One Unsettled Soul Refused to Play the Hollywood Game
By: C.S. Voll
Tags: Mental Health, True Crime, Media, History, Film

A career pivot

Acting called out to Frances Farmer. To answer the summons, she transferred to the university’s Drama Department. Subsequently, she drew praise for her performances in student productions. On 10 March 1935, she won a contest of the left-wing newspaper The Voice of Action, which paid for the winning contestant to go to the Soviet Union (USSR) as an ambassador. Her own mother denounced her as a pawn of Communists, threatening to stop her from going to Russia. Frances was 21-years old though, leaving her free to go where she wanted, and on the 10th of April she embarked on her trip.

On her return, a photo in a newspaper caught the eye of someone at Paramount Pictures, and Frances got a screen test at the studio. In February 1936, during the filming of Too Many Parents, she married fellow actor Leif Erickson. Her big breakout role would be in that year, in the film Come and Get It, in which she gave a dual performance as a mother and daughter. Critics proclaimed her to be the American Greta Garbo.

A Paramount headshot of Frances Farmer. From Wikimedia (Public Domain).

Paramount was less enthused, their new star favored an austere life, wore little makeup, supported the Spanish Republicans, and refused to change her name to something more glamorous. Frances didn’t step into the pre-fabricated role made by the public and the studios. After her success in Come and Get It, she also battled with Paramount executives over the candy floss roles she was being given, and she wanted something with a substance she could sink her teeth into.

Heading out on her own

Finding the desired roles not forthcoming, Frances headed East in the summer of 1937, to join New York’s politically active Group Theatre collective. She later wrote about the reason for going away from film (The New York Times, 1970):

“I was feeling constricted now…suffocated, as in the stagnant air of a sealed room.”

She couldn’t merely go through the motions and collect her paycheck. There was a deeper desire, a purpose, for her artistic fulfilment. At the Group Theatre, she won a lead role in Clifford Odet’s play, Golden Boy, but after a disastrous love affair with the playwright, she returned to Hollywood. Frances found the type of film work uninteresting. Trouble only continued to grow as a former agent sued her, and she became more dependent on alcohol, further exacerbated by the divorce from Leif Erickson in early 1942.

A photo from Photoplay, January 1937. From Wikimedia (Public Domain).

This all came to a head when, in October 1942, she was driving home after visiting her half-sister Rita, and Santa Monica police pulled her over. Her headlights had been turned on in a dim-out zone, necessitated by World War II worries over possible Japanese attacks. Frances reportedly told the police officer “You bore me”, along with much stronger defamatory statements, which led her to face charges of drunken driving. Paramount cancelled her contract.

Mounting criticism of actions

Frances’s agent advised her to get out of town. The actress accepted an offer to be the lead in a low-budget film which would be shot in Mexico, titled Five Were Chosen. Ricardo Montalbán, one of the fellow actors in the project, claimed in an interview that a few days before filming began, a nude Frances roamed the halls of their hotel, spraying people with a seltzer bottle (Kauffman 1999).

A photo of Frances Farmer. From Flickr by Classic Film Scans (CC BY 2.0).

During her time in Mexico, Frances could not sleep and nightmares plagued the little rest she got. The uneasiness boiled over in a heated argument with the director, during which a male co-star slapped her after she made a sarcastic quip, becoming a brawl when she fought back until police broke it up. The next morning Mexican authorities escorted her out of Mexico.

Frances Farmer had become a pariah in Hollywood. She continued to mix Benzedrine, an amphetamine, with alcohol, resulting in a dangerous cocktail. At the start of 1943, she began working on the low-budget melodrama No Escape. Frances struggled with head pains, exacerbated when combing her hair and, on 13 January 1943, she attacked the hairdresser Edna Burge. Afterwards, Frances went to the Knickerbocker to have drinks with friends, which devolved into a brawl. Police apprehended her at her hotel room the next morning.

Frances Farmer’s arrest photo (17 January 1943). From Wikimedia (Public Domain).

At her court hearing, when Judge Marshall Hickson asked her about her drinking habits, she replied (Shelley 2010: 32):

“I put liquor in my milk. I put liquor in my coffee and in my orange juice. What do you want me to do, starve to death?”

The judge sentenced her to 180 days in jail for violating her probation. On 20 January 1943, Frances was declared to be mentally incompetent, after which she was sent to La Crescenta private sanatorium, although the treatment alarmed her to such a degree that she ran away from the institution. She would spend the following years in and out of mental institutions until her parole on 25 March 1950.

A sunset over troubled waters

Promotional photo of Frances Farmer (left)and Connie Stevens, from The Party Crashers (1958). From Wikimedia (Public Domain).

Frances Farmer would gravitate to living on a farm near Indianapolis. She would make a comeback in acting in the 1950s, eventually hosting the popular television show Frances Farmer Presents (1958–1964), and becoming the actress in residence at the University Theatre at Purdue during the late 1960s. On 1 August 1970, she died of esophageal cancer. After her death, a friend commented she had been content during her later years, “raising stray cats and friends” (The New York Times, 1970).

Sources:

Estrin, E. 1983. “The Unraveling of Frances Farmer” on The Washington Post.

Kauffman, J. 1999. “Frances Farmer: Shedding Light on Shadowland” on jeffreykauffman.net.

Kopfinger, S. 2016. “Unscripted: Remembering Frances Farmer, whose tragic story lives on” in LancasterOnline.

Morgan, K. 2017. “Come Back As Fire And Burn All The Liars: Frances Farmer” on The Huffington Post.

Reiher, A. 2017. “Mindhunter: The Tragic Story Behind That Frances Farmer Reference” on PopSugar.

Shelley, P. 2010. Frances Farmer: The Life and Films of a Troubled Star. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.

The New York Times. 1970. “Frances Farmer, Actress, 56, Dies” in The New York Times.