Hollywood Studio Magazine (December 1972)

The cameraman snorted. “And lose one of those flashing orbs. It won’t come off.” But it did. Old-fashioned geeks might have called it a “Come-hither” look. Full of invitation. “You can’t know what that hidden eye is telling a man.” Director Mitchel Leisen was so intrigued, he played Ronnie as a hidden-eyed vampire in the film. Cooking up switcheroos on the Peek-a-Boo Bank and the one-eyed star was simple and easy and a delight to me for the several years when I handled Publicity on Veronica Lake pictures. The job was made even more like a “breath of fresh air” in all the muck of being a press agent when she teamed with my good friend, Alan Ladd, whom I had guided through his first picture. These co-starrings included that one “This Gun For Hire,” “The Glass Key,” “The Blue Dahlia.” Other Lake assignments for me covered “So Proudly We Hail,” “I Married a Witch” and “Sullivan’s Travels.” On the personal side, there was sweating out the birth of her first baby and acting as spokesman from Mrs. Wallace Beery’s home for Veronica’s very private second marriage to Andre de Toth. Publicists rate stars they must exploit in relation to the “color” they provide, the “peg” for stories, the “handles” and “angles” for provocative ideas, the “gimmicks” for printable photos. Veronica rated high in all of those. As a Starter, she was so photogenic with that velvety-skinned cherubic face that photographers worked at ease and art editors on publications printed her photos by the hundreds. The creamy skin and spun-gold hair made her head glitter. Her body needed no shadows or angling to hide unwanted bulges. She stood barely five feet, one, and never weighed as much as 100 pounds. Because of her youth, which showed clearly on her unlined, unjowled and unsagging skin, she. would have been a tremendous star in film’s infancy when the Mary Pickfords all were sixteen or younger. Cinematography in pre-World War I days had to go with hard sunlight, with no soft lighting to tone down defects. Angles for stories and stunts seemed to drop into the hands of publicists with almost yawning simplicity. Publicizing La Lake was no sweat. The one-eyed gimmick could be twisted to the point of nausea. Comics on stage and radio (no TV then) made jokes about the peek-a-boo thing, the one eye and the tumbling hair. Said one, “I opened the closet door and Veronica Lake feil into my arms. I kissed her for five minutes before I realized it was the floor mop.” Some of these we created and fed out. The best came out of the blue. Al Capp’s “Lil Abner” was the tops then and he injected a movie star into one long sequence. This gal wore hair over BOTH eyes. Capp came to Hollywood for exploitation photos with Ronnie. We all thought it hilarious when Capp’s movie star finally brushed back her hair and revealed she was grotesquely cross-eyed. Every time Veronica changed her hair-do, it was worth a story. In “This Gun For Hire,” the famous sex queen was kissed for movies for the first time. By Robert Preston, her co-star. How we milked that one. The unkissed femme fatale gets lip smacked! Came “Sullivan’s Travels” and her legs actually were shown for the very first time. She wore a bathing suit. Newspapers ran photos happily to show that the gal had good gams. That movie was the film with the “big secret.” Veronica had married an art director, a friend of mine, from MGM. The wiley lass waited until director Preston Sturges chose her to co-star with Joel McCrea and to get well into the picture before she revealed she was months along the pregnancy trail. The baby was born not long after the final shot. Her condition was kept secret. At least it was not a promotion stunt. She 9