Couldn’t you just ignore the letters and calls?

I could ignore the regular bundle of mail and phone messages that was forwarded from McGraw-Hill but most of it came to the P-I, where I was still a columnist. I couldn’t not answer my phone. I couldn’t not open my mail. And I wouldn’t know what it was until I saw that fateful first line: “I just read your book Shadowland.”

 

After which, with the letter in hand, you had to keep reading?

The problem was that these letters were not hand-scrawled nothings or the kind of dashed off one-liners you would get in the e-mail era. Overwhelmingly, they were thoughtful, well-written, neatly typed communications from people who deserved a response.

 

What, precisely, was the nature of these letters and calls?

They tended to fall into three categories. The first was from people who had just read the book, felt kicked in the stomach by it and wanted—no, needed—to connect with me and share their grief. Embedded in these was always a question that was not rhetorical and seemed designed to establish some sort of personal bond or relationship.

 

What was the second category?

These were from people with some experience of mental illness. People in some level of treatment or facing a stay in a facility and fearful they might end up like Frances Farmer. They were hoping I could help them. Often I would get calls from people recently arrested or facing a civil commitment who wanted me to get them out of it. Also in this group were those with a troubled loved one caught up in the mental health system, people who were distrustful of psychiatry but knew nowhere else to turn and wanted my advice. These were the most agonizing.

 

And the third?

The third group were people who wrote or called to point out a mistake or typo in the book or to offer some new information or theory about Frances Farmer they had stumbled upon or obtained from personal experience or had inherited from their parents. Also in this miscellaneous group were a surprising number of letters commenting on or asking questions about the law suit. For decades afterward, I was getting gentle commiserations or gentle inquiries about it, and I still do. It has its own cult following.

 

Did you try to answer these letters?

I did, especially at first, especially those from the family members. But as the months turned into years and there was little ebb in the flow, it was a losing battle. I would answer one or two a week and put the others I intended to answer onto the stack that kept growing until I would finally shuffle it into a box just to get it out of sight. Then a new stack would begin. It was oppressive.

 

Did any of these fans try to seek you out in person?

All the time. I was easy to find. And they would come from all over. When someone makes a cross-country trip just to see you it’s hard to say no. Sometimes they would show up at my house. I’ll always remember this one obviously unbalanced fellow appearing at my door late one night. He wanted to talk to me about the book. It was scary.

 

Were any of these encounters with your readers pleasant?

Of course. Many of them. There was one very intelligent and sincere Frances Farmer fan from Indianapolis named Greg Fischer who wrote me regularly and over the years we became friends. He came to Seattle once to see me and we had a nice visit. He sent me a framed lobby card of the Frances Farmer movie, Exclusive, that I still have hanging on my wall.

 

Were there ever times when the book actually helped you in your job as a journalist?

I’d have to say yes, in terms of getting me access to certain people. Because the book was so well known and had a particular following among movie people, it got me through doors that might have otherwise been closed to me or put me in a better position with a celebrity I was interviewing. For instance, I did a lunch interview with Anthony Hopkins shortly after he’d read the book and he was so taken with it, he allowed the interview to run on for nearly three hours. We ended up talking about such personal things—the recent death of both our fathers, for instance—that we were both bawling by the end of it. I’m not sure any other journalist ever had that much access to this great actor on that deep a level and I owed it all to the book. 

 

What other names can you drop in that department?

I’m pretty sure the book was responsible for me getting lengthy, one-on-one interviews with Jack Nicholson, Woody Allen and Madonna.

 

The book seems to speak to actors in a special way. Viggo Mortensen told me that when he read it as a student in Argentina, it “changed his life.”

He told me that too. I can’t imagine how and I didn’t ask.

 

What did you hear from the Farmer family after the book came out?

Edith, as you might imagine, was not happy with it. Her letters became even more angry and full of name-calling. She was convinced the book and I were part of the ongoing Communist plot against her sister. 

