How Farrah Fawcett Changed the World

Reflections on the Elvis of television.

by Gregory Curtis

April 1982

(Page 3 of 5)

In 1950 Payton starred with James Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, and her private life made headlines. The debonair actor Franchot Tone had fallen in love with her. He and Neal went to her house one hot summer night to talk things over. The three of them began drinking. Tone, sent into a sudden fury by tripping over one of Neal’s barbells, threw a punch. The barbell should have been a warning. Neal immediately flattened Tone’s nose and sent him to the hospital. Payton subsequently married Tone, although she was never able to leave the brawny Neal completely out in the cold.

The next year, 1951, was the apex of her career: she co-starred with Gregory Peck in Only the Valiant. But her reviews were bad, and the fight had made Hollywood, then officially much more straitlaced, wary of her. The next year the best she could do was a movie called Bride of the Gorilla; the year after that, The Great Jesse James Raid. Her marriage broke up. She made a few cheapo science fiction thrillers in England and toured with Neal in a stage production of The Postman Always Rings Twice, but soon enough the bulk of her income was from prostitution.

“You know,” she wrote in I Am Not Ashamed, “at first when you start going in the wrong direction you hardly notice it. There are a few less autograph hounds outside the theater. The studio boss rushes past you on the lot but you are sure he didn’t see you. The market manager politely reminds you your account is running a little high. You don’t quite get the ‘A’ treatment at the beauty parlor. Your agent sends you just a few less scripts to choose pictures from. And most important you look in the mirror and you don’t look quite as good. You don’t know why but that’s the way it is.

“Then all of a sudden you find yourself doing a western. A western with ‘Jesse James’ in the title . . . . When people at parties ask you what you’re doing you find yourself excusing your role. Like ‘I was given six varied scripts to look at and I chose a western of all things because it was a fine role with shading and character.’ Or, ‘You know I’m doing a western because it’s such fun and you know how I love to ride . . .’

“You drink a little bit more. You get on that sorry-for-yourself kick. If you’re like me you need more affection and sex because you have to prove there’s one area of living you can still score in. You go to pills . . . You take pills for anything in any quantity. It doesn’t make much difference. They all seem to work.”

Early in 1962 Payton was arrested for soliciting on Sunset Boulevard. She was bloated and alcoholic and appeared in court clutching a large box of Kleenex whose contents she used to swab her tears. She had a scar running down her stomach and thigh where a customer had stabbed her. “I live in a rat-roach infested apartment,” she wrote, “with not a bean to my name and I drink too much Rosé wine. I don’t like what my scale tells me. The little money I do accumulate to pay the rent comes from old residuals, poetry and favors to men. I love the Negro race and I will accept money only from Negroes.” She died at the age of forty in 1967.

For every Barbara Payton, however, there are thousands and thousands who have found in Los Angeles a different kind of life. Hollywood in particular and Los Angeles in general have often been portrayed as tinsel to the core, a place of thwarted desires and broken dreams. Lives like Barbara Payton’s, where stardom was followed by sordid excesses and ignominy, are trotted out as exemplary, even in movies: Sunset Boulevard, A Star Is Born, and many more. But for all the glitter and lunacy, for all the people there whose combination of high energy, greed, and phoniness have caused the phrase “L.A. hustler” to pass into the language, Los Angeles remains what it has always been—a city of great beauty and opportunity. Fortunes are still being made not only in entertainment but also in oil, real estate, electronics, virtually anything you can name, including chocolate chip cookies. Along the city’s broad avenues and boulevards, which seem to run on endlessly with only the ocean being sufficiently powerful to stop them cold, there is an infinite variety of shops, stores, workshops, offices, eateries, all manned by so many people of so many different nationalities speaking so many different languages that you can find any product and any service that exists anywhere in the world. There is domestic architecture of astonishing, frequently dreamlike beauty, not only along the streets of exclusive enclaves like Bel-Air and Beverly Hills but along average streets in average parts of town. And if you make your fortune there, look what comes along with it: the best houses, the best food, the best cars, the best clothes, and the company of people who are the best at whatever they do, all this in a setting with the Pacific on one side and the mountains on the other. And the sun shines every day.

5. The Girl In The XR-7—Adventure

A television actress (Farrah Fawcett) almost freezes in the ocean even though she’s married to a big star (Lee Majors).

