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Revision as of 07:02, 25 January 2007 by 69.22.249.79 (talk)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Frances Elena Farmer (September 19, 1913 – August 1, 1970) was an American film actress.
Early life, career and marriage
Farmer was born in Seattle, Washington, to Ernest Melvin Farmer and Lillian Van Ornum Farmer. In 1931, while attending West Seattle High School, she entered and won $100 in a writing contest sponsored by Scholastic Magazine with her controversial essay God Dies, a precocious attempt to reconcile her wish for, in her words, a "superfather" God with her observations of a chaotic, seemingly Godless, world. In 1935, as a student at the University of Washington, she won a subscription contest for the leftist newspaper The Voice of Action. First prize was a trip to the Soviet Union, which she took despite her mother's strong objections. These two incidents led to accusations that Farmer was both an atheist and a Communist. Farmer studied drama at the University of Washington. During the 1930s its drama department productions were considered citywide cultural events and attended accordingly. While there she starred in diverse plays including Helen of Troy, Everyman and Uncle Vanya. In 1935 she starred in the school's production of Alien Corn, speaking foreign languages, playing the piano and receiving rave reviews in what was the longest running play in the department's history at the time.
Early film career
Returning from the Soviet Union in the summer of 1935, Farmer stopped in New York City, hoping to launch a legitimate theater career. Instead, she was referred to Paramount Studios' talent scout, Oscar Serlin, who arranged for a screen test. Paramount offered her a 7-year contract. Farmer signed it in New York on her 22nd birthday and moved to Hollywood. She had top billing in two well-received 1936 "B" films and, that same year, was cast opposite Bing Crosby in her first "A" feature, Rhythm On The Range. Also in 1936 she was loaned to Samuel Goldwyn to appear in Come and Get It, based on the novel by Edna Ferber. Her portrayals of both the mother and daughter were praised by the public and critics, some of whom wrote of her potential to become a major star. She also married her first husband, actor Leif Erickson, in 1936.
A rebellious star
Farmer was not entirely satisfied with her career, however. She felt stifled by Paramount's tendency to cast her in films which depended on her looks more than her talent and her naturally outspoken demeanor made her seem uncooperative and contemptuous. In an age when the studios dictated every facet of a star's life, Farmer rebelled against the studio's control and resisted every attempt they made to glamourize her private life, refusing to attend Hollywood parties or to date other stars for the gossip columns. At the time, she was sympathetically described as being indifferent about the clothing she wore and was said to drive an older-model "green roadster," which, according to a columnist, once broke down on Melrose Avenue, blocking traffic as Farmer pushed the stricken car to the side.
Hoping to enhance her reputation as a serious actress, she left Hollywood in 1937 to do summer stock on the East Coast, where she attracted the attention of Harold Clurman and Clifford Odets. They invited her to appear in the Group Theatre production of Odets' play Golden Boy in a performance which at first received highly mixed reviews (Time commented that she had been miscast), but which, due to Farmer's box office appeal, became the biggest hit in the Group's history. By 1938, when the production had embarked on a national tour, regional critics from Washington D.C., to Chicago gave her rave reviews.
Farmer also had an affair with Odets, but he was married to actress Luise Rainer and didn't offer Farmer a commitment. Farmer felt betrayed when Odets suddenly ended the relationship, believing he had used her drawing power to further the success of his play. She returned to Hollywood, and arranged with Paramount to stay in Los Angeles for three months out of every year to make motion pictures, freeing up the remainder of her time for theater activities. However, her two subsequent appearances on Broadway had short runs and she found herself back in Los Angeles, often loaned out by Paramount to other studios for starring roles. At her home studio, meanwhile, she was consigned to costarring appearances, which she often found unchallenging.
By 1939, her temperamental work habits and worsening alcoholism began to negatively impact her reputation. In 1940, after abruptly quitting a Broadway production of a play by Ernest Hemingway, she starred in two major films, both loan-outs to other studios. A year later, however, she was again relegated to co-starring roles. Her performance in Son of Fury (Fox, 1941) was critically praised, but in 1942 Paramount cancelled her contract, reportedly because of her alcoholism and increasingly erratic behaviour. Meanwhile, her marriage to Erickson had disintegrated.
