Frances Elena Farmer (September 19, 1913August 1, 1970) was an American actress. She appeared in over a dozen feature films and three significant Broadway plays over the course of her career. Farmer gained greater notoriety posthumously for having had a nervous breakdown and undergone a five-year involuntary commitment in a state-run mental institution. She was said to have suffered abusive conditions, which have remained the subject of much controversy and speculation.
A native of Seattle, Washington, Farmer began acting in stage productions while a student at the University of Washington. After graduating, she began performing in stock theater before signing a film contract with Paramount Pictures on her 22nd birthday in September 1935. She debuted in the B films Too Many Parents and Border Flight, before co-leading with Bing Crosby in the musical Rhythm on the Range (both 1936). Unhappy with the opportunities the studio gave her, Farmer returned to stock theater in 1937 before being cast in the Broadway production of Clifford Odets's Golden Boy. She followed this with two Broadway productions directed by Elia Kazan in 1939, but a battle with depression and binge drinking caused her to drop out of a subsequent Ernest Hemingway stage adaptation.
Farmer returned to Los Angeles, earning supporting roles in the comedy World Premiere and the film noir Among the Living (both 1941). In 1942, publicity of her reportedly erratic behavior began to surface and, after several arrests and committals to psychiatric institutions, Farmer was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. At the request of her family, particularly her mother, she was committed to an institution in her home state of Washington, where she remained a patient until 1950. Farmer attempted a career comeback, mainly appearing as a television host in Indianapolis on her own series, Frances Farmer Presents. Her final film role was in the 1958 drama The Party Crashers. She spent the majority of the 1960s occasionally performing in local theater productions staged by Purdue University. In the spring of 1970, she was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, from which she died on August 1, 1970, aged 56.
In the decade after her death, Farmer was the subject of two high-profile books focusing on the years that she was institutionalized: Will There Really Be a Morning? (1972) was an autobiography partially ghostwritten by a friend. In it, she claimed to have been subjected to consistent and harrowing physical abuse. Subsequently, Seattle journalist William Arnold investigated the book's claims for his own novel, Shadowland (1978), in which the author pieced together a larger story behind her commitment and alleged mistreatment. These books offered drastically different visions of Farmer, and elements of each would be disputed, but they created an intense posthumous interest in her life. This interest resulted in many feature films, stage plays, and songs about Farmer, who is celebrated as a psychiatric martyr and defiant feminist rebel.
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; 18731955), a boardinghouse operator and dietician and Ernest Melvin Farmer (18741956), 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."
In 1931, while a senior at West Seattle High School, Farmer formed a strong friendship with her English teacher, Belle McKenzie, who would serve as her mentor and confidante off-and-on through much of her life. Impressed by an essay titled "God Dies" which Farmer had written for a class project, McKenzie entered it in the prestigious Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. It won the first prize of $100 but, regarded as a declaration of "atheism" by the more conservative Seattle newspapers and local church groups, it created a minor scandal in the city. In her autobiography, Farmer dismissed the furor as a misunderstanding and the essay as a precocious attempt, influenced by her reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, to reconcile her wish for, in her words, a "superfather" God, with her observations of a chaotic and godless world. "[Nietzsche] expressed the same doubts, only he said it in German: Gott ist tot. God is dead. This I could understand. I was not to assume that there was no God, but I could find no evidence in my life that He existed or that He had ever shown any particular interest in me. I was not an atheist, but I was surely an agnostic, and by the time I was 16, I was well indoctrinated into this theory."
After graduating from high school, Farmer enrolled at the University of Washington, initially majoring in journalism. She worked various jobs to pay her tuition, including as an usherette in a cinema, a waitress, a tutor, a laborer in a soap factory, and a singing waitress at Mount Rainier National Park.
During her second year, she met a second teacher who would have an influence on her life and career: a young university drama instructor named Sophie Rosenstein. Farmer later described her as "the most commanding woman I have ever known." Without seeing her on a stage, Rosenstein judged Farmer to be a natural star and, convincing her to change her major from journalism to drama, mentored her appearances in a succession of UW plays, including Euripides' Helen of Troy, the 15th-century morality play Everyman, and Chekhov' s Uncle Vanya. In late 1934, she starred in UW's production of Sidney Howard's Alien Corn, which earned her rave reviews in the Seattle press and ran for fourteen consecutive weeks, a UW drama department record.
She graduated from the university with a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama in 1935. At the end of that final year, Rosenstein engineered a scheme in which Farmer's fellow drama department students sold subscriptions in her name for the Seattle Communist newspaper, The Voice of Action, as part of a subscription drive contest it was holding. The first prize, which she won handily, was a trip to the Soviet Union, timed with its May Day celebrations. Ostensibly, the purpose of the plan was to get Farmer to New York City, where Rosenstein had theatrical contacts who could get her professional acting career a start, as well as giving her an opportunity to expand her horizons and see the pioneering Moscow Art Theatre.
But her mother did not see it this way, and when she could not talk her daughter out of the trip, she went to the press. The story of the young UW drama star making such a journey under the auspices of the Communist Party and over her mother's strident objections was front-page news in the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer. It was quickly picked up by the national wire services. In a press conference at the Farmer home, Lillian Farmer clarified her position:I am afraid the Communists will influence my daughter against her country—without her realizing what they are doing... I cannot bear to see her go under the wing of the Communist agencies. She does not know the Russian language. I am afraid that innocently and without recognizing the subversive principles behind the thing, Frances will be presented to her Russian audiences as a Communist representative from American universities. They may even use her to solicit funds to be used to spread Communist propaganda in the United States—to cut the throat of her own country.
In another interview, Lillian Farmer took aim at the part Sophie Rosenstein and Belle McKenzie played in what she viewed as the radicalization of her daughter. Under the headline "A Seattle Mother's Warning", she cautioned that, "the University and high schools are hotbeds of Communism" and "something should be done immediately to clean the schools of radical teachers before they sway other girls and boys away from American ideas... If I must sacrifice my daughter to Communism, I hope other mothers save their daughters before they are turned into radicals in our schools."
She vowed that "if all else fails, I shall lay myself under the wheels of the bus and let it drive over my prostrate body. She shall never go." This threat, however, was not carried out, and her daughter did go to the Soviet Union.
Farmer wrote in her autobiography that – despite her mother's vociferous objections – she left Seattle by bus for New York on April 10, 1935, where she had a three-day layover before sailing to Europe. Arriving in New York, she described a visit from a representative of a sister paper to The Voice of Action:He was a squat, rumpled man, and despite my protests, he insisted on taking me to dinner...He was my first introduction to someone who openly admitted to being a card carrier, and I was appalled as I listened to his outlandish ideologies. According to him, I had a responsibility to act as a contributing correspondent during my stay in Russia...I was too exhausted to argue, and the longer I listened to his fanatic ramblings, the more irritated I became. He planned for me to spend my layover at their newspaper office, during which time I was to acquaint myself with my Russian schedule. Since I had had quite enough of him and his orders, I emphatically refused, and a tirade of "What kind of party worker are you?" followed. When I informed him that I was nobody's comrade, he was outraged that the Voice would have allowed someone with questionable loyalty to win the contest.