Mention the name Frances Farmer to most people under 40 and you will be greeted with a puzzled stare.

At best they will venture, "Didn’t she make fudge and write a cookbook?"

No, Frances Farmer did not write a cookbook. Frances Farmer was, for a brief period in the 1930s, the most celebrated actress in America. She starred in 17 [sic] motion pictures opposite such leading men as Cary Grant, Bing Crosby, Tyrone Power and John Garfield.

She was the heralded star of the Clifford Odets’ "Golden Boy" on Broadway. She appeared in radio plays, starred on the summer stock circuit, and was featured on the cover of every major magazine in the land.

She was beautiful, intelligent, and possessed of a wicked wit. She seemingly had the world in the palm of her hand. 

And yet this same golden girl spent five years of almost unimaginable hell in a mental institution. She was kept naked on a dirt floor and made to clean up the excrement of lunatics. She was subjected to electro-shock, hydro-shock and insulin-shock therapies. She might also have been the victim of a transorbital lobotomy. When she finally emerged from the damp, gray shadows of Fort Steilacoom State Hospital in her native Washington, she was a glazed half-woman, only a suggestion of the vibrantly alive artist she had once been.

How did it happen?

How did a woman who had everything, who had the American Dream wrapped around her little finger, fall from such heights to such depths? The story of Frances Farmer is one of the saddest chapters in recent American history, and it is written in invisible ink. No one wants to remember it.

No, Frances Farmer did not write a cookbook.

She was a woman who spoke loudly and often against the structure of power both in Hollywood and in Washington, both from neurotic and heroic impulses. And she paid dearly for it.

Frances was born in 1914 [sic] in Seattle, at the time a hotbed of right-wing fanaticism. The slaughter in nearby Centralia of a boatload of union Wobblies (International Workers of the World) was one of the most brutal incidents of its kind in American history.

And good old Northwest conservatism had a no more outspoken advocate than Lillian Farmer, Frances’ mother, whose patriotism was so extreme, and even ridiculous, that she once cross-bred a red, white and blue market chicken and lobbied Congress to have it named our national bird. Lillian was an active member of the American Vigilantes of Washington, a reactionary organization devoted to quashing the labor union and anything remotely pink.

Born a rebel, Frances wasted no time in reacting against her family, and at 16 mysteriously won a national scholastic essay contest with a piece that the whole state of Washington considered shockingly atheistic.

The title – "God Dies." By the time Frances was 21 she won a trip to Moscow from a local left-wing newspaper and, against the advice of her mother who unsuccessfully tried to stop Frances from going (she even went so far as to try to persuade local officials to forbid Frances to go), Frances left for Moscow. It was an insult that neither her mother nor the local officials (maybe even the Federal government) would ever forget.

But it was at the University of Washington that she found her real religion, and it wasn’t communism (all her life she denied having ever been a Communist). It was theater.

She was baptized by a flamboyant, radical drama teacher named Sophie Rosenstein, who imbued her with ideals about the purity of acting that would later make Hollywood intolerable to her.

And indeed again mysteriously Hollywood snapped up this promising, beautiful, raw-boned newcomer and made her a star. But she found the work superficial and said so, and worse, refused to play ball with the studio system that prescribed when, where, and with whom its young stars would be seen.

When Frances finally left Hollywood for New York to work with the Group Theater, considered leftist in those years, the studio bosses and her mother, fuming over both her independence and their loss of her income, joined hands with Seattle officials. Now, Frances had a full fledged list of enemies waiting and watching for their first chance to bring her to her knees.

And they didn’t have long to wait.

After a run on Broadway in Clifford Odets’ "Golden Boy" she had a disastrous affair with the playwright that seemed finally to destroy all her illusions about love, the theater and social ideals. In short, she felt used both for her money and reputation. She was being passed around. It is even rumored that she slept with Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan.

She returned to Hollywood, where Adolph Zukor, chairman of the board of Paramount, who was reputed to have hated her, and the William Randolph Hearst machine, via Louella Parsons, attacked her nationally in "Screenland" print, calling her ‘very,very snooty" and accusing her of "being the most ungrateful young woman who ever won sudden success in Hollywood."