The spiral
On October 19, 1942, she was stopped by the police in Santa Monica for driving with her headlights on bright in the wartime blackout zone that affected most of the West Coast. Some reports say she was unable to produce a driver's license and was verbally abusive. The police suspected her of being drunk and she was jailed overnight. Farmer was fined $500 and given a 180 day suspended sentence. She immediately paid $250.00 and was put on probation. By January 1943, she had failed to pay the rest of the fine and a bench warrant was issued for her arrest. At almost the same time, an assault charge was filed against her by a studio hairdresser who alleged Farmer had dislocated her jaw on the set of a low budget movie. The police traced her to the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood and, getting no answer, entered her room with a pass key. They reportedly found her in bed (some stories include an episode involving the bathroom) and made her dress quickly. By all accounts, she did not surrender peacefully.
At her hearing the next morning she behaved erratically. She claimed the police had violated her civil rights, demanded an attorney and proceeded to throw an inkwell at the judge, who immediately sentenced her to 180 days in jail. When the judge asked if she had had anything to drink since the last time she was in court, she replied that she'd drunk anything she came upon and also that she had been taking Benzedrine. She then knocked down a policeman and bruised another along with a matron. She ran to a phone booth where she tried to call her attorney, but was subdued by the police who physically carried her away as she shouted, “Have you ever had a broken heart?”
Newspaper reports gave sensationalized accounts of her arrest, including claims she had used profanities when speaking to police officers. Through the efforts of her sister-in-law, a deputy sheriff in Los Angeles County at the time, Farmer was transferred to the psychiatric ward of L.A. General Hospital and diagnosed with "manic depressive psychosis."
Within days, having been sent to the San Fernando Valley and the Kimball Sanitarium in La Crescenta, Farmer was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and received insulin shock therapy, a treatment which was later discredited, but accepted as standard psychiatric procedure at the time. The side effects included intense nausea. Her family later claimed the treatment was given without their consent (as documented in her sister's self-published book Look Back in Love and in court records). The sanitarium was a minimum security facility and after about nine months, Farmer walked away one afternoon. She appeared at her half-sister Rita's house over 20 miles away, and the pair called their mother in Seattle to complain about the insulin treatment. Lillian Farmer traveled to California and began a lengthy legal battle to have guardianship of her daughter transferred from the state of California to her. Although several psychiatrists testified that Farmer needed further treatment, her mother prevailed, and the two of them left Los Angeles by train on September 13, 1943.
Western State Hospital
Farmer moved back in with her parents in West Seattle but she and her mother fought bitterly. Within six months, Farmer physically attacked Lillian, who had her daughter committed as "legally insane" to Western State Hospital at Fort Steilacoom, Washington. There, she was sometimes placed in a strait jacket and received electro-convulsive shock treatment (ECT). Three months later, during the summer of 1944, she was pronounced "completely cured" and released. While traveling with her father to visit at an aunt's ranch in Reno, Nevada, she ran away and spent time with a family who had picked her up hitchhiking, but was eventually arrested for vagrancy in Antioch, California. This received wide publicity and offers of help flooded in from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, which she ignored. After a long stay with her aunt in Nevada, she went back to her parents. At her mother's request, was returned to Western State in May 1945.
Sensationalized accounts
In the years following Farmer's death, her treatment at Western State was the subject of serious discussion and wild speculation. A sensationalized chapter relating to her breakdown was included in Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger. Farmer's ghostwritten, posthumously published autobiography Will There Really Be A Morning described a brutal incarceration and claimed she had been raped, beaten, doused in freezing baths and forced by a warden to eat her own feces. However, Farmer's friend and ghostwriter, Jean Ratcliffe, admitted she had written the book specifically to create a saleable and filmable property. She conceded that she had deliberately exaggerated Farmer's torment, and that most of the finished work was not contributed by Farmer.
The false lobotomy claims
William Arnold
In the fictional biography Shadowland (1978), published eight years after Farmer's death, William Arnold was the first to claim she had been subjected to a transorbital lobotomy performed by Dr. Walter Freeman. This assertion was repeated in Lobotomy, Resort to the Knife (1982) by David Shutts, who cited Frank Freeman (Walter Freeman's eldest son) as saying his father performed a lobotomy on Farmer. As evidence, he offered a dramatic photograph of a lobotomy procedure. This was later shown to be from a series of images accompanying a July 1949 Post-Intelligencer article about Walter Freeman. The same patient's face is completely visible in other photos and she is clearly not Farmer (a link below to Shedding Light on Shadowland includes the photos).
