Frances Farmer

Life and career

1913–1935: Early life

Frances Elena Farmer was born on September 19, 1913, in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of Cora Lillian (née Van Ornum; 1873–1955), a boardinghouse operator and dietician and Ernest Melvin Farmer (1874–1956), a lawyer. Her father was originally from Spring Valley, Minnesota, while her mother was from Oregon and a descendant of pioneers. Lillian's maternal grandparents were John and Jemima (Skews) Rowe, who came to Waldwick, Wisconsin, from Truro, England, in 1849. Farmer had an older sister, Edith; an older brother, Wesley; and an older half-sister, Rita, conceived during her mother's first marriage. Before the birth of Wesley and Edith, Lillian had given birth to a daughter who died of pneumonia in infancy.

When Farmer was four years old, her parents separated, and her mother moved with the children to Los Angeles, where her sister Zella lived. In early 1925, the family moved north to Chico, California, where Lillian pursued a career in nutrition research. Shortly after arriving in Chico, Lillian concluded that caring for the children was interfering with her ability to work. The children's Aunt Zella drove them to Albany, Oregon, and put them on a train back to Seattle to live with their father.

Farmer's inconsistent home life had a notable effect on her. She later recalled about returning to Seattle: "In certain ways, that train trip represented the end of my dependent childhood. I began to understand that there were certain things one could expect from adults, and others that one could not expect...being shunted from one household to another was a new adjustment, a fresh confusion, and I groped for ways to compensate for the disorder." The next year, her mother returned to Seattle after her home in Chico burned down.

In Seattle, the family shared a household, but Lillian and Ernest remained separated despite his attempts to repair their marriage. In the fall of 1929, when Farmer was 16, Lillian and Ernest divorced, and Lillian moved to a cottage across Puget Sound in Bremerton, Washington. The children remained with their father.

In her autobiography, Farmer described her mother as a "hard-willed" woman whose "eccentricities created humiliating circumstances that nearly destroyed my life... No matter how hard we thought we tried, there was never a day when we were able really to understand each other. From childhood on our relationship was strained and torn by strife. Each encounter between us ended in screaming hysteria and slamming doors."

1935–1936: Early films and rise to fame

Returning from the Soviet Union in the summer of 1935, Farmer stopped in New York City, hoping to launch a theater career. She met up with her old college friend, actress Jane Rose, and moved into her small Upper West Side apartment. Soon after, on June 25, 1935, she met with talent agent Shepard Traube, who referred her to Paramount Pictures talent scout Oscar Serlin, who arranged for a screen test. Paramount offered her a seven-year contract, which Farmer signed in New York City on her 22nd birthday. After completing screen tests on Long Island, Farmer moved to Los Angeles to begin working for Paramount. Upon arrival, she underwent dental surgery to fix a gap in her front teeth, and she spent long hours screen-testing and training on the Paramount studio lot. In November 1935, she was cast in the B-movie Too Many Parents (1936), a comedy about young men in military school. The film was a box-office success. Farmer later described the making of the film as a "dull, professionally humiliating experience." After completing it in February 1936, Farmer wed fellow Paramount contract player Wycliffe Anderson (who had changed his name to William Anderson, and later to Glenn Erickson, and finally to Leif Erickson, after the Viking explorer). She was then cast in a lead role in the drama Border Flight.

Later that year, Farmer was cast in her first "A" feature, Rhythm on the Range, a musical Western starring Bing Crosby. She recalled of the film: "I had had a crush on him [Crosby] since my high school days, and stood in awe of the fact that in my first important film I was actually working as his leading lady." Rhythm on the Range earned favorable reviews and brought Farmer an enhanced public reputation. After its release, Paramount studio head Adolph Zukor phoned her and told her, "now that she was a rising star she'd have to start acting like one." Farmer was resistant, however, and spent most of her time at her home in Laurel Canyon with Erickson, forgoing invitations to Hollywood parties and events. In an attempt to make her marketable, Paramount chose to brand her in press releases as "the star who would not go Hollywood," focusing on her "eccentric" fashion tastes. Farmer later wrote that she was happy with the way she dressed, preferring slacks or a tweed skirt to more elegant attire as befitting a rising young Hollywood film actress in the 1930s. However, she did make one concession to Zukor's calls for her to dress more glamorously by buying a trench coat from Paramount's wardrobe department which had been worn by Marlene Dietrich in one of her previous films for the studio. Farmer later wrote in her autobiography that – other than purchasing the trench coat – she completely ignored Zukor's request to dress more "appropriately" as a Paramount Pictures film star, and that she later came "to ponder the wisdom of [her] deliberate antagonism" by making a determined enemy out of him.