 

Did you hear anything from the brother, Wesley?

Not a word. But I heard a good deal from the next generation of the Farmer family. The children of Wesley and Edith and their numerous cousins. They mostly all loved the book. They would often stop by the paper to see me when they were in Seattle. One of them, Frank Farmer, I became quite friendly with, and we corresponded for a time.

 

You said that people wrote to point out mistakes in the book. Can you give an example?

Things like having the name of the ship that carried her back from Europe wrong. I had it as the President Cleveland, which a reader pointed out only operated in the Pacific. The ship was actually the President somebody-else. Another reader pointed out that I.W.W. stands for Industrial Workers of the World, not International Workers of the World. Small mistakes that I, or at least a good proofreader, should have caught.

 

During this period were you still seeking information on the story, still, in any way, investigating the case?

No. I was not actively seeking information, though, as I mentioned, it was coming at me in a steady stream. I couldn’t avoid it.

 

Can you give an example of this?

One day in 1986 or ’87 I was interviewing the Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban and he brought up the subject of Frances’ mysterious episode in Mexico City, in which, she went down there to make a film shortly before her breakdown and ended up being deported. It turned out Montalban had worked on that film in some capacity and knew some of the details. It didn’t clear up the mystery of what happened but it definitely offered some new information and perspective.

 

Didn’t you also find a new source about Frances’ notorious trip to the Soviet Union?

Yes, in 1983 McGraw-Hill sold the Russian-language rights of Shadowland to the Soviet literary magazine, Inostrannaya Litertura. This was considered a big deal because the Soviets normally didn’t pay good rubles for those kind of rights: they just took them. When it ran in the magazine, several former Young Pioneers who had met Frances in Moscow wrote me with stories and anecdotes that gave a much clearer picture of her time there.

 

Anything else?

Another episode that jumps to mind is the famous interview she gave to Collier’s magazine that defined her as a nonconformist.  In the book I referred to the author of that piece, Kyle Crichton, as “a Hollywood correspondent.” Actually, besides being a fairly well-known author and non-Hollywood journalist, he was also a Communist-party member and one-time editor of The New Masses. The interview was not a chance thing in which she said too much or was maybe even misquoted. She and Crichton knew each other and conspired to give the article just the effect and impact it had. That’s a little shading I’d certainly liked to have worked in.

 

You said earlier that, after the book came out, you met a number of people who had known her and gave you more perspective on her. Can you give me a for instance?

Martin Ritt, the celebrated movie director, was one. He’d been an actor with the Group Theater and in the cast of Golden Boy. Like everyone else in the company, he’d been madly in love with her. He had some insightful stories about that period that I’d have been happy to use. And there were many others I met or interviewed or got to know who had information about her. Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., Earl Robinson, Billy Lee.

 

Who is Billy Lee?

Billy Lee was the child star of Frances’ very first film, Too Many Parents. I interviewed him in 1986 at the Telluride Film Festival where he was introducing a revival of the wonderful 1940 boy-and-his-dog film, The Biscuit Eater, which was thought to have been lost but had been re-discovered by film historian William K. Everson. Everson pulled Billy Lee out of obscurity for the screening and the poor guy was alcoholic-thin, chain-smoking—nervous and sad as only a fifty-seven-year-old ex-child star who has not made a picture in forty years can be. My interview was a disaster, with Lee answering every question with a monosyllable. Then it hit me. Billy Lee! Frances Farmer! I changed the subject to Too Many Parents and the guy absolutely lit up. Frances had been enormously kind to him, they bonded on the set and he remembered her as a kind of precious mother figure. That would have great to use.

 

What about the non-Hollywood people in her life?

