Her Mother Believed the Glamorous Star Was Driven Crazy by Communist Buddies. Now She's Trying to Make A Comeback
.By Robert Durant
Frances Farmer, the leggy Hollywood quail who flirted with the Commies and wound up blowing her spectacular stack, says she's ready for a comeback. After 14 years in and out of nut houses, Frances has returned to show biz via summer theater work in Bucks County, PA. All we can say is hooray for you, honey, and more power to you. Climb back there on top and give 'em hell. Your face and figure, although you're in your forties, are better than most women's ever were. Frances was a product of the riotous 1930s--remember? She was a hot buck at the box office and starred in such movies as "Rhythm on the Range", "Ebb Tide" and "South of Pago Pago." In New York, she wowed Broadway in Clifford Odets' "Golden Boy." Like a lot of smart kids in the entertainment world in those days she got fouled up with the Commies. When she found the Reds were phonies with nothing to offer she began to worry herself sick. Complications in the form of whisky and men cropped up and Frances went down with a thump heard round the country. It was her ma, Mrs. Lillian V. Farmer, who first put the Red tag on Frances. She said that her daughter, a studious type even as a teenager, was first exposed to Communism in high school. When Frances moved on to the University of Washington she attended Communist meetings at the urging of her instructors. She won a free trip to Russia and Mrs. Farmer feared her daughter might never return to this country. "Men who were admitted Communists and who were influential in Hollywood and New York held some terrible threat over her," Mrs. Farmer said. "For a while Frances trusted them and they used her and other stars to attract people to their meetings. I don't know how much Frances gave them, but I know it must have run into thousands of dollars." Commies, she declared, were responsible for the disintegration of Frances' marriage to Lief Ericson. And Frances confessed she was afraid to leave the Reds because she knew too much, her mother said. Frances was a product of Seattle, Wash. Her parents were separated. Her lawyer father lost his money as a result of the 1929 stock market crash and Frances worked her way through the university. She was busy on the campus, but scarcely a social success. A picture of her then shows her wearing a boyish shirt, plaid, rolled collar, open at the neck. Her short hair was slicked back, masculine style. It doesn't take much of a park bench psychiatrist to deduce that here was meat and drink for the Communists. When the Voice of Action, a longshoremen's weekly newspaper, offered a free trip to Russia for the student who sold the most subscriptions, who won it? Frances. It was this trip that brought Frances to the attention of the starmakers, among them, Oscar Serlin, then head of Paramount's talent department. She was on her way by 1938, married to Lief Ericson, appearing in "Golden Boy," affluent enough to attract a suit (later thrown out of court) filed by a publicity-man-about-town who estimated her income at $150,000 a year. But like Lillian Roth, Diana Barrymore and so many others, her day in the sun was short. It wasn't long before she and Ericson began to drift apart. Perhaps the marriage never jelled. She began to appear in public with other escorts, including "Golden Boy" playwright Odets and director Harold Clurman. Friends began to worry about her flashes of temperament. The first overt sign of trouble came in 1942 when she was on location in Mexico. She suffered a mental blackout in a hotel, stripped off her clothes and wandered through the corridors. Forced to abandon her role because of persistent lapses of memory, she entered a sanitarium for six weeks. The end came fast. In September she was arrested for drunken driving, fined $250, put on probation for two years and ordered to abstain from liquor. When she failed to pay the last of the fine a warrant went out for her arrest. She wasn't hard to find. In January she walked off a movie set, created a mad scene in a night club, staggered into a glittering Hollywood hotel, tore off her clothes and locked herself in a bathroom. Disheveled and screaming, she was hauled to court where she described herself as a prostitute and defiantly told the judge she drank everything she could get her hands on. As they strapped her kicking into a straitjacket and carried her away she yelled at his honor; "Have YOU ever had a broken heart?" Mercifully, instead of prison they sent her to a hospital where a psychiatrist said she was subject to manic-depressive fits. He diagnosed her as "hyper-emotional, dangerous to herself and others." "She is not a drunk," Clurman, among others, said. "She was always nervous, emotional, sensitive... the Hollywood crowd resented her." Other friends blamed the failure of a return trip to New York where she felt she had been rebuffed by the theater, offered only bit parts when, after "Golden Boy," she deserved better. She was treated at Lacresenta hospital until September. Then her mother signed Frances out and took her to Seattle where she tried to cure her at home. In the spring of 1944 Mrs. Farmer gave up and had Frances committed to the Western State Hospital for the insane at Steilacoom, Wash. Schizophrenia with paranoid illusions, said the report, adding that Frances was destructive and was growing worse. After that she flitted in and out of Steilacoom, sometimes worse, sometimes better, until she worked and stumbled her way to sanity and was released, finally, as cured. In Seattle, in 1947, Frances was married again, to a city employee. This marriage didn't last either, but by then Frances was strong enough to endure the blow. Recently, in San Francisco, where she was working as a reservations clerk at the Sheraton-Palace hotel, Frances said: "I have learned to have faith in myself. I believe I came out of this a stronger person." She doesn't talk about her busted romance with the Reds, and who can blame her?
Article published in On The QT magazine in 1957