Random Film of the Day — Frances (1982), Graeme Clifford’s biographical drama about Hollywood actress Frances Farmer: a star in 1936, a shattered career, a psychiatric hospital, an early death. Jessica Lange played the lead and received an Oscar nomination for it; Kim Stanley, who played her mother, received another. That evening, both went home without an award for Frances: Lange took the statuette for her supporting role in Tootsie, while Stanley lost in the same category — to her.
What hooked me was something else: how the film ends. In the finale, Farmer is laid on a table and an instrument resembling an awl is driven through her eye socket into her brain: a lobotomy. The scene is staged as the resolution of the whole picture — it explains why the heroine leaves the hospital broken, and why what follows is mere survival instead of life. The problem is that there is no documentary evidence for the scene. It was invented by a journalist who wrote the book the film supposedly was not based on — and invented deliberately.
Which led to the question I carried further: what remains of a person’s biography if its central episode is an author’s conjecture, and that person left not a single record of what happened to her?
Frances Elena Farmer was born on September 19, 1913, in Seattle, into a family whose parents split up when she was four. Her mother, Cora Lillian, worked as a dietitian and ran a boarding house; her father, Ernest, was a lawyer. The children were shuttled between relatives and cities. At school, Farmer was close to her English teacher, Belle McKenzie, who submitted her class essay, titled “God Dies,” to a national contest. The essay won the first prize of one hundred dollars, while conservative Seattle newspapers and church circles turned it into a scandal: a schoolgirl had declared that God did not exist.
In 1935, already a student in the University of Washington’s drama department, she won a trip to the Soviet Union — the contest was run by the Communist newspaper The Voice of Action. Her mother was horrified and went to the newspapers, and the story of “a young star leaving under the wing of the Communist Party” spread through wire services across the country. Farmer went anyway. She saw Moscow, Leningrad, and collective farms, then returned and signed with Paramount on her twenty-second birthday.
Things moved fast after that. In 1936 — Rhythm on the Range with Bing Crosby, then Samuel Goldwyn’s Come and Get It, in which she played both mother and daughter and was compared to Greta Garbo. In 1937, she left for New York to perform in Odets’s Golden Boy — 248 performances — turning down a role in Beau Geste that went to Susan Hayward and made her a star. Paramount built her a brand: “the star who didn’t go Hollywood.” She wore tweed skirts, gave no interviews about her private life, and once, to get the studio off her back about looking more glamorous, bought a coat from the costume department that Marlene Dietrich had worn before her.
At the same time, she was active in left-wing politics: committees supporting strikers, fundraising for the Spanish Republicans, backing Communist publications. Her FBI file, dated April 18, 1941, contains thirteen instances of ties to such organizations, and the head of the local office calls her “a very active and convinced member of the Communist Party in Hollywood.” Publicly, she said something else: “I am not a Communist.” That discrepancy would surface later — and cost her dearly.
On October 19, 1942, a Santa Monica patrol stopped her for using high beams during a blackout: the war was on, and the West Coast lived under blackout rules. The officers decided she was drunk. She mouthed off, spent the night at the station, was fined 500 dollars, and had her license suspended. Three months later, she had not paid the remainder of the fine, and an arrest warrant was already sitting in court — just as a hairdresser appeared at the studio claiming that Farmer had struck her in the face and dislocated her jaw.
On January 13, 1943, she walked off the set and collapsed in her hotel room. The police came to take her away, and she did not surrender: they dragged her from the lobby, screaming and kicking. The next morning in court, she hurled an inkpot at the judge and, when asked about drinking, replied that she added liquor to milk and coffee and also took Benzedrine regularly. The judge gave her 180 days. As they led her from the courtroom, she managed to shout: “Have you ever felt your heart break?”
Then came psychiatry. Through a relative who was a deputy sheriff, she was transferred to the psychiatric ward of Los Angeles General Hospital, where she was diagnosed with “manic-depressive psychosis, probably a precursor of overt dementia praecox” — what schizophrenia was called then. Then came Kimball Sanitarium in San Fernando, insulin shock therapy — patients were given a horse-sized dose of insulin to induce coma and convulsions — and a diagnosis of “paranoid schizophrenia.”
Her mother secured guardianship and took her daughter to Seattle. In March 1944, the King County court, on the testimony of two psychiatrists, declared Frances insane and sent her to Western State Hospital in Steilacoom — a state hospital for the mentally ill, thirty-five miles from the city.
After three months of electroshock therapy, doctors declared her “completely cured” and returned her to her mother. One of the psychiatrists who signed the assessment even gave a speech about the triumph of the state’s public-health education. A year later, she was back in the hospital; another year later, she was released on bail; and at the end of 1946, she returned for a third time — now classified as a “recidivist,” without a review of her case, straight into the old barracks for chronic patients. She did not leave until March 1950.
