“I put liquor in my milk, in my coffee, and in my orange juice. What do you want me to do, starve to death?”
Beautiful and troubled, Frances Farmer had a career that derailed not long after leaving the station. A precocious girl, she won a national essay contest in high school for a piece titled “God Dies.” Farmer provoked further controversy in college with a publicized trip to the Soviet Union in 1935, when she visited the Moscow Art Theatre. Signed by a Paramount talent scout soon after, she despised Hollywood from the start and constantly bucked against the studio. Nonetheless, Farmer managed to get cast opposite major stars such as Bing Crosby, Tyrone Power, and Fred MacMurray; her finest moment was a double role in Howard Hawks’s Come and Get It (1936); Hawks declared her “the greatest actress I’ve ever worked with.” A failed marriage to actor Leif Erickson and professional frustrations led to increasingly erratic behavior; she was arrested for drunk driving in 1942 and for assault in 1943. The latter resulted in an involuntary commitment to a mental hospital, which led to seven years shuttling in and out of institutions. (Her mother recommitted her in 1945.) The 1982 biopic Frances depicts Farmer getting a lobotomy, but the scene was entirely fictional and all records show that she never underwent the procedure. Her final years were spent in Indianapolis, hosting Frances Farmer Presents, a weekday movie showcase.
HAVE YOU EVER HAD a broken heart?” The stunningly beautiful Frances Farmer was shouting after her recent arrest—her second in four months, to be exact. The first was on a charge of drunk driving; she’d been fined $500 and placed on probation. The second, in January 1943, was a bit messier. For one thing, nobody could say exactly what had happened. Farmer certainly couldn’t—she had been drinking far too much. Witnesses alleged she’d started a brawl in a restaurant and then run topless along Sunset Boulevard. Added to that, she hadn’t checked in with her probation officer, and the police had been looking for her for the last two weeks. When they finally found her, at the Knickerbocker Hotel, she did not go quietly.
At the police station, when asked her occupation, Farmer answered “cocksucker.”
Farmer’s six-year marriage to actor Leif Erickson had recently ended, but if her heart was indeed broken, there had been a number of wrecking balls. A few years prior, while playing Lorna Moon in a Group Theatre production of Golden Boy in New York, she had an affair with playwright Clifford Odets. Odets would later turn to screenwriting (Sweet Smell of Success) and name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The thing was, both Farmer and Odets were married to other people at the time, and Odets refused to leave his wife. Eventually, it would be Farmer he left—left feeling used and betrayed. It was then that problems with her temper and alcohol began to spiral out of control.
Witnesses alleged she’d started a brawl in a restaurant and then run topless along Sunset Boulevard. Added to that, she hadn’t checked in with her probation officer, and the police had been looking for her for the last two weeks.
In a Los Angeles courtroom on the morning after her second arrest, the presiding judge asked Farmer a few basic questions about what had transpired the day before. Had she been fighting? Yes, Farmer replied, she had. “For my country as well as myself.” Had she been driving a car (a violation of her parole)? No, Farmer replied. “But only because I couldn’t get my hands on one.”
After a series of such replies, the judge sentenced Farmer to 180 days in jail, which was commuted to a court-ordered commitment to a mental hospital. She left the courtroom and asked a police matron if she could use a phone. When told she couldn’t, Farmer punched the matron. Police had to put her in a straitjacket to get her to a cell. As they dragged her away, both from the courthouse and from Hollywood forever, Farmer tried to explain herself. “Have you ever had a broken heart?”