Magazine Articles This is an interview from Silver Screen magazine This is an article Carole wrote in 1941 Carole's mother Clara wrote this article after her death Sidney Skolsky wrote this article for the July 22, 1943 issue of Hollywood Citizen News Carole Landis tried to get into the movies by working as a waitress. She had seen several movies in which directors look up at the waitresses serving them and discover an actress. But times have changed since then. Now, directors sit in restaurants waiting for a waitress to discover them, and she has become the movie star who has entertained more servicemen and covered more territory doing it than any other actress. She has played more than 250 camps in this country, and has entertained in England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Africa and Brazil. Along with Kay Francis, Martha Raye and Mitzi Mayfair, she gave a command performance at Windsor Palace. After the performance, Queen Elizabeth spoke to her personally. This is a long haul for Frances Lillian Mary Ridste, who got her initial big publicity by being billed as "The Ping Girl" She Makes You Purr." It was when she started working seriously on a career as a dancer-singer-actress that she changed her name. Carole was always her favorite name. She immediately took it. Then she went through a telephone book and jotted down about 200 named to go with Carole. Landis appealed to her, and Landis it is now legally. She was born in Fairchild, Wisconsin, on Hangover Day, Jan. 1, 1919. She is 5 feet 5 1/4 inches tall, weighs 118 pounds. Her eyes are blue, and she is not a natural blonde. Her chest measurement is 36 1/2 inches, and that's without taking a deep breath. She appeared on a "Command Performance" broadcast, and, answering a serviceman's desire, she merely "sighed" over the radio. It is said that D.W. Griffith discovered her for pictures. The truth of the matter is that she discovered D.W. Griffith and made him discover her. Griffith was searching for a girl to play the lead in Hal Roach's One Million B.C. She had her agent take her to the Roach Studio and leave her there. Then she got busy. She found Griffith's office. Got in to see him. Told him about herself. Enacted a scene in the office for him, and impressed him so much that he said he'd give her a screen test. She wore a sweater that afternoon. She's an outdoor girl. She swims a lot, rides horseback, and plays tennis. She says she's not very fond of the indoor type of man, the fellow who wants to sit and sit. Her favorite man is her husband, Capt. Thomas C. Wallace, formerly of the Eagle Squadron, RAF, and now with the American Air Force. He doesn't just sit, having seen action in the Battle of Britain, all over England, occupied France, Norway, as well as on convoy protection duty. She was introduced to Captain Wallace by Neil Lang, estranged husband of Martha Raye, when she landed in England. She went for him immediately. The romance started with a cigaret. She admired the service wings on his lighter. He promptly insisted on trading lighters with her, saying, "I'd rather have your lighter. Think how impressed people will be if I can show them a lighter with Carole Landis' name on it." They had their first date the night following their introduction. After a drink in the American bar at the Savoy, dinner at Pastori's, a ride to Victoria on the tube, a sight-seeing return to London on a doubledeck bus, they danced and talked for hours at the 400 Club where he proposed. She didn't say "no," but she didn't say "Yes," although she wanted to. A week later she did. He is expected in this country for reassignment shortly. Her finger nails used to be an inch and a quarter long, but are now normal since taking piano lessons. She never uses polish on her nails. She thinks it is vulgar. Her favorite breakfast consists of orange juice, eggs, and coffee. She rarely eats lunch, and when she does it's invariably an omelette. Her favorite dinner is anything with corn on the cob. She always drinks plenty of milk followed by coffee. She loves going to the movies, and she believes that Bette Davis and Ingrid Bergman are the best actresses. Her favorite actors are Charles Boyer, Cary Grant and Franchot Tone. She has never appeared with any of them in a picture. Her leading man in her latest picture, Wintertime, is Cornel Wilde. She resides in a beach house on the ocean front at Santa Monica. It is practically a boarding house for servicemen. Although the house is done in early Spanish, her living room has a Chinese motif. Her bedroom, upstairs, is her favorite room. She sleeps in a modern bed-sitting room decorated in pale rose, eggshell, and intriguing olive tones. She sleeps in a low double bed, with quilted eggshell satin covered back, and there is a bedspread bordered in rose. She used to sleep in the nude, but now wears sheer nightgowns, usually trimmed with black lace. She dreams every night. And mostly, her dreams are the kind Freud would love to analyze. United We Stand is an article Carole wrote for MAST magazine Hitler wasn't guessing when he incorporated into his psychological warfare the strategy of "divide and conquer." It worked in Norway and it worked in France, and because there is no immunity to Fascism, it's trying hard right here in the United States. There is one antidote. We've got to remember that we're all in this together. British, Russians, Chinese. And French-Polish-Yugoslav-Jewish-Irish-Mexican-English or what-have-you-Americans. Indians, whites, and Negroes. Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, boys in the AAF or Merchant Marine. And civilians. Yes, civilians. All the names from Pearl Harbor onwards are written on our memories and on our hearts and in your steel and your blood and your courage. The exploits at home aren't of this kind. But believe me, boys, they do exist. In two and a half short years, the country has rolled up its sleeves, and our production record can be heard in the planes that roar over Germany; our War Bond record is built into every tank and destroyer, and the blood banks of the Red Cross are only one of the "musts" on the daily lists of the men and women on the home front. None of us here can give as much as you. We all know it. That's why there is such a determination to give all we can, in time, spirit, money, work. We believe in you. We know you're good. But you've got to believe in us, too, because the home front is also a fighting front. And because this belief, this unity, brings the day of Victory right up there in plain sight. Unity is the one thing Hitler and his cohorts cannot cope with. Casually in Hollywood is an article from the July 19, 1948 issue of Time magazine Like millions of other American girls, Frances Lillian Mary Ridste had a voracious hunger for happiness. Like millions of others, she was certain she knew the definition of that sad and elusive word. It meant being rich & famous. It meant having a big car and fine clothes. It meant having a shapely body, unashamedly shown. It meant being madly in love with a handsome man. It meant applause. By dint of this wild thinking, and because she lived in what may become known as the era of American brassiere-worship, Frances Lillian Mary Ridste became a motion-picture star. She was born to poverty. Her father was a drifting railroad mechanic; her mother a Polish farmer's daughter. During her childhood in San Bernardino, Calif., her teachers despaired of her. She skipped classes, made eyes at the boys, and got miserable grades. She entered a beauty contest at twelve and won fourth prize, a pair of stockings. At 15 she married a youth named Irving Wheeler. He was not a touchstone to happiness, and she left him in three weeks. Cheesecake & Horse Operas. She rode a bus to San Francisco, gave herself a new name "Carole Landis" and got a job as a hula dancer in a cheap nightclub. She began the kind of swift and brutal education a boxer gets in the ring. She sang with a dance band. When she had saved $100 she went to Hollywood to court the cold-eyed janizaries of the motion-picture business. She danced in the chorus of a Warner Bros, musical. She worked in horse operas. Life was a round of cheap rooms, skimpy meals, an endless attempt to look glamorous and "sexy." She posed for hundreds of cheesecake pictures. Finally the Hal Roach studio cast her as a scantily clad cave woman in a picture called One Million B.C. She hit the jackpot. A press agent nicknamed her the "Ping Girl," explained somewhat illogically, "she makes you purr." The money, the cars, the house, the. clothes, the adulation followed. "All Girl All the Time." But Carole Landis was still Frances Lillian Mary Ridste, a lovely torso, not an actress - generous, shrewd, unstable. Walter Winchell described her in the adolescent and gritty language of Broadway: "She was ... All Girl all the time." During the war she went overseas, spent months singing and mugging before wildly applauding servicemen in steaming outposts. She was still "a patsy for a handsome guy." She fell in & out of love as wildly and thoughtlessly as a high-school girl. In 1940, she had married a young yacht broker named Willis Hunt Jr., left him in two months complaining that he was "sarcastic." Two years later, in war-darkened London, she fell ecstatically in love with a young American aviator, Captain Thomas Wallace. They were married in a church "with a veil and all" after which she hurried off to Africa. When she saw him in New York the following summer, she found that she hardly knew him. She divorced him in Las Vegas. Her last marriage, in 1945, to a balding, amiable theatrical producer named W. Horace Schmidlapp, had long since disintegrated. So had her career. She was still working in B pictures, but she had lost her appeal at the box office. Her health was not good - she suffered from amoebic dysentery contracted overseas. There were rumors that she was broke. "Dearest Mommie." But she was recklessly in love again - this time with lean, British-born Actor Rex Harrison, a man Hollywood had nicknamed "Sexy Rexy." One night last week, after Harrison had dined with her at her big Pacific Palisades house, Frances Ridste gulped a few fast highballs and wrote a note to her "Dearest Mommie." She scribbled: "Goodbye, my angel. Pray for me." She signed it, "Your Baby." Then she took a lethal handful of sleeping pills, sank to the bathroom floor, and died. Her funeral, which Harrison attended with his wife to show gossips they were not "rifting", was a splendid affair. She was buried holding an orchid in one hand and wearing two on her dress.
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