Thank You: Toward a Buddhist Life of Frances Farmer (1913-1970)

Thank you, Frances

—Michael Ellis

We need love when we are most unlovable.

—Edith Farmer Elliot

To love something is to be grateful for it.

—Harry Allen Overstreet

Prologue

The Positive Uses of Error

The purposes and aims not undertaken in this essay are as important to identify at the outset as those I have undertaken. I intend neither to set the record straight on Frances Farmer's life nor, as Ralph Edwards announced in the 1990 rebroadcast of the 1958 This is Your Life, Frances Farmer, "to set the record straight once again" (emphasis added).¹ The record of Farmer's life has been repeatedly set straight, made crooked, then set straight again. Even certain basic facts have chronically resisted permanent correction in the popular imagination, as for instance whether or not she underwent a transorbital lobotomy while institutionalized in the Western State Hospital at Steilacom, Washington. No evidence supports this claim, and Farmer and her family denied the rumor. Yet the lobotomy legend perdures as a topos that paradoxically demeans by lionizing her in the arguably true but much more complex story of Farmer's medical victimization.

In my personal experience of casual conversations with friends, formal inquiry with others, and occasional accidental encounters, I have repeatedly heard this resistant myth of Farmer's lobotomy. While waiting in line to check out books at the University of Missouri Library in Columbia, Missouri, on November 25, 2008, for instance, I happened into conversation with a graduate student in Social Work. When she asked what I was working on and I replied, "Frances Farmer," she commented, "Oh, Farmer, the one who had the

Frances Farmer, Paramount Studio portrait, 1938

lobotomy. I remember my undergraduate Women's Studies Professor [at another institution] telling us about this operation performed on this difficult woman to control her." I corrected the lobotomy error, as teachers have a habit of doing, even outside the classroom. By now we had moved forward in line, the librarian had become part of our conversation, and so two people heard not only the record set straight, but also a brief history of the lobotomy urban myth, first popularized in 1978 in William Arnold's Shadowland, a life of Farmer described later by the author himself as substantively fictional. The graduate student seemed disappointed to hear my correction. The story from her teacher had served her well in ways I can imagine but will never know. Now I came along, accidentally, unbidden, telling her to change this story not only about Farmer but also about herself in some way—a story belonging to her and interconnecting her, her teacher, and Farmer. The librarian, a male, appeared somewhat interested in this conversation but not disappointed, as had been the student, by my correction.

Frances Farmer, after arrest in Santa Monica, 1942

Although neither person thanked me, I was grateful for this opportunity to correct mistaken biographical history. Throughout the rest of the day, this encounter arose now and again in my mind, combining with other observations and information that had been accumulating in thought and on paper for the preceding six months. This combinatory expansion cued me to focus on the need to rethink some fundamental premises of my work, and the next day I began writing this prologue. Rather than placing my chief efforts toward telling the story of Farmer's life in order to set the record straight once again, I decided that a more apt and potentially worthwhile aim would be to ask why her life has proved to be difficult to tell, why corrections, or at least certain corrections, haven't stuck, and what, by examining these difficulties and their historical traces, we can learn not only about Farmer, but also about those who have told, retold, and listened to renditions of her life. And thus, though there will be some biographical narration, identification of error, and correction, these activities are epiphenomenal to my main purpose. My procedure, shaped by...