XX Factor: the blog

For Farrah, A Wing and A Prayer

I was 10 years old when Charlie’s Angels debuted in 1976. This is my school picture from that year, my aggravatingly straight and unstyleable hair awkwardly plastered into the style that was referred to, at least in Texas, as “wings.” Wearing your hair in wings, with a middle part and plenty of hairspray, was near-obligatory in the fifth grade at Helotes Elementary. Even the boys, at least those aspirationally cool enough to have left behind the childish mushroom bowl cut, feathered and sprayed their hair. When the girls played “Angels” at school or at each others’ houses (tossing our wings, pointing imaginary guns and shouting “Freeze!” in breathy voices), I usually took the part of Kate Jackson’s Bree. (She was the "brainy one.” Now there’s a low bar: The brainy Charlie’s Angel.) But the beautiful, athletic, popular girls, the ones who could run fast and had hair that feathered right (and who lacked the pink plastic glasses and epic overbite on view in this photo), got to be Farrah Fawcett's golden and gleaming Jill Munroe.

I can’t agree with Ellen that Farrah will be remembered only for her hairstyle. She did an admirable job of reinventing her career in midlife with the play and movie The Burning Bed, which brought a lot of attention to the domestic violence issues she advocated for later in life. And I’ve always been touched by her turbulent but enduring partnership with Ryan O’Neal, who was by her bedside when she died (and who told the press this week, heartbreakingly, that he’d finally ask her to marry him “when she’s able to say yes”). But since Farrah’s iconic legacy was her glorious, ridiculous, leonine mane (and the unfortunate imitations it inspired), I think it’s fitting that we mourn her with a photo gallery of attempted Farrah-dos gone by. Readers, please dig through your yellowing snapshots and contribute! Don’t leave Hanna and me alone in our winged shame! Send photos to doublex.slate+farrah@gmail.com.

Comments

Farrah the Actress

By: Phil Nugent | Mon, 06/29/2009 - 10:13

"The Burning Bed" wasn't a play, or really a movie; it was a (godawful) torn-from-the-headlines issue-of-the-week TV film about a woman taking violent revenge against an abusive husband. I suspect that Dana Stevens has mated it in her memory with "Exposures", the (godawful) off-Broadway play and movie about a woman threatening to take violent revenge against a rapist.

I too was about ten when Farrah-mania broke big in America, and I remember finding it perplexing and kind of disturbing, because even at that age--or maybe, for some reason, especially at that age--it was disorienting to feel the full force of the world's media joining forces to assure you that someone who seemed to have no personality beyond her hair and teeth was the most desirable woman in the world. It was hard to compute for somebody whose first hard celebrity crush was on a Bugaloo.

I still don't have a lot of affection for that dorm-poster image, and Fawcett's performances in those heavyweight issue films--someone who (briefly) became a superstar by agreeing to be objectified lending her unsteady acting chops to fiery attacks on sexism--don't deserve anything better than a grudging "A" for effort. But I did think she came through as an actress a couple of times, and I was always surprised at how touching it seemed when she did well. The first time she was good was in the TV miniseries "Murder in Texas", where she played a trophy wife whose husband was bored enough with her to kill her, and she was very sweet in her small roles in such movies as "The Apostle" and "Dr. T and the Women", where she played beautiful women weighed down a little by time and age who were looking for some happiness and stability and willing to settle for less than the woman on that poster looked as if she expected as her due. In those parts, she seemed to know a lot about the long-term costs of having the looks, and the blank personality, of someone other people naturally project their fantasies on.

Farrah, winged hair

By: jhillmurphy | Fri, 06/26/2009 - 23:16

I played Jacklyn Smith -- Kelly, right? -- because I had dark hair and eyes, so there was no way I could do Farrah. I got my hair cut so I could feather it, but I rarely used a blow dryer or hair spray. My hair would feather back pretty nicely on one side of the middle part -- I discovered I actually had some wave in it -- but the other side it would start to feather back but then curl forward again or just stick out to the side. 1/2 AFH (Angel Feathered Hair) + 1/2 DNFH (Dorky Non-Feathered Hair) = DH (Dorky Hair.)

Plus, at age 11, I had acne and braces. From my eyes to the top of my head, though, I was a dead ringer for Jacklyn Smith.