Stars Gone Broke

But Keaton married a third time, cleaned up and lived on for decades after his heyday. He was never destitute, though often in financial stress, despite which he continued to support his own parasitic parents, brother and sister. However much it may seem to us unimaginable that the genius who made The General receded into obscurity, Keaton himself was remarkably unbitter about his comedown. He worked willingly at any number of unworthy tasks, including television guest shots in the '50s and '60s, and cameos in movies like Beach Blanket Bingo. His wife said of him, "He had no artistic ego whatsoever. I would say his personality and ego might be the equivalent of a house painter's." By the time he died in 1966 at the age of 70, Keaton had, like Brooks, been resurrected as a screen legend.

The dignity that Keaton and Brooks achieved despite losing all their Hollywood riches was, of course, a rarefied state. The delicately beautiful, blonde star Veronica Lake, whose memorable films Sullivan's Travels, The Glass Key and I Married a Witch were all made in a brief period in the '40s, kept none of her money and little enough of her dignity over the next quarter century. During her marriage to her second husband, Hungarian director Andre De Toth, Lake lived the Hollywood good life, owning a farm where she attempted to raise wheat, a 23-acre ranch outside Los Angeles, a vacation house, a yacht and a plane. She had no business sense, however, and, more disastrously, no man sense either. "I'd always been attracted to the sick or unattractive, and still am," she would later say, rather amazingly, in the autobiography she cowrote. De Toth, who meddled controllingly in her career and stalled in his own, spent money compulsively. "[He] kept spending everything we had," wrote Lake in the same autobiography. "He found it increasingly difficult to get rid of the money at home so he started taking long and frequent trips abroad, reportedly in search of properties and future film stars. I accepted it as necessary and stayed home to continue my acting career. Also to make money to support the farm, ranch, airplane and [his] travels." With or without De Toth's help, Lake developed alcohol and emotional problems that quickly undermined her career. When her own mother sued her for financial support, there was none to be had. Lake separated from De Toth in 1951 and declared bankruptcy. Her home was seized for back taxes.

Lake claimed to have left Hollywood on her own steam ("To hell with you, Hollywood,' I said to myself. 'And fuck you, too'"), but no one was trying to stop her. Back east, she scraped by with stage, TV and radio work for a while, but no comeback materialized. At one point, she worked in a factory pasting felt flowers on lingerie hangers. In 1959, a reporter came upon her working as a barmaid in the Colonnade Room, the cocktail lounge in the cheap residence hotel for women where she lived. She eventually married a merchant seaman whom she claimed to love deeply, though it seems to have been a profoundly alcoholic relationship that finally killed him and left her at rock bottom. She moved to England for a few years, where she "wrote" her autobiography and remarried, but despite the fan appreciation that her U.S. press tour for the book generated (she referred to herself in TV appearances as "a former sex zombie"), she died of acute hepatitis, broke and alone in 1972. Veronica Lake was a classic victim of Hollywood and the men she chose, and seemed to play the victim right to the bitter end.

Two later female stars had husbands at least as bad as Lake's, but they played their fates out very differently. Doris Day, born Doris Mary Ann Von Kappelhoff in 1924, lives in luxurious retirement today on an estate in Carmel, California, from which she carries on her various animal advocacy activities. But in 1968, when her husband of many years, Marty Melcher, died, she was--despite her enormous success as a singer and star in movies like Lover Come Back, The Pajama Game and Pillow Talk--facing financial ruin. Melcher had been his wife's manager for years and had, through a mix of fraud and negligence, lost all her money and more. On top of that, he had committed her to do a television project she knew nothing about. Day bounced back from the trauma of those revelations to take creative control of her television venture and turned into the successful "The Doris Day Show," which ran for five years. That toughness and victory in a long court battle over money owed to her put Day in the position where she can, today, watch out for furry little creatures more carefully than she once looked out for herself.

Pages: 1 2 3