Vanity Farrah
It’s been twenty years since Charlie’s Angels and the poster that drove men wild. But even today, at fifty, Farrah Fawcett still turns heads—including mine.
(Page 2 of 4)
To her credit, Farrah valiantly attempted to prove herself as an actress. In 1983 she moved to New York to appear in a small Off-Broadway production called Extremities and received laudatory reviews for her portrayal of a woman attacked in her home by a sadistic rapist. She practically invented the imperiled-woman-of-the-week TV movie with her role in 1984’s The Burning Bed, in which she set her abusive husband on fire as he slept. And while her big-screen career has so far been abysmal—the joke in Hollywood was that one of her feature films, Somebody Killed Her Husband should have been titled Somebody Killed Her Career—she manages to get the occasional interesting role. Last year, for instance, acclaimed actor Robert Duvall asked Farrah to co-star in an independent feature film he’s directing, The Apostle E.F., which is about a Texas Pentecostal preacher who escapes to Louisiana after accidentally killing his wife’s lover. Confounding his comrades in Hollywood, Duvall asked Farrah to play the sought-after role of his wife.
“Farrah Fawcett?” I asked Duvall when I reached him by phone. “Of all the actresses who would kill to be in a movie with you, why did you pick her?”
“Do you know what the hell you’re talking about?” Duvall snapped. “That woman’s work has been very underrated. I’m serious, now: You go look at some of Farrah’s work in those TV movies, like the one where she kills her children [Small Sacrifices]. That woman knows how to act. So I don’t have to apologize for a thing.” Before hanging up, Duvall told me that he had spent fifteen years trying to get The Apostle E.F. made. “And let me tell you, it’s a project very close to my heart. I didn’t just pick people out of thin air to be in this. What are you trying to do—mess with my mind?”
Unbelievable, I thought. Here was this serious figure in Hollywood and he’s just as bowled over by Farrah as I am. How can the woman have such staying power?
WHEN I SHOWED UP AT THE HOTEL Bel-Air bar fifteen minutes before Farrah was due to arrive, a grim waiter took one look at my denim shirt and handed me an oversized white blazer with a red wine stain over the heart. “Coats are required, sir,” he said.
I sat down at a table in the corner and waited … and waited.
An hour and a half later, she came through the door looking left and right. She had her sunglasses on even though the bar was dark enough to hide a herd of cattle. She was wearing black motorcycle boots, a black miniskirt that revealed aerobicized, lump-free thighs, and a black T-shirt that could have been painted on. Her famous tresses were going in about thirty directions. She seemed impossibly tiny—you could have counted all her ribs—and her skin was so translucent it was pale. Other patrons of the bar—rich and powerful people who you’d think were accustomed to seeing celebrities—made pathetic attempts to act uninterested in her. But every head twitched as she walked toward my table. Clearly, a Farrah Fawcett sighting was still buzzworthy in this town. “Hello, how are you?” she said, pulling off her sunglasses as she sat down next to me. I assumed she would be reserved, the kind of star who carefully chose her words. But before I could say hello back, she started rotating her head in a slow, circular motion until her neck made a popping noise. “There, now I’m comfortable,” she said, raising her eyebrows suggestively. And then, like a curtain pulling back in a theater to reveal a brilliantly lit stage, she opened her mouth and smiled.
We had known each other for less than two minutes, and the seduction was already beginning.
SHE HAD TO HAVE SENSED EARLY ON—perhaps as far back as her childhood in Corpus Christi—that she was a golden girl. Her mother, Pauline Fawcett, once said that when she carried Farrah to the grocery store, women would stop their carts and say, “She looks like an a-n-g-e-l.” Other kids in the neighborhood came by the house just to look at her. “I always felt so self-conscious,” Farrah told me. “I wanted people not to look at me because so many people kept looking at me.”
Before long, Farrah Leni Fawcett—people are astonished to learn that her name was invented not by Hollywood but by her mother—was dating the most popular boys and winning her high school’s beauty contests. And from the day she set foot on the UT-Austin campus, she drove young men mad—and none madder than Greg Lott, a dark-eyed sophomore quarterback who had come to play for Darrell Royal when the Longhorns ruled the NCAA. The story of what happened to his life because of Farrah is almost as legendary as the story of what happened to Farrah. To UT alums from the mid-sixties, Lott is a mythic figure: He was the Texas boy who had nearly corralled the great Farrah only to destroy himself in the process.
When I called Lott, I fully expected him to say he had no desire to talk about his past. Now 51, he runs a small flooring-and-design company outside Austin and prefers to live a quiet life: He has never given an interview about his days with Farrah. But when I told him I was attempting to explain her allure, he chuckled and agreed to meet me for lunch.
“In the fall of 1965 we were in two-a-day practices,” he told me, “and the word started spreading through the huddles about this new freshman at the Tri Delt house. So me and a buddy who played linebacker threw on our clothes between practices and ran over to the house to get a look at her.” In those days the girls who pledged Delta Delta Delta were shown off at the start of the school year to the fraternity boys. The pledges stood in a straight line, and the fraternity boys asked the ones they liked to various parties. “We showed up right when all this was happening,” said Lott, “and there were about fifty to sixty pledges in the back yard. A few guys were standing in line to meet one girl, and a few guys were standing in line to meet another girl. And then—I swear to God—there was this line of guys going out the back yard and then around the block. All of them were waiting to meet Farrah.”
No one had ever seen such a sight. She had platinum-dyed hair shaped in the classic bouffant style, and she was wearing a sleeveless minidress—“The kind we had only seen on models like Twiggy in magazines,” said Lott. Utterly smitten, he walked straight up to her—“Football players at UT didn’t wait in line for anything,” he said—but when he finally got a chance to talk to her, she told him that she already had dates for the rest of the year. “It was true,” Farrah told me. “I had been asked out every weekend for the next four months. Dinners, lunches, breakfasts, brunches. Oh, I was so stupid. I thought I was supposed to go out with all of those guys.”
Here’s a philosophical question to ponder: If an eighteen-year-old Farrah showed up at UT today, would she be treated the same way? According to one school of thought, Farrah would be just another sexy blonde on a campus where chic fashions are everywhere and Playboy photographs naked coeds every couple of years. On the other hand, say Lott and others who knew her, Farrah was unique. She was like a frisky palomino, all legs and teeth and spirit. She danced barefoot at a Phi Gamma Delta fraternity party while other sorority girls watched in appalled fascination. She wore cutoffs to art class. And most important, she knew how to mix it up with the boys. “She was a guy’s gal,” said Lott, who finally got a date with her at the end of her freshman year. “She’d stand in the middle of a room at a fraternity party and talk to some guy, and even if she didn’t even know his name, he’d walk away believing that she really, really liked him.”
When Farrah was voted one of UT’s ten most beautiful women—an unheard-of honor for a freshman—her reputation spread throughout the state. Guys from other Texas colleges would take weekend trips to Austin on the chance they would see her emerge from the Tri Delt house. After a night of drinking, they would call the house, hoping to get her on the phone. A few years ago, actor Peter Weller, who in the mid-sixties was a thin, no-name drama student at North Texas State University in Denton, told Farrah that he was walking along the beach one spring break at Padre Island when he spotted several young men surrounding a blonde sitting on a convertible. Weller heard another person say, “That’s Farrah Fawcett over there”—and he headed for the car.
My Library