Western State in the forties had 2,736 patients — five hundred more than its capacity. The staff included fifteen registered nurses and twenty-three student nurses; National Committee for Mental Hygiene standards called for one hundred and seven. There were fourteen doctors, against a minimum of twenty. Patients were put to bed at four in the afternoon and kept there for twelve hours. In March 1947, a fire destroyed part of the buildings, along with patients inside them.
In February 1949, reporter Lucille Cohen put an exposé on the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: patients slept in unheated courtyards beneath tarps, beds stood jammed together, staff lived in a basement with collapsing floors. Superintendent William Keller replied that repairs required eight million dollars the legislature would never provide, and added: “People seem more interested in how cheaply the mentally ill can be kept than in how well.”
Against that backdrop, surgery that promised to send a patient home looked like a solution. Walter Freeman, a neurologist with no surgical training, turned transorbital lobotomy into an assembly line: an awl-like instrument under the eyelid, against the upper wall of the eye socket, a blow from a mallet, a twist — and the connections between the frontal lobes and the thalamus were severed. No anesthesia, operating room, or neurosurgeon was needed: electroshock instead of anesthetic, a mallet instead of a scalpel, and the procedure itself run like a vaccination clinic.
Freeman’s slogan sounded exactly like an administrative report: “Lobotomy gets them home.” Over four decades, by various estimates, he performed up to four thousand operations, two and a half thousand of them with the “ice pick”; in 1967, after a patient died of a hemorrhage, he was stripped of his right to operate.
At Western State, he demonstrated the method three times: on thirteen patients on August 19, 1947, then on October 15, 1948, and July 7, 1949. One photograph survives from the final visit, later reproduced in every textbook history of psychiatry: Freeman, instrument in hand, standing over an unconscious woman. According to archival records, Western State performed 252 prefrontal and transorbital lobotomies between July 1942 and June 1953.
In January 1974, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a major piece, “The Dark Odyssey of Frances Farmer” — a dissection of the actress’s “autobiography,” published two years earlier, and a demand for answers about the atrocities described in it. Its author was young editorial writer William Arnold, who had seen Come and Get It at a local theater two years before and wondered why he had never heard of its star. In the newspaper archive, he found a whole folder: clippings spanning forty years, letters from Farmer’s mother to the editor, a copy of the court ruling declaring her insane.
The responses brought him two sources with opposite versions. Farmer’s sister, Edith, insisted there had been no abuse in the hospital. Teacher Belle McKenzie advised him to look into the political angle: McCarthy, the left-wing past, revenge. Arnold dug for four years, changing jobs along the way. One day, someone called and gave him a name — Walter Freeman. At the time, he did not know the name.
He found a perfect gap in the story. Edith said that at the end of 1948, Keller called the family and said the case was hopeless and that Farmer ought to be lobotomized. Her mother made a scene, the doctors backed down — and a few months later, Farmer was discharged as cured. There was too little time between “hopeless” and “completely healthy.” Arnold looked for a record of the operation and found neither record nor witness. Then he made the move that would later cost him his reputation: he wrote the book as a first-person detective story, where the lobotomy remained a possibility the narrator could neither prove nor rule out.
Shadowland came out in June 1978, went through six printings in its first month, and topped nonfiction lists. Four years later, Universal released Frances — with the same resolution, one that had existed in no source before the book. Mel Brooks was the producer, uncredited; the screenwriters claimed it was all their own research. Arnold and the producer of The Exorcist, who had bought the book rights, sued.
The case was heard in federal court in Los Angeles in the summer of 1983 and became one of the most discussed show-business trials of the time: the plaintiffs insisted that the book was a “fictionalized” work and therefore deserved the protection accorded fiction.
Judge Malcolm Lucas left the defense unchanged and, in his ruling, went after precisely that position: the book had been presented to the public as nonfiction, all promotional material and reviews treated it as a true story, and the plaintiffs had never hinted at fiction anywhere before the trial — adding separately: “The evidence at trial showed that parts of the book were fabricated by Arnold out of whole cloth.”
What is more interesting is this. In court, the studio argued that the lobotomy was a historical fact in the public domain and produced its own evidence that the operation had indeed taken place. Outside court, the same people insisted that the book had not been a source for the film at all. Both claims defended the same side, but they can coexist only one at a time.
Then the story entered culture. Kurt Cobain, who read Shadowland in school and reread it for years, wrote “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” for In Utero. French singer Mylène Gautier took the stage name Mylène Farmer in her honor. And an organization created by Scientologists to fight psychiatry used Farmer for years as its chief poster-child for the horrors of psychiatry — tellingly, it is mentioned in Arnold’s acknowledgments.
The most serious counterargument came later, and from another direction. Musician and historian Jeffrey Kauffman was the first to gain access to Farmer’s medical and court documents and published an analysis titled “Shedding Light on Shadowland.” His case is built like a reconciliation of lists.
