Nixing photos at home - he claimed it was "booby-trapped" - Jacobson posed instead on a discarded davenport on an L.A. street.
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| People who were close to
the late Frances Farmer insist that Jacobson's claims are of dubious validity. "I
don't recall Frances ever mentioning Stewart Jacobson," says Lois Kibbee, an actress
in The Edge of Night and a writer. Before Farmer died, Kibbee interviewed her
over several months in Indianapolis for what ultimately became the Farmer autobiography, Will
There Really Be a Morning? "I'm sure that Jacobson was not her lover," she
declares. Clearly, the man who claims to have been France's longtime lover has less than impeccable credentials. Born in Eastsound, Wash. and raised in Seattle, Jacobson managed to compile an extensive rap sheet. It began in 1939 with a murder charge (he was acquitted) and included arrests for vagrancy, tampering with a witness and assault, and a conviction for pimping. His record continued through a 1953 conviction for operating as an unlicensed private investigator. Jacobson says that he first met Farmer in 1931, while working as a detective in King county, Wash. (he would have been 17 at the time), and that he sometimes used the name Harry York. He says he had been sent to investigate Farmer and her "God Dies" essay, which had |
enraged some of the locals.
His portrayal of the relationship that allegedly followed borders on the fantastic. Among
Jacobson's highly dubious claims: that he set up a sexual liaison for Frances with Justice
William O. Douglas in 1941 at a hot springs resort (Douglas "never got over
Frances," says Jacobson); that he personally persuaded Sen. Joseph McCarthy not to
accuse Frances of being a Communist agent; and that he arranged Farmer's last job, as a TV
movie show hostess at an Indianapolis station. Jacobson also swears that William Randolph
Hearst wanted to kill Farmer because she had witnessed the murder of a producer who had
been making love to Hearst's mistress, actress Marion Davies, aboard the publisher's yacht
in 1924. (Frances would have been 10 at the time.) The absence of any photos showing
Farmer and Jacobson together is easy to explain, Jacobson claims, because "everything
has been destroyed." And the lack of any mention of Jacobson in the Farmer
autobiography is, he says, in compliance with "my direct orders." The ties between Jacobson and |
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