Despite her madness, Francis
Farmer was a brilliant person. During her final year of college in 1935, she
won a subscription selling contest for the leftist newspaper, The Voice of
Action. Her prize was an all-expense-paid trip to the Soviet Union. Francis, a
drama major, accepted the prize, but, as she later said, only because she wanted to visit the pioneering
Moscow Art Theatre.
However, there may have been
another reason she even entered the contest. Francis was the star of the University
of Washington theater and the prize student of UW drama instructor Sophie Rosenstein. She
wanted to got to New York and work I theater but had no way to get there. Her
family was, like so many others during the depression, strapped for cash. But the prize she won, the trip to Moscow, included a round-trip bus ticket from Seattle
to New York, to Moscow by steamer and back again, to New York and then Seattle.
Her mother, who may well have
been insane herself, was an anti-Communist zealot who was opposed to Francis’s
trip to Russia, saying her daughter had
been corrupted by radical teachers, meaning Sophie Rosenstein.
"The Soviet dagger has struck deep in the
heart of America," she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1935 "If
I must sacrifice my daughter to Communism I hope other mothers save their
daughters before they are turned into radicals in our schools."
Local leaders denounced the trip
as a Bolshevik propaganda ploy and the YMCA of Seattle, which had rented space
to the Voice of Action for a banquet honoring Farmer, cancelled the event.
Francis was “an emotional lefty”
but not a communist and she denied ever having been a communist. Considering her
breathtaking straightforwardness on all things, it’s unlikely she was lying
about that
Francis said in a Seattle Times
article titled "Why I Am Going to Russia," that "I'm sorry
mother is objecting to the trip, but it is a splendid chance to further my
dramatic career to see one of the ten most important theatrical centers in the
world was "the best thing that could happen to me."
Later she said that her real
objective had been simply to get to New York and that the Russia trip was
"nothing more than a convenient step up a dedicated and ambitious
ladder"
Oddly enough, the Russia trip
brought her to the studios attention.
She eventually became a contract player
with Paramount Pictures at $100 a week. By 1936 she was a mega star and then
her life began to unravel. By the 1940s she was out the outs with Hollywood and
was reduced to making low budget stock films. By 1942, her mental health was
slipping, her drinking increased and she developed a dependency on
amphetamines. On October 19, 1942, a cop in Santa Monica stopped her for driving with her
bright headlights on in a wartime "dim-out" zone. She got into with
the cop and was arrested on charges of
drunken driving, driving without a license, and failure to obey dim-out
restrictions. She was fined $250 and sentenced to 180 days in jail, suspended.
She failed to pay the complete fine (she was running out of money)
In January 1943, while filming a
low budget bomb called No Escape, on the first day of filming, she slapped a
studio hairdresser, causing her to fall and dislocate her jaw. A complaint was
filed for assault which is when the cops found the outstanding warrant she had
for failure to pay her fine from the drunk driving charge. She was arrested at
her hotel later that night and booked into jail on charges of assault and
violation of probation.
In court, when the judge asked
her if she'd had anything to drink since last appearing in court in October,
she said, "Yes, I drank everything I could get, including
Benzedrine." When he asked if she had been in a fight in a Hollywood
nightclub the previous evening, she said, "Yes, I was fighting for my
country and myself."
She was sent to the slammer for 180-days.
On the way out of the court, she started
a fight, knocked a cop to the floor and bruising another officer and a
matron before she was carried out of the courtroom, screaming, "Have you
ever had a broken heart?"
Her mother would blame her
daughter's breakdown on international Communism.
Farmer spent a total of two nights
in jail and then, after the intercession of a psychiatrist she was transferred
to the psychiatric ward of the Los Angeles General Hospital and then to the screen
actors' sanitarium at La Crescenta in the San Fernando Valley.
She would spend most of the next
seven years in mental institutions, beginning diagnosed as "manic
depressive psychosis," a "split personality,"
"schizophrenia with paranoid illusions [sic]," or simple depression. Her
treatment included insulin shock.
As for being blacklisted, that never
happened. Due to her fragile mental health, she spent most of the 1950s in
mental asylums and developing accurate alcoholism. She was discharged from state
jurisdiction in 1952 after confinement to a mental asylum. She spent most of
1953 sorting laundry at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle. By 1957 she had relocated
to Eureka, California, where she found work as a bookkeeper and secretary at a
commercial photo studio.
In August 1957, she returned to
the stage in New Hope, Pennsylvania, for summer stock production and in 1958 appeared
in several live television dramas and made her last film that same year.
In a December 1957 interview with
Modern Screen, Farmer said: "I blame nobody for my fall. I had to face
agonizing decisions when I was younger. The decisions broke me. But, too, there
was a lack of philosophy in my life. With faith in myself and in God I think I
have won the fight to control myself."
In her last days she became more
erratic, demonstrating outbursts of temper and sometimes showing up for work
drunk. She died of esophageal cancer, on August 1, 1970, six weeks before her
57th birthday. leaving unanswered many questions about the sad trajectory of
her life.