The Seven Christmases of Frances Farmer

Frances Farmer paced the floor of a small white room that Christmas morning in 1943. "It’s so hot," she mumbled as she walked, "It’s so hot." She walked to the door and tried the knob. But the door was locked. She turned toward the window at the other end of the room, the window made of that funny glass so that you really couldn’t see outside, so that you could barely see the bars outside. "I’m hot," Frances mumbled, wiping the dampness on her palms off on the white uniform they made her wear. "I’m hot," she said, whispering. She was afraid to say it too loud, that the heat was on too high and that she was perspiring all over. She was afraid because they might come in again like they had that other time and squeeze her into a straitjacket and never let her out. As hazy as her mind was now, as confused as she was, there was one thing that Frances knew she hated more than anything – and that was the straitjacket. That was the way she had been brought here eleven months ago, wearing one of those miserable things, tight and tortuous around the whole upper part of her body. That day – that day of hell, Thursday, January 14, 1943 – had started out at the studio where Frances was making a movie called No Escape. She’d arrived on the set drunk, for about the tenth time in a row, and when, just before they began to shoot a scene, a hairdresser had gone up to her to run a comb through her hair, Frances had suddenly pulled the comb from the girl’s hand and flung it at one of the other actors who was standing by, ready to work. The producer of the movie happened to be standing by, too. When he saw this he felt he’d had enough. It’s almost unheard of to fire a star in the middle of a movie, but the producer told Frances that she was through. "Get out," he told her, "you’re absolutely impossible!"

Frances left, aided by a studio cop. She got into her car and drove straight to a nearby tavern. Within an hour she was so drunk and noisy that the proprietor phoned the cops to come get her out of his place. When the cops arrived, Frances made a dash for the ladies’ room. "You’ll never get me," she screamed, slamming the door behind her. The cops banged on the door with their sticks. "Come on out," they said, "come on out or we’ll have to come in after you." They could hear Frances laugh on the other side of the door. The laugh became more and more hysterical. One of the cops called over a barmaid and asked her to go in and bring Frances out. Reluctantly the barmaid agreed. She opened the door. When she did, Frances came running out, stark naked. "I told you you’d never be able to get me," she said, still laughing and beginning to dance over towards the bar. "Gimme a drink," she yelled. She reached for an empty glass on the bar and flung it across the room. "Gimme a drink!" After a struggle, the cops managed to get her half-dressed and rushed her to court. The police judge read her record and then reminded her that she’d broken her probation. He said he was sorry, but that he would have to sentence her to jail – for 180 days. "Fine," Frances said, running her fingers through her disheveled hair. She turned to the officer who was to escort her there: a short pudgy man. "Why in hell don’t you get that pot belly off of you?" she asked, giving him a nudge in the stomach. "I got that from eating, not drinking," the officer said, taking her arm and leading her away. An hour later, Frances was in her cell, mumbling, "Haven’t I any friends? I was never so alone in my life. Haven’t I any friends in the whole wide world?" A guard came to her cell door. There were some reporters and photographers outside who wanted to see her, he said. Would she?  Frances said sure she would, sure. When the newspaper people were in her cell, one of them got his tongue out of his cheek long enough to ask Frances what her occupation was. "I’m an actress," she said, "You know that – you fools! ...  Just put me down as a vag - a vagrant vagabond... Or better, put me down as one of the world’s oldest. Huh? How about that, huh? Put me down as one of the world’s oldest." The reporter began to write down what she’d just said. "You rat," Frances screamed suddenly, lunging at him and grabbing his pencil. A photographer snapped at this moment and the flashbulb went off in Frances’ face. There was no controlling her now. She kicked the camera first, then the photographer. "Rats!" she began to scream as she kicked and clawed at everybody in sight. "Rats! Rats! Rats!"...  It had taken a straitjacket to calm her down. That was the same straitjacket she’d been wearing later that day when they’d brought her here to the mental institution. That had been eleven long months ago. And now it was Christmas, 1942 – and Frances Farmer couldn’t know – yet – that there was to be another Christmas, later. A better one. All she knew where the past Christmases….

