William s arnold biography book

After about three days, I was rescued by the idea that I could actually do something about it. I could write a story about this forgotten psychiatric commitment, in light of her book. An op-ed piece. I could name its unnamed institution and maybe even some of the doctors and lawyers involved. You were thinking of a kind of feature book review?

Not exactly, because the book was more than a year old. But by this time, I had read that there was movie interest in the book. Charles Bronson wanted to produce it as a vehicle for his wife, Jill Ireland. I wanted to do a piece that would tie-in with that possibility. You know, like, tell how they were going to make a big movie about this horrific long-forgotten story in our civic past, and tell some of that story and question whether or not it could be true.

So how did you go about this? The first thing I did, after I returned from vacation, was to head straight for the P-I library to see what we had on her in our card files. I think I know what a newspaper card file is, but maybe you should explain it. It was like the card catalog you used to see in every public library, only the cards were a bit larger than the standard index-card size.

On them, generations of librarians had typed summaries of every story the newspaper had published about a certain person or subject. The system was very low-tech but also very efficient, with coded information about the editions in which the stories ran and the reporter and photographer involved. Did you expect to find much on her? Frankly, no.

I expected to find something about her early movie-star years and maybe the commitment. But I was bowled william s arnold biography book by what was there. Her cards just went on and on. And lots of them dealt with the period before she became a movie star: stories about the controversy she had aroused as a william s arnold biography book radical.

It was an incredible treasure trove of information. The number of words the P-I had devoted to Frances Farmer over the first thirty years of her life would fill a book. Would this be a different book than the autobiography? In many ways, yes. I could see that our files contained a great deal of material, whole chapters of her life, that was not covered by the autobiography.

Were there photos as well? It was as thick as the Tacoma phone book. Baby photos, elementary school photos, high school photos, college photos, all obviously given to the newspaper by her mother at various williams s arnold biography book over the years. Photos of the Russian trip, tons of publicity stills, photos taken at her commitment and inside the institution.

At this point, she had been dead for only three years. Surely there were people working at the newspaper who knew of her and her story. Amazingly few. My boss, a woman named Ruth Howell, had gone to school with her at the University of Washington and knew the general outlines of her story. And the newspaper librarian, Florence Frye, also knew of her.

But they were both women in their sixties. Otherwise, there was no sense of her at all. How could that be? How could anyone this famous, and this famous locally, be so completely forgotten? To what did these women attribute this strange oblivion? The librarian Florence Frye, who became a great ally to me, believed it was the stigma that earlier generations placed on mental illness.

As if it might be catching. What did Ruth Howell think? Frances Farmer might have been a Hollywood celebrity but she was also linked to a dark chapter of its labor history that it wanted to forget. She gave me quite an education on this subject. When did it first occur to you that maybe Frances Farmer had not been insane at all, that maybe she had been railroaded into that mental institution?

Pretty much right away. Understand, I was operating off her movie image: a persona that exuded not just patrician beauty but also intelligence, reason, emotional depth and idealism. No way could I accept the idea that such a vision could just, out of nowhere, go stark raving mad. I was prejudiced from the start and, over the next six months, as I read all our stories on her, and read her FBI file, and read her responses to her inquisitors in her kangaroo court of a commitment hearing, it was easy to find plenty of justification for my prejudice.

Only one. It was an interview with Lillian Farmer in which she goes on and on about how the Communists harangued her daughter into insanity and how lucky she was to be safely locked up in the Western State Hospital at Steilacoom, where they could no longer get at her. The author of this piece was the Ed Guthman? Yes, the same Ed Guthman who a couple years later would win a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering how a Washington State Un-American Activities committee had deliberately withheld information that would have cleared a University of Washington professor it had charged with being a Communist.

At this time he was national editor of the Los Angeles Times. You mention in the book, I believe, that you spoke to him. Did you tell Guthman what you were doing? You say you spent six months reading all this material you dug up in the newspaper file? Why so long? Was there really that much of it? This was in no way my fulltime job. I could only get at it when my other duties were done.

And, gradually, it became a sort of hobby that I let draw out. I mean I was really enjoying it, the mystique of it all. I was totally absorbed by her. I began making pilgrimages to the various places in the city she knew—the schools she attended and the house where she grew up in West Seattle. I would spend hours looking at her photos. I knew the theater very well.

I knew that very drinking fountain. I found myself returning to it again and again. Obsessed, you might say, by the ghost of this dead woman. Like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo. But you did eventually write an article. Why did you have to connive? Because, first of all, it was longer than possibly anything that had ever run in the paper before. It was also written in a rather unobjective way, in which the barely suppressed rage of the reporter and his sympathy for his subject were palpable—very much in the style of the New Journalism, which was not the house style at all.