Western State preserved everything relating to Freeman’s visits: correspondence with Superintendent Keller, reports, photographs, newspaper clippings. According to those documents, Freeman operated there on August 19, 1947, October 15, 1948, and July 7, 1949. There are name-by-name lists of patients operated on — and Farmer is not on any of them. More than that, Kauffman argues that throughout her time at Western State, she was never operated on at all, for any reason.
Charles Jones, a psychiatrist trained in the method who had assisted Freeman, confirmed the same thing in writing to the King County Medical Society in 1987 — and added that he had already told Arnold so while he was gathering material. Nurses from the lobotomy ward told the newspaper the same thing in 1983: “I worked with all the patients after lobotomies, and Frances Farmer was never admitted to that ward.”
And there is one more argument, the one that seems strongest to me. Freeman kept records with manic thoroughness and loved publicity: he traveled the country, operated for free, invited reporters and photographers, collected case histories as marketing material. In his archives — both published books and private papers — Farmer’s name never appears even once.
Would a man who could not help boasting about Rosemary Kennedy’s lobotomy have kept quiet about a Hollywood star who returned to work? There is also a formal detail: Freeman considered the method suitable for cases lasting less than a year, while by 1947 Farmer already had more than four years of manifest psychosis behind her.
The family was against it too. Farmer’s mother was her guardian from 1943 to 1951, and relatives said that a lobotomy had been proposed and they refused — her lawyer father even threatened legal action if doctors began administering any treatment at all without their consent.
That still leaves the question Arnold began with: why was a “hopeless” patient discharged as cured a few months later? The answer turned up in the dullest part of the archive. At the end of 1949, Lillian suffered a stroke, her father’s health was failing, and the older children were busy with their own lives. In mid-March 1950, Ernest wrote Western State asking that his daughter be sent home: she was needed as a caregiver. A week later, the request was granted. There was no miracle — only correspondence between two elderly people who needed help.
And yet Arnold has one card left to play. Five former hospital employees recalled seeing Farmer with Freeman or his trainees; three said Freeman had remained alone with her in a procedure room. At the trial, Freeman’s son stated that his father had told him about performing the operation. In a 2017 interview, Arnold stuck to his line: nothing from Farmer’s life in the book had been invented, and after thirty years the lobotomy seemed more likely to him, not less. There he also said the sentence that, for me, is this entire story: he deliberately left five percent doubt because he decided doubt would help the story rather than harm it.
There is another thread, without which none of this can be understood. Farmer began an autobiography three times and never completed one herself. She made her third attempt in 1968, received a 3,500-dollar advance from Putnam’s, and enlisted the help of Lois Kibbee, a New York actress and writer. Kibbee came to visit, recorded Farmer’s stories on tape, and took the reels back to New York to transcribe them. The work went badly: Farmer remembered entire years of her life only in fragments, while her neighbor and friend Jean Ratcliffe, in whose home it all took place, did not get along with Kibbee. Kibbee left the project.
Farmer died of esophageal cancer on August 1, 1970. The book Will There Really Be a Morning? came out two years later, and the question of who wrote it remains open to this day. Kibbee insisted that its substantive basis was her interviews and tapes. An editor at Putnam’s was certain that Ratcliffe had written the entire text. Ratcliffe herself said that only the final chapter, about Farmer’s death, was hers.
In his analysis for The Morning News, Matt Evans described the text as the record of three women speaking in the first person, “I am Frances Farmer”: Farmer herself, who knew how to write; actress Kibbee, who knew how to imitate; and the loud, rough-edged Ratcliffe. The book’s tone veers from tearful to dry, from comic to ghastly — as a text assembled by different hands should. And this is what matters: this very book, in which the voices of three authors are mixed together, served as evidence for some and proof of forgery for others.
The primary sources, meanwhile, disappeared. In Kibbee’s archive at the University of Washington, Evans found fifteen folders of material and twelve tapes: nine with Farmer’s dictation, and three on which she, already gravely ill in March 1970, reads her own medical records aloud — crying and drinking. Kibbee returned all of the materials to Ratcliffe in the fall of 1971. Ratcliffe died in May 1987; the relative who cleared out her apartment immediately after the funeral found nothing connected to Farmer. The archive that reached the producers of Frances in the eighties was, according to studio employees, sent to storage and perhaps lost forever.
Which means that the only source in which Farmer speaks about herself in her own voice — twelve tapes — is unavailable today. All we have is a text in which her voice has already been rewritten by two other people.
It seems impossible now to determine whether the operation took place — not because the evidence conflicts, but because nobody has seen the necessary document since the seventies. The operation list from Steilacoom does not contain her surname, and that is the only answer that can be verified at all. Everything else is a matter of faith: whom we are willing to take at their word. What remains is a strange asymmetry: Farmer sat down three times to write her own life and never finished a line, while the most memorable episode of that life was invented by someone who never saw her even once.