How Farrah Fawcett Changed the World
Reflections on the Elvis of television.
Keith says: It is a shame this features doesn’t have all the pictures from the article, some information is missing and a big disappointment - view it on Google books for a better presentation of this wonderful story. (November 15th, 2009 at 2:55am)
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We went into Mirisch’s office. His desk was piled with stacks of paper, books, and knickknacks. He is a round-faced man with wavy hair, about fifty years old, slightly bug-eyed, and he was dressed in a sport shirt and slacks. “What’s in this for me?” he asked.
I said I wasn’t sure and plunged ahead anyway. “Listen,” he said, “without me, Farrah Fawcett would be a housewife in Texas. What this business is is luck. Take Erik Estrada. He’s a nice-looking boy, but really all he can do is ride on a motorcycle, and anyone can do that. There were a number of people that tried out for that role, and he got it. He was the lucky one. The rest of them we may or may not have heard of, but now we’ve heard of him. It’s the same thing with Farrah. She’s no better or worse than anyone else. She just happened to be at the right place at the right time to get on a good product like Charlie’s Angels and take it from there.”
Whatever luck can or cannot do for a career, Farrah didn’t have much luck with Mirisch. She made some appearances and got her picture in the local papers as Miss Boat Show and the like. On September 23, 1969, a little more than a year after her arrival in Hollywood, Farrah had her lawyer send Mirisch a letter saying that she no longer required his services and a check for $210.46 to settle the account. At this time, had Farrah stayed in Texas, she would have just completed her senior year at the university. As it was, alone in Hollywood, she had the self-possession and the clear sense of her own self-interest to come to the conclusion that the 25 per cent Mirisch was charging for his services was too much, to find a lawyer, and to get out.
Not long after the Flying Nun appearance, Farrah had a screen test for the movie Myra Breckenridge and landed a role in it. The movie is a flaming piece of kitsch. In it Farrah plays a short and rather chaste love scene with, of all people, Raquel Welch. Farrah is surprisingly effective in her role, in part because she appears to be exactly what she was: a green girl from Texas who landed in bed with a big movie star of the wrong sex.
“I never had to look for work,” she told me. “I always had jobs.” She kept working because she had both a natural talent for television acting and a shrewd sense of how to conduct herself. “On Myra Breckenridge we had to wait hours“—she threw her arms out and heaved herself back into the corner of the couch—”for Raquel. I wasn’t anybody so I stood around the set and I heard what the crew said about her. I decided I didn’t want them saying those things about me.”
People who worked with her then are universal in their compliments and goodwill toward her. Lee Zimmerman of the Kenyon & Eckhardt advertising agency in New York worked with her on a Mercury Cougar commercial that began with Farrah coming out of the ocean at night, pulling off a diving mask, and saying, “Hey, you want to see my XR-7?” She had just gotten off a plane after working fourteen hours on another job, the shooting went on all night, and the ocean water was choppy and frigid. “We kept having problems,” Zimmerman says, “and had to shoot take after take. She was always ready, never complained. She stayed in that freezing water until we got it right.”
She also, very soon after her arrival in Hollywood, met Lee Majors, an ex-college football player from Kentucky who was making a good career for himself as a television actor and would later become a star in The Six Million Dollar Man. They dated, lived together for a while, and were married in July 1973, long after the idea of returning for her last year at the university had faded forever. She was doing commercials for Noxzema and Wella Balsam as well as Mercury and appearing on such shows as McCloud, Apple’s Way, The Six Million Dollar Man, Harry-O, and Marcus Welby, M.D. By the beginning of 1976 she had become a reasonably successful journeyman actress who was married to the latest national star. About this time, two separate conversations occurred—one in a farmer’s field outside Akron, Ohio, and one in a limousine returning from a Los Angeles Rams football game—that would change everything.
6. The Passionate Angel—Fantasy-Drama
The girl from “The Flying Nun” (Farrah Fawcett) conquers Planet Earth.
