How Farrah Fawcett Changed the World

Reflections on the Elvis of television.

by Gregory Curtis

April 1982

(Page 2 of 5)

The combination of extraordinary looks and the completely average makes this kind of girl seem unique and mysterious at the same time that she seems perfectly familiar. A young male who aches just to look at her can be surprised to find she’ll go out with him, but when he arrives, after three solid hours of showering and hair-combing, she says, “. . . such a good friend from my hometown and he’s going to meet us for dinner . . .” At dinner, just when our swain has gathered his pride to tell her off for this and leave, she has the unerring instinct to turn and say, “When are we going on that evening boat ride you promised?” and the speech never gets made. Will the boat ride happen? Who knows? She is, in short, precisely the heroine of Henry James’s novella Daisy Miller (1878).

Daisy was a young American girl who, while visiting Italy, was ostracized by Roman society for her various offenses against propriety. But did she know they were offenses? Winterbourne, an American living in Europe, “said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon her ostracism, or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced.” (Winterbourne’s mistake, at least in Daisy’s eyes, was becoming more interested in this conundrum than in her.) The elegant organism of Farrah Fawcett carries all this with her, and, frozen within the edges of a poster, captured inside a chameleon role inside an electronic box, she carried it into every home in America.

3. Father Knows Best—Comedy

A happily married couple (James and Pauline Fawcett) raise a beautiful daughter.

She was born on February 2, 1947, in Corpus Christi. Her father, James, had grown up in Hillsboro as the second oldest of seven children and had gone to work in the oil fields right out of high school. At the time Farrah was born, James Fawcett was working in a refinery. He and his wife, Pauline, had had another daughter, Diane, nine years before.

Farrah was beautiful, even as a child. Before she was in school, people would stop her mother in the grocery store and, with an odd prescience, say, “She looks like an a-n-g-e-l.” In grade school Farrah would come home and entertain her parents by mimicking the nuns in her Catholic school. She grew up with straight white teeth and lots of blonde hair. As she got older, the younger kids in the neighborhood would drop by just to look at her. “Your eyes,” they would say. “Your hair.”

As a teenager, she never went through a gawky stage and never had trouble with her skin, and of course, there was always the hair. She had a wide circle of friends and admirers. Some of those admirers, drafted after graduation, not at all members of the high school aristocracy, would later carry on a correspondence with her from Viet Nam and other places around the world. She did, however, show a preference for the kind of men that would continue to attract her in college and in Hollywood: good guys with handsome, round faces who played sports and were comfortable in the world of other good guys, men who in these regards were not unlike her father. After coming home from a date, Farrah would knock on the door of her parents’ bedroom and say, “Mother, let’s eat.” The two of them would fix some food and talk into the night.

In 1965 Farrah entered the University of Texas at Austin. By this time Pauline Fawcett had become very much absorbed in the life of her younger daughter. She came to Austin with Farrah and helped her move into her dorm. Then, when her mother said she thought she’d leave, Farrah said, “Leave? Why?”

Mrs. Fawcett stayed through rush week. At parties Farrah attracted a circle of boys; word about her spread so fast that within a few days her roommate had to screen her calls. She pledged Delta Delta Delta, although during rush she had complained disconsolately to her mother that none of the sorority girls liked her because their boyfriends were spending so much time talking to her. Mrs. Fawcett returned home after the first week, but she came back to Austin frequently to stay in the dorm with Farrah. Mrs. Fawcett would smuggle in a small pet dog in her suitcase. In later years there was always an extra bed or a separate room for her mother’s visits wherever Farrah lived.

She was selected as one of the ten most beautiful girls on campus, a rare honor for a freshman. Her picture found its way into the hands of David Mirisch, a show business publicist in Los Angeles. He called her at the university and told her she should come to Los Angeles to try her luck in Hollywood.

