Will There Really Be a Morning, by Frances Farmer
This is one of the best autobiographies I have read in my life, and a fine piece of literary work by a Hollywood actress who endured so much; she had so much to offer and yet suffered throughout her life due to heavy alcohol abuse and the betrayal from her own parents. Her relationship with her mother was strained and torn by strife since childhood. Alcohol was the beast which controlled her life. Many of her close business associates also took advantage of her situation. Her irrational behavior with law enforcement officials did not help either. Frances Farmer was a fighter in life and kept fighting much of her life. Her experience at the psychiatric wards in sanitarium is vividly described and the abuses that occur there is experienced by a few and long forgotten by others, but women like Frances Farmer survived and lived to tell her story.
The book describes pretty honestly the reasons for her rise and fall from grace. Some not so honorable things she did in her life have been taken out of this book. Author Kenneth Anger, in his book, "Hollywood Babylon" researched her life and discovered that she had tremendous outbursts at the police. For eight years she was an inmate of a state insane asylum; she was sexually and physically abused, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food, and living in the filthiest conditions ever possible. She was chained, strapped and half drowned in ice baths. She says that there is no victory in survival, only grief of having to live through such horrors.
She made 19 movies and three Broadway shows between the ages of 21 to 28, and her career was fast paced and she could not handle the pressures of Hollywood. She was highly disliked in the industry by her business associates. Her life reached a frightening climax when she was arrested for a minor charge of driving with car lights in a dim-out zone in Santa Monica, California, during war time. This scandal was printed nationwide, and later she failed to report to a parole officer. Arrested again at Knickerbocker hotel in Hollywood, and from then on everything turned violent. Some of the problems were caused by the law enforcing officers themselves for not informing her why she is being arrested, and giving her little time to get dressed in her own hotel room when they broke open the door when she was asleep naked. Even the judge was cruel in giving her maximum sentence. She went volcanic and started destroying the court property and in a fit of rage threw an ink bottle right smack into judge's face. She entered her occupation in police records as "c**k-sucker." Her violent behavior did little to ease off things either.
When she was an undergraduate student at the University of Washington, Seattle campus, she won a contest to visit Moscow. In high school, she wrote an essay called "God dies" for a National Scholastic essay contest, a well-respected educational publication and won the contest and became a national winner. She enjoyed working on Broadway than doing movies in Hollywood; she claimed after doing her first movie "Too many parents," she sold her soul for the almighty dollar. But when she became famous she started reading literature voraciously and built herself a solid well-rounded personal library. She spent more on literature than on her wardrobe. For the movie, "Come and Get it," she devoted more time than any other movie of her career. Set in 1890s, she had to wear stiff corset and high laced shoes. She spent all her spare time living in them and practiced her voice to play both mother and daughter. She even went into red-light district in Los Angeles, disguised herself to study the ladies and their business practices. She completely immersed herself in the role of studying from every angle. As an actress she was reaching motion picture zenith and as a woman, she was plunging deeper and deeper pits of despair.
After her release from sanitarium, she worked as valet girl to pick up laundry from the guests of a hotel in Seattle for 75 cents per hour and briefly married a man after one date which ended up in disaster. Then she moved to Eureka, California with just $50 and start working as a typist for commercial photographer. She started to visit liquor stores and bars daily to buy her alcohol supplies. Later she worked at Sheraton Hotel in San Francisco as a reservation clerk for $7 a week that is when she gets a break after a call from Ed Sullivan Show to appear on his show. In one of her confessions in the church (after her conversion to catholic faith), she confesses to six abortions to which the priest reacts unpleasantly. She dies at relatively young age due to esophageal cancer.
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