It was to this lovely, energetic, seductive and dangerous city that Farrah Fawcett moved in the summer of 1968. Farrah, her mother, her father, and her father’s sister drove to Los Angeles, pulling behind them a U-Haul trailer stuffed with Farrah’s clothes. They drove across West Texas, across the mountains of New Mexico, across the deserts of Arizona and eastern California, across the mountains, and down into Los Angeles. Mrs. Fawcett was driving at the end, her eyes bleary and her face haggard from the trip. On a freeway a patrol car pulled them over. She had been driving in an inside lane, forbidden for cars with trailers, but when the cop saw her, his first question was “Have you been drinking?” Mrs. Fawcett began stammering a reply in her distinct Texas accent, and the cop laughed and waved them on.

They stayed the first night in a Holiday Inn. David Mirisch came out to meet them there, and the man who had been calling Farrah in Texas to come to Hollywood saw her for the first time. The Fawcetts, in turn, saw the man in whose hands they were placing their daughter’s future. The next day Mirisch took them to Universal Studios and showed them around. There they met Gene Barry, then starring in the series The Name of the Game. The cast and crew had just completed a scene that required a large number of young women, who were still on the set. “You should have come earlier,” Barry said to Mr. Fawcett. “We had all these pretty girls up there dancing.”

Mirisch had arranged for Farrah to stay in the Hollywood Studio Club, a residence established by the YWCA in 1926 for women who come to Hollywood to find work in movies. Her room was at the top of three flights of steps. The woman who ran the place wouldn’t allow men above the first floor, so Mr. Fawcett was able to bask in the California sun while the three women trudged up and down the stairs carrying in Farrah’s possessions from the U-Haul.

Then they went on to Las Vegas. As they walked about, Mr. Fawcett got angry and had words with a young man who had stopped in his tracks and begun staring at Farrah. “I don’t mind them looking,” he said, defending himself against his wife’s insistence that he hush, “but just to stare, I don’t like that. That’s plain rude.” Later Farrah and her aunt sat down at the same blackjack table. Farrah began to win, the aunt to lose. Finally the aunt threw down her cards in disgust. “The dealer’s just letting her win because she’s so pretty,” she said. In the evening the Fawcetts put Farrah on a plane. Her mother cried as the plane took off. All she could think of was that there would be no one at the airport in Los Angeles to meet her daughter.

David Mirisch comes from an old and distinguished show business family. His grandfather, father, and uncles are all in the business and among them have received numerous Oscars. Our Mirisch now runs David Mirisch Enterprises, which he describes as an international promotional firm. His offices are on the third floor of a low, nondescript office building on Beverly Drive, not far from, but on the less glamorous side of, Wilshire Boulevard. Here also are the offices of the WPAA, or the World Professional Arm-wrestling Association.

Inside the door is a small waiting room containing a small secretary’s desk with bottles of nail polish standing by the typewriter. Along the walls are black and white photographs, some of actors and actresses and others of brawny guys arm-wrestling. Posters for racquetball and tennis promotions are mixed among the photographs. When I walked in to call on Mirisch, a tall, thin, rather handsome young man appeared, then disappeared back into the offices to tell Mirisch I was there. As I waited, I could hear Mirisch talking on the telephone. “André,” he said, “do you want a fabulous, beautiful girl who has waitress experience?” After a brief silence he asked someone in his office, “How much experience do you have?”

“Two years.”

“Two years. All right, I’ll send her right over. Oh, she’s wonderful. Okay, okay. I love you, too. Good-bye.”

Then the girl asked him some questions. “Oh, it’s a steak and salad kind of place,” he said. “You know, average check ten, fifteen dollars. You’ll make about fifty, sixty dollars a night.”

After a few moments’ further conversation and the smack of kisses, Mirisch emerged with the young woman on his arm. She had an average blonde prettiness and was wearing a simple black dress. “Hey, Mr. Curtis,” he said. “I’d like you to meet my latest discovery.” She looked back and forth between Mirisch and me. Who was I? “He’s a writer from Texas,” Mirisch said. “He’s here doing a magazine article.”

“Oh,” she said, still confused as to what degree of attention she should pay me. “Nice to have met you.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5  next »