She had gotten odd long distance calls often enough. Her mother remembers them coming from college boys around the state and even the rest of the country—and once from Paris. Dorm life being what it is and horniness being what it is, college boys who have struck out with the beauties at their own school will, with just a name and a photograph to go on, ring up a girl hundreds of miles away and try to talk her into some impossible rendezvous. David Mirisch’s call was clearly something else, but what? Confused, Farrah told him to call her father, which Mirisch did. And for the next couple of years he kept on calling.

In the meantime Farrah stayed at the university. She studied art with Charles Umlauf, a well-known sculptor. She dated a football player and developed a group of close friends who remain in her orbit today. She still corresponds with Umlauf, and at the end of our talk in Los Angeles, I was introduced to another friend from college, a Texas woman who had come from her ranch outside Athens to visit Farrah in California and who, apparently, had been waiting patiently somewhere until we finished.

By the spring of 1968 Farrah was at the end of her junior year, and the lure of Mirisch’s call to Hollywood had become too much to resist. Her parents had agreed, the idea being that she would try it for the summer, see how things went, and then come back to Austin for her senior year. She showed up at the office of Frank Armstrong, who was then a photographer for Texas Student Publications, and asked him to shoot some pictures for her to take to California. They went to Zilker Park, where Farrah climbed rocks and trees and ran with outstretched arms across the playing fields while Armstrong’s shutter clicked away.

It is more typical for a girl to run off to Hollywood to get away from her family, but Farrah, as when she left for college, took them along on the trip, and she remains close to her parents. Today the Fawcetts live in a comfortable house in far North Houston. They are both handsome, likable, and in a word, sweet. Every day their mailbox is jammed with correspondence for Farrah, sometimes arriving addressed only “Farrah, Houston.” There come all kinds of greeting cards and letters, usually very large or with elaborate folds or designs showing that the senders have picked them out in hopes that this particular card will stand out from the rest. The letters are often personal, like this one from Ohio: “Farrah, I wanted you to know I’ve met a wonderful girl and I know we’ll be very happy. I want to thank you for all you’ve meant to me . . .” Other fans get the Fawcetts’ phone number somehow and call just to chat. Mrs. Fawcett talks to them, frequently at some length. One young woman from Minnesota called over a period of time, decided she was tired of the snow, and moved to Houston. The Fawcetts put her up in their house until she found a job and her own apartment, having known her only over the phone. And Farrah calls almost every day, too.

“She likes for me to go along on trips,” Mrs. Fawcett says. “If there’s some business dinner she has to go to and then some party where she doesn’t want to go, she can just say, ‘I have some plans with my mother.’ It’s easier on her that way.”

Mr. Fawcett is still in the oil business. He pats you on the back and laughs and says, “Are you a country boy or a city boy?” in a way that lets you know “country boy” is the preferred answer. Even today, if Farrah is upset she will crawl into his lap for a soothing talk. “I tell her, ‘Health and happiness,’” says Mr. Fawcett. “Those are the important things.”

Her close relationship with her mother and father is certainly one reason why Farrah has not foundered on the tempting but jagged rocks of Hollywood. Not everyone is so fortunate; some end up like Barbara Payton, whose story is a sad but instructive digression.

4. Movie—Drama

“The Barbara Payton Story.” A young Texan (Payton) seeks fame in Hollywood but finds misery instead. Also staring Tom Neal, Franchot Tone, James Cagney, and Gregory Peck.

She was a very beautiful young girl from Odessa who married at seventeen and had her husband, a soldier, take her to Hollywood for their honeymoon. That was in 1944. By 1949, five years, one husband, and one baby boy (left with her parents) later, she was starring in B-pictures and had begun an affair with, among many others, the actor Tom Neal. “I went out with every big male star in town. They wanted my body and I needed their name for success,” she wrote in her “shocking” autobiography, I Am Not Ashamed (© Holloway House, Los Angeles, 1963). Just looking at Neal, she wrote, “sent red peppers down my thighs.”

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