Frances Farmer (1913-1970)
"She'll come back as fire
/ To burn all the liars
Leave a blanket of ash on the ground ..."
The other day, a friend wrote to say she was watching a movie with Frances Farmer on TV and I had to confess that I didn't know who that was - even though, it turns out, the latter has cemented her place within the cultural imagination thanks not merely to her filmstar good looks and acting career, but her much discussed mental health issues and notorious drunken exploits.
At the height of her fame - and amidst reports of increasingly erratic behaviour, fuelled by heroic amounts of alcohol - Farmer was committed to psychiatric care, where she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and, according to some of the more sensational accounts, subjected to insulin shock therapy and non-consensual psychosurgery; i.e., lobotomised.
That last point may not be true and her experiences might not have been as grim as some have made out. But, even so, no one wants to be kept in a madhouse for several years and it can't have been a barrel of laughs being "raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats [...] chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and
half-drowned in ice baths" [1].
After her release in 1950, Farmer staged an acting comeback, mainly on TV and in local theatre. She died in 1970, from cancer, aged 56. Her (fictionalised and ghostwritten) autobiography - Will There Really Be a Morning? - was published posthumously in 1972. Since then, there have been several films made of her life story, including the 1982 film, Frances, directed by Graeme Clifford and starring Jessica Lange in the title role.
Of course, being mad, bad and beautiful, ensured that Farmer would gain legendary status amongst the rock 'n' roll set - Kurt Cobain even named his daughter after her [2] - but what really interests me is the fact that in 1931, whilst still at High School, Farmer won an essay writing contest with a controversial text entitled God Dies.
Essentially an attempt to reconcile her wish for divine order ruled over by a strong father-figure with the growing realisation that, actually, she existed in a chaotic and godless world, Farmer explains in her autobiography how the essay was very much influenced by a reading of Nietzsche:
"He expressed the same doubts, only he said it in German: Gott ist tot. God is dead. This I could understand. I was not to assume that there was no God, but I could find no evidence in my life that He existed or that He had ever shown any particular interest in me." [3]
And so, the question is:
How could this woman - a Nietzschean with an idiosyncratic sense of style who shunned Hollywood, fought the law, and, like Garbo, combined sexual allure with cold aloofness - have remained entirely unknown to me for so long?
It really makes me wonder who else I've never come across before, but should have - figures that I don't even know I don't know about!
It's possible - and this is not a happy thought - that the ones we would love most in this life are also those perfect strangers about whom we remain entirely unaware ...
Notes
[1] Frances Farmer, quoted in Sexual Abuse in the Lives of Women Diagnosed with Serious Mental Illness, ed. Maxine Harris and Christine L. Landis, (Routledge, 1997), p. 146.
[2] Kurt Cobain also wrote the song 'Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle', which can be found on Nirvana's third (and final) studio album, In Utero (DGC Records, 1993), or played by clicking here. The three lines of song lyric at the top of this post are taken from this song.
[3] Frances Farmer, Will There Really Be a Morning? (Putnam, 1972), p. 159.
It is with regret that I must also note that, towards the end of her life, Farmer finds God and converts to Catholicism - we might arguably read this as the final manifestation of her mental illness.
This post is for Carrolle who brought the figure of Frances Farmer to my attention.
