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. Fawcett's braless escapades on "Charlie's Angels" (and tight-shirted shenanigans on "Battle of the Network Stars") 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." Her marriage to "The Six Million Dollar Man" star Lee Majors was one of the first celebrity marriages we cared about, and it served as incontrovertible evidence to a fair number of preteen boys that bionic limbs were most likely a powerful aphrodisiac.
The face-framing feathered tresses she wore when she met the world as one of "Charlie's Angels" came by way of Beverly Hills stylist Jose Eber. And as that signature look took off, it kicked his career into high gear.
"I got calls from women all over the U.S., Europe, even Saudi Arabia, who wanted to get the Farrah hairdo," Eber noted in a published interview. But he gave his client due credit: "It was the way Farrah moved her head, the way she ran her fingers through her hair, her natural sex appeal."
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 (and more than a few men) sporting some variation on Fawcett'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 bestselling poster of all time, the one that gave some of us our first inkling that there was more to life than comic books. The woman on that poster was Gen X's first crush.