Walter Freeman's younger son disputed the lobotomy story, but it was widely accepted as fact for several years. Wholly fictional scenes of Farmer being subjected to the procedure were used in the 1982 film Frances. In a court case brought by author William Arnold against Brooksfilms and the film's producers (one of whom was comedian Mel Brooks), Arnold admitted he had never intended to create a true biography of Farmer and that much of his story was, in his words, "fictionalized", including the lobotomy episode. Years later, on a DVD commentary track of the film Frances, director Graeme Clifford stated, "We didn't want to nickel and dime people to death with facts."
Also, Arnold acknowledges having received help from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (an anti-psychiatric group created by the Church of Scientology) and Scientology president Heber Jentzsch
Medical archives
Western State Hospital's medical archives record all of the lobotomies performed during her time there. Since lobotomies were considered a ground-breaking medical procedure at the time, the hospital did not attempt to conceal their work and kept extensive records. Although hundreds of patients underwent the procedure, no evidence has ever been presented to support the claim Farmer was among them. Farmer's own medical records show she was never operated on for any reason while she was institutionalized. Former staff members, including all the lobotomy ward nurses who were on duty during Frances' years at Western State, confirmed during 1983 interviews with Seattle newspapers that Farmer did not receive a lobotomy. Nurse Beverly Tibbetts stated, “I worked on all the patients who had lobotomies, and Frances Farmer never came to that ward.” Freeman's own private patient records contain no references to Farmer. Dr. Charles Jones, Psychiatric Resident at Western State during Frances' stays there (and personally trained by Freeman to perform transorbitals) also stated that Farmer was never given a lobotomy. In The Lobotomist, a later biography of Walter Freeman, author Jack El-Hai reported that Freeman's son Frank ultimately hedged his earlier statements and was no longer willing to assert unequivocally that his father operated on Farmer. Farmer's sister, Edith, said her parents were asked for permission to perform the lobotomy, but her father was “horrified” by the notion and threatened legal action "if they tried any of their guinea pig operations on her."
Second career and death
On March 23 1950, at her parents' request, she was "paroled" back into her mother's care. Farmer's mostly ghostwritten autobiography bitterly stated that her parents needed her to take care of them in their old age. She took a job sorting laundry at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle, the same hotel where, in 1936, Farmer had been feted at the world premiere of Come and Get It. At the time Farmer is said to have believed her mother could have her institutionalized again. In 1953, ten years after her arrest at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, a judge legally restored Frances Farmer's competency and full civil rights at her request.
In 1954, after a brief second marriage to utility worker Alfred H. Lobley, Farmer moved to Eureka, California, where she worked anonymously for almost three years in a photo studio as a secretary/bookkeeper.
Comeback attempt
In 1957, she met Leland C. Mikesell, an independent broadcast promoter from Indianapolis who helped her move to San Francisco and get work as a receptionist in a hotel, where he then arranged for a reporter to recognize her and write an article. This led to renewed interest. She told Modern Screen magazine, "I blame nobody for my fall... I think I have won the fight to control myself." She made two appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and also appeared on the This Is Your Life, during which she was asked about her alcoholism and mental illness. Farmer said she had never believed she was mentally ill and remarked, "if a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one."
In August 1957, Farmer returned to the stage in New Hope, Pennsylvania, for a summer stock production of The Chalk Garden.
Through the spring of 1958, Farmer appeared in several live television dramas, some of which are preserved on kinescope. The same year, she made her last film, The Party Crashers, produced by Paramount. During this period, she divorced Lobley and married Mikesell, but that marriage was also brief. By the summer of 1958, offers for television and theater appearances had fallen off. Her comeback ended with a six-day performance of The Chalk Garden in Indianapolis, where she accepted an offer to host afternoon movies on a local TV station.
Indianapolis
After her last film appearance, she made a success of a TV show called Frances Farmer Presents, and was in demand as a public speaker. She was actress-in-residence at Purdue University during the early 1960s, appearing in some campus productions.
By 1964, however, her behaviour had turned erratic again, and she was fired, re-hired and fired again.
Her last acting role was in The Visit at Loeb Playhouse on the Purdue University campus in West Lafayette, Indiana, which ran from October 22 to October 30, 1965. During this engagement, she was arrested for drunk driving.
