Lost in the Michael Jackson tsunami was the premature death of another, more modest pop culture icon: Farrah Fawcett.
Jackson was an international superstar. Fawcett was uniquely American.
He was a troubled, tragic genius. Her talents were smaller, but noteworthy still.
His music, reaching nearly a billion people, dominated early ’80s sound. Her 1970s pin-up poster – the spectacular girl next door in the red one-piece – dominated the bedrooms of more than 12 million American boys and inspired as many girls to buy curling irons, blow dryers and Wella Balsam shampoo in a labor-intensive, forever futile attempt to flip their hair, too, into wispy golden wings.
Farrah Fawcett managed something else not easy in this culture, or any other. She surpassed expectations. She moved beyond the dim-witted, bottle-blond stereotype to become a respected actress. And as a woman who embodied much of what feminism disdained, she nonetheless brought massive attention to issues central to women’s rights: the brutality of rape and domestic violence.
One could aruge that her 1984 role in “The Burning Bed,” the story of a woman who endured 13 years of beatings before killing her husband, did more to bring an understanding of battered women’s syndrome to America than a thousand academic tomes. And in the mid-’80s, when rapists were rarely prosecuted and even more rarely jailed, she starred on Broadway and in the movies in “Extremities,” the story of a woman who gets revenge on her would-be rapist.
Almost nobody saw her finest acting performance as the preacher’s wife in Robert Duvall’s 1997 near-masterpiece, “The Apostle.” That was the same year she appeared on David Letterman rambling and barely coherent, which is what we do remember.
But fortunately, many more saw her final screen appearance: on TV, the riveting “video diary” of her struggle with cancer. There are no Beacon Street marches or glitzy fund-raisers to support the dare-not-speak-its name cancer she endured: cancer of the anus. You may recall, if you tuned in, seeing her bald head. Thus was the most copied, distinctive hair in late 20th century America taken, too, by cancer, the great leveler.
Wheelock College sociologist Gail Dines wonders whether Farrah Fawcett’s pin-up would get much attention in 2009, when our sex icons are “hyper-sexualized” and less dependent on nature than manmade additions. Fawcett had no surgically enhanced breasts, like the recently deposed Miss California or the models in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. There were no kinky overtones, like Britney Spears’ studs and leather or Jenna Jameson’s porn-star past. .
“She didn’t even wear a bikini. She just looked very wholesome,” like the cheerleader Farrah had been back in Corpus Christi, Texas, said Dines. But Farrah Fawcett wanted more than that. She tried really hard, persisting even when few took her seriously, or noticed. By the end, she had succeeded.