The powers that be made her pay for her former insolence by offering her third-rate scripts. Depressed by that, and still pursuing a broken heart for Odets, she was arrested one night for drunken driving, and was so abusive and obscene to the judge that she got an unusually stiff sentence.

Basically, the louder she screamed the stiffer the sentence got, and the whole, tragic spiral didn’t stop until she found herself on the dirt floor on the back ward of a Washington State mental hospital.

The story of Frances Farmer raises as many questions as it answers. We know that after her release years later, and after untold abuse, she drifted anonymously and alcoholically throughout the West and Midwest. She finally settled in Indianapolis (where she died of cancer of the esophagus in 1970) where someone recognized her, and she became an afternoon TV movie show hostess for a couple of hundred dollars a week. A far cry from the $5,000 a week she was used to making or the diamond necklaces that admirers like Bing Crosby, her costar of "Rhythm on the Range," showered on her.

What is not clear is why no one, not her Hollywood friends, not the idealistic Group Theater in New York, not her ex-husband actor Lief [sic] Erickson, not her family (indeed, her own mother had her committed), stepped in to stop the terrible flow of events.

Was everyone so afraid of the power structure that Frances had insulted that they dared not make a peep? Years later, when Frances was the subject of a Ralph Edwards "This Is Your Life’ episode, the turnout of old acquaintances was embarrassingly small. To be seen with Frances was perhaps still a danger?

Now twelve years after Frances’ death, all America seems to be rediscovering her. Again mysteriously, however these things work, the veil has been lifted and Frances is being resurrected. Hollywood has filmed a multi-million dollar motion picture, starring Jessica Lange as Frances and Kim Stanley as her mother, Lillian. There is also a television movie on her life, starring Susan Blakely as Frances and Lee Grant as Lillian that will air sometime this winter.

There are no less than three paperbacks currently available on her life, one written by an investigative reporter who says Frances was targeted by government officials who, with the help of her own mother (coupled with Frances’ own rebellious nature), tried to destroy her.

"Look Back in Love," written by Frances’ sister claims that the Commies did it, and Frances in her own book, "Will There Really Be a Morning?" tries to reconstruct her own life using scrapbooks faithfully kept by her mother. Frances says in her book that she lost her memory or much of it due to all the experimental drugs and other medical "therapies" that were inflicted upon her.

There are also several Off-Off Broadway plays trying to going to surface, one in which Frances will be played by drag queen Jackie Curtis and even a Broadway musical trying to find a backer.

Scooping all these projects was "The Frances Farmer Story," and off-Broadway play that somehow incurred the wrath of almost all the critics and yet grew to become a favorite with audiences who by the third week were "Bravo!" and having the cast take two and three curtain calls, something rarely done even on Broadway.

The play was simple, straightforward, lightly touching in script and very heavy a la Lillian Hellman in the questions it raised, not only about Frances’ life itself, but more importantly, the socioeconomic and political climate of the time. It was closed by the fire department after four weeks amidst rumors that political pressure may have been applied. Did somebody somewhere not want this play in this version seen or heard?

Author Sebastian Stuart, a well-known Manhattan playwright with a string of Off- and Off-Off Broadway underground hits, claims "The Frances Farmer Story" is really all of our stories. "It is the story of the death of idealism," he says. "We all grow up thinking the world is one thing and we find out in one way or another, that the world is not what we thought it to be. At this point in our lives, we must find a second faith, a second wind, if you will, and we must go on living.

"Frances was unable to or unwilling to accept the world as it is; she still believed in her ideals. This prideful refusal to sacrifice them (even after she found out the rules she refused to play the game) obviously contributed to her downfall. It was also what made her such a noble and beautiful soul."

Stuart, normally a cheerful 30-year-old, grows thoughtful when discussing Frances Farmer and it is obvious that her story has touched him deeply. "In the first draft of this play, I concentrated on Frances’ rebellious nature, on the fact that she was really a female James Dean 20 years before James Dean. However, as I kept working on the play I saw Frances was much more that a rebel, she was a believer in life, in her work as an actress, in humanity.

