This is an extract from the Montreal Crypt Tales that I was sent to me by a visitor to this site. I don’t know what way to take it... serious, fun, joke, sensationalized? ... Whatever it is related to Veronica Lake so I guess it has a place here but please take what is written with an open mind and if you are offended take it that its merely sensational.
A note from the author: "Hi. I noticed that you put my article on your site. The story was divided into three stories. One of them (the Duplessis one) is pretty fake-ish. The other two (Lake and the one armed mystic stock swindler) are true. I think it was a mistake to include all three in one story, but I was under pressure to write a feature on top of my regular column. My editor packaged it as "urban legends" for his own purposes."
The dead Peek-a-boo Girl, the sex-related death of Maurice Duplessis, and the mystical one-armed swindler: unearthing cadavers in some lesser-known local urban legends
by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR
Day turned to dusk, yet there was little relief from the oppressive heat on July 8, 1973, as Jim Schneider pulled his golden ’70 Olds Vista Cruiser up to an apartment on Queen Mary.
Schneider, a young writer for Joe Azaria’s locally based stable of now defunct tabloids, remembers the day in detail. Next to him, nervously sucking on White Owl cigars sat his boss, Nat Perlow, an old-fashioned, hard-bitten, New York crime-magazine editor who moved here to edit the Police Gazette, recently bought and relocated to Montreal by Azaria.
Another news-office hang-about who did odd jobs for the paper laid a delicate 4’11" package onto a backseat that faced towards the rear window. It was screen legend Veronica Lake, a 54-year-old former film star. Her expression was that of a perplexed dreamer. She was as motionless as her famous photo glossies, as still as the models at the Wax Museum just down the street. Her sweet customary scent, Evening of Paris, hovered over the tension of the car. A Spanish lace doily was placed over her face to provide the appearance of a woman having a nap.
Femme fatale
Veronica Lake was born Constance Ockelman on November 14, 1919. She moved to Montreal with her family from New York in the ’30s while her stepfather was treated here for tuberculosis. Constance attended Villa-Maria High School for a couple of tumultuous years but after her bizarre behaviour earned her an expulsion, she was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. The young rebel skipped all her doctors’ appointments and the family left here for Miami in 1937.
After entering and winning a Florida beauty pageant, Constance was encouraged to try to pursue a career in acting. In Hollywood she quickly scored a small role in I Wanted Wings and her sultry voice and unruly hair, which constantly fell over one eye, immediately grabbed audiences. Within months, the former Montrealer with the hair-over-one-eye ’do was rechristened the "Peek-a-boo Girl." A name change soon followed, as Constance became Veronica Lake.
So many imitated her hairstyle that the U.S. State Department pressured her to change it. They worried that women sporting the obstructive hairstyle were lowering wartime factory production. Over the next few years, the tiny, curvaceous Lake starred in such film noir classics as The Blue Dahlia, The Glass Key, and This Gun for Hire. She kept company with names like Howard Hughes and Aristotle Onassis, whose marriage proposal she claimed to have turned down.
Eventually a drinking habit, several failed marriages, a miscarriage, and a broken leg suffered during a film shoot all propelled Lake to skid row. By 1961 she was broke and tending bar in a New York grill.
Lake’s fifth and final marriage ended in heartbreak as her sailor husband died in an accident in 1965.
Heartbroken, she befriended Perlow, the tall, pudgy, balding editor of the Police Gazette, a crime sheet published since 1830 and for which Edgar Allan Poe had once written. He brought her to Montreal, where Lake spent the last chunk of her life in a second floor apartment near St-Joseph’s Oratory, in a gin-induced haze, having made the switch from vodka some time before. Schneider recalls her telling incoherent stories of her life, sometimes weaving the story of the soap operas she was watching into her own story.
In her self-deprecating 1971 autobiography Veronica, Lake mocks her screen image: she describes herself as a "sex-zombie" rather than "sex-symbol." In spite of her apparent indifference to respectability, Schneider remembers that Lake cared enough about her legacy to make a final request to Perlow: she did not want to suffer the final shame of having died in Montreal.
Sin city
At that time Montreal had a reputation as Sin City, where pleasure-seeking American tourists, banned from Cuba by Castro in 1959, turned for their thrills. Although the FLQ Crisis of 1970 scared many of these tourists off, our city’s unwholesome reputation lingered.