Also, it was a huge slap in the face to many elements of the city and state government. What changed his mind? Doughty was an old-school journalist if there ever was one, but he was sensitive to the changing times and he sensed that this could be a splashy story. So he finally said it could run sometime—he was vague about when—but it would have to be cut way down, perhaps as much as by half, and divested of much of its New Journalism passion.

This, I assume, is where the conniving came in. Ruth Howell, the editorial page editor, also thought the piece would have to be diluted and cut way down. But I had an ally in her assistant and my direct superior, the third person in the department. He thought the piece was terrific and had to run as it was written. So we waited until a week when Howell and Doughty and even the publisher were all out of town and we snuck it into the Sunday paper, taking up one whole page and jumping it into another.

And no one noticed what you were doing? There was no one above us to notice. But that was not the end of the conniving. The day before the piece was to run, minutes before I was about to go to the back shop to make up the pages, my friend and ally in this snafu came back from lunch drunker than a skunk. Wait a minute. Back shop? Make up?

For those unfamiliar with the stone age of journalism, can you elaborate a little about this process? Okay, at this time—the first week of January, —the Seattle Post-Intelligencer operated exactly like a newspaper in the s. I wrote the story, on a typewriter of course, and then my editor edited it, pasted the pages together, rolled them up and sent them via a pneumatic tube to the composing room—the back shop.

Here, an operator typed the copy into a linotype machine that spit out the lines of type in rows, or galleys, of hot-metal slugs. Then a proof of the galleys was tubed back to the editorial-page office, which we read for mistakes and sent back. Then the printer made a page proof that we would read for more mistakes. Okay, I think I have that.

So you were about to make up the page and your colleague came back drunk. This was not unusual. It was an era when newspaper people tended to drink their lunches. But this particular newsman, my boss and friend and ally, had a real problem with it and he returned from this particular lunch with a drunken whim that my story needed to be suddenly reedited after it was in page proof.

He took out a pencil and started changing the wording and adding qualifiers and cutting the length of sentences and tossing out full paragraphs—in a way that, to my mind, utterly destroyed the piece. It would only have made him more belligerent. I knew him pretty well and this was his nature. Then what did you do? At this point, my duty was to return to the back shop with the page poof filled with his chicken-scratch editing and be in charge as the new lines of type were made and the printer substituted them for the old ones.

Then a new page proof would be made which I would read right there for any new typos. But what I did was none of the above. I simply approved the page the way it had been before my boss made his drunken changes. This was an unthinkable act of mutiny for which I could have been summarily fired. But the piece ran exactly as you wrote it? Exactly, and the morning it ran—a Sunday—as I gazed upon it in its full glory, I felt it was worth being fired for.

I knew it was going to have a seismic impact. Did it? When I drove to work the next morning—Monday—I heard three different deejays on three different radio stations talking about it. But in those days there was only three television stations, a smattering of radio stations and two newspapers. And the TV and radio stations took their lead from the newspapers.

So that morning the city was wired to Frances Farmer. What did your boss have to say to you? Who was calling? A mixture of people who were so moved by the story they felt they had to tell me. Among them were a number of people who had known Frances Farmer in various stages of her life and wanted to impart some information or anecdote about her. He was so taken by the story that he wanted to bounce his scheduled guests and have me for the entire show that day.

Where do I know that name? The Frances Farmer of my day there. In what way? I later stayed in contact with them and they were able to put me in contact with a lot of the former staff. Lewis who had been sneaked into the institution for clandestine sexual encounters with Frances and the other women patients. One of her rapists? He gave a detailed account of how this pimping operation worked and he broke down and wept as he related it.

I cried too. So did Thom Gunn. So did the rest of Seattle. Kurt Cobain brought me here. This is the second book published about the life of Frances Farmer. An interesting look at an intriguing woman, this biography reads almost like a mystery story. It was a quick read. Short, trashy, and entertaining. The author claimed later that much of it was fictionalized in order to claim copyright for the purpose of suing movie producers who used this bio for the film version.

This book delivered in answering that question. Random but great read. Mary Narkiewicz. Grueling account of the life of Frances Farmer. Brief chapters and the sad story just speeds along. Nicolas Martin. The things that were done to Farmer — by the legal system, psychiatry, her family, and herself — were appalling. To those add the fraud of this book by author Arnold, who admitted fictionalizing important aspects.

