Farrah Wasn't Like Us, Until She Was

Anyone who attended a coed college campus in the late '70s likely remembers running into Farrah Fawcett.

I sure do. She seemed to be everywhere at Kent State University, especially in the dorm rooms of guys who couldn't understand why girls like me felt immediately irrelevant at the sight of the unbearably beautiful Farrah smiling from their walls.

Her famous poster was produced by a company in Ohio called Pro Arts, which sold 6 million copies of that single shot of Fawcett in the rusty-red swimsuit.

Few things are easier to find on a college campus, then or now, than young women who see only their flaws when they look in the mirror. In 1977, we compared ourselves with the impossibly wholesome Farrah and — poof — we evaporated, if only in our minds. All that hair in various shades of blond, all those impossibly white teeth.

Still, I never resented Fawcett. She was sweet and so unassuming. It wasn't her fault that she was so pretty. She wasn't a threat, just a fact: There was Farrah Fawcett, and there was everybody else. We could layer our hair like the steps of an escalator and lather up with Wella Balsam until we were waterlogged, but we still would be Farrah wannabes.

In a way, Fawcett liberated me. I was not a sunny, floppy-haired girl from Texas. I was a mouthy brunette from Ohio, full of deep thoughts and a fear of hair products. There were some male fantasies that never would be realized in the likes of me.

There was some comfort in knowing that. It was as if somebody up there shouted, "Girl, just be yourself." Like so many other women squinting in the glare of Farrah's prime time, I decided to polish a better version of little ol' me.

This is not to say I stopped following Fawcett's comings and goings. She was hard to ignore, what with "Charlie's Angels" and all the stories churning around her every move. And she had a healthy awareness of her own celebrity, which came through in her 1978 interview with Playboy magazine, when she talked about the success of "Charlie's Angels" and co-stars Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson.

"When the show got to be No.

3, I figured it was our acting," she said. "When it got to be No. 1, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra."

Unlike most of us mere mortals, Fawcett felt forced to prove she could be something other than sexy. Over time, I came to respect many of the ways she tried.

She was mesmerizing as an abused wife in the made-for-TV movie "The Burning Bed." She looked so haggard, so real. As New York Times reporter Susan Stewart noted in her obituary last week, Fawcett was one of the first prominent actresses to eschew makeup for authenticity.

Fawcett was nominated three times for an Emmy, but there were also plenty of detours on the road to something better. In what seemed a desperate reach for a youth gone by, she posed twice for Playboy. She painted her naked body for a video, too, and seemed virtually incoherent when she showed up on Letterman to promote it.

I never held that against her. As Stewart wrote, "Ms. Fawcett's career was a patchwork of positives and negatives, fine dramatic performances on television and stage as well as missed opportunities."

Sounds a lot like real life to me, only most of us get to stumble out of camera range.

When Fawcett was diagnosed with a rare cancer three years ago, her every move was the source of speculation, some of it fueled by leaks from an employee at the hospital where she was treated. The relentless coverage made life with cancer even more difficult, she told the Los Angeles Times.

"It's much easier to go through something and deal with it without being under a microscope," she said. "It was stressful. I was terrified getting the chemo. It's not pleasant. And the radiation is not pleasant."

Last week, she died, but only after she'd done everything she could to stay alive.

Farrah Fawcett wanted to live, which made her like just about all of us in the end.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.