1937–1941: Transition to theater

Unsatisfied with the expectations of the studio system and wanting to enhance her reputation as a serious actress, Farmer left Hollywood in mid-1937 to do summer stock on the East Coast, performing in Westchester, New York, and Westport, Connecticut. There, she attracted the attention of director Harold Clurman and playwright Clifford Odets, who invited her to appear in a three-month production of Odets's play Golden Boy, produced by the Group Theatre. Paramount wanted Farmer back in Los Angeles for the film, Beau Geste, but Farmer pleaded to stay in New York for the play. The part Farmer turned down later went to Susan Hayward, essentially launching her film career. Golden Boy opened in November 1937 and ran for a total of 248 performances. Her performance at first received mixed reviews, with Time commenting that she had been miscast. However, Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times on November 5, 1937, that "Frances is sufficient to the part and excellent in the romantic scenes." And Cue magazine's November 13, 1937, review of Golden Boy written by Herbert Drake stated: "Frances Farmer turns in a simple and honest portrayal, completely in tune with the magnificent ensemble acting of the rest of the Group performance." Due to Farmer's box-office appeal, the play 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.

During the run of Golden Boy, Farmer began a romantic affair with Odets, but he was married to actress Luise Rainer and did not offer Farmer a commitment. Farmer felt betrayed when Odets suddenly ended the relationship, and when the group chose another actress for its London run–an actress whose family helped secure funds for the play–she came to believe that the group had used her drawing power selfishly to further the success of the play. Disheartened, Farmer returned to Los Angeles to star opposite husband Erickson in Ride a Crooked Mile (1938). By this time, Farmer had acquired a reputation in the press for being somewhat "difficult" and The New York Times made note of Farmer's return to Hollywood for Ride a Crooked Mile (which was also known as Escape from Yesterday):Paramount is pleased with the tranquility surrounding Frances Farmer's brief resumption of her screen career. Following her substantial Broadway stage engagement of "Golden Boy," the studio rather expected fireworks when it came to casting her. However, when she was assigned a role in the modest film Escape from Yesterday, there was no objection from the star, who attained note for, among other things, giving voice to caustic opinions about Hollywood in her New York interviews.Odets later wrote in his 1940 journal about Farmer, describing her as an "unhappy, stiff, rude and uncontrollable girl, but with a real purity." In April 1939, she performed in a short-run Broadway production of Quiet City, an experimental play by Irwin Shaw, directed by Elia Kazan. Farmer was also performing on radio at this time and in May, following the closing of Quiet City, she appeared on The Kate Smith Hour opposite Luther Adler in a radio adaptation of Men in White. She then performed in summer stock in New Jersey through August. In November that year, she returned to Broadway, portraying Melanie in Thunder Rock, also directed by Kazan, and produced by the Group Theater. The play was not well received, and Farmer was profoundly unhappy after its closing in December 1939. She subsequently accepted a role in a Broadway adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Fifth Column, for which she was scheduled to begin rehearsing in early 1940. During rehearsals, Farmer began binge drinking in an effort to alleviate her depression. She ultimately chose to withdraw from the production, resulting in a $1,500 fine from the Theater Guild, for "unprofessionalism".

1942–1949: Legal troubles and psychiatric confinement

On October 19, 1942, Farmer was stopped by Santa Monica police for driving with her headlights on high beam in the wartime blackout zone that affected most of the West Coast. Some reports stated she was unable to produce a driver's license, and was verbally abusive to the officers. 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 and was put on probation. With her vehicle impounded and her driver's license suspended, Farmer holed up in her Santa Monica home and denied the press interviews.