The real story was bad enough, but this fictionalized account is a disgrace. John Arnold. K Jukes. More novel than biography, he really did the dirt on her here. Was interesting but I think I will read more of her own writing to get an insight into her life.

William s arnold biography book

Couldn't feel morr blessed for having been born in the mid seventies! It 's so sad, so brutal Despite telling a quite sad story, Arnold has written "Shadowland" in a rather breezy style with very short chapters. For readability and interest, I'd give William Arnold's book about Frances Farmer more stars, but several details in the book have sparked controversy and charges that they're false.

I don't know the truth of the matter. No one seems to. I don't think there has been anything written about Frances Farmer that hasn't been criticized as at least part fiction, including a memoir that she wrote, unfinished at the time of her death and published post posthumously and doctored by a close companion. It's disconcerting. Frances Farmer grew up in West Seattle, maybe about five or six miles from where I live.

She's no longer remembered in Seattle or in almost any place else. But she was once famous. He named his daughter after her. So what happened to Frances Farmer? As alluded to earlier, no seems to have nailed down the facts. William Arnold attempts to tell her story in this book published in Arnold was a long-time movie critic for the "Seattle Post-Intelligencer," a print newspaper no longer published but still has a small on-line presence.

I read his reviews regularly; he was one of my favorite movie reviewers. So I give his book more credit than some do. Some basic biography seems to be agreed upon. Frances was an intelligent but not very popular student. When at West Seattle High School, she won a national writing contest for her william s arnold biography book, "God Dies," resulting from a disappointment about unanswered prayers.

It seemed she had help from others who sold in her name. At any rate, the prize was a trip to Russia. Her mother, a fervent anti-communist, forbid her to go. Frances went anyway and came back deeply moved by the poverty she saw there. Seattle was not impressed. Frances' great ambition was to be on the legitimate stage. Hollywood was only a way to get some fame and some money so that she could make it in New York.

You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. There are good sources of information about Frances Farmer, but Shadowland was meant to sell, not tell the real story of the beautiful, rebellious and highly intelligent FF. No doubt she was exploited and abused.

The real story is disturbing enough without Arnold's concoction. From the late 's to the early 40's, Frances Farmer was the most promising young Hollywood star and a gifted performer on the New York stage. Blessed with a sharp intellect, exceptional acting talent, and stunning beauty, she shot to the top of stardom in what seemed a Cinderella story and fascinated millions of fans.

However, Frances Farmer was a strong-willed, independent thinker at a time when such behavior, especially by a woman, was not generally accepted. She quickly clashed with her studio, the Broadway community, and the public over her associations with socialist and human rights causes. In both high school and college, her controversial religious perspective and politcal leanings had made powerful enemies in her hometown of Seattle, Washington with the political right and anti- communist vigilantes.

After becoming disallusioned with both Hollywood and Broadway, she encountered legal troubles with convictions for drunk driving and assault, though never allowed legal defense or advice. That this violatiion of basic rights could occur in the United States is almost unbelieveable. Yet, no evidence of intoxication was ever presented, and the assault on a female co-worker may very well have been caused by abuse of amphetamines, ironically recommended by a doctor to control her weight and available over the counter at a time when no one knew of the potential side effects.

Instead of serving her jail sentence, she mysteriously found herself forced into a public mental institution in her hometown known as Steilacoom - a place so brutal that it should go down in history as the equivalent of any Nazi concentration camp. The life of Frances Farmer is inseparable from the issues of psychiatric abuse of mental patients, freedom of religion and politics, and freedom of speech because it was her opinions and words that were used as a basis for her alleged insanity.

In essence, she was punished for her views and her outspokeness with six years of institutionalization in a hellhole incredibly understaffed, where the "worst" cases those considered too anti-social, violent, psychotic, criminals, senile, and retarded children were housed in a huge, grossly crowded room with a dirt floor and left to fend for themselves.

Nude patients screamed, cried, and fought with each other and the rats for the food that was routinely thrown on the floor for them - the same floor covered in urine and excrement. Patients took sexual liberties with each other, the strong terrorizing the weak, and many patients suffered from malnutrition and near starvation. The few interns who worked this dungeon were prison inmates on a work program, who supplemented their incomes by prostituting female patients, mostly to the soldiers at the local army base.

Some of the same soldiers glorified as heroes for WWII when their crimes made them unworthy of even being spit on. In fact, the institution was commonly referred to as Seattle's whorehouse, where women were systematically raped by drunken soldiers while orderlies held them down.