On an afternoon in mid-1976, in the backyard of the Bel Air home she shared with her husband, the actor Lee Majors, a twenty-nine-year-old former University of Texas student named Farrah Fawcett-Majors stood barefoot on concrete in a red Norma Kamali one-piece swimsuit she had pulled from her own closet, in front of a striped Mexican serape the photographer Bruce McBroom had pulled from the front seat of his 1937 Chevrolet. McBroom, who had been hired by the Ohio poster company Pro Arts Inc. for a flat fee of one thousand dollars, had been shooting for several hours and was running low on color film. He had asked Fawcett-Majors to find something in her closet she had not yet worn for the camera. She came back wearing the red suit. McBroom hung the blanket on the side of the pool house. He shot what remained of his last roll of color film.
The poster Pro Arts produced from the shoot, titled simply “Farrah,” went on sale in October 1976. It sold six million copies in its first year and over twelve million copies in total. It is the bestselling pin-up poster in American history. Fawcett-Majors earned approximately four hundred thousand dollars in royalties from it. McBroom was paid his original one thousand dollars and never received a percentage.
Three months later, on Wednesday, September 22, 1976, at ten o’clock Eastern, ABC premiered Charlie’s Angels, a one-hour crime drama produced by Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg about three female private detectives working in Los Angeles. The show was an immediate ratings hit. Within weeks, more than half the televisions in use during the ten o’clock Wednesday hour were tuned to ABC. By the end of the 1976-77 season, Fawcett-Majors was the most photographed woman in the United States, and every American salon had a photograph of her hair pinned to its mirror.
The Poster
The Farrah Fawcett poster was constructed by accident and recognized as significant only after the fact. Ted Trikilis, who ran Pro Arts Inc. with his brother Mike from Medina, Ohio, had been alerted to Fawcett-Majors’s potential as a pin-up subject in April 1976 by a neighbor’s son, a college student who reported that male undergraduates in his dormitory had been clipping shampoo advertisements featuring her from women’s magazines to hang on their walls. The Trikilis brothers had founded Pro Arts in 1967 selling antiwar posters and had survived the cultural transition into youth-oriented commercial poster work. They were one of the leading distributors of pin-up posters in the United States.
Trikilis contacted Fawcett’s agent Rick Hersh in May 1976. Hersh asked what kind of product Trikilis intended Fawcett to be selling. Trikilis answered that she would be selling herself. Fawcett accepted the deal on the condition that she approved the final image. After she was dissatisfied with the results of two prior shoots with other photographers, she insisted that Bruce McBroom, who had photographed her several times before, be brought in. The shoot ran approximately a full day in mid-1976 at the Majors home. Pro Arts had requested a bikini shot. Fawcett did not own a bikini. She wore one of her own one-pieces, in part to conceal an abdominal scar from a childhood injury. She did her own hair and makeup, lightening her hair with lemon juice on the morning of the shoot.
The picture was not what Pro Arts wanted. Trikilis, on first seeing McBroom’s contact sheets in Ohio, complained about the absence of a bikini and threatened not to pay. He showed the sheets to others in the trade, who told him to go to print. The poster shipped in October 1976. It sold over two hundred thousand copies in its first month, became one of the few pin-up posters in American history to be sold in middle-class home decor catalogs, and was hanging in the bedroom of the Saturday Night Fever protagonist Tony Manero by the time John Badham’s 1977 film opened.
Corpus Christi to Hollywood
Ferrah Leni Fawcett was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, on February 2, 1947, the younger daughter of James William Fawcett, an oil-field contractor, and Pauline Alice Evans, a homemaker. The name Ferrah was a Sicilian word her mother had read in a magazine; Fawcett later anglicized the spelling. She attended W. B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi, where her classmates voted her the most beautiful girl in her year. She enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin in 1965 as a microbiology major, switched to art in her sophomore year, and was named one of the ten most beautiful girls on the Austin campus in a UT publication that distributed widely enough to reach a Hollywood publicist named David Mirisch.
Mirisch contacted her parents in 1968. Fawcett’s parents initially refused to allow her to leave Texas. After the summer of 1968 they agreed to drive her to Los Angeles. She was twenty-one. Within weeks Mirisch had placed her in commercials for Wella Balsam shampoo, Ultra Brite toothpaste, Mercury Cougar, and Noxzema shaving cream. She was photogenic in the way American mass-market advertising required: tall, blonde, white-toothed, smiling, athletic. By 1969 she was doing four commercials a month and earning more than her father.
She met Lee Majors, six years her senior, on a Hollywood movie set in 1968. Majors was an established working actor; Fawcett was three months out of Texas. They dated for five years. They married on Saturday, July 28, 1973. Majors’s career had just transformed: the previous year, ABC had ordered The Six Million Dollar Man to a regular weekly series for the 1974 season, and Majors was about to become one of the highest-paid actors on American television. Fawcett, billed for the rest of her marriage as Farrah Fawcett-Majors, made guest appearances on The Six Million Dollar Man in 1974 and acquired a small recurring role on Harry O. She remained, for the purposes of her own career, primarily known as a commercial actress.
The Haircut
In 1974, a Beverly Hills hairstylist named Allen Edwards received a new client. She had been brought in by his existing client Jane Brolin, the wife of the actor James Brolin and a friend of Fawcett-Majors. Edwards had begun his career as a Beverly Hills assistant, then partnered with the rising celebrity stylist Jon Peters at a salon in Woodland Hills, then taken over a Beverly Hills salon on Rodeo Drive when Peters departed to concentrate on producing Barbra Streisand’s films. The Rodeo Drive salon was four thousand square feet with twenty-seven employees. Fawcett-Majors arrived with one-length blonde hair falling below her shoulders. Edwards proposed cutting layers into the hair to give it lift around the face.
