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.
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One enduring rumor about Farrah’s pre-Hollywood life was that the Tri Delts kicked her out after she was caught having sex in the shower at the sorority house. Farrah said such an incident never happened. She quit Tri Delt, she told me, because she was tired of jealous sorority leaders telling her what to do and who to go out with. Moreover, she said, compared with the other girls, she had different tastes in everything from shorter skirts to art. (Under the tutelage of Professor Charles Umlauf, she became a dedicated sculptor and painter, concentrating on female nudes.) “If you believe everything that was said about me during my college years, then I slept with lots of people I never even met,” she said. “It’s one of the things I really regret—being so famous at the University of Texas, having no control over the gossip, having no privacy.”
Whatever the case, it’s true that during her sophomore and junior years, Farrah dated only Lott. They were the most glamorous couple on campus: Lott with his infectious grin, Farrah with her blond hair. But in his junior year, Lott’s football career ended on a single play, when a University of Arkansas defender hit him from behind, tearing the ligaments in his knee. Then, in the summer of 1968, at the end of her junior year, Farrah moved to Los Angeles. Hollywood publicist David Mirisch had been trying to lure her there ever since she was named one of UT’s most beautiful girls, and she finally decided to give it a try. By the end of her second week in town, she had signed with an agent and had met another former college football star, Lee Majors.
Lott made a few futile trips to California to try to win Farrah back, yet her life was headed in a different direction. She began to get cast in commercials, the most famous of which, for Mercury Cougar, showed her rising up out of a dark sea. She also landed bit roles on TV shows; for her first, on The Flying Nun, she wore a sailor blouse and flirted with a casino owner. (“Soon, we’ll go out to sea,” the owner told her. “Out to see what?” Farrah asked with a giggle.) “You could just look at her and tell that she was a lot of fun,” says Alana Stewart, who competed with her for roles. “And she had this great knack for conveying that on screen.”
In 1973 she and Majors—“The Right Fluff,” one writer called them—were married in a ceremony at the Hotel Bel-Air. Meanwhile, Lott dropped out of sight. He was supposedly spotted a few times among the hippies who were beginning to populate Guadalupe Street adjacent to the UT campus. His former Longhorn teammates heard that he had grown his hair long and was peddling dope. Indeed, not long after Farrah made her name on Charlie’s Angels, Lott was arrested while driving a truckload of marijuana from Arizona to New York and served a year in federal prison.
The legend of Lott grew even bigger in the late seventies when he cleaned himself up and briefly reconnected with Farrah while she and Majors were separated. Lott even went to see her in Acapulco while she was filming the 1979 movie Sunburn. But then Majors resurfaced and won her back. A defeated Lott returned to East Texas and took a job with an oil company. Eventually, his bad habits returned too. In 1982 he was busted on a federal cocaine charge and imprisoned for three years.
Today Lott says he has been sober for nearly a decade. After his release from federal prison, he worked as a drug counselor with inmates in a state penitentiary. Seven years ago, he married a woman he had met in a twelve-step program. He is still big and handsome, with his silver-streaked hair brushed back and a UT ring on his right hand. And he still has that protective tone in his voice that all men use when they talk about their first loves; he told me, for example, that Lee Majors was “one bad hombre.” He also told me that he had last seen Farrah in 1995, when she asked him and his wife to a charity benefit in Corpus Christi where she was being honored. In the crowded ballroom, Lott and Farrah, who had barely seen each other in seventeen years, spoke only for a few minutes. “Ryan O’Neal was there,” said Lott, “and let’s face it, he is not the most comfortable guy for an ex-boyfriend to be around.”
I delicately asked Lott if he felt his obsession with Farrah had led to his downfall. “Well, you could say my college life pretty much disintegrated,” he said. “But no—heck no. I think I was rebellious because my football career ended so quickly. I hadn’t prepared for a life after football, so I started drinking, I got involved with drugs, and I just dropped out.”
