When Frances Farmer was called into the office of Phyllis Laughton, then coach of new talent at Paramount, she thought it sounded a bit ominous. "Frances," began Miss Laughton nervously, "there is something I think you ought to know ..."

By this time Miss Farmer didn't know whether she was at last to learn the Facts of Life or had been apprehended while shoplifting or was to be accused of matricide.

"It's ..." continued Miss Laughton and then ended in a blurt, "it's the way you've been dressing on the street. Never wearing a hat ... Well, that's not the worst, I admit ... But that old raincoat and those shoes ... And that horrible little dinky green second-hand car you ride around in. Really you can't act like that. The movie fans expect something more of their favorites."

Miss Farmer looked at her for a moment steadily.

"Phyllis," she said finally. "You never thought that up yourself. You know you don't care how I dress. Who put you up to that?"

It came out after some discussion that the hint had rather drifted down from the head office. Miss Farmer thought the matter over a minute.

"Phyllis," she said. "Will you do me a favor? I've never seen anybody from the head office so I wouldn't know how to get in, but will you go up there and give them a message from me? Will you tell them that if they paid as much attention to the parts they give their actresses as they do to their clothes, we'd probably both make a lot more money?"

This was after she had made Rhythm on the Range for Paramount and before she had been picked for Samuel Goldwyn's Come and Get It, which has definitely established her in Hollywood but has not succeeded in eliminating the raincoat. Prior to Rhythm on the Range, her Hollywood experience had been confined to minor roles in two little stinkers entitled, Too Many Parents and Border Flight. Players who have done nothing more than bits in two little stinkers do not usually send message to head offices and the casual observer might be excused for thinking that the young lady could talk big because she knew that the message would never be relayed. The error in this reasoning became apparent, however, when Miss Laughton herself sometime later received a message from the head office relieving her of her position. Miss Farmer had no trouble in finding the head office then.

"I just went in and told Mr. Zukor I thought he had pulled a dirty trick on Phyllis," says Miss Farmer.

She is a tall, thin girl who is more intelligent-looking than beautiful, uses no makeup off the set, doesn't give a damn for clothes, is going to be an actress if Hollywood will let her, and is going back this summer to play in a stock company in Seattle, and don't anybody get the notion she won't do it. Her taste in clothes is atrocious because there is nothing in the world she cares less about. She likes sailing, is not particularly athletic, thinks movie gossip is blah, gets $250 a week and a bonus of $150, which makes $400 in all and will give up all the salary boosts ever heard of if they'll give her decent pictures to play in. She is married to Leif Erikson, the movie actor, and they live in a canyon home which will never be photographed as a show place and can be reached only by a mountain guide equipped with a divining rod. The second-hand roadster is getting feebler and faintly less green by the year and she was cursed roundly by a few hundred motorists on Melrose Avenue no later than last February when the engine died and she was out pushing the thing to safety.

She probably gets her independence from a Scottish grammar-school teacher in Seattle, Miss Belle MacKenzie, who seems to have run her classes on the theory that her pupils had a brain as well as a memory. It was in Miss MacKenzie's class that Frances won a national essay prize of Scholastic Magazine for a paper entitled God Died. It was an innocent-enough document seeking to show that, no matter what lofty powers were looking over us, the individual had the duty of fighting his own battles. The commotion in Seattle was tremendous. The atheists yelled hooray and the ministers held special meetings of protest and Frances got more than a hundred letters from the public.

"It was pretty sad," she says, "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."

By the time she entered the University of Washington her reputation was established. But she didn't care because she was acting at the Studio Theater, where they did their shows Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights during the winter and had single productions lasting as long as sixteen weeks. She had a room at a boardinghouse just off the campus and picked up spare change ushering in a movie house and working during the holidays at the Bon Marche department store, where she got bounced because she couldn't keep her sales book straight.

About this time a paper called the Voice of Action, which had been launched by a group of young men with radical ideas, offered a trip to Russia as a circulation prize. Frances had no idea of getting into it, but somebody registered her name and she got thinking that she'd like a look at the Soviet theater. It was a great battle but she won - and again the city of Seattle was up in arms.

What she remembers best about the trip was (a) a steward who nightly sneaked her up to the first class (which she didn't like and finally settled on tourist third), (b) a Frenchman who invited her to a dance and sent down in the afternoon for her gown so he could have it pressed (a very good idea, she still thinks), (c) a lawyer who confided that what he had always wanted to be was a fireman, and (d) the swell time she had on the Soviet boat out of London, where there was only one class and the crew took part in the fun.

She spent most of her time in Russia seeing the shows and got her Hollywood break on the boat coming back when she met Dr. George Gladstone, who was returning from his medical course at Cambridge. Dr. Gladstone knew Shepard Traube and Traube knew Oscar Serlin, who was then talent scout for Paramount. She had started from Seattle with $100 in cash and was dead broke when she got to New York. In between times of taking tests for Mr. Serlin, she got jobs as a model, two of them, and was let out each time.

"You're too much the Greenwich Village type," they told her.

The screen tests continued over a period of two months and she worked up to the point where she did scenes from The Lake, which had been Katharine Hepburn's Waterloo on the stage several years before. She had great admiration for Miss Hepburn and proved it last winter when she appeared in a broadcast by Jimmie Fidler in which she was being lauded as the most promising female screen star of the year. The script called for various cracks at Hepburn. When Miss Farmer couldn't get them changed in the script before the broadcast, she inserted a boost for Miss Hepburn while it was going on, balling up the timing considerably but getting her point across.

After fiddling around with tests for months, some giant mind in the Paramount plant at Hollywood decided that Miss Farmer was worth gambling on and she came out from New York. She worked with Miss Laughton for several months and was then given her first part in Too Many Parents, which had Henry Travers as star. Next was something entitled Border Flight with John Howard.

"Oh, by long odds the worst picture ever made," says Miss Farmer enthusiastically. "I was in four scenes and always sitting in a roadster. They'd wheel the thing in, I'd spout a few lines over the windshield and out we'd go again. It could have been played just as well by a cripple."

After that she took tests for weeks for a part in Rhythm on the Range, without knowing what is was about.

"I never did find out," she says. "I was just the tall skinny dignified dame while Crosby and Martha Raye and Bob Burns were having the time of their lives. It was a long sweet nightmare for me."

While Paramount was making Rhythm, Howard Hawks was making tests for Edna Ferber's Come and Get It. Virginia Bruce had been selected for the part but there was a row of some sort and the deal fell through. Hawks saw some tests of her and arranged to borrow her from Paramount.

"Thank heaven he saw the tests instead of those pictures," she says, fervently. The only serious casualty in the matter was Sam Goldwyn, who was trying to die in a New York hospital and almost made it when he heard the news about Farmer. He began frothing at the gills, yowling at nurses and jiggling the phone trying to get the Hollywood operator. But the contract was signed and it was too late.

Because he felt so bad about it, she was more willing than customary when the Goldwyn office asked her to make personal appearances when the film opened in Seattle. She regretted it the minute she hit town.

"What they had me doing first was autographing copies of Come and Get It at the Bon Marche, where I had been fired a couple of years back. That was bad enough but think of me autographing a book written by somebody else. That took crust but it didn't turn out so badly because when I got to the store, about twenty people finally strolled in and looked at me from a distance and kept their buying firmly in control. What the Goldwyn people had forgotten was that up that way I'm still remembered as the freak from West Seattle High."

"It's a nuthouse," she says firmly. "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?"

Written by Kyle Crichton for Collier's magazine, May 8, 1937

Index