She subsequently attempted two small businesses with her friend Jean Ratcliffe, but both failed. She was arrested again for drunk driving and her license was suspended for a year.
Farmer died from esophageal cancer in 1970 at the age of 56. She is interred at Oaklawn Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Fishers, Indiana.
Quotes
"It was pretty sad, because for the first time I found how stupid people could be. It sort of made me feel alone in the world. The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it."
"It's a nuthouse . The other day a man phoned and wanted me to endorse a certain brand of cigarettes. I had nothing against them and in fact will smoke them or anything else that comes along, but I didn't know why he was bothering me. I thought maybe if I was nice they'd give me a carton as a thank offering, so I rather tentatively broached the matter of remuneration. What was the endorsement worth, I asked, and he said three thousand dollars. What are you going to do in an atmosphere like that?"
Trivia
- She allowed the Paramount make-up department to shave off her eyebrows as a part of the routine "makeover" given to any newly contracted actress. Only a year later (1937), studio photographs show they'd grown back and she wasn't trimming them pencil-thin, contrary to the standard practice for Hollywood actresses at the time.
- Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain liked to draw parallels between his career and that of Frances Farmer. Cobain cited Farmer in the song "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle", featured in the album In Utero.
- Farmer was one of only a very few featured guests of the popular This is Your Life series to have been alerted beforehand about the impending show.
- Throughout her career, Farmer was frequently announced for projects she ultimately did not end up performing in. Among the many Paramount films for which she was announced are College Holiday, Hideaway Girl, Spawn of the North, Big Broadcast of 1938, Beau Geste and Take A Letter, Darling. Preston Sturges apparently wanted Farmer for Sullivan's Travels, but the role ultimately went to Veronica Lake. From 1944-45, during her initial institutionalizations and releases from Western State Hospital, several news articles quoted producers as offering her the lead in the film The Enchanted Forest and the Broadway play The Incredible Woodhull.
Biographical films
- Jessica Lange played Farmer in the 1982 film Frances and was Oscar-nominated for her role. Lange maintained her compassion and empathy for Farmer's plight and in interviews remained an ardent supporter.
- Susan Blakely portrayed Farmer in a television production which used the title of the autobiography.
References in popular culture
- The French singer Mylène Farmer took her last name as a homage to her favorite actress.
- The T'Pau song "Monkey House" is supposed to have been written about Farmer.
- Farmer is the subject of a song by Nirvana on the album In Utero titled "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle."
- Courtney Love wore a dress previously owned by Farmer in her wedding to Kurt Cobain. Contrary to rumor, their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, is not named after Frances Farmer, but rather after Frances McKee of The Vaselines.
- "The Medal Song" by Culture Club was written about Farmer. The single release featured a photograph of Farmer with the caption "From Here to Eternity" and is included on the 1984 album Waking Up With the House on Fire.
- "Lobotomy Gets 'em Home" by The Men They Couldn't Hang is about Farmer.
- Farmer is the subject of the song "Ugly Little Dreams" by Everything But the Girl on their album Love Not Money.
- Author Michael Chabon references Farmer in his novel Wonder Boys.
- Farmer is referenced in an episode of The Simpsons entitled "Lady Bouvier's Lover". Marge Simpson's mother, Jackie Bouvier, says,
Jackie: Boys all paid attention to me and it drove my friends crazy.
Abe: Who were your friends?
Jackie: Oh, Zelda Fitzgerald, Frances Farmer, and little Sylvia Plath.
- Wu Ming's novel 54 features Frances Farmer as one of the characters. She never appears directly, but her "ghost" (the term is in brackets because she was still alive at the time the novel is set) haunts Cary Grant throughout his temporary retirement from movies.
- Farmer is the subject of the Deftones song "Rats!Rats!Rats!"
See also
Notes
- IMDb: Biography for Frances Farmer
- ^ Jeffrey Kauffman: Frances Farmer: Shedding Light on Shadowland
- Catch a Rising Star, Premiere Magazine, September 1993
References
- "Shedding Light on Shadowland" - Essay debunking many commonly believed myths about Farmer, with a wealth of previously undisclosed information about her
- Frances Farmer biography by HistoryLink, Washington state
External links
- Frances Farmer at IMDb
- Frances Farmer at the TCM Movie Database
- Frances Farmer at the Internet Broadway Database