CHAPTER 10
I was a Rams football fan with season tickets. I invited Sonny Bono to go with me to a game. The idea was to drink a few beers and have a good time. When I picked him up in my limousine, he asked, “Do you mind if Lee Majors comes along?”
I didn’t mind at all. Sonny recently had done a cameo on Lee’s successful television series, The Six Million Dollar Man. I didn’t know Lee, but he had been on the periphery of my life twice. His first movie role had been in Strait-Jacket, the mask movie that sent my old girlfriend Leslie Parrish into hysterics, and he had been Ryan O’Neal’s backup when Ryan threatened me at the Daisy because I was seeing his estranged wife. In those days Lee had been Harvey Lee Yeary. He had come a long way. He was his own man now, a veteran television superstar.
I was living in a void — plagued by boredom and acute depression. I was managing Glenn Ford and Charlotte Rampling, but my public-relations business was falling behind. I’d lost much of my interest in it. Actors, because they were so insecure when unemployed, were unreliable, and corporate accounts bored me. I thought Lee might be a potential management client.
Sonny and I picked up Lee and went to the game. Lee was a handsome man, athletic and masculine, but also shy and taciturn. After several beers, he began to loosen up. Sonny, who felt he owed me something for helping resurrect his career, encouraged Lee to hire me as his publicist. I didn’t mention that I would prefer to manage him. After the game, Lee pulled me aside. “I’ll hire you for a thousand bucks a month, Jay,” he said, “but you have to represent my wife for free.”
“Who’s your wife?”
“Farrah Fawcett-Majors.”
He explained that she’d had a few modeling jobs and a couple of minor television roles. She’d recently done a pilot for Spelling-Goldberg called Charlie’s Angels. ABC had it on their March schedule. Farrah and Jaclyn Smith, another model turned actress, were playing second-fiddle to Kate Jackson, the show’s star. It was about three women detectives. I yawned. Lee was my priority; Farrah would be just another name on my list of clients.
The timing was good. I was in need of a movie hero. Bill Holden was making his last major movie, Network, but he was no longer capable of carrying a film on his own merit. George Peppard was floundering, lost in the sea of Machiavellian Hollywood waves. John Wayne, suffering lung cancer, was making his last movie. The new stars were Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, fine actors but not replacements for the brilliant heroes of the past. Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty were nearest to the stars of old, but they were into antihero roles, a shift in storytelling I thought detrimental to the cultural influence of movies in times past. I saw Lee as a potential international hero in the mold of Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson.
Lee invited me to his home to meet Farrah. It was a very unusual meeting. As I looked at her, she smiled. I smiled back—time stopped. The moment lasted an eternity. I felt spellbound. I saw a magical, golden glow around her; it was an extraordinary feeling. Farrah was literally breathtaking. I knew at that very moment that a superstar was born and I was her launching pad.
But Hollywood was replete with beautiful women, as I was firmly reminded by Lee, who did most of the talking, making it clear he was head of the household. Farrah’s role as an actress was subsidiary to their domestic life. It was something to keep her busy. Farrah laughed in genial agreement. She was quiet, but not shy. She knew when to speak, when not to speak. It wasn’t that Lee had trained her, but rather that she was perceptibly and innately bright.
I kept my thoughts to myself about making Farrah into a Superstar. Lee was the star in the Majors household. Farrah was an adjunct, an appendage, as far as he was concerned. Lee was like Bill Holden and George Peppard—conservative, old fashioned and narrow-minded. A wife’s place was in the home, not in front of a camera. Lee was the breadwinner and the decision maker. Even with all my deep, intuitive and surreal feelings about Farrah and her star potential, none of us that night had a real inkling of what lay in the bright future; it was too fantastic to contemplate.