This is the story of what happened to Frances Farmer. It’s a sad story about a confused kid who became a confused woman - a beautiful, wealthy, talented and confused woman, who ended up in an insane asylum.

And, too, it is a happy story, as you will see.

It covers seven Christmases in Frances’ life.

The first of these Christmases was back in 1927, when she was fourteen years old...

Her mother called to her from the kitchen, "Frances. Are you going to that party?" Frances was looking out the window too hard, thinking too hard, to hear her. She looked across the gray Seattle street at the dingy row of houses on the other side. She stared at one particular house. It was the house where the Christmas party for the kids in the neighborhood, the kids her age, was going to be held. Frances had been one of the first invited, way back about two weeks ago. The family who was giving the party had always liked her and they’d wanted to make sure she came. Frances remembered the lady’s smile now, how she had smiled so warmly when she said that. And then she remembered the look on the lady’s face only yesterday, Christmas Eve, when she’d come out to talk to Frances accidentally-on-purpose as Frances walked past the house. "Frances," the woman had said, the smile gone and a look of confusion and wonder on her normally jolly face, "I hate to have to tell you this but you see we have too many girls for the party and so few boys and I’d appreciate it if you... if you wouldn’t mind not coming." Frances didn’t ask why. She knew why. That essay she’d written for composition class in school - the one called God Dies, the one in which she’d said some pretty clever things, she thought, about people always ask-ask-asking an invisible God to help them out when they should wise up and start doing things for themselves. That was why. The essay had shocked her schoolteacher. "Unchristian!" the teacher had snorted and her snorts had been heard far and wide. In the matter of about twenty-four hours, Frances’ name was being whispered all around the school and the neighborhood. One woman had walked up to her on the street and yelled at her. "Why?" Frances had asked, "I only said what I happen to feel." The woman didn’t understand that some young people get to wondering about God at a certain age, about who He really is and what He really does. But the woman just yelled at her. "You’re a peculiar girl, Frances Farmer, a peculiar girl." And that was the word that had gone round the neighborhood now - that Frances was peculiar and didn’t believe in God and shouldn’t be associated with.

It began to grow dark outside now. The warm street lights had gone on. So had the happy lights in the house across the street, the house where the party would begin in just a little while…

Frances sat alone, again, on Christmas afternoon, 1935. She’d come a long way from Seattle - to Hollywood, California, in fact, and to a career in the great motion picture industry. It had been a real Cinderella story. Back in Seattle one day Frances had decided to become an actress. She’d been ushering, at thirty-six cents an hour, in a local theater and after a couple of months of watching high-paid beauties up there on the big screen she decided that she could act better than all of them put together and could probably end up making more money than any two of them put together. She figured she’d go first to New York and get some experience on the stage, then go knocking on the Hollywood studio doors. In order to get the money to get to New York, she pulled the kind of Frances Farmer stunt that still had people in her home town shaking their heads. She entered a contest sponsored by a Communist newspaper. The prize for selling the most subscriptions to the paper was to be an all-expense paid trip to Moscow. Frances wanted to visit Moscow like she wanted another hold in her Swiss cheese sandwiches, when she was flush enough to be able to afford Swiss cheese. What she did want was the part of the trip that would take her to New York and Broadway. She won the contest - she told everybody she would, all along - and she got to New York. But it was midsummer and all the producers were out of town and the Communist paper had given her more rubles to spend than dollars. So one morning Frances found herself boarding a ship for Europe. At least, she figured, if she went to Russia she could keep on eating for a couple of months.

What she didn’t figure on was meeting a man aboard ship the second day out, that day she sneaked up to First Class for a peek around, a man who told her right off that she should be in the movies, a man who in fact promised to and did arrange a screen test in Hollywood for her when she came back. And now here she was in Hollywood and she’d just finished making her first big picture and it was her first Christmas without any money worries and she had a nice fat contract with PARAMOUNT tucked high in her holiday stocking.