Every couple of months in those years, someone would approach me with some new story. For instance, one night I was up very late at the paper, covering the Academy Awards I believe it was, and I got in a conversation with this old guy who worked the “rim”—the night copy desk. It turned out he’d been a good friend and drinking buddy of Frances’ second husband, Al Lobley: the man she was briefly married to after getting out of Steilacoom. For a time, he’d been a third wheel to the couple and he saw her almost every day. He told me she had bruises around her eyes that gradually went away during the first three or four months he knew her.  

 

From Dr. Freeman’s special medicine?

He didn’t know. But he believed she’d had the operation. He described her as “zombie-like.” Here’s another interesting incident. One day I got a call from a woman somewhere in the Midwest who said she had just bought a steamer trunk, contents unknown, at a public auction. Apparently it had been sitting in some railway station warehouse, unclaimed, for decades. When the woman opened it, she found it had belonged to Frances Farmer and contained her wedding dress, several scrapbooks she kept of her career, stacks of letters and a treasure trove of her writing. Quite a find. She wondered if I wanted to buy it.

 

Did you?

No. I wanted to get away from the whirlpool, not get sucked back into it.

 

You mentioned earlier that, after the book came out, you learned the identity of the deep throat who called you with the tip about Dr. Freeman.

The man continued to call me every once in a while, we played a cat-and-mouse game as to his identity, and I gradually deduced that he was a certain Dr. Charles Jarvis.

 

Doctor?

A Seattle psychiatrist. He was well known for being a “court whore,” testifying as an expert witness for a fee at court proceedings. He later became even better known for drawing up an amazingly accurate profile of Ted Bundy, before that celebrated Seattle serial killer was identified. Apparently, Jarvis had been at Steilacoom in 1948 and witnessed some of the Freeman experiments.

 

Did he actually see Freeman with Frances?

I don’t know. When I asked him that question he wouldn’t say. But he enjoyed teasing me with clues and morsels of information. He was a case himself.

 

Did you ever meet Dr. Freeman’s son, Franklin, who strongly supported the idea that his father lobotomized Frances?

He called me at one point and we talked about getting together but it never happened. Someone sent me a tape of him making the claim on a 1998 episode of the TV documentary series, Mysteries and Scandals. 

 

Didn’t Marie Yates, around the time of the movie, tell reporters that she had seen “illegally obtained documentary evidence” that proved the lobotomy beyond any shadow of doubt?

That’s what she told the writer Eric Estrin, but she wasn’t able to produce it in the trial.   

 

Did any other information or evidence come to you about the Freeman surgery?

From time to time. Art Forde, the photographer who took those pictures of Freeman in action at Steilacoom, sent me a photo that had never been published or archived. It shows Freeman hovering over a blond woman on a gurney who is a dead ringer for Frances Farmer. But if it is her, it doesn’t prove anything except Freeman’s interest in her. In 1995, the daughter of another nurse who had attended the Freeman surgeries wrote me that, before she died in 1971, her mother told her she had witnessed a Frances Farmer lobotomy. But that conflicts with other, more reliable evidence that he was alone in the room with her when it happened, if it happened.  

 

Did you not think that testimony deserved a news story? You were still an employed journalist, after all.

No. I had written all I intended to write on the subject of Frances Farmer. Anyway, as compelling as it was, none of this new evidence was one-hundred-percent conclusive. The mystery of the lobotomy remained.

 

That reminds me: did you ever see the display the Seattle Museum of Mystery did on Shadowland? I don’t know if it’s still there but for a long time it was part of their permanent exhibit.

I never saw it.

 

You should have. They did a terrific job. You would have liked it.

I’ve heard this from others as well. The owners asked if I could contribute something: pictures, research material, a manuscript page, anything. I didn’t respond but they went ahead and did the display anyway. Now I regret not cooperating with them. That museum has become a Seattle institution and a major tourist attraction; and it approaches the Frances Farmer story in the way with which I am most comfortable: as an unsolved historical mystery.

 

Let’s talk about the Frances Farmer movies a minute. When you were writing the book, many of these films were unavailable. But they’ve since become available on DVD. Did you eventually see them all?