In the beginning of my relationship with Lee and Farrah, I felt like a babysitter. In his absence, Lee wanted me to escort his wife to various functions. It wasn’t easy to satisfy his demands; taking Farrah about town was time-consuming. I enjoyed being with her, but it was disappointing to see her plodding through the routine of trying to stay on the periphery of the Hollywood game. She had enjoyed success as a model, but now, after a so-so career as an actress, she had assumed the role of a thousand other Hollywood actresses, that of a has-been, no longer a wannabe.
I repeatedly told Farrah not to worry about anything. As long as she followed my rules and took my advice, things would dramatically turn around for her and her career. I plotted all day and I schemed by night, and in my sleep, I dreamed about it.
One afternoon I took her to The Merv Griffin Show at a studio in Hollywood. Farrah was one among many star wives participating in a fashion show. For me, it was another humdrum episode; I had more important things to do. I sat through the taping, talking with various people between shots. When it was finished, I got Farrah and we left through the stage door with several other couples. Then another extraordinary thing happened.
Three dozen fans were waiting outside, which wasn’t unusual. What was unusual is they only wanted to see Farrah. They collapsed on us, ignoring the other wives who had modeled. It wasn’t just a crowd; it was a swarm of fanatics, all wanting to be near Farrah. It was a new experience for me. Farrah radiated something extra, a quality esoteric and ethereal. Hair rose on the back of my neck. It was uncanny, but the instant I saw the reaction of her fans it reaffirmed to me that Farrah was going to be a Superstar. I resurrected a word from the Kennedy years: charisma. She had it, a magnetic quality that defied description. When we got into our limousine, I said, “Farrah, I’m going to make you a Superstar.”
“Oh, Jay! Don’t be silly.” She saw nothing of the sort. She had been going with the flow since her arrival in California in 1969. Her career had not been a struggle as it was for most actresses, although nothing of importance had come her way. She’d had minor parts in Myra Breckinridge and Logan’s Run, and a few forgettable television roles. I think she had given up on being a star, if she had ever wanted to be one. She was wholesome, not desperate, a beautiful woman dedicated to her husband and her domestic responsibilities. She had more interest in sports than in movies or television. She spent her time playing tennis, swimming and being Mrs. Lee Majors.
Suddenly my mind-set changed. I had been dwelling on heroes—more precisely on the lack of them. Watergate and Vietnam had changed everything. After Nixon’s fall, political heroes were absent from the American landscape. Vietnam had made military heroes a thing of the past. Sports figures were no longer loyal to their fans or team, except for one season; Joe Namath was advertising pantyhose. Forget heroes; maybe America was waiting for a heroine, someone who was not only gorgeous but who espoused values. I saw that heroine in Farrah. She didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink, she was into fitness and exercise (I thought she perspired Perrier water) and she was beyond beautiful.
She was heavenly. I saw her as America’s new role model.
Nobody seemed interested in Charlie’s Angels except Aaron Spelling, Leonard Goldberg and Fred Silverman, president of ABC Television Entertainment. Lee certainly wasn’t, and I don’t think Farrah gave it much thought. The buzz was that Spelling-Goldberg had produced a dud. That was not unusual; most television projects failed. The bottom line, as always, would be the Nielsen ratings.
The week the pilot aired, Patty Hearst was kidnapped in one of the more lurid and perplexing cases since Leopold and Loeb. The news dominated the airwaves. I felt Charlie’s Angels would be overshadowed by Hearst. After all, it was an escapist fantasy about three women detectives. Patty Hearst was real.
The two-hour TV movie debuted on March 21, 1976. The critics lambasted it, but the show received a phenomenal 54 share, which meant over half of America was tuned to it. It was a gargantuan rating. No one could doubt that ABC would give Spelling-Goldberg a green light to develop the show into a dramatic-action series for the fall season.
My emphasis had already shifted from Lee to Farrah. She couldn’t act, but she had spunk and a natural ease in front of the camera. I thought acting classes would help, but she vetoed my suggestion: “I’ll never take acting classes, Jay. Don’t bring it up again!” She wasn’t against tutelage, but it was too time-consuming. She was an outdoor girl, an athlete.
I needed a game plan, a way to exploit her assets. As if by accident, Farrah solved my problem.
