Actress, Scandal Figure. In the 1920s, there was speculation that Lake was the child of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and actress Marion Davies, who carried on a public affair despite Hearst being married to another woman. Many reference books state that Lake’s parents were Marion Davies’ sister Rosemary and her first husband, George Van Cleeve, but after her death in 1993, Lake’s family claimed that she was actually the daughter of Davies and Hearst, born during a trip the pair took to France in 1923. The Lake family asserted that the newborn was given to Davies’ sister, whose own child had died in infancy, and that the dead child’s birth certificate was altered to support the deception. It was reported by CBS News that Hearst is alleged to have acknowledged to Lake on her wedding day that he was her father. According to the Magazine Americana, published by The Institute for the Study of American Popular Culture, George Van Cleve kidnapped Patricia in 1924 and went into hiding. Hearst’s detectives located the pair after five years and the child was returned to Rose’s custody, only to be returned to Van Cleve’s custody after a court decision. Show business career: Lake performed in theater during the late 1930s through the mid-1940s. When after 7 years Penny Singleton left the radio sitcom Blondie in the mid-1940s, Mrs Lake, the former Patricia Van Cleve, replaced her as the voice of Blondie Bumstead for the remaining five years of the show, opposite her real-life husband Arthur Lake, who played Blondie’s spouse, Dagwood. In 1954, she also co-starred with her husband in an early television sitcom he created called Meet the Family. She was selected by the Motion Picture Publicists Association to be one of the MPPA ‘Baby Stars’ of 1940, an award similar to the WAMPAS Baby Stars selections of 1922 through 1934.