WILL THERE REALLY BE A MORNING?

If you don't remember and you probably won't, Frances Farmer signed a motion picture contract back in 1935 and made a number of minor movies. By 1945, her mother had her committed to a state asylum (their relationship was so filled with rotgut hatred that it does not need further definition) where an attendant told her ""here sooner or later everybody eats their own shit."" Indeed before she left some eight years later (paroled to take care of her mother who then needed her) she had eaten rats and there is one scene of a trustee's assault which is as outright depraved as anything you will read anywhere. Frances Farmer made a comeback of sorts on television; drank hopelessly through the subsequent years; finally found a few rehabilitative friends; and died of cancer in 1970. It is a terrible story; sad to say it is also terribly written (""I had run the gamut of life. I had lain in the whore's bed. I had rolled in human waste, etc."") which defeats its questionably redemptive purpose.