Ted Trikilis, a part owner of Pro Arts, a poster manufacturing company in Akron, Ohio, took a couple of days off in April 1976 to work on his farm near town. He hired Patrick Partridge, a student at Akron University, to help him. While the two were working, Partridge mentioned to Trikilis that he ought to do a poster of Farrah Fawcett. Trikilis had never heard of her. Partridge told him that she was the actress in the Mercury Cougar commercials; the guys in the dorms at school all had her magazine ads up on their walls, and when the Cougar commercials came on television, the people watching shouted and guys came running out of their rooms to watch her. Trikilis asked his wife about the idea, and she knew immediately who Farrah Fawcett was. Back at work he asked people there. None of the men recognized her name, but they all knew whom he was talking about when he mentioned the Cougar commercials. But all the women he asked knew her by name. (Much of her fame is based on her appeal to women as well as men; Charlie’s Angels, for instance, was equally popular with male and female viewers.)
With a why-not attitude Trikilis contacted the William Morris agency in Los Angeles, which was handling Farrah at the time. The agency talked to her about it and in turn told Pro Arts that Farrah said she thought the idea was “cute.” She hired a photographer, Bruce McBroom, a friend of a few years, and he shot a vast array of photographs. At Pro Arts they went around and around about which shot to use, finally deciding on one in a single-piece red bathing suit because they liked it as well as many of the others and she had marked it as her own choice. The poster was an immediate sensation and has become one of those artifacts that calls up an entire era. It is, for instance, hanging on the wall of John Travolta’s room during the scene in Saturday Night Fever where he combs his hair in preparation for an evening’s dancing. After the poster’s publication, Trikilis ran into a college professor he knew. The professor told him he’d seen it for sale in the open-air markets of New Delhi. It has sold well in excess of six million copies.
About the time Pro Arts was talking about the poster, Lee Majors went to a Los Angeles Rams football game in a limousine with Sonny Bono and a publicity agent and manager named Jay Bernstein. Bernstein wanted Majors as a client. On the way home from the game, Majors agreed to sign on with Bernstein if the agent would also handle his wife, Farrah.
Bernstein is a well-known agent who has handled such people as Suzanne Somers, Linda Evans, and, for a brief period, Patti Davis Reagan. He lives in a house overlooking Los Angeles that used to belong to Carole Lombard. It has an indoor swimming pool. In his office downstairs, there is a framed copy of the People magazine story about Farrah’s firing him and a photograph of the two of them at the Cannes Film Festival in 1977. All the rest of the wall space, from the floor to the ceiling, is hung with magazine covers bearing pictures of his clients. There are several hundred of them and most are of Farrah—People, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Tennis, foreign publications, on and on.
Having been shown the office by a secretary, I waited for Bernstein upstairs in the bar. I stared at the view of Los Angeles—endless streets of dreamy white buildings that, on the distant horizon, met a blue sky—and then noticed a stack of magazines on the endtable by the couch. The top one was the then current issue of Los Angeles magazine with a picture of Linda Evans on the cover. Below it was a stack about a foot high of Time, People, Newsweek, and so on, each one with a page paper-clipped. The next magazine was People; the clip marked an article about Bernstein. The third was another People, and the clip marked another article about him. Below that a Time was clipped at an item about one of his clients. Similarly, each clip marked an article about Bernstein or one of his clients.
In a few moments he walked in. About average height with a short, pointed beard, on the verge of pudginess, he is pushing middle age. He was wearing blue jeans, blue suede loafers, and a knit T-shirt, and he was not carrying one of his famous collection of canes, a number of which I had seen in an umbrella stand by the front door. He is obsessed with the glamour queens of Hollywood in the thirties and forties, and his ambition has always been to engineer the rise of the modern equivalents of those stars. “I felt an electricity about Farrah immediately,” he said. “I asked her if she minded if I made her a legend. She laughed like she thought I was kidding and said, ‘Sure. Go ahead.’ I thought of her as a little like Betty Grable because she was blonde. But Grable is just too boring for today. So in my mind I added Rita Hayworth for spice.”
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