In June, just before Charlie’s Angels went into series production, she showed me a new pinup poster of herself. I was bowled over. It was tasteful, yet the sexiest picture I had seen since I was a kid. It reminded me of the World War II pinup poster of Betty Grable. Grable, however, had been a star that made a poster. As I looked at Farrah’s photograph, I realized the reverse could be true also—a poster could make a star.
The brainchild of the poster was an executive at the Pro Arts poster company. When Farrah was asked to pose in a bikini, she dismissed the idea—not the poster but the bikini. She also rejected their photographer, choosing fellow Texan Bruce McBroom, whom she’d met while doing Myra Breckenridge in 1969. She had chosen a one-piece red bathing suit, and McBroom shot a series of photographs alongside the Majors’ pool.
The photograph was not nearly as revealing as other cheesecake pictures of the day. Farrah appeared in profile, her head tilted back, her hair as dry as the Sahara, with a wide, radiant smile. The swimsuit was wet, and it clung tightly to her lithe body, exposing her full breasts, something Betty Grable had been prevented from doing. When I saw the poster shot I instantly perceived an angle for a campaign—nipples. No mainstream celebrity had ever been so exposed. “I can promote this,” I told her. “I can merchandise this.”
She shrugged, expressing no excitement.
“This can be something big,” I continued, “just like you’re going to be big.”
She laughed. The poster was no big deal. She had done it, that’s all, and whimsically.
One salient idea I learned in college was that history repeats itself. It was time for a new pinup poster. I wouldn’t draw commission from it because I was on a flat retainer with no perks. It was a challenge, that’s all; I thought I could change history while simultaneously repeating it.
Farrah was almost thirty. Traditionally, the perfect celluloid woman was under twenty-five. When Betty Grable did her famous poster, she was twenty-four. Elizabeth Taylor was twenty when she made A Place in the Sun; Lana Turner was twenty-one in Honky Tonk; Jane Russell twenty-two when she did The Outlaw; Jean Harlow was dead at twenty-six. If there were women who had become star sex symbols at an older age, they lied about it.
The age attitude was not a Hollywood creation. It was a cultural holdover of a Victorian concept regarding marriage, and it was still in play in the mid-seventies. Essentially, if a young woman was not married by her twenty-fifth birthday, she was a spinster. We were in the midst of the women’s liberation movement, but for all their good intentions, women progressives had failed to resolve the stigma of age, married or not. I remember when Raquel Welch, today still one of the most beautiful women in the world, turned thirty but claimed to be twenty-five.
I asked Farrah if she would mind if I revealed her age in a publicity campaign. To my surprise, she didn’t give it a second thought. She shrugged and said, “No. Why should I?” On September 14, ABC aired the Charlie’s Angels pilot again. It took fourth place in overall ratings. Eight days later the first episode of the series aired. Suddenly we didn’t have enough pinup posters to meet the demands of retailers, and the printing presses starting rolling twenty-four hours a day. Farrah’s poster was a star before she was. It became the biggest seller in pinup-poster history—12 million copies. Millions of teenage boys and young men had their first sexual experience with Farrah Fawcett. She just wasn’t there in person.
When Farrah celebrated her birthday, she was the most famous thirty-year-old in the nation. She received a half-million letters from young women, saying in effect, “I’m twenty-six, and I thought I was over the hill. Thanks to you, I realize I’ve got a few more years to get my life together.”
Poor Lee. When I first met him at that Rams game, he had seemed ebullient, confident and supremely mature. It was the beer; it fogged my observation. Lee was as insecure as any actor I ever knew. He was unprepared for fame. He could be rude to his fans and uncommunicative to his colleagues. He was a television heartthrob who lived in fear of losing his wife.
We shared one common interest—sports. If I had business to discuss, I warmed him up by talking sports. And we were both gamblers. He was good; I was not. I was a risk-taker. Lee said, “I’ll be your bookie. Why give your commissions to someone you hardly know? Let me have them.” I did, and he had no qualms about taking them.
