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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Bernstein worked to make sure that of the three actresses on Charlie’s Angels, Farrah was the star. Hence all the magazine covers. When she left Charlie’s Angels, Bernstein handled her movie career. “She did Somebody Killed Her Husband, Sunburn, and Saturn 3,” Bernstein said. “People say that’s not much of a movie career. But remember she was involved in that suit for leaving Charlie’s Angels. She was blacklisted, since no one wanted to become part of the suit. And she never got less than $750,000 a picture.” Then, in October 1979, Farrah fired him.
“He just kept pushing me and pushing me,” she said. “For a while it was a great ego boost. He kept saying, ‘You’re going to be big. You’re going to be big.’ But he just had this idea of what he wanted me to be. He would send me books about the old movie stars with pages marked for me to read about Jean Harlow. I was rearranging some books the other day and I opened one from Jay. It was a beautiful book with this sweet, sweet flowery inscription he wrote to me, and then on the inside he had underlined passages about some of the old stars. But I realized he’d done all this and I’d never even read it. He kept pushing me and I got so tired. I’d hear him talking on the telephone and he’d become me. I mean, he’d do the interview like talking to him was just like talking to me. I finally just had enough. I separated from my husband, fired my attorney, and fired Jay Bernstein all in a month.”
Today Bernstein’s assessment of his role is this: “What I did with Farrah was simply maximize her potential.” The push he provided—all those magazine covers!—came just at the time her poster was papering the walls of America and she had begun her role in a new series, Charlie’s Angels. Only a few weeks after it aired, an ABC survey showed that over 90 per cent of the people contacted had seen the show. Two thirds of them named it as their favorite show on television. During its first season, 1976-77, it was the fifth most popular show after Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, ABC Monday Night Movie, and M*A*S*H and ahead, significantly, of The Six Million Dollar Man, which finished seventh.
Charlie’s Angels was produced by Aaron Spelling, a poor boy from Dallas who made good in Hollywood, and his partner, Leonard Goldberg. This pair had already left a significant mark on television, for better or worse, with The Rookies, S.W.A.T., Starsky and Hutch, and a number of made-for-TV movies like The Great American Beauty Contest and The Girl Who Came Gift Wrapped, in both of which Farrah had had roles.
Spelling and Goldberg had one day come up with the idea of a show with three women detectives. They originally thought the women would be called Alin, Lee, and Catherine so the names could be combined to form the show’s title, The Alley Cats. The B-movie tone of this title certainly carried over into the underlying tone of the resulting show, but as the project progressed the name got changed to Harry’s Angels (the change to Charlie was to avoid reference to Harry-O), and the difference between alley cats and angels is the reason for the show’s great popularity. The plots had the Angels solving crimes by pretending to be prostitutes, masseuses, go-go dancers, models, and the full range of other B-movie fantasies, but these are angels, after all; they are only pretending and they never really do the main thing a prostitute does. They are nice girls who become teases and return to being nice girls by the end of the show. In one episode Farrah works in a massage parlor. Customers come in and are stunned by their good fortune in finding such a girl for hire. Farrah takes a man upstairs, but when they come back down the man looks happy but confused. “She really gave me a massage,” he announces. All the waiting customers get up and leave.
Charlie’s Angels is a very sharp show technically, but it isn’t any good. There isn’t any real suspense, the plots begin as transparent and then are stretched thinner than that, and the touches of light humor—mostly mugging by David Doyle, who plays the eunuchlike Bosley—fall with a flat thud. It is even much overrated as a skin show. It is much more a tight blue jeans and tight T-shirt show, although—and here is the tease—Farrah is clearly without a bra.
Only one episode, “Angels in Chains,” is really fun, simply because it rushes through a lifetime of B-movie clichés in just one hour. The Angels work undercover as inmates in a Southern women’s prison where there have been some mysterious deaths. There are a bovine and corrupt Southern sheriff, his creepy deputy, and a butch female guard named Max. The warden appears at first to be kindly, but she is actually running a brothel in a nearby town with women from the prison. The Angels are required to go to a party there in sleazy evening gowns. They escape, all three chained together, but with the sheriff and the slobbering deputy in hot pursuit. The Angels commandeer a truck and toss boxes of potatoes off the back, which, incredibly, forces the sheriff’s car off the road and over a cliff where it explodes and burns. All this is exactly as good as it sounds. If Charlie’s Angels had always had this ludicrous but headlong swirl of ever more outlandish events . . . but it didn’t.