"She wanted to be a great actress and she wanted to fight injustice. She had a pure heart and never sacrificed her ideals. I think we can all learn something from her honesty, and from her life. It is my deepest hope that my play will do justice to the beauty of her spirit and that it will make all the terrible suffering she went through mean something to the people today."

"The Frances Farmer Story" was directed by John Albano, the assistant director of the smash "Pirates of Penzance." The part of Frances Farmer was played by the beautiful London-trained actress Elizabeth Hess, who found herself caught, not unlike Frances herself, between the slaps of the critics who praised her one minute and trashed her the next. In spite of everything, Miss Hess "still feels very lucky to have been able to play Frances, full of integrity and vulnerability."

A second Farmer play, "Golden Girl," written by Peter Occhiogrosso aired on a recent radio program as a character study of Frances’ relationship with Odets and not a political play, was a much more commercially ambitious play and, as a result, the playwright has taken many poetic liberties. Odets is cast as a sexy Stallone type, Frances (played by Maria Duvall) becomes a stock character, an early Joan Crawford type – fast talking, cheap shop girl, and her mother, who in real life was from strong pioneer stock, is portrayed as a New York Jewish intellectual.

To add insult to injury the playwright has Odets saying he visited Frances in the asylum but stopped because he became too depressed after visiting her. When asked where he got his information, Occhiogrosso said he made it up and had been thinking of deleting it from the script but decided not to.

The play also implies through several doctor characters that Frances was a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur. This also seems a strange diagnosis, however seemingly plausible, as Frances was being groomed for stardom, was a hit on Broadway and in the movies, and a national celebrity. What could smack more of actual grandeur?

As far as being a paranoid schizophrenic Frances has problems that were very real and the saying "Sure I may be paranoid but that doesn’t stop people from following me," judging from all the public information available about her, may really have been true.

The director of "Golden Girl" Ron Link, known most prominently for his work on "Neon Women" and "Women Behind Bars" – both camp underground hits with Divine and written by Broadway’s "Dreamgirls" playwright Tom Eyen (who has put money into the production) – said in a recent interview in "Other Stages":

"I don’t think its any accident that Frances Farmer’s life is surfacing right now. I believe in a collective unconscious, and I believe people need people to look up to. Whatever else can be said about her, Frances fought back and asked questions. Also, I think Frances, as a force, wants all this exploration of her life. She’s not at rest.

"There are so many conspiracy stories circulating…but conspiracy stories are hard to accept when you consider that she wasn’t a card-carrying ‘Commie’ or "Pinko.’ She was an emotional leftist. Of course, this is another instance where it is simply out of our range to imagine what the word ‘Commie’ or ‘Pinko’ meant in establishment Hollywood at the time."

Whatever the story is, like other hot stories which resurface all the time (such as the Monroe-Kennedy conspiracy – both strangely enough linked together), it is a sure thing that Frances Farmer’s story is all the rage.

The movie has already ruffled enough feathers that William Arnold, the investigative reporter who wrote "Shadowland," is suing Mel Brooks, the film’s producer, claiming that they pirated material from his book. CBS, whose TV project, "Will There Really Be a Morning?’ is to be released next year, is already shaking in its boots that the Farmer story will be a dead issue by the time it airs.

The movie people feel differently, and "Frances" is being released in time to qualify for the Oscar race. Rumors abounding that the rape scenes (Frances was raped repeatedly in the asylum) were too graphic and the lobotomy scenes saw raw that audiences have walked out, are all very good for publicity.

Whatever happens (movies being the masses’ link to culture and art and, by that flimsy reasoning, the truth) Frances Farmer’s reputation and history will be examined, taken as gospel, and laid to rest amidst much fanfare and hoopla.

But there is a sneaky suspicion that history being what it is (so completely rewritten and reinterpreted each and every day), nobody will get any closer to answering the question which only one critic of the many who reviewed "The Frances Farmer Story," ever asked: "Why did what happened to Frances Farmer happen?"

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