A fascinating little fighter is this latest problem child of Hollywood - where frankness spells trouble ahead!

Frances Farmer fascinates me. This girl with the cold porcelain skin and the honey hair is an amazing person. She is highly educated. She is intelligent. She is interesting because she not only can speak with authority on a great many subjects but she has very definite opinions. If the fifty or so actresses and stars with whom I have become rather well acquainted were lined up before me and I was told to pick a companion with whom I might have to spend anywhere from sixty minutes so six months I'd choose Frances. 

In fact, I've made this decision in a minor way. When we were employed at the same studio for more than a year I used to seek her out in the commissary and on the set. I'd never done this with any other actress before, although I had been in the studios for more than seven years. Why? Because Frances knows more about art, literature, music, acting, philosophy, sociology, politics and my own job, which was publicity, than I do. I've never discussed baseball with her, but I rather imagine she has me there, too. She's been educational, stimulating and refreshing.  

She has characteristics, too, which I admire. She has ambitions and stick-to-itiveness in a marked degree. In fact, I have known few people who have the desire to achieve and the hunger and power to make dreams come true that she has. If you will watch her closely on the screen and note the power of her jaw line and the cold intensity in her rather deeply set eyes you may get an approximation of what I mean.  

She has a very great chance to become one of the screen's immortals. Cold reasoning, plus an unquenchable ambition, plus an inherent talent for acting, plus a fighting nature which finds no opposition too serious will do all this. She made a splendid start in her first picture, "Come and Get It", with Edward Arnold. Yes, she'll make the top IF ---

The IF in the case has to do with the fact that with all her attributes she has one serious drawback. You can blame it on her ambition. She has to go it alone. She doesn't know the meaning of teamwork. Using a football simile, when she gets the ball in her hands she forgets what the coach has told her, the signals, and the other guys, and runs the field in her own way.

It isn't ego. Not the type of ego which Pola Negri had, for instance. Negri thought Negri was great. Farmer doesn't think Farmer's great. One day, some months ago, I said to her in a casual way: "Frances, I've got to get some stuff about you and the other stars." She rather snapped back at me: "Go see the stars, then." She was telling me that she didn't consider herself a star.

However, her ambition is getting her into trouble. Most of those who have worked very close to Frances in any of her four big pictures to date label her as temperamental. They call her a prima donna. Behind her back they ask if she thinks she's Bernhardt. They prophesy an evil end. This feeling first started with "Come and Get It." It grew with "the Toast of New York," in which her acting could have been much better, in "Exclusive," and in "Ebb Tide."

This, I'm sure, is because Frances is misunderstood. Yet one executive told me recently: "I don't mind temperament. I'll allow myself to be argued with, beaten down and even cursed by a player who will deliver in his or her own way. But Frances doesn't know enough yet to insist on her own interpretations. What she should do is to listen more, carry out her own theories less."

Another director had a run-in with Frances over the playing of a scene. "I'd like to have you cry," he said. "I don't want to cry. Nobody cries," Frances insisted. "At least, not grown women. And I'm no ingenue." The director finally won his point because when the battle was over Frances was crying in real life. Needless to say, she cried in the scene. And, afterward, she apologized to the director. Self-willed? Yes, there's quite a bit on that in Frances' make-up and she'll have to get rid of it before she goes where she's destined to go - the top.

Frances' self-will was developed at an early age, complementing her ambition. She decided to be an actress when she was fourteen. She gave the matter a good deal of thought. Then, one day, Frances, who was rather stocky at the time, and her mother were in the kitchen. "Mother," Frances said, "I'm going to reduce and be an actress." Her mother, as mothers will, laughed. Frances got mad. But she didn't break into tears of temper as would most girls of her age. Instead, she ran to the attic of the Seattle home of the Farmers and began exercising strenuously!

Frances had no theatrical background of any kind. Her mother was a housewife who did a little writing as an avocation. Her father was a lawyer. Her brother and sister grew up to be newspaper people. All the odds of environment were against her. But that didn't matter. Frances was going to be an actress!

Her career from this point on was a studied one. She didn't go off half-cocked, in the usual manner of youth. She began, in high school, to act. She went to drama school at the University of Washington under handicaps which would make the average movie-struck maiden quit after the first week.

She held six jobs at once while going through her last year at the university. Usher at a motion picture theater - actress in radio advertising sketches - employment under the Federal Student Employment Project - typing manuscripts in the university dramatics department - working in a newspaper contest - majoring in dramatics and appearing in university productions.

Family, friends and anyone else handy went up in arms about that newspaper contest. Everyone said, "Frances, you can't do that." Why? Because a Communist newspaper was running it. To understand this situation, as it relates to Frances and her ambition, you have to go back several years. Frances' first thought was to be an actress. Her next thought was that she had to go to New York City to get a start. "I'll go to New York," she told herself.

