A SHADOWY FIGURE SAYS HE WAS FRANCES FARMER'S LOVER, BUT A LAWSUIT CLAIMS DIFFERENT

Sam Shepard (with Jessica Lange in the film Frances) "wasn't at all like me," scoffs Jacobson.   "He moved slowly.  I was like a cat."  Of Farmer (below in 1940), Jacobsen says, "I loved her.  She was like a racehorse."

Apart from the tormented title character played by Jessica Lange, he is Frances' most intriguing--if improbable--figure. The shadowy Harry York (played by Sam Shepard) appears repeatedly to bed and befriend the doomed actress Frances Farmer in her downward spiral through alcohol, despair and a Dickensian insane asylum. But is the York character, as the New York Times says, "a figment of the writer's desperation" or, as Universal Pictures claims, part of the "true life story of Frances Farmer"? That question has embroiled the widely hailed hit in a lawsuit that raises doubts about the business practices of Mel Brooks, whose company produced Frances--and about the veracity of the film itself.

Last week, rising to defend the integrity of the film, Frances' co-producer Marie Yates, 39, brought forth one Stewart Jacobson, 69, a Seattle elevator operator, detective and ex-convict who claims to be the real-life Harry York, Farmer's occasional lover and longtime confidant. Like York in the film, Jacobson says he met Farmer shortly after she wrote her controversial "God Dies" essay in high school and stayed in intermittent touch with her until her death from throat cancer in 1970 at age 56. Both he and Yates contend that his intimate relationship with Farmer was the major source for the film. "Jacobson provided the love story," insists Yates, "and the viewpoint that we wanted to present."

Hogwash, charges Bill Arnold, 37, a a Seattle-based author who signed a contract with Yates to sell movie rights to his 1978 Farmer biography, Shadowland. Arnold, who is bringing the suit against Yates, Brooksfilms and producer Jonathan Sanger on copyright infringement and related charges, says Jacobson was used by Brooks and Yates as a means of "stealing my book." Noel Marshall, executive producer of The Exorcist, who was originally slated to produce Arnold's Shadowland before Yates defected to work with Brooks on Frances, agrees. "Mel Brooks is a crook and an incredible cheat," he says, citing the similar controversy that erupted when Brooks successfully used the title of Bernard Pomerance's 1979 play The Elephant Man for a film; he was able to do so by claiming that all the source material for the film was in the public domain.