His vocabulary seemed limited to a few sports words, like hike. His sign language was prehistoric. A high five was his most expressive gesture. “Gimme five!” he would cry when excited, and then slap the shit out of my hand.
He was making tons of money and his innate conservatism demanded that nothing change the status quo. He transmitted his philosophy to Farrah. My problem was selling them new ideas, turning no into yes. Lee wanted to be blameless. He argued with me vociferously before acquiescing, because if an idea failed he would then have a scapegoat. That was Lee’s mentality: wary, self-serving and self-protective. He once advised a friend: “When you go to Hollywood, hire yourself a smart Jew.” I was his Jew.
Lee had a cabin on a lake in some mountains north of Las Vegas. It was his retreat from a world he didn’t feel comfortable in. When Farrah was working and he was not, he would often go alone to the cabin and stay two weeks at a time. He had a boat and he would fish by himself, just Lee and the fish. It reminded me of Leslie Parrish and her cats.
His wilderness experiences sounded like he was reliving the life of Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond. I went to the cabin with him once, thinking it might give me a chance to establish a better rapport with him. His father and another friend from Kentucky joined us. We were supposed to be gone a week. It was one of the worst experiences of my life.
The cabin was smaller than my kitchen and the refrigerator hadn’t been cleaned out in two years. The four of us were cramped in the hut of a cabin like cellmates in jail, yet no one ever said anything of importance. The boat was hardly big enough for one person. We were four men leading lives of quiet desperation. There were no elephants or lions or Cape buffalo to stimulate the flow of adrenaline. The great wide world beyond that little cabin and that little boat and that little lake no longer existed.
After twenty-four hours of communing with nature I began to go stir-crazy. We fished hour after hour, catching nothing and seldom speaking. I roughed it two days, and then I bade the trio farewell and hightailed it back to Los Angeles. I needed some polluted air in my lungs.
If Farrah was hesitant about becoming a star, she wasn’t uncooperative. On a personal level, Farrah and I developed a very special friendship that would last the rest of our lives. Shoot, we were having the time of our lives! We teased each other and tried to have fun when we could; however, there just wasn’t enough time in the day. I was extremely driven and focused. She went along with everything I asked, which was a lot.
All summer long, while Charlie’s Angels was being filmed, she gave lunchtime interviews. On a staggered schedule, I brought in forty top national and syndicated journalists, people I had dealt with over the years. I briefed each of them for a solid hour before I took them to Farrah’s trailer. I preached to them about symbols and mythical goddesses; I gave each a poster. By the time they met Farrah, they were preconditioned, totally in sync with my agenda without realizing it. I stayed for the interviews. When questions about foreign affairs and abortion and a hundred other controversial topics were asked, I interrupted and steered the reporters in other directions. I declined interviews with writers who might be hostile, and I turned down requests for Farrah to appear on talk shows. I wanted to build an image; I had to control the questions and the environment.
“If somebody wants to meet the girl next door, they should go next door,” I told Farrah. “We need to create a mystique. You represent apple pie, baseball and the American flag, but your wholesomeness must be imitated, not shared. A national treasure. An icon. You are part of the American dream. Remember that—a dream. You are unattainable.”
Charlie’s Angels had been intended as a vehicle for Kate Jackson. By the time the series aired, however, Farrah was bigger than the show.
In pop culture people are interested in stars, not artists. Meryl Streep is a great artist, but most movie fans don’t know much about her private life. While Farrah was reaching her peak, her fans’ need for information about her could not be sated. She was known globally as simply “Farrah.” When a celebrity is recognized by just one name, it is sometimes referred to in our business as achieving “iconic” status. It’s the pinnacle of the business for an actor. Always to be remembered, and never to be forgotten. With Farrah, it came amazingly quick. The Farrah phenomenon was something the world had never before experienced with a Hollywood starlet, or any mortal woman in the history of mankind, for that matter.
