"She really was someone who could look fear in the face and conquer it...When all of us reflect on our own lives, the emotion which controls us so greatly is fear. I think that was Farrah's message to us in the way she conducted her own journey, is:
"Be as fearless as you can be. Don't be intimidated by fear. Keep marching forward. Do what you think is right. Fight for what you want to fight for, whether you are losing the battle or not." (emphasis mine)
--Dr. Lawrence Piro, President, Angeles Clinic and Research Institute, personal physician to Farrah, in an interview with Barbara Walters for ABC.
When I remember Farrah Fawcett, I don't think of her dazzling smile or the famous poster in the red bathing suit. I don't even think of her tabloid personal life--her romantic tumult, her drug-addicted son--I think of her talent, and her guts, and I'm not just talking about the three years she spent battling incurable cancer.
In order to truly understand Farrah's courage, you have to take her life in context of growing up in the 50's and coming of age in the '60's and '70's, especially if you were a pretty girl from the South.
Pretty girls coming of age in those days were taught to be pleasers. They were taught to always smile, no matter what, to defer to men in every way, to mask their own intelligence if it meant that other people (read, men) would be threatened by that, and that the only ambition suitable for the time was to find a good husband to take care of you, settle down, and care for him and your houseful of children for the rest of your life.
If, like Farrah, you were truly beautiful, you were supposed to parlay that beauty into the position it afforded: choice. By that I mean, you were supposed to choose the man with the most earning potential, the most political power, the most POTENTIAL. (He, in turn, was to be commended for winning the hand of the prettiest girl in the room.)
You weren't supposed to have any potential of your own, beyond being pretty and pleasing for him.
After a beautiful girl got married, she was supposed to "represent" her husband by how she conducted herself, how she helped propel his career, how she kept her home and raised her children. If she did everything right, that meant a fine home in the best neighborhood, kids who qualified for the best schools, and so on.
Even when she gave birth, she was not identified in the paper by her own name, but by her husband's. In fact, for her entire life, her identity was supposed to be a reflection of her husband's, and later, her children's.
It wasn't just pretty girls from the South who rebelled against this corset of an existence.
(Full disclosure: My despairing mother enrolled me in "Charm School" when I was 12, in hopes I would learn how to do things like walk straight with a book on my head, sit properly like a "lady," with my hands lying passively in my lap and my ankles crossed demurely, and deal with any disaster with a smile. So, in the class, I kept up a steady stream of sarcastic wisecracks which, ultimately, got me kicked out, much to my mom's chagrin.)
Anyway, as everyone knows, Boomer women rebelled big-time in the '60's and 70's, but it took a couple of decades for their battles to make the kinds of changes that people who were born in the '70's now take for granted.
So, at the time, American culture was still dominated by male-centric themes. (In that respect, it still is in many ways. Check out the latest blockbuster movies and see how many have female leads, or females in any serious capacity beyond being The Girlfriend or The Tortured Victim Awaiting Rescue.)
No one could capitalize on the male-dominated themes better than Aaron Spelling, and when he created "Charlie's Angels" and cast three hot, incredibly sexy unknowns in the lead roles, he created a phenomenon that comes along once a decade, if that.
Those of us who were budding feminists enjoyed the program simply because it showed women being brave and intrepid and solving the crime and dodging danger and saving victims--even if they did it in bikinis. Our husbands and boyfriends enjoyed it for the obvious reasons.
And nobody was a bigger hit than Farrah. She was a terrible actress at that time, but there was something about her, a quality that went beyond sexiness to seduce us all. Part of it was the dazzling smile, of course, but it was more than that. She was fun. She was playful. She didn't take the part seriously because she knew nobody else did, so in a way, she was winking and nudging her audience as if to say, "It's okay. I get the joke, too."
We all fell in love--by the bazillions--so when, after only one season on the program, she suddenly quit the show, it caused a cultural tsunami that makes Jon and Kate's divorce seem like child's play.
You have to understand how hard that was for her. Aaron Spelling was the most powerful man in Hollywood at the time and had limitless legal options to destroy her, which is what he tried to do. She was still under contract, and there were suits and countersuits that would tie up much of her time and most of her fortune for years.
Not only that, but because she'd signed a contract with the program for several years, then she was not permitted to work in the business for years after that. Not just because of the obvious reasons, but because Spelling was so powerful that nobody really wanted to cross him.
Farrah Fawcett's decision to leave Charlies Angels was part of a multi-pronged effort to reinvent herself and rechannel her career. She also fired her agent and her manager, and left her husband, Lee Majors, who was himself a huge TV star at the time.
She could see that if she had stayed with the TV show season after season, she would be branded as the T-and-A girl, the ingenue, the sexpot lead. And she knew how short the careers are for girls who base their careers on that, and that alone.
That was not what Farrah wanted. She wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, and she knew that the longer she stayed entangled in the Spelling spiderweb, the less chance she'd have to achieve that goal.
During her time out of the limelight, she studied acting, and she read, and she painted and sculpted, and she tried to get people to see past the hair and the teeth.
In an interview with Barbara Walters in 1980, her famous hair was straight, as if she'd just gotten out of bed and run a brush through it. She said that her looks were sometimes "a curse," which I'm sure most viewers took as arrogance but was in fact, raw honesty.