I did, for this conversation. But not in the period we’re now talking about. As the videos and DVDs came out, people would send them to me but I just put them in a drawer. I didn’t want to go there emotionally.

 

Did you see the other Frances Farmer biographical movies, all of which were influenced by or derivative of Shadowland?

I saw Frances, of course. It was screened during the trial. 

 

What did you think? Your professional opinion?

I generally liked the casting and loved the production values. But that script was hopelessly adrift and Clifford’s direction was barely competent. All the meaning of Frances Farmer’s story was absent.

 

What about the TV-movie of Will There Really Be a Morning?, which had been rushed out that same year to take advantage of all the Frances Farmer publicity?

That too was screened during the trial. The Brooks lawyers insisted on screening it to show that theirs was not the only movie project that borrowed elements of the book.

 

What did you think of it?

It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Frances I knew.  

 

Did you see Committed (1984)?

I didn’t. I know it has some fans. I vaguely recall one of the two women who made it approaching me but I can’t recall if I actually had a conversation with her or not. Wasn’t it shot in black & white?

 

I believe it was. What about the plays? Do you know about them?

I know there was a British play about her called The New Garbo. A journalist friend of mine saw it in London and spoke to the playwright, Doug Lucie. He told her he had a similar experience to me: he saw one of her movies, was blown away by her and got intrigued by the mystery. He said Shadowland came out while he was writing the play and he admitted changing it to reflect the book. Lucie went on to become one of Britain’s most important avant-garde playwrights of the 1980s.

 

What about this other play, the one that’s actually called Shadowland?  

One day our theater critic showed me a press release from the Broom Street Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, announcing a play called Shadowland, written by its artistic director, Joel Germann. I thought: this can’t be about Frances Farmer. But, sure enough, it was. The playwright obviously thought, if I’m going to steal the book I might as well steal its title too. I thought there was a strange kind of honesty in that. I recently looked up the Broom Street Theater on Wikipedia. It went on to become one of the Midwest’s most successful theater companies, and Germann, now deceased, is remembered as a major force in regional theater.

 

I count three other plays in New York in this same period, The Frances Farmer Story, Golden Girl and I Died Yesterday; and one in L.A. called Steilacoom. USA Today did a story about the plays called “The Frances Farmer Deluge.”

I didn’t read it and I don’t know anything about those plays. Were any of them successful?

 

Apparently not. But, you know, it surprises me that no one ever thought of doing an Andrew Lloyd Webber-style musical of the Frances Farmer story. It has the kind of epic quality that lends itself to the genre.

Actually there was, or almost was. A composer—I can’t remember his name but he had some Broadway credits—wrote me about it. He also sent me a tape of his score, fully orchestrated and performed by professionals. I think it may have gotten as far as an out-of-town try-out before collapsing.  

 

You maintain that, in the decade and more following the publication of the book, you were distancing yourself from it, and letting it die a quiet death.

Yes.

 

But my research shows that, during this period, you sanctioned a braille edition of the book.

The National Institute for the Blind asked me. There was no money involved. It was a donation. You’d have to be a real hardass to say no to something like that.

 

You also, I see, sanctioned an audio-book version.

No, I didn’t. Up until 2016, there was a program on National Public Radio called The Radio Reader that read books in serialized segments on the air. The show was phenomenally popular for more than fifty years and was the forerunner, really, of the audio-book industry. Dick Estell, the founder of the show, read Shadowland but didn’t ask me for permission or even tell me he was going to do it.

 

Did you hear it?

Yes, because I was a regular listener to the show. One day I turned on NPR as I drove to work and there it was. 

 

You also, during that decade, sanctioned the use of the book as a text in Seattle high schools.