In November 1942, her agent secured her a role in an independent film adaptation of John Steinbeck's Murder at Laudice, which was set to film in Mexico City. Upon arriving in Mexico, she discovered that the shooting script was unfinished, and the production never reached fruition. According to Farmer's sister Edith, she dropped out of the production after waiting two weeks in Mexico City for script rewrites to take place. While in Mexico City, Farmer was allegedly charged with drunk and disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace, and was forced by authorities to return to the United States. Upon returning to California, she found her Santa Monica home cleared of her possessions and inhabited by a strange family. Farmer later contended that her mother and sister-in-law had stripped the house and stored her belongings while she was gone. Her mother rented her a room at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, where she temporarily took residence.

By January 1943, Farmer had failed to pay the remainder of her fine, and a bench warrant was issued for her arrest. At almost the same time, a studio hairdresser filed an assault charge alleging that Farmer had hit her in the face and dislocated her jaw on set. Farmer had just begun working on the Monogram Pictures film, I Escaped from the Gestapo (1943). By her own admission, Farmer was by this time in a poor state of mental health. She stated that she was feeling as though she were "slipping away" and she realized she was behaving in a "peculiar manner," suffering with constant head pain and a nervous twitch in one eye; the pain was so intense that she could hardly bear to sit for make-up or have her hair combed. On January 13, 1943, she left the studio abruptly and went back to her room at the Knickerbocker Hotel and collapsed. Later that day, police went to the Knickerbocker to arrest her, but she did not surrender peacefully. Farmer stated that she fought the arresting officers and had to be dragged forcibly through the hotel lobby kicking and screaming.

1950–1958: Post-hospitalization and comeback attempt

On March 23, 1950, at her parents' request, Farmer was paroled back into her mother's care. Farmer later wrote that her behavior pattern in the five years she was an inmate at Western State Hospital had not changed drastically prior to her discharge hearing. She wrote that the only thing she had learned was to keep her mouth shut. Her mother had recently had a minor stroke and her father was back living at home with her. Frances was needed at home to help take care of them. Farmer wrote:For five years I had survived every conceivable torture and had been considered too dangerous to be allowed at large. Now, suddenly, not only was I sufficiently cured to warrant a parole, but I was also considered capable of accepting the responsibility of caring for the two people who had been singularly responsible for my commitment. A year later, on March 25, 1951, Farmer was formally discharged from the jurisdiction of Western State, but was not made aware of it for two years; in the interim, she believed her recommitment to the hospital an imminent threat. In June 1953, upon discovering her discharge, Farmer requested that her mother's conservatorship be lifted, which the Superior Court did. With her freedom restored, Farmer took a job sorting laundry at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle, the same hotel where she had been fêted in 1936 at Come and Get It's premiere. While working at the Olympic Hotel, a co-worker set Farmer up on a blind date with Alfred H. Lobley, a 45-year-old city utility worker. The two married in April 1954, and moved in with Lillian, who was growing senile and needed assistance at home. Within the year, Lillian was sent to a nursing home, after which Farmer's marriage to Lobley began to disintegrate.

Farmer remained estranged from her sister until Lillian's death from a stroke in March 1955. After their mother's death, Farmer's sister Edith moved to Portland, Oregon, to be nearer to their father, who died there on July 15, 1956, also of a stroke. During this time, Farmer and Edith occasionally corresponded. Edith claimed that on one occasion, Farmer visited her in Portland, where the two spent an afternoon at The Grotto, a Catholic sanctuary they had once visited with their father.

In late 1957, Farmer separated from Lobley and relocated to Eureka, California, where she found work as a bookkeeper and secretary at a commercial photo studio. In Eureka, she met Leland C. Mikesell, an independent broadcast promoter from Indianapolis, who recognized her at a local bar. The two soon became romantically involved, and Mikesell envisioned a career comeback for her. They moved to San Francisco, where Farmer temporarily worked as a clerk at the Park Sheraton Hotel. In 1958, Mikesell and she married.

