I think late 2019 was when I realized that depression doesn’t always manifest itself with dormancy. You don’t have to spend days in bed, binge eat/starve, and cry yourself to sleep to realize that you’re having a bad time. The fact is that I was not in a good place in late September when I was laid off from my job. However, I know that it was hard for outsiders to tell; I still was able to work my part time job, still able to look amazing (it’s such a curse to look this good) and still able to be a good friend. However, I realized that this blog suffered. It was something so personal and something that took me being brash and brave and I was unable to do it. I have such imposter syndrome that when the identity of employment was taken away I thought putting my interests on page was the gauche: who cares what I think?

I’ve written the skeletons of countless posts but I just couldn’t finish them. It’s only been in the last few weeks that I feel this haze around me truly open up. I’m so thankful that I’m able to have this moment where the things I love are returned to me. These thoughts of mental health made me think of Frances Farmer and do some research on her. It turns out we have the same birthday and were born exactly 30 years apart; isn’t that a freaky coincidence?!

Most of us know of Frances Farmer from the movie starring Jessica Lange. However, the book that that movie is based on, Shadowland, has since been known to contain huge lies about Frances’ life.

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Some facts are true in her known biography. She was born in Seattle. Her parents split up when she was four. Her mother was a dietitian and Frances and her siblings moved to LA so that her mother could pursue her career. Frances’ mother thought the children were interfering with her ability to work so they were sent back to Seattle to live with their father.

While in high school she entered an essay contest and won for her provocative essay “God Dies,” a Nihilist, Atheist piece that was extremely provocative for 1931.

In her final year of college at University of Washington, where she majored in Drama, she won a subscription contest for a leftist newspaper. The prize was a trip tot he Soviet Union. Much to the consternation of her mother, she went in 1935.

From there she stopped into New York where she met an agent who connected her to an LA talent scout and POOF, she has a 7 year contract with Paramount and is cast in her first movie in late 1935. As one does. She starred in a bunch of movies and tried to start a theater career when she felt pigeonholed by Hollywood, but quite frankly I feel like her movies may be the least interesting thing about her.

1942 started the tumultuous downturn of her life. In October of that year she was pulled over in Santa Monica for driving with her brights on in a wartime blackout zone. She was reported to be belligerent and drunk and was jailed and fined. She went to Mexico to film a movie in November and was forced to leave the country for her drunk and disorderly and disturbing the peace.

When she had not paid the rest of her fine from the drunk driving incident a warrant was issued for her arrest. While the warrant was issued a hairdresser accused her of hitting her in the face and dislocating her jaw and supposedly got into a bar fight and was found running down Sunset Boulevard topless. GOALS RIGHT? She barracaded herself in her room and the police had to break into the room and take her into custody kicking and screaming. She was equally beligerant at a hearing the next day (where the bulk of these iconic photos come from.)

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She avoided jail time by being committed to a sanitarium where she was eventually diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. While at the Kimball sanitarium she was forced to undergo Insulin treatments, a common practice at the time. Frances claims that she was forced to undergo this procedure for 90 straight days when she ran away to her sister, who called their mother, who made her way to California straight away.

Her mother fought to take control of her guardianship but the two fought constantly and bitterly. Eventually Frances was committed to Western State Hospital for more than 5 years. These years would be the store fabricated for the eventual movie “Frances.”

Eventually she gained her performing career in regional productions and tv work in the late 1950s. She even had her own show “Frances Farmer Presents” By the mid to late 1960s she became a resident actress of Purdue University. She died of cancer in 1970.

After her death, her treatment in Western State became the subject of multiple writings. Frances’ autobiography released after her death accused the hospital of unspeakable horror, including making her a sex slave. How much of that was added by the ghost writer after Frances’ death remains unclear. Shadowland, the book which Frances was based on, made the lobotomy claim. After his relationship to the film soured he claimed he made a lot up. No one in Frances’ family ever confirmed that the lobotomy took place.

What Frances represents has become more tangible than her actual career and what she represents is based on sensationalist lies. She had tragedy and sadness in her life but the most tragic aspect, her lobotomy, never occurred. It reminds me of the whole Dickensian trope that all sexworkers must die so that we maintain morality. A woman who insisted on being boisterous must literally have her brain examined and rearranged from within her head.