The Tragedy of Frances Farmer:  The Star They 'Railroaded' Into An Asylum

By Leon Freilich

Hollywood's real-life Cinderella starred in movies with Cary Grant, Bing Crosby and Tyrone Power - until the fairy tale turned into a nightmare.

At the height of her fame, this tall blonde with delicate cheekbones was hurled into the violent ward of a state insane asylum.  At 27, her film career was shattered.  And so was she.

She was Frances Farmer, and the story of her "madness" made lurid headlines in newspapers all over the country some years back.  When she died in 1970 in obscurity, she was considered a tragic figure.

Now a thorough investigation reveals that Frances Farmer's tragedy ran even deeper than people suspected.  She was penned up at the asylum, her brain was experimented upon brutally, just as was depicted in the award-winning movie "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," starring Jack Nicholson, raped hundreds of times - and yet there was no conclusive proof she'd ever been insane.

Conspiracy

Who said she was?  Psychiatrists.  Psychiatrists who'd made up their minds before meeting her.  Psychiatrists who wanted to use the glamorous star as a guinea pig.   Psychiatrists who were determined to make her more conventional.

"The real conspiracy against Frances Farmer was the conspiracy of psychiatry against any individual who happens to be different," charges William Arnold.

He's an investigative reporter who spent three years tracking down every clue to the reasons for her gruesome ordeal.

"She found herself the prime attraction of a psychiatric sideshow that allowed no possible escape and led to one inevitable conclusion."

"When these ruthless and arrogant men could not 'save' her by their standards, they destroyed her.  She was quite simply, and in the truest sense of the word, a martyr."

Worse still, the horrors suffered by this young girl from Seattle could happen to virtually anybody - today.  There's been little done to prevent such psychiatric abuse, according to Arnold.

"Many states, including Washington, have passed new laws which make involuntary commitment more difficult, but the potential for abuse remains enormous in a field where a mental patient's future may be decided on the most arbitrary and subjective grounds," he says in his new book, "Shadowland," by McGraw-Hill.

The psychiatric establishment didn't know what to make of Frances.  With little acting experience, she'd been signed to a long-term Hollywood contract at 21.

The critics swooned over her.  They compared her to Katharine Hepburn.  Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons predicted, "She will be as great and probably greater than Garbo."

Men adored her.  Chet Huntley, her boyfriend at the University of Washington journalism school, called Frances "the most beautiful girl I've ever known."

Trouble was, she refused to behave the way movie stars were expected to in 1942.  "She adamantly refused to make any concessions to stardom or compromises in the way she lived," says Arnold.

"She would not wear makeup or have her hair done professionally.  She shocked studio publicists by using language a lady should not even know existed.  She drove an old wreck and she dressed sloppily."

A total nonconformist.  But not a madwoman.

Picked up for drunk driving in Santa Monica, she sassed the judge, who promptly threw her in the slammer.  The newspaper account intrigued a psychiatrist - her carefree days were over.

"As any psychiatrist could do under California law, he simply went to the Superior Court and filed a complaint requesting that he be permitted to examine Frances to determine her sanity," says Arnold. 

He'd already decided she was mentally ill.  And after a short examination, he was ready with a label.  "A manic-depressive psychotic," he informed the judge.

Frances was immediately hustled off to a psychiatric ward, the first of several.  Against her will and without legal representation, she was committed in 1944 to Western State Hospital at Steilacoom, Wash.

Experimenting

"She was taken from a padded van and led to the main recreation area," Arnold says.   "The straitjacket was removed and she was stripped.

Standing nude before a large crowd of patients and orderlies that had assembled to see her, she was then numbered and fingerprinted.

Later she was tied to a toilet for several minutes and then - still nude - taken to a large bare auditorium-like room where about 25 sobbing and screaming patients paced about aimlessly.   She spent the night in this room, huddled in a corner for protection."

Now that the psychiatrists had the famous movie star in their hands, they started experimenting on her.  Electro-shock.  Insulin shock.  LSD.   Hydro-therapy - thrashing about naked in a tub of icy water for eight hours.

Between experiments, it was hellish in a different way.

"On almost any night of the year, soldiers from nearby Fort Lewis were sneaked in for clandestine sexual relations with female patients," Arnold says.

"Frances was subjected to obscene perversions, raped by orderlies, friends of orderlies, and patients hundreds of times."

Nevertheless, the snake pit did not crush her spirit.  After five years of "breakthrough therapies," the psychiatrists still couldn't make her conform.

Finally, they turned to the "surgical miracle" of 1949.  They subjected Frances to a prefrontal lobotomy - cut away portions of her brain.  And in 1950, she was released as "cured."

Three husbands figured briefly in her life.  Before her harrowing face-off with the psychiatrists, Frances had been wed to actor Leif Erickson.

Following her torments, she married a promoter named Lee Mikesell and later, briefly, a Seattle engineer, Alfred Lobley.  Mikesell persuaded her to try a comeback.  But she was empty inside.  Her humanity had been sliced to ribbons.

The onetime Cinderella, the most notable personality ever to be confined to a public mental institution, had been reduced to a vegetable by the operation.

Frances was 36.  She was manageable now, and for the next 20 years she offered no resistance as various individuals exploited her and committed her to numerous asylums.  She died of cancer in 1970 at the age of 56.

The psychiatrists' victim was mourned by fans who knew only half of her chilling story.

Now that all the grisly facts have been laid bare, an editor of Variety comments, "Hers was the greatest tragedy in the history of Hollywood, far more tragic than, say, Marilyn Monroe or Judy Garland."

This article appeared in Midnight Globe – October 3, 1978