A check of Ancestry.com shows that there was only one Constance Ockelman recorded in the 1930 US census. Her parents’ names are consistent with the known parents of Veronica Lake, the film actress. And the NYC birth index shows a Constance Ockelman born in Brooklyn on 11-14-1922. While it’s only an index of names, dates and certificate numbers (not actual images of the certificates), there seems no prima facie reason to doubt its accuracy.
(Pursuing this deeper to establish the reliability of the NYC birth index: Bea Arthur’s actual birth certificate can be found online. Her birth name was Bernice Frankel, born 5-13-1922, and the date and certificate number match what the index gives.)
From the earliest days of the star system in motion pictures, it was practically the norm to alter one’s age, even if adding or subtracting just a year. Men and women both did it. Sometimes a family may have genuinely lost track of a child’s correct birth year and moved it forward or back slightly, and the child honestly believed he/she was older/younger.
At other times, especially for performers who started young, adding years was necessary to get roles meant for adult-age performers. Or years were subtracted to preserve an illusion of youth. Birth registrations, church records and newspaper birth announcements can often be used by modern-day researchers to clear away the fog of celebrity birth dates.
Why would you think her original name bore any resemblence to Constance Ockelman or Veronica Lake? Similarly for her hometown. She might have paid off Constance’s mom to say she was her, while the true Constance might have been institutionalized, as others note was the norm for schizophenics in that era. Veronica Lake doesn’t come off as schizophrenic in the interviews. And she doesn’t look 17 in the photo on the book cover held up at the start of the 1971 interview (but that was said). I could believe she was a young looking woman in her late 30’s on the cover, if anyone made that claim.
According to a psychiatrist I worked with when I worked in supported living, before the 1950s, there wasn’t a good distinction between bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. So it’s possible that someone who had a diagnosis of schizophrenia before 1950 actually had bipolar disorder. It’s an important distinction, because a lot of people with bipolar disorder can function well much of the time, even without medication. Of course, there also are people with mild manifestations of schizophrenia. There are even people who carried a diagnosis of schizophrenia before about 1960 who may have actually had either Tourette’s syndrome or autism. So even if Lake had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, it was long enough ago, there’s no telling what she really had. It was what they called you when they thought you were a little “off,” and just needed a word.
As far as judging her as looking older than her stated age in the OP videos: I don’t agree. I think she looks just about right for her stated age.
Where does the idea that electro-convulsive therapy ages you? I’ve never heard that before, and I know people who have had it. I know people who have had it on a regular basis, and I haven’t noticed them aging rapidly.
I was asking if ECT speeds “aging”. You have suggested no. I was also wondering the same for antipsychotic medication and heavy drinking. To me the medication issue is moot, as my guessing rules out her being insane in any clinical sense. That leaves alcohol speeding aging, and to what degree, as an open question.
OK, dude, you’ve officially gone down the rabbit hole. The lady has literally decades of biographical information compiled about her. If you’re at the point where you’re happily casting doubt on all of that, then I think there’s nothing that any of us can do to provide the answers that you’re looking for. I’m done here.
I don’t know if you’re being serious here or this is all just a joke. But if you are being serious, get a grip on reality. The people who argue Paul McCartney is dead make a better argument than you are. You’re inventing a bizarre conspiracy out of nothing more than your opinion that Veronica Lake didn’t age well.
The older types of antipsychotic medication tended to make people gain weight, and had other undesirable side effects, so people who were difficult to manage were often on high doses when they were younger, gained a lot of weight, and were on lower doses as they got older, and naturally calmed down a little, so they lost weight. This sometimes led to sagging skin from the weight loss-- we could be talking 40-140lbs between age 25 and age 45. That kind of sagging skin will make you look a little older than you are; it’s why people who have weight loss surgery sometimes end up having plastic surgery, because they end up with a whole lot of loose skin.
But other than that, I don’t think they age you. The modern ones, that don’t cause weight gain don’t age you.
