How Farrah Fawcett Changed the World

Reflections on the Elvis of television.

by Gregory Curtis

April 1982

American music changed on July 6, 1954, when Elvis Presley, just nineteen, walked into the Sun studios in Memphis to make his first commercial record. American television changed on October 15, 1969, during a very brief moment in an episode of The Flying Nun. Alejandro Rey, who played a roguish but lovable casino owner, sat on a couch next to a 22-year-old Texas girl with shiny blonde hair who was dressed in a sailor blouse and miniskirt. “Soon,” he said, “we’ll go out to sea.”

“Out to see what?” she said with a dizzy giggle.

Within a year of his modest beginning, Elvis was a national figure. The leading musical stars of the day were people like Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, and Perry Como, considerable talents all. Elvis’s heat burnt them to cinders. Watching him on Steve Allen, Ed Sullivan, and the couple of lesser-known television shows where he was introduced to the whole country, anyone could see that Elvis was a sexual phenomenon of immense power. But no one could have seen then what ultimately is important about him. He was the originator and the lifelong king of a kind of music that is the most powerful common experience for all those born between World War II and 1960.

Farrah Fawcett took longer to reach the national consciousness. But when she did, in 1976, she became the first person from television to claim the same worshipful adulation and obsessive interest from the public that Elvis received as a rock star. That first appearance on The Flying Nun came too early—at a time when the generation that had made Elvis an icon was either in or just out of college. Farrah’s emotional moment had not yet arrived. The winds of social rebellion were blowing, and rock was the informing idea behind a youth culture whose focus was sex, drugs, and urgent yearnings of either a political or religious kind. It was the era when all that Elvis had begun held sway.

Farrah Fawcett had nothing to do with any of it. She wasn’t interested in drugs or rebellion; she played good tennis. She was fresh and blonde and toothy and tanned. She was all-American and middle American. Her values were those of the sorority house and the country club. By 1976, the year she zoomed to stardom, the country was ready for those values, too. Farrah was a comfort, not a threat. All the demons Elvis had summoned, placed on record, and loosed upon the land, she soothed and sent on their way. She was not rock ‘n’ roll. She was television.

1. The Dr Pepper Perplex—Comedy

Farrah Fawcett asks her publicist (Paul Bloch) for a down-home drink from her native state—but can he find one in Los Angeles?

Farrah Fawcett took one look at me and said, “I’m so unprepared.” She covered her face with both hands, shook her head, and lightly stamped her foot. Then, composing herself after this practiced gesture or sudden attack of insecurity, she shook my hand, and we sat down at opposite ends of a beige couch. She was wearing tan suede boots, gray slacks, a light tan sweater, and a gray knit jacket with fur epaulets. Her hair, an equal mixture of tan and blonde, was a glorious mess. She wore no lipstick or eye shadow or nail polish or any other visible makeup except for an almost imperceptible bit of cover-up to camouflage a small blemish near her mouth. Her only jewelry was two diamond rings on the fourth finger of her left hand. The smaller of the two was the size of the nail on my little finger; the larger, the size of the nail on my thumb.

We were in a conference room in the offices of her publicist, Paul Bloch. I had been ushered in earlier by a secretary, given some tea, and allowed to wait for a while. Finally a door on one side of the room opened, and in came Bloch, a hefty man with a round jack-o’-lantern face wearing slacks and a knit shirt.

“Hello, hello,” he said. “How are you? Good to see you. How’re you doing? I’ll bring Farrah in in a minute.” And then he disappeared through a door on the opposite side of the room.

A few minutes later he did bring her in, and when we were settled on the couch, he asked Farrah if she wanted anything to drink.

“Oh, just a soda.”

“What kind?”

“Well, I don’t think you’ll have it.”

“You name it,” Paul Bloch said, “and I’ll find it.”

“Dr Pepper,” she said with the confidence of a woman who feels certain of her audience. And Bloch disappeared out the door again.

