The end of Farrah Fawcett’s life may have played out in the tabloids, but she belonged to us first.
And by “us,” I mean Generation X, generally, and the boys who cut their teeth chewing the plastic wrap off her rolled-up posters.
She was our “first” — the leggy blond model from Texas imprinted on our brains eons before the likes of Jerry Hall or Anna Nicole Smith sashayed into our field of vision.
The first with a hairstyle so remarkable that feathered “Farrah hair” defined a decade the way Jennifer Aniston’s “Rachel” cut could only dream about.
Farrah’s bra-less escapades on “Charlie’s Angels” became the benchmark for all the jiggle TV to follow.
She was the reason some of us opened an atlas for the first time — to find her hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, on the map — and the reason others bought Wella Balsam shampoo or suffered through “Logan’s Run.”
Anyone doubting her influence on fashion need only pick up any prom picture or leaf through any high-school yearbook from 1977 to 1985 to see the inordinate number of women sporting some variation on Farrah’s hair.
But her legacy in the pop-culture canon will always begin and end with that poster — the one many consider to be the best-selling poster of all-time, the one that gave some of us our first inkling that there was more to life than comic books and tree forts. The woman on that poster was Gen X’s first crush.
Farrah Leni Fawcett-Majors was also a guardian angel of sorts, watching us from the walls of our bedrooms, listening as we stumbled through first forays into adulthood: young love, illicit sips of beer. It was easy to pretend that the radiant blonde with the mouthful of pearly whites was tossing her head back and effortlessly laughing at something we’d said.
It’s impossible to imagine a poster today being as beguiling and mysterious. The photo seemed as if it had been taken almost surreptitiously (on a beach in Cancun?), a woven blanket in the background.
The rust-red one-piece swimsuit seemed damp and noticeably cool, and a thin gold chain around her neck dipped into her décolletage.
She was seated, her left arm resting on her left knee, her left hand tousling her own hair, her head tilted back at a 45-degree angle from the camera, a smile so wide and bright that, by today’s standards, it’s full-on caricature.
There was no stylist — Fawcett-Majors did her own hair and makeup.
By March 1977, it had sold 5 million copies. Today, that number is north of 12 million, and no one else of her era has come close to being a swimsuited paragon of pinup pulchritude.
In 2007, GQ magazine named the poster “the most influential piece of men’s art of the last 50 years,” and a copy of it is among the holdings of the Smithsonian.
But for years now, she’s been enshrined someplace much more intimate and meaningful: in the bedrooms, prom pictures and salon chairs of an entire generation that grew up with a definition of female beauty defined by the blonde with the tousled mane and megawatt smile.
She will always be our favorite Angel. Los Angeles Times