Frances Farmer (1) (1913–1970)

Well I think Frances Farmer was not crazy but she was a brat and a bit of a wuss puss when it came to her parents. Through out the book I just wanted to scream at her myself and tell her to grow some balls and a brain. She let her mother run over her constantly, I think what irked me the most is if you are trying to convey the message that you aren’t crazy when you get committed to the insane asylum stop acting crazy while the doctors are evaluating you. Good gosh don’t rip off your clothes and scream. I know you don’t want to be there but you might have a better chance of them sending you right back home if you don’t act insane from the start.… (meer)

This book is not what you think it is.

(And I've written about Frances Farmer in more detail here: http://www.themorningnews.org/article/burn-all-the-liars )

It isn't an autobiography of Frances Farmer so much as it's an autobio-biography. That is, it's a biography of Frances Farmer written by her best-friend, Jean Ratcliffe (to whom the book's dedicated -- !!) but based on FF's autobiographical manuscript. Here's the catch: you never know explicitly when it's FF speaking or when it's Jean Ratcliffe speaking as Frances. In this sense, "Will There Really Be a Morning?" is a lot like V. Nabokov's "Pale Fire", in that the reader, boggled by the constantly shifting narrative, is forced to confront the very nature of identity -- i.e., identity as "identity" -- and reality -- i.e., reality as "reality".

Let me explain.

Frances Farmer was born on September 19, 1913, "always to be the last of a long and bitter series of encounters between [my mother and father]", and died on August 1, 1970, choked to death by a rather virulent throat cancer, but "...I have faced more of death than at this threshold on which I now stand. I have died by the hour, by rote almost. For years I died; every day, every hour, every movement of the clock was a death. And knowing it, I can face this strangulation with ease. I know the terror of pain, as it now is, but locked away those years, forgotten in a madhouse, I suffered even more. I have God here, but He was never there."

"There" is the Western State Mental Hospital in Steilacoom, Washington, where FF spent nearly 10 years of her life, at age 30, after having spent the nearly 10 years prior to that as a prominent Hollywood and Broadway actress. Once hailed as "the next Greta Garbo", lover to Clifford Odets, famous Broadway playwright, FF's downfall began with a DUI that then initiated a bizarre series of events that culminated with FF left to rot in the Steilacoom mental hospital. It's arguable, if not provable, that FF was there because of her father and mother's scheming; and FF left the mental hospital at their behest, so that she could take care of them in their dotage. That FF survived both the institutionalization and the subsequent parental servitude to stage a middle-aged renascence is nothing short of miraculous. But then, FF's is an improbable life.

I first came across her name while listening to Nirvana's "In Utero"; the track "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle," was intriguing enough to make me google the name on yahoo.

The fascinating thing about "Will There Really Be a Morning?" is that it is FF's putative autobiography, but dedicated to "Jean Ratcliffe". Who is Jean Ratcliffe, and why didn't Nirvana write a song about her? As it turns out, FF had collaborated on the autobiography with the writer Lois Kibbee in the year or so before FF's death; however, when FF died, both the publisher and Kibbee lost interest in the project; and with the manuscript not yet finished, the burden of postmortem publication fell to Jean Ratcliffe, FF's BFF and non-lesbian life-partner. The publisher balked at publication -- with the author dead and therefore unavailable to flog sales on a cross-country tour, the book didn't stand much of a sales chance -- and so Ms. Ratcliffe needed to devise other means of garnering interest.

What then happened is the opposite of bowdlerization: Ratcliffe spiced up the autobiography with scenes of rough lesbian sex (albeit, unintentionally comical) in the institution, changed the relational dynamic between FF and her mother -- which at best was a sort of cold politesse, and was at worst, well, imagine a relationship where your mother consciously or sub-consciously schemes to have you *indefinitely incarcerated* -- into something of a simpering "Mommy Dearest" dynamic, and changed too many other various bits and pieces for hope to exist of ever disentangling the original from the final.

Basically, the problem is this: FF was a gifted writer, and Jean was a (well-intentioned) hack. The biggest differences between the two writers is tonal. One example will have to suffice:

At the book's end, FF discovers that she has cancer. Here's how she discloses this to the reader. FF's paragraph on page 376 of the 1983 Dell paperback -- "Buds were just beginning to come on the trees, and through the window I could see the gentle rolling hill that ran up from behind the house. New calves, clinging to their mothers, dotted the fields, and it came to me that all the words I could possibly combine could be simply put into one brief sentence. And it was then, for he first time in my life, I spoke the words 'I'm happy.' " -- this paragraph (and it's not the best of FF's writing, but it's good, especially the image of cows and calves "dotting the fields"), this paragraph is immediately followed by this paragraph: "Cancer! Not real! Not true! Not at first!"

Aside from violating the first rule of exclamation point use -- viz, only one per manuscript, and that for comical or histrionic but never serious effect -- the writing doesn't *say* anything, nor does it evoke an image. What follows that paragraph is more FF writing: "Even after I was told that a malignant tumor had diseased the esophagus and lay against the great artery, making an operation impossible, I still could not accept it."

And so goes the entire book. which is really more a literary mystery than an autobiography: which part is FF and which part is Jean? It gets really tricky when you realize the true and hopeless scope of the problem, best evinced with this (truly) final example, where FF describes the dilemma facing her as a theatrical actress being tempted with a chance at making it in Hollywood:

Here's the paragraph in its published form: "Hollywood was a golden trinket dangling in front of me, and I wanted to reach out and take it, for no matter how disturbed I was in having to lay aside the legitimate theater, the movie contract did offer me the first real security I ever had. I kept telling myself that I could always come back to New York."

Here's the same paragraph as it appeared in FF's manuscript: "Hollywood was a golden trinket dangling in front of me. I wanted to reach out and take it, yet I wanted something else: to be a serious actress in the legitimate theater. On the other hand, the movie contract would save me from the jaws of poverty. All right, I thought, if I don't make a success in Hollywood, I can always come back to New York and try again."

Again, the difference in the two examples is subtle and tonal, but FF's writing is much more engaging. It's as if FF and Jean Ratcliffe are engaged in a kind of operatic duet, where FF is the professional singer and JR a member of the audience, a tone-deaf hack, and the resulting duet is awful on the surface -- i.e, tonally uneven -- but at times there is an odd kind of beauty, too. That's the best metaphor I can come up with for WTRBAM?. If FF's life had played out differently, FF could have been a great writer, a Garbo of the literary world, so to speak. As it was, however, we have only these tantalizing bits and pieces.

All of this gets more interesting when you consider that "Shadowlands", the FF biography published by William Arnold in 1979 or so as a "correction" to "Will There Really Be a Morning?" (which by then had been exposed as a "Farmcliffe" enterprise), was even more error-riddled and infinitely less well-intentioned than the autobiography it was meant to correct. And plus this: it was exposed in the early 1980s as work of nearly complete fiction that was to have been used by the Scientologists (!) (for whom William Arnold was a shill) to discredit the entire medical field of psychology.

Worse, the "correction's" corrective, written and self-published by Frances's younger sister, Edith, entitled "Looking Back in Love", is nothing less than a vaguely written screed aimed at Jean Ratcliffe and the entire amorphous collective of world communists (!!); i.e., entirely "agenda"-driven.

So, the world still awaits the real story of FF. Will she finally have her revenge on Seattle? More like the opposite has been the case. The only real hope is for FF's original autobiographical manuscript to appear in published form. For that to happen, the manuscript will have to located. Lois Kibbee, who last possessed the manuscript, is dead. So is Jean Ratcliffe. That leaves the ghost of FF to direct a willing host to the right spot.

Help?… (meer)