And she was unhappy and alone. She didn’t know quite why. Maybe if she hadn’t gotten off on the wrong foot when she arrived in the movie town, maybe if she didn’t still carry that chip on her shoulder she’d been carrying ever since that day of the teenage party in Seattle she never got to go to, maybe if she still didn’t hear the voices whispering peculiar... peculiar in the back of her head - maybe then she wouldn’t have acted so smart-alecky with everyone she came in contact with, from producers to wardrobe women to messenger boys to interviewers, and maybe she wouldn’t have had to spend that Christmas alone.

But that’s the way Hollywood’s newest Cinderella spent it. She walked over to a nearby diner for dinner that day and then she walked back to her apartment and sat down and, slowly, wrote a letter to somebody she’d met in New York. "I was back in Seattle last week for the opening of my picture," she wrote. "A mere handful of people knew me when I left town, and then I came back to find fans swarming all over the place. You wonder how people can get like that. But that’s what this picture business does. I knew they expected me to turn up looking pretty glamorous, and even though I looked just like I did when I left, they were convinced that I must have changed in some mysterious way. And the truth of the matter is that I’m just as I was at that time - rather bad at clothes, pretty sloppy and forgetting to put any makeup on half the time. And I still drive my rattle-trap car, live in a very modest place, do most of my own housework, and haven’t gone to a nightclub yet…. And concerning men, I prefer my own company to that of most of the men in this town. If they want to pass me by, that’s all right with me. I think all the boys in Hollywood are terrific bores. If I couldn’t stand my own company, I’d be the unhappiest girl in the world, because I’m alone morning, noon, and night…." That was Frances on Christmas Day, 1935....

Christmas two years later was different. Frances was married now, to a tall handsome actor named Leif Erickson. They’d met at the studio gate one morning, Frances in her dinky Ford trying to get into the studio from the left side of the street, Leif in his dinky Chevy trying to get in from the right. They’d blown their horns at one another for a few minutes, trying to signal the other in first. Then, when the gateman came rushing out of his little hut with his hands clasped over ears, they’d looked at each other and begun to laugh. They met in the studio commissary at lunchtime and laughed all over again. And the next night, for the first time since she’d arrived in town, Frances went to a nightclub - with Leif. And for the first time in a long time Frances felt she had a friend again.

Quickly, she fell in love with Leif and he with her and one morning they walked into the PARAMOUNT chief’s office, hand in hand, and told him they’d just come back from Yuma, Arizona, where they’d been married the night before. Now, on their first Christmas together, they sat in their living room, hand in hand. Everything was calm and nice and beautiful. It was, Leif thought to himself, like it had been those first few months of their marriage when everything was just the two of them apart from the entire world, when a kiss on the arm or the neck or the lips was the beginning of happiness that had never been known before, when Frances was the content and loving woman on the face of the earth. Leif was happy that this night was perfect for him and Frances, that it wasn’t like some of the other nights they’d had after those first few months when pressures from out of nowhere suddenly seemed to send his wife into fits of gloom and nervousness, when he would try to smile over them with sudden embraces and words like "Maybe it’s a baby, Frances, and you don’t know it yet?" and Frances would snap back with words like "It’s no baby, Leif, it’s just that I’m not feeling well... and I wish you’d leave me alone for a while." Leif looked at her now. He grinned. She was so beautiful. And then. Slowly, the grin left his lips as he noticed Frances let go of his hand to reach over and pour herself a drink. That was her third drink in the last hour, Leif thought to himself. She’d been starting to drink a little too much lately, he thought. Just a little too much. . . .