The cut Edwards constructed over the next two years was an engineering object. The base shape was a shag cut at the back and sides, with progressively shorter layers stacked above the chin to create face-framing volume. The hair was cut while wet, then blown dry with a round brush back from the face to produce the flicked-out wings that became the cut’s signature. The cut required specific products and significant maintenance: regular trims every six weeks, blow-drying with the brush in motion, finishing spray to hold the shape. The hair was sun-lightened with lemon juice in summer for a graduated blonde effect. The cut was distinctive enough that by the time she sat for the McBroom poster in mid-1976, she could style it herself with a hand mirror and a hairdryer, without professional assistance.
The cut, generally credited to Edwards but also claimed by his rival José Eber, was not yet famous outside the entertainment industry in the spring of 1976. The poster changed that in October. Charlie’s Angels changed it again in November. By the spring of 1977, American salons were charging premiums for the Farrah cut, and Edwards was the most booked hairstylist in Los Angeles. The cut became, by industry consensus, the most requested salon haircut in American history. Edwards has said in subsequent interviews that the Farrah was “the most requested haircut in the history of the world.”
Charlie’s Angels
Charlie’s Angels was the brainchild of writer-producers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, who had pitched a pilot script to Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg’s production company in 1975. The premise was three female private detectives working at the Los Angeles agency of an unseen male employer named Charlie Townsend, voiced by John Forsythe over a speakerphone. ABC executives Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, when shown the pitch, considered it too implausible. Spelling and Goldberg shot a seventy-four-minute pilot anyway and aired it as a Movie of the Week on March 21, 1976. The pilot drew a 54.8 share. ABC ordered the series.
The cast was Kate Jackson as Sabrina Duncan, the lead; Jaclyn Smith as Kelly Garrett, the brunette; and Farrah Fawcett-Majors as Jill Munroe, the blonde. Fawcett-Majors had been offered the role on the basis of her appearance in the 1976 science-fiction film Logan’s Run. The show premiered Wednesday, September 22, 1976, at ten o’clock Eastern, following Baretta. By November, Charlie’s Angels was one of the most-watched shows in the United States. It finished fifth in the 1976-77 Nielsen ratings. Fawcett-Majors was paid five thousand dollars per episode, rising to ten thousand by the end of the season. She received four hundred thousand dollars in poster royalties in the same period.
Tensions developed within the production almost immediately. Feminist critics called the show “jiggle TV” and condemned its formula of glamorous women in implausible undercover assignments designed to keep them in swimsuits, lingerie, or evening wear. Kate Jackson, the most experienced actress, complained about the declining script quality. Fawcett-Majors complained about the seventy-hour work weeks and the demands of simultaneous publicity. Lee Majors, his own career struggling against his wife’s overnight stardom, demanded she be home by six-thirty in the evening for dinner. In May 1977, after one full season, Fawcett-Majors announced she would not return for season two. Spelling-Goldberg sued for breach of contract. The lawsuit settled when she agreed to return for six guest appearances spread across the next two seasons. She was replaced by Cheryl Ladd, who played her character’s younger sister Kris Munroe.
The Burning Bed and After
Fawcett-Majors’s bet on a film career through the late 1970s did not work as she had planned. Somebody Killed Her Husband (1978), Sunburn (1979), and Saturn 3 (1980) were commercial and critical failures. She separated from Lee Majors in late 1979 and began a relationship with the actor Ryan O’Neal that would last, with interruptions, until her death. The 1982 divorce from Majors restored her professional name to Farrah Fawcett. She continued to appear in television and film through the early 1980s in roles that did not establish her as a serious actress. A 1986 appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, in which she appeared possibly impaired and answered questions in non-sequiturs, became a tabloid story that took years to recover from.
The reinvention came on Monday, October 8, 1984, when NBC broadcast The Burning Bed, a television movie in which Fawcett played Francine Hughes, a Michigan woman who had killed her abusive husband by setting his bed on fire in 1977. The performance was unrecognizable as the work of the Charlie’s Angels-era Farrah. She received her first Emmy nomination. She followed with the 1986 film Extremities, an adaptation of the William Mastrosimone play in which she played a rape victim who turns the tables on her attacker; she had originated the stage role at the off-Broadway Westside Theatre in 1983. By the late 1980s she was a respected serious actress with several Emmy nominations. She received three more across the next two decades.
Farrah Fawcett was diagnosed with anal cancer in September 2006. She refused conventional American chemotherapy in favor of experimental treatment at a clinic in Bavaria. The German treatments extended her life by approximately thirty months. She documented the experience in a 2009 NBC special, Farrah’s Story. She died at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica on Thursday, June 25, 2009, at sixty-two. The same day, in another part of Los Angeles, the singer Michael Jackson collapsed at his rented home in Holmby Hills and was pronounced dead at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Jackson’s death dominated the news cycle for a week. Fawcett’s obituary ran in the back pages.
Sassoon cut the geometric bob. Edwards cut the feathered flick. The first defined the British 1960s. The second defined the American 1970s. Every American salon between 1976 and 1980 had a photograph of Farrah Fawcett pinned to its mirror. Every adolescent bedroom had her poster on the wall. She was twenty-nine when both happened and sixty-two when she died, and for one year of her life she was the most photographed woman in the United States.