Lott flashed me a look. “But I’ll tell you, she could wrap you around her little finger and make you think about nothing else but her. I’m not saying she did it on purpose. She was the sweetest girl you could meet. She just had an aura. Listen, my wife’s niece is a Tri Delt pledge at UT, and she asked me the other day, ‘Is it true Farrah was caught having sex in the shower at the sorority house?’ I couldn’t believe it. Here we are, thirty years later, and girls who’ve never seen Charlie’s Angels are talking about her.”
IT WAS CLEAR FROM THE MOMENT I began my interview with Farrah that I was in the presence of a master. I started to ask a question, but she was staring at me. Finally, I realized what she was looking at: my jacket!
“They made me wear it,” I said.
She leaned over and fingered the material. “Actually, it’s not bad on you,” she said.
Usually the celebrity interview is one of life’s most superficial encounters. In the hour or so they spend together, the reporter tries to ask questions the celebrity hasn’t answered a thousand times already, and the celebrity tries to say something interesting so the public will continue to care. I had assumed my time with Farrah would be no different. But after thirty years of being hounded by the media—she once said that all she had to do to get on the cover of People was to “have a new boyfriend or even a new dog”—she knew exactly what to do. For the first 45 minutes of our interview, she sipped hot tea and mused on everything from her workout regimen (yoga, tennis, paddle tennis, squash, racquetball, and 175 sit-ups a day) to her “difference of opinion” with her neighbor, Wilt Chamberlain, over the shed behind her house that she uses as an art studio. “He says I built my art shack—that’s what I call it—without a permit,” Farrah said in a cute but indignant way. “I wanted to say, ‘You know, Wilt, during those years when all those girls were ringing my doorbell by mistake asking for you, did I complain?’” She then told me how certain movie producers were “nitwits” and launched into a description of her teacher from her Catholic elementary school, Sister Philomena, who had beautiful skin. “What is it about nuns and their flawless complexions?” she asked.
She was like a great first date: magnificently flirtatious and slightly unpredictable, an enthusiastic talker who told entertaining stories about herself even if they had no particular point. “What people don’t know about Farrah is that she’s very straightforward and very real,” says Alana Stewart. “She loves to tell you exactly what’s on her mind. We’ll spend an evening painting our toenails, leafing through fashion magazines, and gossiping, just like we’re girls again.” Indeed, Farrah seems to have hardly aged. Perhaps that’s why she did her much ballyhooed Playboy layout—not only because she “wanted to show the female body as an art form,” as she told me, but also because she wanted the world to see that even at fifty, she still looks as good as Jenny McCarthy and other Generation X Farrahs.
At some point in our conversation, I finally got to ask Farrah about her appeal: What could have possibly caused an entire society to adore her, ridicule her, and mob her every place she went? To my surprise, she couldn’t explain it, either. “But it’s something I can’t escape,” she admitted. “I was in Houston recently visiting my parents, and we went to one of those chicken-fried-steak restaurants. Redmond and I had just been Rollerblading. I was wearing no makeup, and I hadn’t done anything to my hair, and this one-hundred-and-seventy-five-pound woman came up to me and shouted, ‘Farrah, how can you let yourself go like this? You are Farrah Fawcett!’ Then she asked me to sign an autograph because Charlie’s Angels had been her favorite show. I thought, ‘Sometimes it isn’t worth it. The fame is just not worth it.’”
MAYBE IT WAS THAT STORY THAT turned the switch. Or maybe it was because our conversation about UT had gotten her thinking again about her carefree coed days. Whatever the reason, after an hour of sitting in the bar, she decided to show the side of herself that had entranced Greg Lott, Lee Majors, Ryan O’Neal, and countless others. She leaned her head in, gave me a lingering stare, and then said with a little giggle, as her tongue darted between her teeth, “Would you like to go on an adventure?”
I felt my mouth go dry. “An adventure?”
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