Frances sat at the far end of the bar that Christmas afternoon, 1942. The cocktail lounge was practically deserted. But Frances wouldn’t have noticed whether there was an Elks convention going on that day or not, she was so drunk. "Happy holiday," she said, winking at the bartender and raising her hand. The bartender knew that was the signal for another drink. "Mrs. Erickson..." he’d say, tentatively, as he handed her one drink after another. But Frances wouldn’t give him a chance to continue saying what he want to say, that maybe she had had enough, that maybe she should get up and go home. Instead, Frances would interrupt him with curt "Thank you!" And then she’d pick up her new drink and down it like a truckdriver taking a swig on a cold winter’s night, like she’d been downing them for the past couple of years, like she’d told the judge she’d been downing them after she’d been picked up for drunken driving a couple of months back - shortly after her return from New York, where she’d appeared in a few stage plays - and had been hauled into court. "Listen, Your Honor," she had told the judge, "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 had scolded her. He’d reminded her that she was an actress, a good actress, a young woman, a young wife who was beginning to drink too much, who was beginning to throw away her career, her marriage, and her life. He’d tried to be nice, but Frances hadn’t wanted anybody to be nice to her. "Who wrote your script?" she snapped at the judge. And then he’d stopped being nice and snapped back at her that she was being put on probation and that if she were ever caught drinking again she’d be put in jail. "Happy holiday," Frances said now, winking over at the bartender again. The bartender shrugged and brought her another drink. Frances gulped it down. Then she reached into her purse for some change and got up from her stool and wobbled over to a phone booth a few yards away.

She dialed a number. She listened to the short buzzes on the other end of the line. They continued. Nobody was home. "Leif?" Frances said groggily, ignoring the buzzes. "I guess we’re going through with the divorce, huh? I guess it’s all over between the two of us, Leif. Is it all over, Leif? Is it all over?" Frances listened to the buzzes for a long time. Finally, she hung up and wobbled back to the bar. The bartender looked at her, hoping she’d pick up her purse and leave. She looked back and forced a smile. "Happy holiday," she said, holding up her hand, signaling for that next drink. . . .

And now it was Christmas, 1943, and Frances Farmer paced the floor of a small white room with a locked door and bars on the windows. The heat in her white little room was on too high and Frances was afraid to call somebody in to tell them to make it lower, to please make it lower. One of the nurses came by a little while later and unlocked Frances’ door just long enough to look in and see that everything was all right and to say a Merry Christmas. Frances didn’t answer back. She just stared, the way she’d been staring at everyone who’d approached her since they’d brought her to this place. And then, when the nurse closed the door again, Frances pulled a sheet from her bed and tried to wipe the sweat from her body and said, "I’m hot... I’m hot." The heat had become intense now and Frances felt as if she were going to suffocate. "I’m hot," she continued saying, her voice growing a little louder, "I’m hot." She couldn’t help it. She knew she must not scream. But her flesh was beginning to burn under the white uniform they made her wear and the skin on her face and arms felt as if they’d been scorched by a sun only a little way away and moving in on her fast. She could stand it no longer and she took a handful of sheet and rolled it into a ball and pushed it into her mouth, pushed it deep and hard, so she would not scream. And she cried. . . .

It was Christmas Day, 1956, thirteen years later. The place was San Francisco, in a tiny apartment not far from the center of town. The woman in the apartment, sitting in the faded armchair near the window was in her early forties, though she looked perhaps just a little older. She was tired. She’d had a job for the last year or so as a reservations clerk at the big Sheraton Palace Hotel, night shift, and with the holiday season in full swing now she’d had to work overtime the last couple of nights. She’d worked so hard and long last night that she hadn’t got back to the apartment from the hotel till just about an hour ago. But instead of going right back to bed, as she normally did, she wanted to stay up on this morning, Christmas morning. She looked down at her wristwatch. No, she shook her head - it was too early. She got up from the chair and went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee and a slice of toast and then she turned on some nice Christmas music one of the radio stations was playing and she sat in her chair again now, looking out the window, humming along with the music and looking out at the houses across the way and wondering how many children lay sleeping behind each window and how many Christmas trees stood gaily decorated behind those walls with how many ribboned boxes under them, all waiting to be opened and ah’d over. She looked at her watch again a little while later. It was still too early. She reached for the envelope on the small table next to the chair, her hands trembling a little as she picked it up. For the hundredth time in the past few days, she reread the letter. It was from New York, from a man named Michael Ellis. It began"

