“My appetite was my own and I simply wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Veronica Lake is best known for her trendsetting “peek-a-boo” hairstyle and a decade of signature roles: I Wanted Wings (1941) with Ray Milland and William Holden; Sullivan’s Travels (1941), written and directed by Preston Sturges; and three films noir with Alan Ladd, The Glass Key (1942), This Gun for Hire (1942), and The Blue Dahlia (1946). She was notoriously difficult on set, the result of emotional/psychological problems dating back to her childhood (when, according to her mother, she was diagnosed as schizophrenic). She was strongly disliked by both costars and executives, so much so that when her initial contract with Paramount expired in 1948, the studio decided she wasn’t worth the trouble. Lake made two more movies before briefly turning to television and the stage, then disappeared altogether. A New York Post reporter found her in the early 1960s at a Manhattan all-women’s hotel, working as a barmaid. Her autobiography, in 1970, failed to return the meteoric starlet to the public eye; her memorial the following year was attended by a few strangers and only one of her three children.
THE INVITATION WAS THE first surprise. It was December 1941, and Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels was to open in New York City in just a few weeks. With the premiere looming, the film’s leading lady, Veronica Lake, invited the entire cast and crew to an impromptu reunion on New Year’s Eve.
Sturges himself hadn’t known about the party before the invitation showed up in his mailbox. Though he’d long since had his fill of Lake’s surprises—like when she arrived on set six months pregnant (a previously undisclosed detail that threw the director into a he-had-to-be-restrained-type rage). But this surprise, what looked to be a fun party, was much more pleasant.
In 1941 Lake’s private life was a secret to most. She’d had her moments on the nightclub circuit, tossing a few back at Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip after it first opened, even though she was only seventeen at the time. But mostly she was an introvert. While shooting I Wanted Wings, William Holden repeatedly invited her out for drinks, but each time she insisted that she’d prefer to remain in her hotel room. Holden, like everyone else, assumed that the teenager was too shy or square to hit the booze—or that her husband, art director John Detlie, had forbidden it.
The fact was, Lake simply preferred drinking alone, ordering her drinks through the hotel’s front desk. Not even Detlie knew the full extent of her boozing. Sure, by the end of the decade, stories—factual or otherwise—of her drunken exploits and random sexual encounters would be a dime a dozen. But on this New Year’s, her private life was still a total mystery. Lake had just given birth to her first daughter, Elaine, and even though her husband was about to leave for the recently declared war, she appeared to be a wife and mother with a very bright future.
Wiliam Holden repeatedly invited her out for drinks, but each time she insisted that she’d prefer to remain in her hotel room, Holden, like everyone else, assumed that the teenager was too shy or square to hit the booze.
The New Year’s Eve bash, it turned out, was where the mystery began to unravel. Though Lake and Detlie had just purchased a house in Mandeville Canyon, the actress had opted to throw the party at her parents’ modest home in Beverly Hills. In itself, this wasn’t strange—except that Lake’s stepfather had been battling tuberculosis for years, and he wasn’t doing very well. So there was one rule: no one could enter his room or disturb him in any way.
Lake’s parents seemed unconcerned. The guests were adults. They knew how to behave. Lake, however, was still a teenager, and once the party hit full swing, the one rule was quickly broken by Lake herself. It seems she hated her stepfather. According to accounts, the tiny, four-foot-eleven actress had a few cocktails, then a few more, and before long, she decided to lead a procession of revelers through her stepfather’s bedroom in a “snake dance,” whooping and hollering all the while. Now this was a bit more strange, yet still short of real gossip mag fodder, that is, until Lake reportedly started to strip. In the middle of her New Year’s party, Lake performed a striptease for her bedridden stepfather, as several lingering partygoers looked on.
Years later, after Lake wrote her autobiography, the facts of her childhood could explain such events more soberly; but to cast and crew that night, only one thing seemed perfectly clear: Wherever he was, William Holden would be scratching his head.
To the studio, this movie defined no-brainer: Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, two of MGM’s most bankable actors, starring in a remake of the 1930 stage musical Girl Crazy, featuring hit music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin. Rooney and Garland had already proven themselves a potent onscreen combo in eight previous movies, which included three musicals directed by Busby Berkeley. And Berkeley had signed on to helm. The movie would practically make itself. Or not …
Within minutes of shooting, cast and crew noticed that star (Garland) and director (Berkeley) were each barely keeping it together. Garland had always drunk booze by the gallon. She was now just days away from ending her marriage to bandleader David Rose and, right before shooting, had begun an affair with actor Tyrone Power. At some point during principal photography, she would call Power to say she was pregnant with his child.
At the same time, the brilliant choreographer Berkeley had the kind of obsessive streak that makes for stunning dance-numbers, but his bedside manner as a director would have made a drill sergeant blush. Garland hated him.
Unbeknownst to anyone but Berkeley himself, he had decided to drastically change the production number “I Got Rhythm.” Berkeley’s new idea involved hoisting Garland, pregnant, and Rooney into the air by their ankles via stunt-wire with pistols firing all around them.
The sequence, budgeted for five days, took nine and ran nearly $100,000 over budget. The guns and spinning and the help-me-I’m-so-fragile had left Garland such a nervous wreck that her doctor insisted she couldn’t dance for another three weeks. And just like that, Berkeley was canned.
Production resumed a month later under the direction of Norman Taurog, who had an Oscar under his belt and had, like Berkeley, previously worked with both stars. Taurog also had ideas about one of the first scheduled scenes—a staged automobile ride in which Garland’s character abandons Rooney’s on a stretch of road outside Palm Springs. Taurog declared it would be shot in Palm Springs itself, not the cost-effective MGM lot—and not for creative or continuity reasons either. Taurog did it because Rooney simply wanted to hang out in Palm Springs.
Thus was the entire production relocated to Palm Springs for a weeklong shoot that was further delayed by equipment failures, sandstorms, and the sudden disappearance of Garland, who was later found in Los Angeles in hot pursuit of Power.
Eventually five and a half months after filming began, Girl Crazy wrapped, at a total cost of $1.4 million, more than $300,000 over budget. MGM seemed unusually blasé about it all, but then clearly they’d already guessed the final outcome: Girl Crazy was the hit MGM expected all along, earning almost $4 million at the box office.