When Hollywood failed to give her any leeway, she left for New York, where she got the lead of a small play off-Broadway called "Extremities," which is about a rape victim who, several years later, encounters her rapist--who does not remember her at all--when he shows up at her home in an official capacity as some kind of repairman. (Been a while since I've seen it.)
She turns the tables on him by using his short memory against him, luring him into a trap she sets for him in which she keeps him imprisoned and proceeds to torture him in revenge.
For the part, Farrah cut off her famous hair in a short shoulder-bob, and delivered the performance of her life; it was searing, raw, almost too painful to watch, and so powerful that it landed her the lead in the TV movie based on the play.
That role relaunched her career and garnered her an Emmy nomination--the first of three.
After that, she played her most memorable part as a wife who is so horrifically abused by her husband that she sets fire to him in bed. Based on a true story, in which the woman was not convicted for the crime because the jury was so horrified by the details of her abuse at her husband's hands, changed public discourse on the battered wife and put Farrah on the map as a talent to be reckoned with.
Her next Emmy nomination came for playing the lead role in Ann Rule's "Small Sacrifices," about a woman who killed her three children (actually one survived, but barely), because her boyfriend didn't like kids.
These roles were gritty and tough, and for the better part of a decade, Fawcett held our attention in one TV-movie after another, proving herself time and again, but unfortunately, that's not what interested the tabloids.
Yes, I would like to have seen Farrah be as forceful and tough in her personal life as she was in her career. She got involved with more than one man who turned out to be abusive. All I can say is, it takes a long time to throw off that pleaser-trait that's been so closely bred into you throughout your childhood and adolescence, especially where men are concerned.
She did eventually kick them all out, living on her own for years until her longtime-love, Ryan O'Neal was himself diagnosed with lieukemia eight years ago and then her own devastating illness, after which he never left her side.
As Farrah aged, the scripts that were offered her were fewer and further between, (a fate typical of most actresses), leaving her in a virtual career-desert throughout most of her 40's, so in typical Farrah fashion, she threw it all back in their faces by posting for Playboy magazine at 48 and again at 50--the bestselling covers the magazine ever had.
You have to understand something here. Before Farrah, beautiful actresses did not take parts where they chopped off their trademark hair and allowed the camera to show them ravaged. It just was not done.
Years later, when Charleze Theron gained weight and butched her way to an Oscar by playing serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, she had Farrah Fawcett to thank for giving her the courage to do it.
And see, before Farrah, women in their late 40's and early 50's wouldn't have been caught DEAD in Playboy magaine or anywhere else that displayed their bodies.
It just was not done.
But Farrah did it. She lived her life on her own terms--mistakes and all.
The David Letterman show was a disastrous mistake. Ryan O'Neal, her lover of 30 years, insists that Farrah was not drunk or stoned or on any kind of prescription drugs when she made the appearance as a spaced-out aging beauty queen who could barely hold a thought.
She told him, he says, that she thought it would be funny. It was--but at her expense.
A few more years passed, but Farrah refused to go to the elephant burial grounds of all aging ingenues.
She produced, directed, and starred in a show for the Playboy network in which she painted giant murals with her own nude body, covered in paint, while O'Neal sat nearby and watched.
It was outrageous; it was bodacious; it was glorious.
Until that special, most people did not even realize that Farrah Fawcett was a gifted artist in her own right, a sculpter of sweeping sensuality and delicate beauty.
She just kept fighting, you see, long after all the others had given up.
When Fawcett was diagnosed in 2006, at the age of 59, with a very rare form of cancer, she did something that might have struck so many as unexpected but really wasn't if you'd been paying attention to more than just the smile and the body: she picked up a handheld video camera and took it along with her to chemotherapy and doctor's visits, eventually enlisting friends to help.
They told her she was going to die but she was so sure that she could beat it that she thought, this way, she could demystify so much that terrifies the rest of us about cancer, maybe help fellow sufferers by giving them courage and heart for their own battles.
When her magnificent hair began falling out in huge gobs, she filmed it.
When chemo made her vomit, the camera did not turn away and neither did she.
When her hair was gone for good, she showed off her brave bald head and kept on fighting.
And when the doctors told her that the tumors had spread and spread and that, even though she'd been feeling so much better, she was not, in fact, going to beat it, she cried and did not ask the cameras to quit filming.
This was Farrah, the REAL Farrah, the Farrah who'd been there all along for anyone to see who'd been looking beyond the red bathing suit.
(The resulting documentary special, Farrah's Story, is going to be re-aired on NBC tonight, I believe. You'll have to channel-check because it won't be on any TV guide schedules.)
Farrah Fawcett was, arguably in her prime, the most beautiful woman in the world. But her beauty went far beyond the smile and the hair and the body. It went soul-deep. She was funny and fiesty and brave and talented and gentle. She loved her family and friends with ferocity and passion, taking time even in her dying days to hand-write letters of love to each of them in her graceful, flowing script.
We can learn so much more from Farrah than how to fix our hair.
As her grieving doctor so eloquently put it, we can learn to fight for what we want to fight for, whether we are winning the battle or not.
Good night, sweet beautiful Farrah.
And thank you.
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