I had a friend named Clay Eals who was, at this time, a teacher, editor of the West Seattle Herald and a fellow movie-theater preservation activist. He asked me if I had any objection to his using the book in his senior English classes. I said, “Fine with me.” Several other teachers followed and, for a while it was a standard text in the city’s senior English classes, a kind of Catcher in the Rye. This was not because of any literary merit but because it was short, sensational in a way that tended to grip 18-years-olds and filled with local references. But I had no connection to any of this. I never addressed or monitored a single class, though I was frequently asked to. I once started to read through a pile of senior essays on the book but found it distressing and soon quit. 

 

Wasn’t all this ongoing attention and interest gratifying to you on some level? If you were really honest with yourself. 

On some level, sure, but in the weeks and months and years and decades after the book I became less and less fond of it. And gradually I developed what you might call an authentic aversion to it.

 

You wanted to disown it?

No, because there was nothing in it I didn’t believe. But I would have been happy for it to go away and be forgotten.

 

Because of the responsibility it placed on your shoulders to counsel the mentally afflicted and their families?

It was more than that, and more than just the mistakes and the usual author regret over some of the choices he made in haste. When I wrote the book, I had only a limited knowledge of, and no experience in, the Hollywood film industry. But for more than thirty years after I wrote the book I covered that industry on an everyday basis and worked on films in numerous capacities. And the more I learned, the more I realized how naïve the young narrator of Shadowland was. It got to where I could pick up the book and read any random paragraph and its inexperienced mentality would make me wince. It embarrassed me. 

 

For instance?

For instance I straightaway refer to Frances Farmer in the book as a “great” Hollywood star. Well, she wasn’t a great star. She was a secondary star.

 

I could argue that she was a great star. She was a unique actress with a riveting persona who made a handful of diverse and several truly memorable films. She was that rare Hollywood star who went on to become a significant Broadway star and she played the lead in one undisputed landmark of the American Theater, Golden Boy.

I don’t want to argue this particular point with you. Surely you can see what I’m getting at. I had an annoying tendency to hype her. Also, the truth is that when I wrote the book I didn’t know anything about actors. In the years since, many, maybe most, of my friends have been professional actors and I’ve learned a great deal about the unique and immensely vulnerable nature of this distinct personality type that should have been in the book and wasn’t.

 

If you thought about it long enough, you could probably think of a million things that are missing from the book. Or any book.

Another thing that distanced me from the book was my increasing realization of just how much of its sensibility was the product of the passion and intolerance of youth—my youth. As I grew older, I became more tolerant of human weakness and appreciative of how hard the human struggle can be.

 

Give me a for instance.

For instance, when I wrote the book I could only see her post-institutional life as a long depressing slide into oblivion. I didn’t give her or her hustling third husband Lee Mikesell the credit they deserved in pulling off her “comeback” in the ‘50s, modest though it was. As I grew older and more versed in the unforgiving cruelty of show business and the energy and fortitude required to combat it, I came to realize just how difficult that effort must have been for her and to view it as much more of an achievement.

 

Age gives us more perspective. It’s supposed to.

When I wrote the book I had no sympathy for Frances’ family, in particular her siblings. My attitude was: how could they let this happen to their sister? But with the perspective of time, I can see how difficult this situation must have been for them, to see how they very well might not have understood or been aware of what was happening. What a tragedy for a family to have to endure! Then to have some kid who thinks he knows everything come along and stir up that tragedy in a whole new way. What an awful thing to do. Poor Edith.

 

You’re being way too hard on yourself.

I can see that intellectually but it doesn’t matter. That was how I had come to feel emotionally. Moreover, with that perspective of age, I began to resent the young author who had been me, and his lack of objectivity in his pursuit of the story.

 

But you were very upfront about this aspect in the book and in all its publicity: the detective falls in love with the object of his investigation. That was the element of the book people responded to most.

My opinion of the book was also affected by the fact that the New Journalism, with its trademark lack of objectivity, began to grow out of fashion in those years. As this happened, and as backlashes and scandals were created by its greatest abusers, whatever achievement the book might have had dwindled in my mind to nothing.

