Happy 108th Birthday Frances Farmer

Today is the 108th birthday of Frances Farmer.  There is something about her, the biopic with Jessica Lange helped push her into cult icon status for a lot of people, including me.  Seattle girl, free thinker, rule breaker, and getting a raw deal from Hollywood all inspire other artists.  They understand the misunderstood.  She is the glamorous Hollywood misfit queen of all misfits.  I think of her several times a week when I walk by the employee side entrance to to the Olympic Hotel in Seattle, a door I know that she went through hundreds of times in the early 1950’s when she took a job sorting laundry after her release from a mental hospital.  How she must have felt going in that side door when only 14 years earlier, that very same hotel had held the world premier of her film “Come and Get It.”  I think of that aching feeling of betrayal and abandonment and the complexities of mental instability, it must have been crippling.  (It is a similar feeling that I have when I am driving home and pass Kurt Cobain’s old house and see the bench in “Kurt’s Park” covered with flowers and burning candles. Only fitting that I have connected the two, Nirvana has the song “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” in their catalog.)  Last year, the signal box outside Easy Street Record at the West Seattle Junction has been painted with her likeness. The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

Song:  Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle by Nirvana

This episode is also available as a blog post: http://waldina.com/2021/09/19/happy-108th-birthday-frances-farmer/

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