Carole Landis (born Frances Lillian Mary Ridste; January 1, 1919 – July 5, 1948) was an American actress. She worked as a contract player for 20th Century Fox in the 1940s. Her breakout role was as the female lead in the 1940 film One Million B.C. from United Artists. She was known as "The Ping Girl", a nickname given to her by Frank Seltzer that she disliked and tried to disassociate herself from.
Landis was born on January 1, 1919, in Fairchild, Wisconsin, the youngest of five children of Clara (née Sentek), a Polish farmer's daughter, and Norwegian-American Alfred Ridste, a drifting railroad mechanic who abandoned the family after Landis's birth. According to Landis's biographer E. J. Fleming, circumstantial evidence supports that Landis was likely the biological child of her mother's second husband, Charles Fenner. Fenner left Landis's mother in April 1921 and remarried a few months later.
In 1923, Landis's family moved to San Bernardino, California, where her mother worked menial jobs to support the family. At the age of 15, Landis dropped out of San Bernardino High School and set forth on a career path to show business. She started out as a hula dancer in a San Francisco nightclub, where she was described by her boss as a "nervous $35-a-week blonde doing a pathetic hula at her opening night at the old Royal Hawaiian on Bush [Street]...that'll never get her anyplace in show business". He apparently employed her only because he felt sorry for her; she later sang with a dance band.
After saving $100, she moved to Hollywood in 1937. She bleached her hair blonde and adopted the screen name of "Carole Landis" in honor of her favorite actress, Carole Lombard, and baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. She would legally change her name to Carole Landis on April 23, 1942.
She was signed by Warner Bros. in late 1936 and went on to appear in two dozen features, mostly for Bryan Foy's low-budget "B" unit (including gradually increasing roles in four Torchy Blane comedies, some of which gave her screen credit). By 1938 she was working in the studio's major motion pictures like The Adventures of Robin Hood and Boy Meets Girl, but only in uncredited bits.
Dissatisfied with her lack of progress, she moved on to Republic Pictures, a small but efficient studio specializing in action pictures. The smaller studio paid more attention to her, giving her ingenue leads in two Three Mesquiteers westerns and a serial, Daredevils of the Red Circle.
Pioneer producer Hal Roach was preparing One Million B.C., a dramatic film about prehistoric people menaced by the elements. He hired another movie pioneer, D. W. Griffith, to cast the picture. It was to be a rugged shoot, with many scenes staged outdoors. Roach recalled:
We had already decided on Victor Mature as the man and Lon Chaney [Jr.] as the father. They brought in girls. [Griffith] looked at them. Every time these girls came in, he took them to the back lot. I didn't know what the hell he was doing in the open spaces. Then one day he said, "I found your girl." It was Carole Landis. We went out on the back lot where there was street scenery and, on the corner, a telephone post. He looked at the girl and said, "Take your shoes off. Now run to that post as fast as you can. Then run back to me as fast as you can." She did. I wasn't particularly impressed. That's a hell of a way to pick our leading lady. He said, "I've had 50 girls run to that post and back. She's the only one who knows how to run. You're not going to make a believable girl in a picture of that kind who runs like an average girl. She's got to run like an athlete, a deer." And she could. Her rhythm was really beautiful. In the picture you never noticed it. But if she ran like most girls, you would damn well have seen the difference.
Hal Roach saw star potential in Carole Landis and signed her to a contract in June 1940. He continued casting her in three more starring roles, the best known being Turnabout (1940), a role-reversal farce written by Thorne Smith and co-starring John Hubbard.
She returned to Republic for one more film, the Judy Canova comedy Sis Hopkins (1941). She then landed a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox and began a sexual relationship with studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck. She had roles playing opposite fellow pin-up girl Betty Grable in the musical Moon Over Miami and the crime drama I Wake Up Screaming, both in 1941. When Landis ended her relationship with Zanuck, he stopped furthering her career. She remained under contract but was now assigned to lesser pictures, and Fox loaned her out to other studios three times. Her final two films, Noose and Brass Monkey, were both made in Great Britain.
On March 20, 1943, the Fashion Academy had named Landis the best-dressed woman for 1943 in its screen classification category. The Fashion Academy honor was based on an annual poll of leading designers to select the twelve best dressed women of the nation for twelve different classification categories.
Carole Landis became a popular pin-up with servicemen during World War II. In 1942, she traveled with comedian Martha Raye, dancer Mitzi Mayfair, and actress Kay Francis, serving for the USO in England and North Africa. Two years later, she entertained soldiers in the South Pacific alongside Jack Benny. During the war, Landis traveled over 100,000 miles and was the actress who spent the most time engaged in this activity. During her travels, she became seriously ill due to amoebic dysentery and malaria.
In 1945 she starred on Broadway in the musical A Lady Says Yes, with future novelist Jacqueline Susann in a small role. Susann is said to have based the character of Jennifer North, from her best-selling novel Valley of the Dolls, in part on Landis.
Landis wrote several newspaper and magazine articles about her experiences during the war, including the 1944 book Four Jills in a Jeep, which was later made into a movie costarring Kay Francis, Martha Raye, and Mitzi Mayfair. She also wrote the foreword to Vic Herman's cartoon book Winnie the WAC.
Landis was married four times and had no children (she was unable to conceive owing to endometriosis). In January 1934, 15-year-old Landis married her first husband, 19-year-old Irving Wheeler. Her mother had the marriage annulled in February 1934. Landis persuaded her father, Alfred Ridste (who had left the family shortly after Landis was born and who, by coincidence, lived near the family in San Bernardino), to allow her to remarry Wheeler. He finally relented, and the two were remarried on August 25, 1934. After three weeks of marriage, Landis and Wheeler got into an argument, and Landis walked out. Neither filed for divorce, and Landis began pursuing an acting career. In 1938, Wheeler reappeared and filed a $250,000 alienation of affections lawsuit against director and choreographer Busby Berkeley. Even though Landis and Wheeler were estranged, he claimed that Berkeley had enticed and otherwise persuaded Landis to transfer her affections. Landis maintained that she had not seen Wheeler in years and had heard from him only the previous year when he claimed to want a divorce. Wheeler's lawsuit was later dismissed, and Landis and Wheeler were divorced in 1939.
In June 1939 Berkeley proposed to Landis but later broke it off. On July 4, 1940, she married yacht broker Willis Hunt Jr. in Las Vegas. Landis left Hunt after two months of marriage due to abuse by Hunt; they were divorced on November 20, 1940.
While touring army camps in London in 1942, she met United States Army Air Forces Captain Thomas Wallace. They were married in January 1943, and the wedding received a two-page photo spread in Life magazine. Landis would also write an article about their honeymoon for the June 1943 edition of Photoplay. The couple separated in early 1945, and they would divorce in July 1945. Landis would write about the relationship, marriage, and later causes that led to the eventual collapse of their marriage in her article "Don't Marry A Stranger" for the January 1945 issue of Photoplay. She would state that "No woman ever loved a man more than I loved Tommy Wallace. And Tommy loved me, too. All my life, above all the rest, I want to remember that."