Review:  Shadowland

By Patrick Owens

A more artless but not less interesting enterprise is Shadowland (McGraw-Hill, $9.95), by William Arnold.  It is the story of Frances Farmer, who was hailed in her early twenties as another Garbo, got rave reviews on Broadway in Golden Boy in 1937, and then flamed out with only a handful of movies to her credit.

She was a nonconformist from Seattle who stirred vast controversy in what used to be called "the Soviet of Washington" by accepting an expense-paid trip to the Soviet Union while she was still a college girl.  She became a featured player within months of this odd piece of payola and was a star very soon thereafter.  Booze and uppers were not far behind, and Farmer was ruined in films.

She spent many years in mental hospitals, mostly in the forbidding Washington State institution at Steilacoom, suffered a great many electro-convulsive-therapy (or shock) treatments, and finally was tamed by a pioneering surgical procedure that involved insinuating an instrument, something like and icepick, around her eyeball and into her brain.

Arnold, a newspaperman, is appropriately outraged at such atrocities but quite helpless before the central question his account raises; was Frances Farmer psychotic or wasn't she?   His book is written from the perspective of a fan, but I never did put it down.   It is too good a tale. 

This review appeared in Penthouse – July 1978