Alcoholism ages you, but I don’t know if it’s the effect of the alcohol itself, or the fact that alcoholics tend not to eat very well, and vitamin deficiencies will really age you-- and minor deficiencies over a long period of time age you more than an acute bout with one, such as a cancer patient who can’t eat well for a few months, or someone who gets lost in the woods, and has no food for several weeks, suffers. Americans usually find it tough to eat so poorly that they actually have vitamin deficiencies, but alcoholics and drug addicts are exceptions to this, because their addictions often make them forget to eat, or they spend food money on their drug of choice. They also tend to make nutritionally poor food choices when they do eat, because they are feeling too unwell to prepare anything, so they buy fast food, or grab a convenience food.
Now, alcohol may age you all by itself, but someone who knows more about the subject will have to jump in. What I do know is that high percentage of alcoholics smoke. I don’t know why, unless it’s just a tendency toward addictive behavior, but at any rate, smoking REALLY ages you. One of the reasons Americans in general seem to look younger in their 50s and 60s in this century as opposed to the last in the huge drop in the number of people who smoke. That, and the movement to get second-hand smoke away from non-smokers.
Smoke dries out your skin, and deposits residue on it, so it really ages your face and hands, which are the most obvious things that people see.
Actors have an additional factor that ages them, and it’s the make-up they use when they work. Women wear a lot more make-up then men do, so they are more affected than men. Make-up ages you, partly by drying out your skin, and partly by low-level irritation that causes it to break down a little. Women who aren’t professional actors, but wear full make-up every day-- a base all over their face, in addition to eye make-up and lipstick, are subject to some of the same kind of effects of aging that actors are.
And, of course, sun exposure ages you. Film actors tend to live in LA, where the sun is bright a great deal of the year, and while pale skin was the ideal in the 20s & 30s, people actually sought tans for a long time. Some still do, although a lot use bronzers, the verdict of their effect on skin vis a vis aging (or cancer) as far as I know is not in yet.
Anyway, it’s the reason that a great many of the most beautiful people in Hollywood when they were in their 20s & 30s, and even 40s, often did not wear well through later middle age, and looked terrible in old age, if they made it that far.
But really, of all those things, smoking is the biggest factor. Here’s a non-smoking Lillian Gish at 62; for comparison, here’s a smoker, Audrey Hepburn at age 47. I realize that genetics also plays a role, but I could give you example after example: non-smoker Irene Dunne once needed age make-up to play a character who was* younger than she was*. Smoker Ingrid Bergman-- the less said the better.
To be honest, I really think Lillian Gish looks her age in that picture. She’s got good skin, sure, but a lot of make-up, a soft focus lens, and - the giveaway - the slightly sagged eyes, cheeks and jowls of someone her age. Audrey Hepburn certainly doesn’t look great, but she doesn’t look like she’s in her 60s.
This thread is a really fascinating example of the birth of a conspiracy theory in the wild. I suspect a lot of conspiracy theories, maybe most of them, get started just like this.
Jim Peebles sees something that just seems intuitively wrong to him. Veronica Lake looks much older than she “should” in later interviews, given her supposed age. He doesn’t do much if any research (it’s idle musing about a trivial matter, so why would he?), but instead on a lark floats an idle speculation that Veronica Lake may have lied about her age and is actually much older than her official bio says. On the face of it, it’s perfectly plausible - plenty of entertainers have lied about their age.
He is then confronted with substantial documentary evidence that the “official story” is correct - including an interview with her mother and census records from long before she became a celebrity. Instead of simply accepting that his perception of how old she looks and his intuition about how old she should look is flawed, he doubles down. He then floats a conspiracy theory that Constance Okelman’s mother and “Veronica Lake” conspired to allow “Veronica Lake” to steal Constance Okelman’s identity. Again, though, this is presented simply as idle speculation, not a full-fledged Conspiracy Theory.
