Casually in Hollywood

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 pressagent 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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