How? Her father couldn't spare the money. She had none of her own. Everything she earned was consumed by tuition. Along came the Communist newspaper with the popularity contest. The winner was to go to Russia and report, during the trip, all the favorable things seen under Soviet regime. Frances ignored Communism, the newspaper, demurring friends, for a single reason.

She found out that on returning from Russia she would pass through New York City - and could stop there and look for a job as an actress. Twelve thousand miles, traveling second-class, third-class and no class at all, actually going hungry, to get to New York City, three thousand miles away!

As it turned out it wasn't necessary for her to look for a job. Crossing the Atlantic to New York City she met a man who knew Oscar Serlin, Paramount talent scout. Serlin tested her and she was given a contract.

She came out to Hollywood and was given coaching by Phyllis Loughton, then in charge of developing Paramount talent. Her relations with Miss Loughton were very pleasant. In fact, to stray from the point a moment, Miss Loughton was also coaching Leif Erikson, six-foot, two-inch singer. A romance developed and he and Frances were married. But, back to her acting.

Frances had an argument with another director. "You aren't putting enough into this scene," he protested. "But I am!" exclaimed Frances. She held out her hands. She had been gripping them so hard - closing her fingers into her palms - that the nails had lacerated them. "That's very fine. It's the Russian school of suppression, I guess," said the director. "But what your nails do inside your hands can't be shown on the screen."

Frances wasn't convinced. She didn't let that piece of advice sink in. Because she still has that icy, frozen look. Or did have, before she left to do her self-imposed stint at the Westport, Connecticut Playhouse this summer. And why did she go to Westport to work on the stage this summer instead of making herself a few thousand dollars in a motion picture? Another opinion, another strange quirk.

Not only does Frances ignore money - she'd be happy on twenty-five dollars a week any time and the gold which is rolling in means very little - but she looks down on Hollywood. She likes the town. But, as far as she's concerned, the people don't act. They sell their souls. And she's fair in that opinion. She says she sells her soul, too.

She had to go on the stage at practically nothing a week. Steeped in the lore of the footlights, alive to their tradition, she rushed away from Hollywood, with her husband, to Westport. Following her appearance there she was signed for her first Broadway play, the lead in "Golden Boy," for which she is now rehearsing.

Frances' career has been studded with disagreements with the publicity department. When she first came to the studio she got the usual newcomer treatment. Or, rather, they tried to give it to her. "We want you to pose in a bathing suit," a publicity man told her. "What does my posing in a bathing suit prove about my acting?" she demanded.

One day I released a story that Frances was glad she was playing a part in a newspaper picture because she'd always wanted to be a newspaper woman. "No more of that," she said. "People will think I want to be a reporter and that the fact I'm an actress is an accident and temporary. They won't think I'm doing my best. My career is no accident. I've fought every inch of the way."

Another time I brought on a newspaper publisher from the East who admired her work. I asked her to meet him. "I don't want to," she said. "I've got my lines 'set' in my mind. I don't want to upset them. If I talk to him, I'll take my mind off my work."

Frances, with little respect for Hollywood acting, also has little respect for Hollywood social amenities. She, her husband and three dogs live in a secluded home in Laurel Canyon, in the hills above Hollywood. They find most of their interests in books, music - they both sing, and Frances some day will surprise you with her lovely voice - and the outdoors. But they aren't hiding away. Their doors are always open.

Frances tells, with an expression of disgust, of their visit to the "civilization" of Palm Springs, where Hollywood roughs it. It seems that they went to a very good hotel, where the clerks needed their noses pulled out of the skies with weights. They went to their rooms. All night there was yelling, screaming, laughter and song.

Frances and Leif, in spite of a lack of sleep, got up at a reasonable hour. Leif began humming an operatic aria and Frances made it a duet. The telephone rang. "We'll have to ask you to stop that," said the clerk. "You're disturbing the other guests." They went away. That was their last venture in a fashionable place.

Frances, in spite of her intensity during a picture and on the screen, is a lot of fun. She can make a joke or very seriously discuss any subject which you broach. You like her ideas. You respect her opinions. You agree with her once in a while. Because she does have left-handed slants on a great many things. However, she's grand company. I envy and congratulate Leif Erikson.

Remember Leif in "Waikiki Wedding?" He was the nasty fiancé from Iowa who very desperately tried to break up the suddenly burgeoning romance between Bing Crosby and Shirley Ross. He was thoroughly laughed at by everybody but the critics. They cast academic glances at his work and applauded him.

"You can act," said Frances, who was mainly responsible for his strange metamorphosis to the distinctly disliked sweetie of Miss Ross. "Take the part."

It is going to be interesting to see what Frances does with her career this winter after her much-coveted experience on the stage. Frankly, she is up against a problem. Hollywood will accept what it chooses to call temperament in those who have what it takes.

The question before the house is whether Frances, who admittedly has not measured up to the expectations of the public since her remarkable performance in "Come and Get It," will become a sensation again with triumphant performances, or if her natural desire to "go it alone" will get the best of her.

Written by Edward Churchill for Movie Mirror, 1938

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