1959–1964: Stage and television work

Farmer's stage work proved beneficial, as she received the opportunity to host her own daytime movie program, Frances Farmer Presents. The show was created after a television executive from the local National Broadcasting Company (NBC) affiliate, WFBM-TV (now known as WRTV), saw her performance in The Chalk Garden in August 1958. The program made her popular as an amiable host, and she subsequently received an award as a local businesswoman of the year. By March 1959, though, national wire service reports indicated that she had separated from Mikesell and that he was suing her for breach of contract. In 1959, Farmer moved in with Jeanira "Jean" Ratcliffe, a widow with whom she became good friends in Indianapolis.

In 1962, Farmer appeared in a Purdue University production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. The following year, her divorce from Mikesell was finalized in Indianapolis. Frances Farmer Presents ended in the summer of 1964; the station's general manager had fired her in April, hired her back two months later, but then dismissed Farmer permanently in late August/early September, aggravated by her alleged drinking binges. Farmer continued her stage work and accepted a role in a Purdue Summer Theatre production of Ketti Frings's Look Homeward, Angel. In 1965, she played Claire Zachanassian in Purdue's production of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit, which ran at the Loeb Playhouse on campus from October 22 to 30, 1965. The production has been described as follows:

The Purdue production wasn't to be the slick Broadway or Hollywood adaptations of the play, but the original "grotesque version". Zachanassian, the richest woman in the world, yet also weirdly handicapped (she sports a wooden leg and an ivory hand), has returned triumphantly (but as an old woman) to the impoverished village of her youth. She offers to save its citizens from poverty on one terrible condition: that they kill Albert Ill, the local grocer, who'd broken her heart when they were teenagers. Zachanassian is a charming and terrible figure—imagine the lovechild of Frankenstein and Greta Garbo.

During the production of The Visit, Farmer was involved in a drunk-driving crash. When confronted by police, she recalled: "Rather than answering as Frances Farmer, I reverted to my role in the play and [suddenly became] the richest woman in the world, shouting to high heaven that I would buy his goddamned town. I got out stiff-legged and ivory-handed, quoting all the imperious lines I could remember. Unfortunately, this did not [sit] well with the [cop], and a patrol car took me to jail." Ironically, following reports of the incident in the media, the next night's performance of The Visit completely sold out. Farmer was very reluctant to return to the stage, but was encouraged by Ratcliffe; Farmer recounted the experience of the performance in her autobiography: "[T]here was a long silent pause as I stood there, followed by the most thunderous applause of my career. [The audience] swept the scandal under the rug with their ovation." It was "my finest and final performance. I knew I would never need to act onstage again. I felt satisfied and rewarded."

1965–1970: Final years

During the early and mid-1960s, Farmer was actress-in-residence at Purdue University, and spent the majority of her free time painting and writing poetry. She and Ratcliffe attempted to start a small cosmetics company, but although their products were successfully field-tested, the project failed after the man who handled their investment portfolio embezzled their funds. In 1968, she formally converted to Roman Catholicism, as she claimed to have felt God in her life and sensed that she "would have to find a disciplined avenue of faith and worship." She recounted her experience: I had never given great concern to organized religion, and I was like a wayfaring stranger until one day I found myself sitting in Saint Joan of Arc, the Catholic church of our neighborhood. I had passed the cathedral countless times, but that afternoon, as I was returning from marketing, I stopped and sat alone in the great hall. It was quiet and dark, and I studied the massive altar and understood, for the first time, the power and meaning of the Crucifixion. Farmer had a great affection for the Saint Joan of Arc church and attended Mass there regularly in her last years. During this period, she also gave up drinking, and began writing her autobiography.

Death

In the spring of 1970, Farmer was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which was attributed to a life of heavy smoking. She was hospitalized for three weeks before being sent home for a brief period. She died of the cancer at Indianapolis Community Hospital on August 1, 1970. She is interred at Oaklawn Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Fishers, Indiana.

Will There Really Be a Morning?