I mentioned that first appearance on The Flying Nun. “Let me tell you a cute story about that,” she said and rushed into a solo performance. She ejected out of the couch into the middle of the room and, with much waving of her arms and wide modulations of her voice, proceeded to do all the parts in this minor drama. “They told me they were ready,” she said, gesturing toward her now vacant place on the couch. Then she turned, shaking her arms as if she were frustrated and confused. “The people doing my makeup had put one of my false eyelashes on crooked. I said, ‘But what about my eyelash?’ And they said, ‘We don’t care about your eyelash. Sit there.’” Now she was looking frantically around waving her arms, little girl lost. “I said, ‘Sit where? Here?’”

There was nothing to do but watch all this. Her energy kept building, but where was the punch line? At this point Paul Bloch rushed back in carrying a paper cup with a plastic straw and handed it to Farrah. She took a sip. “It is Dr Pepper,” she said with an immense smile. She sat back down and put the cup on the coffee table in front of the couch. “And that,” she said, “is when I realized this is a professional business.”

2. MOVIE—Drama

“The Return of Daisy Miller.” (1976) A young American girl (Farrah Fawcett) bombs in Italy but triumphs on American TV.

In answer to the inevitable question: Farrah Fawcett in person looks exactly like the Farrah Fawcett you see in photographs or on television. At five feet six inches, she is slightly above average height. Forced to guess her age, you would not say more than her actual 35 years, but you would not guess her to be much younger either. All her movements are familiar, too. As she sat on the couch, for the most part with one foot on the floor and her other leg bent at the knee and pulled up on the couch but with the sole of her boot not touching the upholstery, she looked just as she did in Charlie’s Angels when she sat on the couch in the office of the Townsend detective agency listening to Charlie’s instructions. “What I always liked about that girl,” she said, referring to her role as Jill Munroe on Angels, “is that she was always teasing Charlie just a little to find out who he was. You know, at the end of the show she’d say, ‘Charlie, I’ll be playing tennis at the club and if you played there . . .’” The change from Farrah to Farrah-in-the-role was a perceptible but still subtle rise in intensity, as if I’d been watching her through a camera and a faint mist had just evaporated off the lens.

This subtle change is the essence of television acting. Unlike the theater or the movies, where acting means the ability to assume a variety of different characters and personalities, television demands that an actor establish a personality that is comfortable and appealing to the viewer and never varies. That’s why to anyone who’s seen a television show even once, you can describe a whole episode with a single sentence: Mary Tyler Moore’s blind date turns out to be Ted. There’s no need to worry that Mary has turned alcoholic and bitter or that Ted has finally seen beyond his own ego. People watch television to be with people, for the most part to be with people they like. And the people they like on television are the kind they like in real life—attractive, easy-going, and entertaining people who are themselves.

“That’s one of the problems in movies,” Farrah said. “I look like me. Here’s all this hair, and look, you can pull it back or pile it up and it’s still all this hair. So that’s a problem. On Charlie’s Angels they’d say, ‘Have her wear a bikini.’ There are forty men on a set. I don’t feel right running around in a bikini. That’s not me. I’d say, ‘Why can’t it be a tennis outfit? Why?’ And okay, so I didn’t wear a bra. Well, I’d been doing that since college.”

Besides being themselves, television personalities should fit some general type that everyone knows or can imagine knowing, like Mary, the chipper working girl. And Farrah? What general type is she? If you went to high school or college anywhere in the United States, you have met Farrah Fawcett. She is that girl you knew who was completely average in every way except for being—quite clearly—the prettiest girl around. She is not at all dense, but neither is she a scholar. She likes the same sports everyone else likes, the same clothes, the same music, the same movies. She has the kind of all-purpose American manners, based on friendliness rather than refinement, that are the same from the nice girl sunning by the country club pool to the nice girl who has to spend her summers working at McDonald’s.

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