 

Ironically, the new Journalism of the ’60s and ’70s has recently been making a big comeback with readers. Books in this genre by Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson are bestsellers all over again.

That’s neither here nor there as to how I was feeling about it in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

 

Was anything else helping to generate this growing aversion to the book in this period?

Yes, and it’s harder to explain, but over the years, the whole Kafkaesque episode of the movie and the lawsuit and the trial and its bad outcome, instead of disappearing, began to weigh on me more and more.

 

But wasn’t this, by now, old news?

It should have been. But it curiously wasn’t. People were forever asking me about it, and wailing on its injustice. This became a permanent part of my life. Numerous legal scholars and historians have approached me about it with the notion that it set a very negative precedent in copyright law and represents an historical low point in the protection of intellectual property rights. As you probably know, judgements in the years since have tended to go in the favor of the copyright holders not the usurpers. Two different screenwriters approached me with the idea of making a TV-movie based on the trial, a courtroom drama in which I would be portrayed, I guess, as something of a patsy. I wanted no part of these projects and, mercifully, they eventually went away.

 

This all weighed on you?

It did, progressively. It’s funny because, at the time, I was just glad to have the trial over. I was in no way devastated by its verdict. I shrugged it off. But, over time, it did bother me. I began to really regret not trying to find the money to appeal the verdict, as impossibly expensive as that would have been for me. Gradually, my feelings segued into a sense of injustice. And at the same time, I also felt guilty for having taken part in the lawsuit and trial, for being part of that whole greedy spectacle, trying to make money off this woman’s tragedy. So it was a conflicting stew of emotions about the event that festered with time. In a way, I think it was like post-traumatic stress syndrome. The more I’ve read about that condition, the more I think I suffered from some shade of it. In any case, it scarred me.

 

Scarred in what way?

After the book tour for China Gate, which happened a year after the trial, I did not do another interview for twenty years. By that I mean I did not sit for an interview. I was still doing interviews with celebrities. I was still part of that process. But I was in control of it, participating in the publicity machine from a position of safety. I was appearing in print every day but I developed an authentic phobia of exposing myself, especially on television or radio. 

 

So you were really haunted by this.

Well, in a way, yes. And the problem was that I could not get away from it. Frances was always in the next envelope or phone call, or suddenly staring me in the face like the ghost in Portrait of Jennie or the femme fatale of a film noir. Because I was forever having to go to an event at the Paramount Theater or the Admiral in West Seattle, her neighborhood theater growing up. Since the Olympic Hotel has always been Seattle’s finest, it is where all the visiting celebrities stay and where I would do interviews with them. Not once in the hundreds of times that I went there did I not see Frances being feted in that famous party after the premiere of Come and Get It or working in the hotel laundry after her release from Steilacoom.

 

Has anyone ever suggested to you the possibility that there might be a curse involved with Frances Farmer?

Many times, and in fact Los Angeles magazine did a feature story in 1982 called “The Curse of Frances Farmer.” But, in my case, it’s not true. I’ve given you a false impression, I’m sure, and exaggerated how much of my life was taken up with the aftershock of the book. I was haunted, to some extent, but I was not cursed. The other ninety-nine percent of my life was nothing but blessed. I had a great marriage, a daughter I worshiped, two successful books, lots of glamorous travel and a job that was the envy of everyone I knew.

 

It was toward the end of this period we’ve been talking about that the first article appeared denouncing you for being a Scientologist. Did that add to your bad feelings for the book?

Actually no. When I saw that piece, in Premiere magazine, my emotion was amusement—it seemed that far off base.

 

Can you tell us something about that article?

Premiere was the thinking-person’s movie magazine in that era and its top investigative reporter, John H. Richardson, was a writer whose work I’d really admired and always looked forward to reading. In October, 1993, he wrote this article about the growing influence of Scientology in Hollywood that named me as one of the most influenced, based solely on the fact that I had acknowledged the work of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights in a book published fifteen years earlier.