In 1972, two years after Farmer's death, her autobiography, Will There Really Be a Morning? (a title borrowed from her favorite Emily Dickinson poem) was published by G.P. Putnam's Sons. The book framed her life as an epic struggle with an eccentric and pathologically controlling mother, narrated in a non-linear, often stream-of-consciousness fashion that starkly evoked the brutality she endured during her five years in the unnamed Western State Hospital at Steilacoom. This included being forced to eat her own feces and act as a sex slave for male doctors and orderlies. Farmer described her stay as "unbearable terror": "I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats, and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths."

By the 1970s, Farmer no longer had a large name recognition but, billed as a harrowing but inspirational survival story, the book was a modest success. Eleven years later, boosted by a new round of publicity and controversy relating to Farmer in 1983, it was made into a CBSTV-movie starring Susan Blakely as Farmer and Lee Grant as her mother.

However, Farmer's complete authorship of the book would later come into question. According to a three-part series on Farmer's final years that appeared in the Indianapolis Star in January 1983, she began working on it two years before her death, aided by her Indianapolis friend Jean Ratcliffe. But finding the process painful and difficult, she eventually arranged for actress/author Lois Kibbee to ghostwrite it for her. This did not get very far before Kibbee, unable to get along with Ratcliffe and frustrated with Farmer's inability to remember large patches of her past, bowed out of the project.

What happened next is unclear. Ratcliffe claimed Farmer finished the book herself and she wrote only the last chapter describing Farmer's death. The book's editor at Putnam's, John Dodds, said that when he received the manuscript from Indianapolis his assumption was that it had been ghostwritten entirely by Ratcliffe. Farmer's latest biographer also contends the book was written solely by Ratcliffe But Kibbee insisted that the spine and substance of the book were taken from a series of oral-history tapes she coaxed out of Farmer before her death.

Shadowland

On January 6, 1974, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the city's morning daily, published a lengthy feature article titled "The Dark Odyssey of Frances Farmer," which was part review of Will There Really Be a Morning?, part editorial demanding answers to the charges of psychiatric abuse it raised, and part a retelling of Farmer's story in the context of Northwest political history.

The author of the piece was William Arnold, a young editorial writer who had two years earlier become fascinated with Farmer after having seen her in a revival of Come and Get It at a local movie house. A major source for the article was a file on Farmer he discovered in the newspaper morgue that included not just all the news stories written about her over the previous forty years but family photos, letters from her mother to the editors, a copy of her sanity hearing and the reporter's notes for the series the paper had run in 1948 on the inhumane conditions at Western State Hospital.

The "Dark Odyssey" piece brought forth an outpouring of letters and phone calls from people who had known Farmer growing up in Seattle, numerous former patients and retired staff of Western State Hospital, and two women who had known her particularly well yet had radically different visions of her tragedy: her elder sister Edith, who insisted that none of the psychiatric abuse chronicled in the autobiography actually occurred; and Farmer's high school teacher and friend, Belle McKenzie, who suggested that if Arnold looked deep enough into Farmer's five-year commitment during the McCarthy Era, he might find a political motive behind it.

Faced with these conflicting visions, as well as all the public interest he had aroused, Arnold decided to make that deeper look into the Farmer story suggested by McKenzie for a prospective series of articles. This inquiry dragged on for almost four years from 1974 to 1978 even as he changed jobs twice to become the newspaper's film critic. Over that time, he uncovered what he considered to be a significant personal and political prejudice in many of the Seattle authorities who committed her that may have tempered their assessment of her sanity, and the testimony of many friends and past coworkers who firmly believed that, though often difficult and her own worst enemy, Farmer had never been clinically insane.

He also discovered indications that Farmer may have secretly received the lobotomy the doctors of Steilacoom had suggested to her family she needed. This was not, however, the assumed "prefrontal" lobotomy, but a newer and less invasive version called a "transorbital" lobotomy pioneered by Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman, who made several trips to Steilacoom toward the end of Farmer's time there to try out the procedure on some of its more hopeless patients.

