Kurt Cobain, Scientology, and an icepick through the eye: unmaking the myth of Frances Farmer
What do Nirvana, the Church of Scientology, and the Oscar-winning actor Jessica Lange have in common? They all helped perpetuate a myth about a Hollywood actor from the 1930s that is still widely perceived as true. Her ghost-written autobiography was published shortly after Frances Farmer died in 1970 at the age of 56. The actor had enjoyed a brief stint as a promising Hollywood star in the 1930s, even appearing opposite Cary Grant in one film, but her prospects faded after several instances of public drunkenness, run-ins with the law, and a period in a mental institution. Her autobiography offered a more detailed glimpse into that abbreviated story.
Titled Will There Really Be a Morning?, Farmer’s posthumous memoir outlined, in gruesome detail, eight years of abuse that she supposedly sustained while institutionalised. Among its claims were the allegations that she was raped, poisoned, chewed by rats, half-drowned, and chained.
Several years later, another biography, Shadowland, was published, and this one was written by Scientologist and film critic William Arnold. The book contained another explosive revelation. While in the mental institution, Farmer had been allegedly forcibly subjected to a trans-orbital lobotomy. Also called an “ice-pick lobotomy”, the procedure involved wedging an ice-pick-like object under a patient’s eye to remove part of the brain.
It wasn’t long before a film was made about Farmer’s life. Starring Jessica Lange in the titular role, Frances was released in 1982, drawing heavily on Arnold’s book and adding a romantic interest for good measure.
A decade later, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain adored Farmer and was specifically enamoured of Shadowland, name-checking it in multiple interviews and even suggesting that the actor’s alleged treatment could easily befall his partner, Courtney Love. He even embellished details to a significant extent, describing a mental institution with corridors lined with orderlies ready to rape Farmer as she stumbled past. When Cobain and Love married in 1992, the bride wore a dress that had belonged to the late actor.
For Cobain, Frances Farmer represented all the tortured stars who dared to live as individuals in a world of hate-filled conformists. Her story fit perfectly with his increasingly embittered, reclusive existence and added romance to the pain he suffered toward the end of his life. The 1993 Nirvana song ‘Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle’ imagined a world in which Farmer returns from the dead as fire to burn all those who wronged her. The trouble was that none of these stories were true.
Born in Seattle in 1913, Frances Farmer was outspoken from an early age. As a teenager, she wrote an award-winning essay titled ‘God Dies’, in which she openly questioned the existence of a higher power. At a time when few women attended university, she completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Washington and won a trip to the Soviet Union in her senior year through a subscription to a left-leaning newspaper.
After graduating, Farmer moved to Hollywood to pursue a career in acting. Within a year, her obvious star power and acting chops landed her a role opposite Bing Crosby. She then starred in a movie directed by William Wyler and was cast in a film opposite Cary Grant. Her trajectory had momentum, but Farmer’s ambitions as an actor had little to do with the Hollywood star-making machine. She argued over the roles she was given, refused to make the rounds of industry parties, and was cool with the press. She finally abandoned the film industry altogether and began working in theatre, finding a home in a world that had little glamour but plenty of creative fulfilment.
Farmer’s struggles with alcohol became public when she was charged with driving while intoxicated in 1942. A year later, she was hauled back into court for breaching probation and failing to pay the entirety of her $250 fine. This, and an altercation with a hairdresser on the set of one of her movies, was enough to earn her a six-month prison sentence. A report in the St. Petersburg Times described the actor as dishevelled and disorderly when she appeared before the judge and claimed that she broke out into a fit of violence after demanding a lawyer, knocking two officers to the ground and sustaining injuries in the process.
Farmer’s family stepped in to convince the court to put the actor in a sanitorium rather than prison. Following a brief period in the institution, the 30-year-old was placed in the legal custody of her mother, who committed her to a mental hospital off and on for the following six years. Eerily foreshadowing the conservatorship scandal of Britney Spears more than half a century later, Farmer didn’t win back her autonomy until she took her mother to court in 1953 at the age of 40.
Farmer worked steadily for the remaining 16 years of her life in television and theatre, but a true comeback eluded her. Alcoholism remained a constant, and despite receiving a $3,500 advance to write her autobiography in 1968, she failed to complete the manuscript before her death from oesophagal cancer two years later. The money for the book was still on the table, however, provided her ghostwriter could finish the book herself.
It is here that the Frances Farmer myth began. The woman she had been collaborating with on the memoir appears to have invented large swathes of the book to ensure that the 400-page tome would make waves, and her gamble paid off.
Looking back on the book, its sensationalised claims are in keeping with the tenor of the 1970s, in which harrowing movies featuring brutal scenes of torture were a new and popular form of entertainment. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and I Spit on Your Grave, were only a few years away from being released, and the public seemed to have a ravenous appetite for stories of unspeakable physical violence and abject cruelty.
Shadowlands is even easier to debunk. Arnold’s allegations in the book were later revealed to be allegedly tied to a Scientology front group that has spent decades trying to discredit the psychiatric profession. Despite having no connection to the group or even the allegations, Farmer became a poster child of the movement after her death.
Frances Farmer’s legacy says more about the people and periods that shaped it than it does about the actor herself. Through each retelling of her story, the truth has been increasingly obscured. In the process, the woman who these mythologisers profess to be vindicating is only dehumanised further.
We will likely never know the complete truth of Farmer’s life. What we do know is that she was an intelligent free-thinker who took her profession seriously and turned her back on Hollywood. She was also one of the many victims of substance abuse and a patriarchal legal system. In her afterlife, Farmer has become one of the worst examples of how Hollywood can mythologise itself to death in an attempt to shed light on real and imagined tragedies.
