If there’s one enduring thing about Veronica Lake it is that iconic hair style.
The flowing locks that covered her eye were a natural feature of her long flowing hair. She was photographed numerous times right from her early career for promotional and advertising materials and that Peek-a-boo Bang was prominent.
Even so when it wasn’t practical for the character she would always be dressed and made-up appropriately for the part. For example in So Proudly We Hail (1943) the long hair was plaited and bound up for most of the duration of the movie where she played a military nurse and it just wouldn’t have been suitable. That is of course until her final scene when the golden locks were let loose.
In 1943 she again became massive international news when stories of her iconic, eye covering hair-do was causing accidents in munition factories due to reduced vision.
Likely due to the publicity machine that is Paramount Pictures they took the opportunity to make some press for one of their biggest names and created a photo-shoot of Ms Lake with hair entangled in a drilling machine to illustrate the dangers of long, unsecured hair in manufacturing environments.
The accompanying articles must have made great press for all involved and to this day the articles can be easily found on the Internet and even show-reels of the news clips.
The obvious response was to shorten that hair-do and rebrand a star for wartime.
It seems ironic that just a year before she appeared in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) singing along to the song "A Sweater, A Sarong and a Peek-a-boo Bang" about how fed up she is to be so defined by the hair-do and not her acting talent.
Of course the lyrics weren’t hers (nor the voice as she lip-sync’d) and it was a bit but the parallels are interesting.
In the 1950’s she was more or less out of Hollywood and threw herself into stage work and the occasional television production.
When playing the role of a Peter Pan in a stage-play she took the opportunity to go for an even more drastic styling. There are a few interviews from that time where she talks about the shortness of the cut and how long flowing hair just wouldn’t work when playing the eternally youthful boy.
For much of the rest of her life she tended to keep her hair shoulder length or above. I don’t know if it was a response to loosing faith in the Hollywood machine that banked so much on her hair in the early years or if it was just more practical.
There are many publicity shots of her with crops and bobs in those later years and her hair remained a fantastically striking feature.
Publicity still of Lake and her iconic hair.