Later posthumous fame and controversy

A lower-budget film biography, Committed, also influenced by the two books, appeared in 1984 and Farmer's reputation as an unjustly institutionalized feminist rebel continued to grow both nationally and internationally. In 1978, the year Shadowland was published, a seventeen-year-old French singer-songwriter named Mylène Gautier changed her name to Mylène Farmer in tribute to her idol and went on to become one of the most successful French recording artists of all time, selling over 35 million records worldwide and engraining her namesake's story in a generation of French music fans.

Ten years later, this posthumous phenomenon received another infusion from the Nirvana song, "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle", which appeared on the group's final album, In Utero. Cobain had first read Shadowland in high school, "obsessively" reread it over the years and frequently mentioned it in interviews as a major influence on his life. In her 2006 book about the In Utero album, critic Gillian Garr referred to the song as being "based on Shadowland." The connection of Cobain-Farmer-Shadowland gained even more notoriety when it was revealed that Cobain had, several times in the months and weeks leading up to his suicide, tried, with some urgency, to meet with Arnold but was unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, throughout the years the Farmer legend was spreading, Edith Farmer Elliot was promoting the vision of her sister advanced in her own 1978 book, A Look Back with Love: The True Story of Fame and Misfortune of a Brilliant, Talented, Beautiful Actress and Her Family. Estranged through much of their adult lives, Edith Farmer was living in Hawaii before and during her sister's Steilacoom years and admitted she had been unable to visit Frances even once in her five years there. But she strongly maintained that none of the psychiatric abuse depicted in Will There Really Be a Morning? and confirmed in Shadowland, happened. She particularly took aim at Jean Ratcliffe, who she only referred to in the book as Frances' "writer friend," but characterized as her sister's chief exploiter. In a 1974 letter published in the Indianapolis News, she called the autobiography "lesbian pornography fiction (full of) filthy lies." Like her mother, Edith Farmer blamed her sister's downfall on her involvement in left wing politics while at the University of Washington, plus her affiliation with the Group Theater.

The book was "privately published with virtually no national distribution," and even its kindest critic, Rita Rose of the Indianapolis Star, admitted it "reads like a desperate attempt to clear the family name and serve comeuppance to Jean Ratcliffe." But over time, Elliot made some converts, and her mantle was eventually taken up by Seattle writer Jeffrey Kauffmann who in 1999 posted a blog called "Shedding Light on Shadowland" that supported her claim that no psychiatric abuse occurred and charged that Arnold admitted during the 1983 Frances trial that he had fictionalized much of Farmer's story.

In popular culture

The first Frances Farmer stage play was a theatrical version of Shadowland on May 28, 1982, at the Broom Street Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, adapted by its artistic director, Joel Gersmann.

Other stage productions about her life include England's The New Garbo by Doug Lucie (Hull Truck Theatre Company, November 1978); Canada's Saint Frances of Hollywood by Sally Clark (Calgary's Alberta Theater Projects, April 1994); and from the U.S.: The Frances Farmer Story by Sebastian Stuart (Re.Cher.Chez Theatre, 1982), Golden Girl by Peter Occhiogrosso (Theater for the New City, Nov. 1982), Mrs. Farmer's Daughter (musical) by Jack Eric Williams (PepsiCo Summerfare '83), George Snow's Frances Farmer, My Hero: The Unauthorized Biography (unproduced musical but survives in 1991 soundtrack recording) and Brilliance (musical) by Kristan King, Lance Lewman and Gabriel Kane (Player's Theatre, April 7–24, 2022).

Along with Nirvana's "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" (1993), Farmer is portrayed in the following songs:

"The Medal Song" on "Waking Up with the House on Fire" (1984) by Culture Club

"Paint By Numbers (Song for Frances)" on "I Thought You'd Be Taller!" (1984) by Romanovsky and Phillips

"Ugly Little Dreams" on "Love Not Money" (1985) by Everything but the Girl

"Lobotomy, Gets 'Em Home" on Silvertown by The Men They Couldn't Hang.

"Frances" on "Soothe" (1992) by Motorpsycho

"Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" (1993) by Nirvana on their final studio album, In Utero.

"Frances Farmer" (2004) by Patterson Hood