 

In fairness to Richardson, you also acknowledged Heber Jentzch, the President of the Church of Scientology.

That’s true. I put his name, without explanation, in a list of people who had been helpful in the research. But he attained that presidency many years later. He was a media liaison the one time I met him.

 

How did he help you?

He got me access to several celebrities I couldn’t otherwise get to that I needed to interview. Later, after Marie Yates did what she did, he wrote me the letter condemning her actions and he also interviewed Stewart Jacobson and helped determine that he was a fraud. That was the extent of our relationship. But I have to say that, in those dealings, he was upfront and never tried to influence me in any way. He was a decent guy.

 

But the CCHR (Citizens Commission on Human Rights) does have links to Scientology?

Yes, I suppose it does. But that doesn’t abrogate the pioneering work it has done in the field of mental health abuse. Here’s an analogy: for more than a decade my wife and I have sponsored a Muslim child in the slums of Nigeria. We do this through World Vision, which is a Roman Catholic organization. Now I don’t think, because I do this, that I need to apologize for the sins of the Popes, nor do I think I should stop supporting that child in Africa because it’s come out that Boston is overrun with pedophilic Catholic priests.

 

Didn’t Thomas Szasz say something similar to this when he was criticized for working with CCHR?

Yes, in 2009, to the Australian Broadcasting Company. I have it here. He said: “I got affiliated with an organization long after I was established as a critic of psychiatry, called Citizens Commission for Human Rights, because they were then the only organization and they still are the only organization who had money and had some access to lawyers and were active in trying to free mental patients who were incarcerated in mental hospitals with whom there was nothing wrong, who had committed no crimes, who wanted to get out of the hospital. And that to me was a very worthwhile cause; it's still a very worthwhile cause. I no more believe in their religion or their beliefs than I believe in the beliefs of any other religion. I am an atheist, I don't believe in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam, in Buddhism and I don't believe in Scientology. I have nothing to do with Scientology.” That pretty much says it for me, except that I’m not an atheist. I’m a Presbyterian.

 

But the Premiere article named you as a Scientologist?

That was the inference any logical reader would draw from it.

 

It groups you with John Travolta and Tom Cruise. Have you ever met these two most famous movie Scientologists?

I’ve interviewed them both. But the subject of Scientology sure never came up between us. 

 

And you reacted to this article, you say, with amusement?

I was not unduly bothered by it. It was such a preposterous claim. But many of those around me were less cavalier about it than I was.

 

How did they react?

Some with panic. The stigma against this religion was just beginning at this time. I remember Ruth Hayler, the major domo of the Seven Gables Theater chain and my friend—she was the one who first called my attention to the article—telling me I must call or write them at once and straighten this out. I said, “Why?” To react like that implies I think there is something awful about being a Scientologist. I don’t. If someone called me an Eskimo would I feel the need to call a press conference to proclaim that I was not an Eskimo? I have nothing against Eskimos. The only thing that really griped me about the article was that Richardson could have picked up his phone and called me at the paper before he named my name and I would have been happy to explain the acknowledgements. But he didn’t bother. That’s hard to excuse in a reporter.

 

In retrospect, do you wish you had stood up and said, “Hey, not me!”?

Probably I do. Once something is said about you in print it’s hard to shake off. It’s like McCarthyism. When someone calls you a Communist, you’re a Communist in the world’s eyes until you prove differently. And the Scientology tag would, as Fred Hills predicted all those years ago, continue to cause me a good deal of grief.

 

Also, by the early ’90s, your Frances Farmer association must have finally been waning. You probably didn’t want to do anything that might call more attention to it.

That’s exactly right. I didn’t want to jump back into the fray in any way. I remember thinking, I’m finally about free of this. Just let this Scientology thing slide. I had no way of knowing that exactly six months later a whole different kind of Frances Farmer bomb would drop on my head.