Dear Miss Farmer,

Frances put down the letter and looked down at her watch again. She got up and put on her coat. It was time to go to church and celebrate the birth of the infant Jesus – and to ask Him, Who had saved her, Whom she had met again through an old Bible during her years of need at the asylum, for His guidance now when she need Him so badly again. . . .

Christmas, 1957, will be a happy one for Frances Farmer, the first truly happy one she will have ever known. She will be with friends. She has made many over the past year. She decided early in the year to accept Mr. Ellis’ offer to come back East and work with his theater group. She came with many misgivings – despite the fact that she had given up drinking completely, that her mind was strong again and she could remember her lines again. "No, I haven’t been reading any scripts recently," she told someone who asked her, "but I’ve been reading the Bible and I can quote from it quite well. I know, because many nights I lie in bed after the lights are out and I read myself to sleep from memory, from the book of Proverbs and Matthew, and Mark, Luke, and John..." But still, she had misgivings. She didn’t want any pity from people who knew of her past, of those unhappy years as a child, as a young actress in Hollywood, as a drunkard, as a patient in the asylum. And from other people, the inevitable other kind, she didn’t want any whisperings behind her back, any side glances from one person to another if she should ever raise her voice a little during a rehearsal or make suggestions or do anything that could be called peculiar or smart-alecky…. One morning in San Francisco, she went to church. God, she prayed, help me to be good, not to hurt myself anymore, above all not to hurt any others. Then she went back to her room and wrote to Mr. Ellis that she’d decided to accept his offer. She said nothing about her misgivings.

But, as it turned out, she didn’t have to bother. When she arrived in the East a few weeks later, everyone was wonderful to her. And everybody, in turn, though that she was wonderful. She received the press and spoke very simply. "I blame nobody for my fall," she said. "I had to face agonizing decisions when I was younger. The decisions broke me. But, too, there was a lack of philosophy in my life. With faith in myself and in God I think I have won the fight to control myself... And I am grateful for the chance to return to the theater. And, too, it’s good to know that if I don’t make it in the theater, I can always go back to the reservations job at the hotel in San Francisco."

But after her opening night performance at the BUCKS COUNTY PLAYHOUSE this summer, it was obvious to everyone that Frances was never going back to any hotel desk. "She is a fine actress," the director of the play said later that night, "and she is cooperative and a pleasure to with. I look forward to working with her again." Up until the opening night Frances – as well as she got along with everyone - made a practice of sticking pretty much to herself. She spoke when spoken to, turned down all invitations to parties or any kind of gathering and sat alone, studying her scenes and lines during any free hours she had. But after the opening, after the reassurance that night from the applause that rang out during the curtain calls, that rang out especially hard when she was told to take a solo bow, applause punctuated with shouts of Bravo and Welcome Back – with tears, Frances relaxed. She accepted an invitation to a party after the opening and shook hands with a couple hundred smiling people.

And then after the party, she and a few members of the company and the director and his wife drove out to a little place near their hotel for coffee and pie. For the next few hours they just sat there, talking and laughing about the play and the rehearsals and the funny things that had been happening to them. And then somebody said, "Why don’t we do this again tomorrow night after the show?" "Yes," Frances said, almost before she realized that she’d spoken up. She looked around at the faces at the table. They were the most friendly, wonderful faces she’d ever seen. They’d been there, around her, all her life, she realized now. But somehow she’d never noticed them before. She nodded. "Yes," she said again, "let’s do it tomorrow night, all of us!"

It’s nice to think that she will be seeing some of these faces – and others – come Christmas day this year.

END

Article published in Modern Screen - December 1957

Provided by Jack Randall Earles