An overnight female goddess on earth. The phenomenon was so intense, it became known as a thing within itself. Farrah-mania some even called it. She became everything to everybody. Men, women and children all adored her for many different reasons. Farrah the sex symbol, role model and all-American superstar.
In the beginning, Aaron Spelling was smart enough to use Farrah’s newfound status. He probably pushed the poster as hard as I did. To his credit, he certainly shared my foresight, as he had his writers reevaluate the role of Farrah’s character, Jill Munroe, and give her equal time with Kate’s character. For the rest of the year, the show was trying to catch up with Farrah. I was receiving over two hundred calls a day from journalists around the world. I began to cut back. I had gone for quantity in the beginning; now I wanted quality.
When UPI’s Vernon Scott said Farrah was the next Marilyn Monroe, I knew we had reached a new plateau. Farrah wasn’t remotely like Marilyn, but I capitalized on the comparison. It was the hair. Marilyn had been the last blonde to achieve stardom. Before Marilyn, with few exceptions, female stars had been brunettes; since Marilyn, until Farrah, most were brunettes again. Where Farrah differed from Marilyn was in her intelligence. The “dumb blonde” was out.
I didn’t ignore Lee and my other clients, but it was Farrah who consumed my thoughts. I wanted to make her the most famous woman in the world. Yet to become her de facto manager, I had to overcome a stubborn barrier—Lee’s ego. “The term ‘personal manager’ sounds like we don’t know how to take care of ourselves,” he said. Then, almost inadvertently, he gave me the green light.
We were poolside at their Bel Air home. Lee was exasperated, tired of phone calls, press pressure and contract negotiations. He and Farrah were working Monday through Friday on their series. Farrah was doing magazine photo shoots nearly every weekend at my place in Stone Canyon. “We’re overwhelmed,” said Lee. “It’s hard to keep up with everything. The business deals are too many to think about. You’ve got to handle some of this stuff, Jay.”
“A lot of this is not the job of your public-relations man, Lee,” I said. “If you want me to take over, I’ll be glad to do it. But we’ll have to strike a personal-management agreement.”
Lee looked at Farrah. “Looks like we’ve got a manager, darling.” Then he looked at me. “How will it work?”
I told him I needed authority to make career decisions, after consultations with him and Farrah. “I know where the quicksand is, and where the crocodiles and cannibals are,” I explained. “I can help you avoid them. I’ll serve as a buffer between you and potential problems.”
“You’ll be the villain instead of me, right?” said Lee with a laugh. “When something gets screwed up, it’s your fault. Right?”
I received $1,000 monthly from each and 5 percent of their incomes from acting, excluding Charlie’s Angels and The Six Million Dollar Man, which preceded me. I got nothing from ancillary activities, like product endorsements and commercial revenues. It wasn’t a good deal for me, but that’s how badly I wanted to get into personal management full time.
I began the slow phase-out of my public-relations business. It was transitional and could not be done overnight. I had many employees to take care of, and I wanted to keep a few choice clients as backups to Lee and Farrah. I wanted to be the first multiple-client manager in the business. It was a new concept.
Farrah, Lee and a few others became my whole life. I did it all day long, two shifts a day, and when I went to sleep at night, I dreamed about them—mainly Farrah.
My goal was to make Farrah a star in every possible medium. When I was growing up, movies had been the medium of mass entertainment. By 1976 the medium was the media. Everything was interrelated: movies, television, radio and publishing. There was no single venue of importance; they all overlapped. It was complicated, because the free-enterprise system demanded a vast array of ownership. I had to deal with dozens of executives every week.
Fabergé, the cosmetics and hair-products company, had a subsidiary motion-picture division, Brut Productions, which I had represented a couple of times, launching movies such as A Touch of Class. George Barrie, the founding father, was an unusual executive. He was a businessman with acumen, but also a talented songwriter, sometimes teaming with Sammy Cahn. He was a two-time Oscar nominee. Combining show business with the cosmetics business, George was responsible for creating the celebrity-endorsement method of selling products.
