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281 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1969
This is the autobiography of the 1940’s Hollywood blonde bombshell Veronica Lake. It was written three years before she died. Untreated alcoholism and mental illness caused her to fall from exaltation, fame, and fortune to ignominy and disgrace.
Her voice, as told to ghostwriter Donald Bain, sounds exactly like that of an alcoholic. She has axes to grind, and she minimizes her part in her own troubles.
She was almost destined to fail, for she was raised by a wolf of a mother.
Veronica Lake seems to have been the queen of narcissism. At the very least, she was blind to the needs of those around her.
She was certainly unsuited to be a mother. She bore four children; her first two pregnancies occurred while married to John S. Detlie from 1940 to 1943. Their first child was a daughter named Elaine who was born in 1941. When Lake soon learned that she was pregnant for a second time, she reported that she “went out and got drunk.” This second pregnancy certainly complicated things, for she had been physically separated for an extended period from her then-husband John Detlie, and both she and her husband realized that it was simply not possible for Detlie to have fathered the forthcoming baby. After trying unsuccessfully to induce a miscarriage, Lake delivered a premature son name Anthony who lived for one week before dying. Lake recounts bitterly the fact that Detlie, the husband she had very publicly cuckolded, failed to rush to her side in support of her when the child died.
Following her eventual divorce from Detlie in December of 1943, Lake had this to say about her family life and her relationship with her then-two-year-old daughter Elaine: “My divorce from John set me adrift. It was a strange feeling being free of family commitments. I’m not forgetting Elaine. But you don’t answer to your child when you’re out all night and come in the next morning in a state of happy, drunk fatigue.” (p.127). (WTF? Daughter Elaine was how old?)
She recounts that her third pregnancy (by a different father) resulted in the birth of a son named Michael. She has this to say about baby Michael: “Little Mike was a problem from the first day. He loved to cry and never hesitated.” (Veronica, p.155).
While working as a cocktail waitress in New York under an assumed name, she died in 1973 at the age of fifty.
What a mess of a minimum of three generations of lives.
My rating: 7/10, finished 7/25/22 (3670).