So on a hot July evening, in the name of Lake’s eternal legacy, the Olds wagon rolled towards Vermont, transporting Lake’s fast-chilling body. The car stereo played an 8-track of Judy Collins singing Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell songs as Perlow, his hard heart breaking under a gruff exterior, sucked on one cigar after another, according to Schneider. The odd-job guy who had brought Lake’s body into the car was also along for the ride, chain-smoking spliffs and spouting disconcerting non-sequiturs from the backseat. He’d be dropped off before getting to the delicate business of crossing the border.
In the smoky tension of the vehicle, with "Both Sides Now" warbling over the tinny speakers, Lake, in death, would play her last acting role: that of an anonymous, sleeping 54 year old. In those years, the border to the States included some semi-manned stations where you’d pick up a phone and sometimes a guard would come out, sometimes not. Perlow decided that route might rouse suspicion, so they opted for the regular crossing spot. As they slowed to the checkpoint, the guard peeked in. "Shh, she’s sleeping," Perlow told the American customs official, pointing to the dead starlet.
The car was waved through and soon Lake’s body was in Montpelier, Vermont, where she was pronounced dead from liver failure, a result of hepatitis caused by excessive boozing. The next day, Montreal papers published newswire obituaries of the screen legend, stating that she had died after spending two weeks in Burlington’s Vermont Medical Center.
Lake’s body, once the focus of fascinated film fans the world over, lay in a crypt for days, as her ex-husbands and children ducked the funeral tab. Perlow, says Schneider, eventually shelled out for the funeral but never recovered his spirit and his once-proud Police Gazette didn’t survive long after. Lake would be pleased to know that every existing biography reports that she died among friends while visiting the bucolic woodiness of the Green Mountain State.
Randy Duplessis
If you rode a bus up Ridgewood Avenue in Côte-des-Neiges in the early 1960s, you might have wondered why the old ladies would reverently scratch a cross across their chests whenever passing the fourth building from the bottom.
They were doing it for deceased premier Maurice Duplessis, who ruled Quebec with the blessings of the then-powerful Catholic Church. In fact, the alliance was less rosy. The premier’s skirt-chasing and adulterous ways were the cause of much clerical head-shaking. Meanwhile, Duplessis described his relationship with one top religious figure: "I kiss his ring and he kisses my ass."
According to official histories, Duplessis died from a series of strokes he suffered while visiting the Iron Ore Company in Shefferville during a trip he took with seven government and company officials on September 9, 1959. He was said to have left Montreal for Sept-Îles on September 2, and spent his last days in a remote log cabin.
But many believe that Duplessis died in an apartment on Ridgewood while having sex with one of his mistresses and that--not unlike Lake 14 years later--his body was subsequently moved for the sake of appearances.
Conrad Black’s effusive biography of Duplessis acknowledges that the premier, in spite of suffering from diabetes and a deformity known as hypospadias (his urethral aperture was an inch from the tip of his penis), had at least one local mistress, a Mrs. Massey. Police officers and ambulance technicians who tended to the dead premier supposedly had their reports destroyed, while a key eyewitness to the event--a neighbour named Paul Wilson--has proven impossible to locate.
The story, which to this day is supported by many, including the aforementioned Schneider, remains unproven. Yet conflicts appear to exist in the official story of Duplessis’ demise. One version claims that Iron Ore doctor Horst Rosmus, a German war medic repeatedly injured on the Eastern Front, attended to Duplessis’ final moments. Another report says Dr. Lucien Larue, a psychiatrist who acted as the premier’s private physician, tended to the premier’s final needs. Larue was unqualified as a general medic and was widely suspected of being involved in falsifying reports in order to intern children in psychiatric institutions. Another secret he kept, according to Dr. Hubert A. Wallot’s recent history of Quebec mental institutions, is that he had probably treated Duplessis in a psychiatric ward for alcoholism.
Duplessis’ precarious health, combined with the demands of several mistresses and his unparalleled influence over Quebecers, which included a physician with a deft touch for falsification, make the story of Duplessis’ death on Ridgewood a lingering urban mystery.