I arranged a meeting with George and his son Richard, who was succeeding his father as president of Fabergé. I low-keyed it, not knowing exactly what I could pull off. I had nothing to sell except a name and an image—Farrah’s. I was looking for a product Farrah might endorse. What I found was a gold mine. When we finished, I had a three-year deal for Farrah at $1.5 million per year, a total of $4.5 million. She would serve as a consultant and spokesperson for one of their new products, Farrah Fawcett Shampoo. Before we signed, Farrah was the second-billed actress in Charlie’s Angels at $5,000 per episode; after we signed, she was rich.
Farrah owed Fabergé sixty days a year, to be used shooting commercials, promoting products and consulting. I was not opposed to their use of her time except when she was on her set. I remembered when Sammy Davis, Jr., almost killed himself doing a Broadway show, a television show and a movie all at one time. I knew the toll it had taken on him, and I didn’t want that to happen to Farrah.
At the zenith of Farrah-mania, I fielded literally thousands of bizarro offers from all over the world. It was utterly insane, but it was one of the many hats I wore as her personal manager. Everything from Farrah toys to Farrah toothbrushes, to Farrah dolls, candy, clothing, lunchboxes and absolutely everything in between. I had never seen or heard anything like it before. The manic frenzy of offers our way never stopped—all my phone lines were constantly lit up and completely on fire.
I did my very best and was successful in shielding her from the steadily building intensity and pressure from all the offers, demands and pandemonium that was crashing in all around us.
I was so dedicated to my clients in those days that my behavior verged on abnormality. With rare exception, I was willing to take a bullet for them. My attitude had begun at Rogers & Cowan. Philosophically, I had been opposed to company policy, which essentially was to side with the media during a dispute between a client and a member of the press. Warren Cowan once told me, “Stars come and go, but the people that do you favors in the press are always there.” I disagreed with him. I believed my allegiance belonged to my client.
My rationale was simple: if I went to my doctor and he said, “Get out of here; you have a fever,” he wouldn’t be doing his job. Robert Shapiro didn’t defend O.J. Simpson because he thought he was innocent. He did it because it was his professional duty. I felt the same way; I was there to protect my clients and I didn’t shirk my duty. My clients were my family.
We were having dinner at the Rangoon Racquet Club—Farrah, Lee, Charlotte Rampling and I. Farrah needed to go to the ladies’ room. To get to the restrooms one had to go through the bar, a long narrow room that ran parallel to the dining room, separated by a short wall and lattice framework. I told Farrah I would escort her.
The cocktail lounge was full of people, mostly men, and it was late enough that more than a few of them had reached their limit. We walked through the bar without event, and I waited for Farrah in the hallway outside the ladies’ room. As we came back, one of the guys sitting at the bar recognized her. “Farrah, I hear you’re a lousy lay!”
Farrah was not yet accustomed to celebrity, neither its upside nor its downside. She was still very much a little girl from Texas with limited experience in the tough world of Hollywood.
“Farrah, did you hear me? They say you’re a lousy fucking lay!”
Shocked at the man’s audacity, Farrah whispered, “I’m getting Lee.” Big trouble was on the horizon if Farrah told Lee what had happened. Lee was a macho man of the old school, one who had no reservations about backing up his machismo with action. He was tough, and he did not treat fools lightly.
All of this happened in seconds—the man’s remark, Farrah’s shocked reaction and the image I conjured of Lee’s wrath and his potential violence. I imagined Lee ending up in jail. There was no upside if Lee became entangled with the guy, so I acted.
I turned and slugged him with a full-fisted roundhouse that sent him tumbling to the floor. Before the guy could get up and react, the bartenders and waiters hauled him outside.
Lee never knew the cause of the incident. Farrah was smart enough to keep her mouth shut. When we returned to our table, we passed off the action as typical barroom mayhem. Lee shrugged, and we continued dinner. It would be years before I realized that taking a bullet for a client was foolish.