Farrah was more than a beauty
Posted: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 9:00 AM by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper
Filed Under:
Celebrities
Two things will stay in my memory about the sad loss of Farrah Fawcett. One is the image of her grown son, Redmond O'Neal, fresh from jail, crawling into bed with his dying mom, as shown on the touching documentary "Farrah's Story." And the other is simply a line from an article published when her illness returned, where Ryan O'Neal reported that her famous hair was gone.
Courtesy Everett Collection |
You didn't have to have a million-selling poster to relate to Farrah's struggle.
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Those two items remind us that Farrah was more than a poster. She was a mom, and although Redmond's troubles with drugs and the law are well-known, she was a mom who loved her son and surely tried to do the best by him.
And the loss of her hair ... as anyone who's had or loved someone with cancer knows, few things make you feel as naked as that one loss. Women, especially, set so much store by our hair. O'Neal said that the loss was especially hard for Farrah, because she probably had the most famous hair in the world. I thought about that statement and tried to think of anyone with more famous hair ... Don King? Jennifer Aniston? The biblical Samson? No, Farrah's hair probably wins. Thinking of her without those famed feathers is sobering, because for all her fame, she was one of us.
Even if you never saw a single role of Fawcett's, if you were alive in the 1970s and 1980s, your life was influenced by her. Just pick up a high-school yearbook and see how many of your friends wore the Farrah 'do. No one could do it as well as the original.
Farrah's most remembered for her one season on "Charlie's Angels," but she later fought back against being considered just a pretty face. Her work in "The Burning Bed" and "Extremities" were all the more stunning because of her looks -- we didn't expect to see that beauty playing a serious role, and doing it well. For me, the most memorable Fawcett role is her portrayal of Diane Downs in the movie based on Ann Rule's "Small Sacrifices." Downs murdered one of her children and paralyzed another, and Fawcett somehow dived into that horrible crime and made Downs a three-dimensional person. Unnerving and unforgivable, but three-dimensional.
I was one of the millions who sat rapt on my couch to watch "Farrah's Story," the documentary about her cancer battle. Her time in hospitals was a jolting reminder for all of us of our own individual losses and struggles, the times we've spent in those same generic hospital rooms with those same wall-mounted TVs, wearing plastic bracelets and drinking water out of styrofoam cups. The show reminded us of how we take our own health and that of our family for granted until the ball drops and there we are, back in those antiseptic-smelling hallways waiting for doctors to tell us news that could either lift us up or smash our hearts.
You didn't have to have a hit television show or a world-famous hairdo or a zillion-selling poster to relate to Farrah's struggle. In her life she entertained us, and in her death, she reminded us of what's really important. Carl Sandburg once wrote, "Death sends a radiogram every day: When I want you I'll drop in -- and then one day he comes with a master-key and lets himself in and says: We'll go now." No one can lock death out, not even an Angel.