What it did have was three women whom people enjoyed looking at even if what the scripts called for them to do and say seemed pretty silly. At the end of the first season, during which Farrah had gone from a virtual unknown to the focus of a marketing empire of posters, T-shirts, dolls, shampoo, and a top-rated show, she quit. Her career since then, except for an accomplished performance in Murder in Texas, a TV movie about the famous case of Dr. John Hill, has never gotten back on track. But whether it would be on track had she stayed with Charlie’s Angels is hard to say. Still, she quit school, she quit David Mirisch, she quit Charlie’s Angels, she fired Jay Bernstein, and she has just gotten divorced from her husband, so she’s hardly afraid to strike out for new territory. And she has a fine instinct for what’s good for number one. When I asked her if she had sensed Charlie’s Angels was going to be a hit, she said, “I guess I must have. I remember sitting in my dressing room one day and thinking, ‘The chemistry on this show is going to sell. I’d better call my attorney.’”
7. THE GOLDEN AGE OF TELEVISION—Documentary
Narrated by Elvis Presley and Farrah Fawcett.
Amazingly, Farrah’s career rests on a poster and one season on a television show. But in the years since she left Charlie’s Angels, she has remained an important celebrity, with her divorce and her romance with Ryan O’Neal chronicled in the papers. At this writing, four teams of producers at MGM, in a flurry of activity that seems from the outside like a scene from a Marx Brothers movie, are working independently to develop a television show for Farrah for ABC. It will be a success or it won’t, but either way, it won’t affect the one great accomplishment of what is otherwise a rather slender career: Farrah Fawcett brought passion to television, and passion has been there ever since. Before her, television was a tremendously popular form peopled with pleasant, ordinary personalities—Robert Young, Donna Reed, Dick Van Dyke. And whatever else may have been on the air, there was most decidedly no sex. Imagine a poster of Lucille Ball or even the very lovely Mary Tyler Moore sweeping the country. Popular music before Elvis in a similar state. Elvis stirred the passions by ignoring all the boundaries of taste and propriety. Farrah stirred the passions by broadcasting a fresh, seductive heat from within the normal boundaries. He was rock ‘n’ roll; she was television.
The kind of frenzy that surrounded Elvis and Farrah is symptomatic of that crucial moment when passion is injected into a previously bland popular art form. After Elvis there was room in popular music for rebels, bohemians, and artists, because the audience was demanding that music reach inside to grab their raw nerves, and the rebels and artists were eager to do just that. The same artistic explosion happened in the English theater during Elizabethan times and in the novel during the nineteenth century; both forms were considered in their day to be lewd and corrupt and cynical stirrers of the popular passions, like rock ‘n’ roll, like television.
Elvis was able to reach as large an audience as he did as quickly as he did because of such technological wonders as the 45-rpm record. Today, with the coming of cable television, transmission satellites, videocassettes, and the rest of the whiz-bang electronic wonders, television is changing, too. Cheap and idiosyncratic local programming will find its way onto the airwaves through a glut of new channels voracious for something to broadcast; similarly, the cheap 45 and the proliferation of Top 40 radio let pretty much anyone who wanted to make a record enter the market. Some of these new television programs and their stars will touch the nerves of audiences now ready for television to do exactly that. What these new stars will be like, even what they will do, is impossible to predict. No one, seeing Elvis for the first time, could have foreseen Jimi Hendrix or the Talking Heads. But they will matter deeply to people, and in that sense, they will owe a great debt to Farrah, because it was Farrah who showed that television was a way to become important in people’s lives. Since her we have had a run of television sirens like Suzanne Somers and Morgan Fairchild, but the better part of Farrah’s legacy will be the rebels and artists for whom she, however unwittingly, made television attractive. The bohemian group of merry pranksters that appeared on the original Saturday Night Live are the best proof so far that once television was able to touch the passions, those who want to do just that rise up from nowhere. Just as Farrah, out of nowhere, rose up first.
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