her “teddy bear” who turned her beloved life associate and ingesting pal. In pitiful and sometimes purple prose, she recounts their booze-soaked love affair—residing collectively in flop homes, sneaking on ships—like some form of Bowery model of Romeo and Juliet that she clearly needs had by no means come to an finish.
Nevertheless it did. Andy was slowly ingesting himself to loss of life regardless of his physician’s warnings: “Why, Andy?” I requested him so typically within the tiny room we shared. We’d lie collectively on the mattress, each drunk, and I might ask him why. He by no means answered the query and it actually didn’t make any distinction. I wouldn’t have recognized what to do with the reply.
In 1965, shortly earlier than Andy’s loss of life, Lake was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct after having a breakdown on the steps of a Catholic Church in San Diego. After nursing Andy by his remaining, harrowing sickness, Lake would transfer to Miami after which England, showing in performs and low-budget movies. In 1969, Veronica was launched, and—recreation however typically drunk—she hit the publicity circuit, calling herself a “former intercourse zombie” and wryly quipping, “I’ve earned this face.”
Lake died in Burlington, Vermont, on July 7th, 1973, of acute hepatitis. In loss of life, one hopes she lastly discovered the peace she as soon as imagined whereas sleeping on the seaside.
“There have been occasions I simply stayed on the seaside all evening, heady with a stomach stuffed with lobster and gin,” she writes. “I’d simply sleep proper there and smile on the considered the water sneaking in and carrying me away to a spot the place peace was at all times current and by no means interrupted by life.”
