Saint Frances of Hollywood

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

Frances Farmer was a patron saint of nonconformity who lived in—and
was destroyed by—relentlessly conformist times. Idealistic,
re-bellious, and foul-mouthed, she was spectacularly unsuited to life as
a 1930s Hollywood diva. Her determination to abandon that life, rumors
of Communist ties, and the inexplicably malevolent actions of her mother
were among the forces that landed her in Steilacoom, a Washington State
psychiatric hospital where patients lived in appalling squalor and were
routinely brutalized. Farmer’s indomitable will survived years of

electroshock, hydrotherapy, insulin treatment, and massive doses of
experimental drugs—it did not survive the transorbital lobotomy she
received in 1948. A cowering and submissive travesty of her former self,
Farmer was pronounced “cured” and released in 1949. She remained a
burned-out shell until her death from throat cancer in 1970.

Blending fact and fiction, Saint Frances of Hollywood deftly dramatizes
the biographical highlights: Farmer’s youthful political activism, her
marriage to actor Leif Erickson, her association with the New York Group
Theatre, her disastrous affair with playwright Clifford Odets, her
arrest on assault charges, her harrowing life at Steilacoom, and her sad
postlobotomy existence. (A recurring line, “I’m a faceless
sinner,” neatly encapsulates the eerie divide between Farmer’s
successive lives as godless rebel and vacuous penitent.)

More polemic than psychological study, this briskly paced and highly
episodic two-act play (there are 51 scenes) sketches Farmer’s tragedy
in broad, bold strokes. In an author’s note, Clark calls her heroine
“an unrecognized saint of the 20th century.” Unquestionably, Farmer
was a martyr to the repressive institutions of her time, particularly
the psychiatric establishment. It is also the case that, as a dramatic
subject, martyrdom lends itself to the kind of stylization featured in
Saint Frances. The difficulty is that while a stylized presentation
sharpens our outrage at the forces pitted against the titular heroine,
it also screens out nuances and prevents us from seeing Frances and her
adversaries as flesh-and-blood characters. Instead of human beings, it
gives us emblems. In the play’s closing line, Clark grants her
lobotomized heroine a moment of glorious defiance that the real-life
Frances could not have imagined, much less achieved.