Tales from the Montreal crypt

>> 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 hangabout 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 Ockleman 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.

Gentleman crook

A few doors down from that love nest on Ridgewood in the '50s lived Stafford Harriman, a one-armed, diabetic, alcoholic, ex psych patient, mystic and con artist. Harriman would have been a good bet to die early and possibly behind bars. Instead, the one-armed bandit operated stock scams said to have helped establish the fortunes of many of today's local social elite.

As a child in Gravenhurst, Ontario, Harriman watched his dentist father die young after losing his life savings on the stock market. Not long after, Harriman broke his arm and ignored instructions to keep his cast intact. A staphylococci infection moved in and Harriman was only saved by the swift amputation of his right arm.

As an adult, Harriman fathered six with the daughter of a wealthy bank president. But his Toronto old-money in-laws never accepted his unconventional ways and after a particularly intense quarrel, Harriman's influential wife had him interned in a mental hospital. While he underwent electroshock therapy, she left with the children.

Soon Harriman joined the flow of post-war bohemians gravitating towards Montreal. He hooked up with Ken Gregory, a respectable stock market figure and the duo set up a boiler room where Harriman, alternately calling himself Mr. Brown or Mr. Green, led a team of fraud artists in selling worthless stock to wealthy Americans.

Harriman tempted investors with glossy flyers featuring hard-working miners, who in actual fact were local beatniks. When officials would try to verify his supposed asbestos mines in the Eastern Townships, Harriman would charm them with good-natured chat and plenty of alcohol. They'd eventually take a cursory peek into the pits and be satisfied with the chunks of asbestos placed there just hours earlier.

Legends of a drunken master

On the surface Harriman was a well-spoken gentleman, tall, lean with white hair who could chat about sports over a beer. Yet he was also "a Canadian mystic, birds would land on his shoulder," according to jazz pianist Billy Georgette. Longtime associate Dennis Miller says that, "Harriman was a crazy wisdom master who had flashes of insight that were extremely deep and metaphysical." Retired promoter Alfie Wade says Harriman, "was incredibly intuitive with a perception that was absolutely incredible." Anne Harriman, his third wife, describes him as, "a bit of a chameleon, he could blend into a person's likes and people would see in Stafford what they wanted to see." Some say he had a Jesus-like presence, others describe him as having an evil eye.

Harriman was also reckless, disregarding a doctor-ordered ban on drinking, often dropping the cost of a college education on a single evening of bacchanalia. He gobbled peyote and persuaded a doctor to issue him a prescription for medicinal marijuana in the early '50s. Later, after being busted for weed, Harriman unsuccessfully hounded federal officials for a license to grow marijuana.

Harriman never drank before five but he'd make up for lost time after that. One typically out of control evening he was jailed for drunk driving with his girlfriend. From the drunk tank cops noticed the trickle of blood at the end of his stump that Harriman had ignored for years. He was immediately hospitalized and doctors removed a cancerous growth.

Harriman, using his real name, even penned an article entitled "How to Sell Phony Stocks To American Suckers" which was read by millions in a January 1952 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. Meanwhile the stock ruse was generating big money for its partners, who showcased their sudden wealth by parking foreign sports cars outside their office in the building with the curved façade on Sherbrooke near du Fort.

As pressure from the Mafia, police and stock exchange officials mounted, Harriman's mind wandered from defrauding hopeful investors. He became increasingly distracted by the expansion of his consciousness and became consumed with an unlikely fascination with Eastern mysticism, specifically the Hindu philosophies of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. Legend has it that he frustrated his cronies by walking away from stock fraud just days before a million-dollar opportunity.

By 1970 Harriman had renounced materialism and lived the rest of his days in Toronto as a semi-mendicant, sometimes chanting mantras while sitting naked in the snow on the roof of his apartment building, Georgette recalls. In November 1996, at the age of 75, he finally died, never having been caught or punished for his misdeeds. The ashes of the one-armed Canadian mystic were sprinkled between the towers at the Seminary on Sherbrooke near Atwater.