Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl

Chapter 6. B Actress and Patriot (1941–1942)

94 CHAPTER 6 After completing her double assignment of Cadet Girl and I Wake Up Screaming in September 1941, Carole traveled to New York, where she stayed for a month, attending all or part of the “subway” World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Carole attended the marriage of her friend Florence Heller (later Wasson) to Albert Lary on September 9 in Los Angeles, was in Milwaukee for the American Legion convention around the twentieth, and reached New York by the twentythird . She appeared on the Eddie Cantor radio show with Joe Dimaggio on the twenty-fourth, did the town with Burgess Meredith and Tony Martin, and came down with the “flu” in the process. Carole went back to Los Angeles on October 8 to feed Donner, who “had refused to eat for a week,” then returned to New York, attending a Fight for Freedom rally in Madison Square Garden on October 15. On the thirtieth, back in Los Angeles, Carole was escorted by Martin to Charlie Foy’s Café. Although, from the standpoint of stardom, the second phase of Carole’s career at Fox was a year of disappointment, Carole was never kept busier, both on B Actress and Patriot ( 1941–1942) B ACTRESS AND PATRIOT (1941–1942) 95 and off the set. Beginning in November 1941, she worked almost without a break on six films, including a loaner to Charles Rogers/United Artists. Production on the first of these, A Gentleman at Heart, occupied Carole from early November until the twenty-ninth. Gentleman, like so many B films, had once been an A project. Dating back to 1937, it was originally titled “Masterpiece” and set in Italy; Simone Simon, Tyrone Power, Loretta Young, Henry Fonda, and Don Ameche had been thought of for the cast at one time or another before the story was moved to the United States and the B lot and assigned to Carole, along with Cesar Romero, her most frequent leading man, and her most frequent director, Ray McCarey. If Cadet Girl, the beginning of Carole’s “normalization,” had left her in the foreground, in Gentleman Carole is little more than a female ornament in a masculine plot. The most obvious sign of this process is that she has become “respectable.” The quasi-biographical resonance of I Wake Up Screaming that lent depth to Vicki’s showgirl persona would be much less prominent in Carole’s remaining Fox films. In Gentleman, all we know about Helen Mason’s past is that she is a failed painter who went to work at an art gallery. As the story goes, bookie Cesar Romero takes over a bankrupt gallery inherited by Milton Berle in payment of the latter’s gambling debts. Struck by Carole’s beauty, he takes interest in the gallery and gets her to teach him the rudiments of art history. Meanwhile Cesar and a master art forger, played with verve by J. Carrol Naish, concoct a plot to forge and sell a longlost Velasquez painting. Coincidentally, a Spaniard gets Cesar to buy what he claims to be this very same painting. But when federal experts begin to examine it, it is revealed as a crude fake. In the nick of time, Naish substitutes his superior forgery and it passes the official inspection undetected. The government buys the painting from Cesar, but for less than he had paid for the supposed Spanish original. The final sequence of the film takes place at a race track. Cesar is consoled for his loss when Berle reveals that the money given the Spaniard was just as phony as the painting. Meanwhile, in the romantic side plot, 96 B ACTRESS AND PATRIOT (1941–1942) while Carole has been instructing Cesar about art, he has been teaching her about his own area of expertise. When in the final moment Carole joins Cesar and Milton at the track and begins vigorously cheering on a horse, we sense that she has put aside high-cultural snobbery for popular culture and true love; the movie ends with a kiss. During their first encounter, Cesar tells Carole he intends to sell the gallery; Carole becomes upset at his crass materialism. But when he calms her down by expressing interest in getting the gallery back on its feet, her suspicions instantly evaporate; she asks him brightly, “You mean you’re interested?” and unhesitatingly accepts his invitation to lunch...