For the right personality, I suspect this sort of “idle speculation” and “just asking questions” would, over a short period, evolve into a firm belief that the “official story” is a lie, and the original intuition is correct. Since all of the available evidence points against that original intuition, it would require an increasingly baroque conspiracy to explain all of the evidence. Eventually, you get massive conspiracies involving tens of thousands of individuals faking moon landings, killing Kennedy, and bringing down the twin towers with demolition charges.
Note to Jim Peebles: I am not saying that you personally are a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know how seriously you yourself take your latest speculation about Veronica Lake and Constance Okelman’s mother, but it is literally a conspiracy theory, involving not just the active participation of those two, but the passive participation of a number of other individuals, from Constance Okelman’s relatives to the staff at the institution where the “real” Constance Okelman was institutionalized.
And keep in mind, although Veronica Lake’s film career was fairly short, she was a textbook case of a meteoric career - while she was famous, she was extremely famous. And the identity theft involving the active connivance of the victim’s own mother would be for no discernible reason. If Veronica Lake had wanted to lie about her age, all she had to do was, you know, lie about it.
In this interview, Veronica Lake’s hair, clothing, and makeup all make her look like a woman who was born many years ago. The styles were current at the time of the interview, but they make her look old to the modern eye. If you ignore that, and look only at her skin, eyes, cheeks, neck, etc., she doesn’t look that old.
Here’s Veronica Lake as Peter Pan. It’s essentially contemporaneous with the first interview. The reason she cut her trademark hair was for this role. Granted, it was a stage appearance, and the stage can hide things the screen can’t, which is why 30-year-old women could play Peter Pan on stage, but not in movies. However, Lake certainly looks younger in this photo (and you can Google up a lot more photos of her in the role) than she does in the interview, thanks to her not wearing a matronly dress, and having hair at an awkward stage of growing out.
BTW, here’s Lake before she cut her hair. That’s why she jokes about finally being able to see out of both eyes. Her look was openly borrowed for Jessica Rabbit.
Lillian Gish always looked really good for her age, and she lived to be 99. I wasn’t suggesting that she didn’t look her age, just that I should look so good when I’m that age. As for the “jowls,” she always kind of had cheeks like that, even in her early 20s. Hepburn, on the other hand, lost her looks pretty fast once she hit her late 30s. Not that Hepburn didn’t continue to be a lovely person, and did a lot of good works in her retirement from films, but she was a heavy smoker, and a good advertisement for not smoking, if you ask me. A 25-year-old Hepburn, and a Hepburn a couple of years before her death don’t even look like the same person. From what I understand, she was a pretty heavy smoker. But, she probably started when she was a teenager, and trying to survive the Dutch hongerwinter, so it’s hard to blame her.
:DI smoked for 50 years and drink like a fish. Yet I don’t have any really bad wrinkles at over age 60. I don’t do anything except wash with a washcloth, soap and water, a little moisturizer in harsh winter… No one including my new doctor can believe I am as aged as I am…Hollywood types have always had access to the latest greatest anti-aging techniques.
All I really remember about Veronica Lake is from one of Edith Head’s books, where the teensy VL was taken to be glammed up, and they thrust her at Ms. Head, and said, 'see what you can do with this!" . And all I can remember of that was, ‘she had a good bust.’
How did we hitherto miss this from Veronica’s wikipedia:.
“In 1962, a New York Post reporter found her living at the all-women’s Martha Washington Hotel in Manhattan, working as a waitress downstairs in the cocktail lounge.[37] She was working under the name “Connie de Toth”.”
Why the third name? Maybe it was her original name, or at least the “de Toth” was? Any census sleuths want to dig into it?
Oh, FFS. Read the entire Wiki article before you you jump to another crazy conspiracy theory. There is NO MYSTERY HERE.
Her second husband was named Andre de Toth. All she was doing was using a shortened version of her birth name, and her ex-husband’s surname. My guess is that she was simply using the name to live anonymously – at that point, her acting career had completely cratered, and she may have simply not wanted anyone to know that the one-time Hollywood star was now working as a cocktail waitress.
