Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 18, 1994 TAG: 9404190028
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By WILLIAM ARNOLD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
This note actually had been at the top of my to-do list for weeks, months even, almost a full year since I learned that the rock star was eager to talk to me about ``Shadowland,'' a book I'd written in 1978 about an ill-fated Seattle movie star of the late '30s named Frances Farmer.
I never got around to returning Cobain's call, and now I'll never know what was on the man's mind, though I can guess. There is plenty of evidence that the story of that earlier Seattle celebrity had haunted Cobain for much of his young life.
The deluge of Cobain coverage hasn't picked up on this obsession, which he never disguised and which seems to be a key to understanding his character.
Cobain's best song on Nirvana's last album was called ``Frances Farmer Will Get Her Revenge on Seattle.'' He often spoke of a psychic connection with the dead actress, and even named his daughter after her. He married a woman who is often compared to Yoko Ono, but who looks and acts more like Frances Farmer than any Seattle performer since the real thing.
Who exactly was Frances Farmer?
Very briefly, she was an extraordinary woman who provoked two civic scandals as a West Seattle schoolgirl in the 1930s - one involving a prize-winning essay embracing atheism, the other a trip to the Soviet Union sponsored by the Communist Party - and who later became one of the most outspoken and controversial movie stars in Hollywood history.
Utterly uncompromising, pathologically honest, given to four-letter expletives, and variously denounced as a communist, feminist and lesbian, Farmer became snarled in personal problems in the early '40s. The right-wing Seattle establishment took it as an opportunity to railroad her into Western State Hospital. She spent six hellish years in that public institution in its worst snake-pit days, until she was lobotomized and set loose in the early '50s, a shadow of her former self. She died of cancer in 1970.
It's the ultimate Northwest horror story, and yet there is something powerful and appealing about it. At its center is a heroine, an authentic martyr, a figure of mythic proportions.
Farmer was a talented, beautiful, exquisitely enigmatic woman who was persecuted for what, in retrospect, seemed her very best qualities, and who was finally destroyed by those who couldn't make her conform to their idea of being ``normal.''
In the years since the book was published, the story has inspired three movies, three stage plays, a musical that didn't quite get to Broadway, a record album, a half-dozen songs and a large cult of fans, mostly young people, many of them troubled, some with an almost religious fascination with Farmer's legend. They see in her life a justification for the belief that they too are being persecuted for their higher qualities.
I've heard several versions of when and how Kurt Cobain became one of these people. The most likely is that he just happened to pick up the book in the Aberdeen library when he was a skinny high school outsider, and instantly identified with her tragedy.
When his band started to hit it big in Seattle, I started hearing stories of this rising rocker and his special interest in the Frances Farmer insanity case - that he was doing his own research into it, that he thought he was related to the judge who committed her, that he was desperate to learn more.
In the last years of Cobain's life, his fascination with Farmer is said to have become even stronger. From his punkish-honesty-meant-to-shock to his outbursts of violence, Cobain's behavior might be interpreted as the actions of a man determined to embody the spirit of Frances Farmer. It was during this time that Cobain let it be known to me that he would like to talk about her.
Why didn't I jump at it?
The reasons are complicated, but it boils down to this: It's a subject I just don't enjoy talking about. My own obsession with Farmer had been purged long ago by writing the book, there was the lingering sting of two painful lawsuits associated with the 1982 movie version, and the dozen impassioned letters and phone calls I still get every week are an unending burden.
There is also an element of frustration and guilt over the fact that the book seemed to be misunderstood by most of these people who are so devoted to it. Written in the first-person and structured as a novel, it was never meant to be ``objective'' journalism or standard biography. It is the story of a reporter who falls in love with a dead woman, who looks for and finds evidence of her martyrdom, but who realizes finally that the ``truth'' of her life - any life - is probably unknowable.
Even so, when Nirvana's ``In Utero'' album came out last fall, I felt I should talk to the guy. His song ``Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle'' seemed to me a suicide note, a statement that he intended to martyr himself, to avenge Farmer (``come back as fire, to burn all the liars, and leave a blanket of ash on the ground'').
The song hit me like a brick, but I still never made that call, even though I had his home phone and fax numbers, even though I knew he was back in town, even though I meant to. I was too busy and then I was out of the country for a month, and then it was too late. Maybe that was all destiny.
In some delusion of grandeur, I may be overestimating Cobain's Frances Farmer fixation and its place in the puzzle of his life and death. And I don't know what I would have said to him that could conceivably have had any effect on the events of the other week.
But if I had a chance to talk to him today, I would tell him what our odd relationship has left me with: When you compose a song or make a movie or write a book, you invariably influence people in ways you can't possibly imagine. And with that, you assume a moral responsibility that should not be taken lightly.
I would also tell him what I would say to those millions of teen-agers who will now be influenced by the myth of Kurt Cobain: It is a big mistake to judge your own life by the life of someone else, particularly a celebrity. Even the most appealing, soothing and seemingly positive of myths can be, if embraced too fervently, enormously destructive.
William Arnold writes for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
New York Times News Service
by CNB