Farrah Fawcett: The Mona Lisa of Baby Boomer Generation or Just Another Lovely Work of Art?

Two of the most famous portraits in the world have to be the ageless Mona Lisa painting, done in 1503, by Leonardo Da Vinci, and in more recent times the Farrah Poster, in the 1970's which sold over 12 million copies to the teen/tween offspring of Baby Boomers all over the U.S. and beyond. It is said that Farrah's poster not only marked the beginning of the sexual revolution of the seventies but also introduced the era of athletic sexuality that the likes of Anna Kournikova and Maria Sherapova have made millions exploiting. There have been other beautiful women through out the passages of time but in terms of "Mona" and Farrah , what was it about them that made their images catapult skyward to the iconic level of fame?

Apparently, Andy Warhol saw the connection. His gallery of work includes his interpretation of both Mona Lisa and Farrah. Both show a beautiful yet melancholy even stoic expression. The famous Warhol silk print hangs in Farrah's living room and was visible to the almost 9 million viewers who tuned into Farrah's documentary of her valiant fight with cancer shown on NBC.


Are these visions of Farrah her legacy? Mainly known for portraying one of "Charley's Angels", the Aaron Spelling production that continues to reappear, Farrah lasted just one year and left over a battle of merchandising product revenues....the selling of Farrah's angel image. After leaving "Angels", Farrah made her debut in a horrible movie, Sunburn, with Charles Grodin, the only memorable part of the flic being the beautiful Farrah wearing an equally beautiful white side split tunic over white pants...again a vision.

Later in her career, when the image was reinvented and and that poster, i.e., vision was put in mothballs, Farrah gained respect for her Broadway performance in "Extremities". Fawcett's most critically acclaimed movie was not a big screen splash of beautiful hair, forever teeth and slow motion shots of Farrah jogging braless being blasted across the screen, but a small made for TV production of "The Burning Bed" a tragic story of spousal abuse. Farrah Fawcett, sans make up, was determined to show the world, much like her predecessor, Marilyn Monroe, that she could act, even if it meant the dismantling of the product, the image, the merchandising.Now, as Farrah struggles for a cure of the anal cancer, the question still remains; is it the icon or the heroine that in a two hour documentary showed us, in heart wrenching detail, the battle that millions of Americans know too well, the invasive enemy that is cancer? Farrah's German Doctor stated that cancer is like a terrorist of the body.

Incredibly, we are once again reminded of the remarkable beauty of Farrah when she first learns that the cancer has receded. She looks amazing for a woman of sixty plus who has endured chemo, surgery, radiation and all the pain. But the documentary goes further as Farrah also allows us the intimacy of her devastation when the cancer returned, when she realizes that her options were fewer and fewer. Farrah fought the good fight but the battle is becoming increasingly more difficult to sustain.

I was left thinking how will I remember the Mona Lisa of my generation, Farrah Fawcett? We all pray for her and admire her courage. Farrah, and those close to her, cling to her hope for a miracle. But I can't help but recall that beautiful yet melancholy song by Nat King Cole, "Mona Lisa", which describes the contradictions of beauty and iconic status.

"Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?

Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?"

I believe that our Farrah is all of the above.

Assassination: Six Degrees of Separation from David Feherty's Remarks

Open Letter to Dallas Morning News:


By Aggie Yeakel, editorial writer and former Odessa, Texas (Ector County) teacher

This letter is a grim reminder to you that Dallas,TX holds the egregious distinction of being the city that hosted the first Presidential assassination since 1901(McKinley) which took the life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963. That this happened in Dallas was no accident. The hatred and vitriol that was bubbling just beneath the surface of the City of Hate ( in the 60's) was palpable. President Kennedy was advised to reconsider this trip and avoid Dallas where the right wing hate mongers had both the power and oil money to carry out their verbal assaults.
Fast forward to 2009, in their April issue, D Magazine published an article entitled "President George W. Bush Comes Home (Yo, Dubya)" which included a death threat proposal penned by David Feherty, a golf analyst for CBS Sports. When it comes to political discourse. Ferhery not only rears his ultra right wing side in his article welcoming George W to Preston Hollow, but projects a much darker side of his allegiance to the 43rd President."From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this though, despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death." suggests Feherty in his disdain for Speaker Pelosi.
On Sunday, April 10, CBS Sports published a lame, lapdog apology by Feherty who indicated his article was written as a "joke", albeit a poor one, and apologized to Speaker, Nancy Pelosi and Senate Leader, Senator Reid. Okay then, in the spirit of this so called jocular piece describing how any good soldier can gun down the 3rd in line for the Presidency, let's play Six Degrees of Separation. No, not with Kevin Bacon, but with assassinations, the real kind, David, the kind that attempt to destroy democracy, hope and political decency.
1. The article in question, " appeared in D Magazine which drew the attention of Media Matters for printing the tongue (or was it gun) in cheek article by David Feherty. Put another way, that would be an assassination.
2. D Magazine is a bi-monthly publication which is co-founded by Dirk Allison and Ray Lee Hunt, the son of H.L. Hunt.
3. David Feherty, in the same article, describes his chummy connection to "George 1"(Former President George Herbert Walker Bush) and suggests that now George W and Laura live in the Preston Hollow zip code, (where Feherty also has a residence) they could get together via Jim Nance, CBS Sports Commentator.
4. The alliance of former President George H Bush and the Hunt family go way back. The privately-held Hunt Oil Company(that would be Ray's company) is one of the big money Texas donors behind the Bush family political empire," according to SourceWatch. A Hunt subsidiary, Hunt Oil Co. of the Kurdistan Region , had big plans in 2007, with the blessing of the Bush Administration, to enter into a production-sharing contract with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) for petroleum exploration in northern Iraq, the first such deal since the Kurds passed their own oil and gas law in northern Iraq. This is now under investigation.
5. Ray Lee Hunt's, Daddy, H.L. Hunt had strong connections to the Conspiracy Theory of the Assassination (which the Warren Commission conveniently left out) . The dirty little secret in Dallas oil baron circles is that anyone actually did believe that Lee H. Oswald acted as the lone gunman. Hunt's top aides often heard him say that America would be "much better off without Kennedy". On one occasion Hunt reportedly expressed his desire to see JFK shot . But who needs an FBI investigation and charges when it comes to Texas -approved assassination threats of our nations' leaders? That would be an oxymoron.
6. The Secret Service gave only lip service to the current of hate for JFK in Dallas in 1963 and later dismissed the threats as not a serious threat. Presidential historians tells us that President Kennedy would have easily won his second term as our President had he not been gunned down in Dealey Plaza. Put another way, that would be assassination.
Hatred for President Obama, Speaker, Pelosi and Senate Leader, Harry Reid is, once again, fomenting along the Metroplex as it did in 1962-63. Assassination plots with oil field ambitions and cash to fund them are born, not only in the extremist fox holes of the Middle East, but in the grassy knolls of the Preston Hollows of our world as well. Make no mistake about that. Feherty's crime is serving as the carnival barker and he should be held accountable; however the real danger lurks where greed, oil and power simultaneously rule. Having the audacity to crimp their Middle East oil profiteering or cross their ideological views has proved to be life threatening.
Looking back, I was just a college freshman attending Friday classes on the campus of Illinois State University on that sunny, fall day in November of 1963, when the news came over the radio that our President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was fatally shot in the head by an assassin. On that tragic day, the bullet hole that ripped the President's brain wide open also ripped a hole in the fabric of our democracy that remains today.
So there we have it: Six Degrees of Separation: From H.L. Hunt's desire to see JFK dead, to his son as co-founder of D Magazine, and CEO of Hunt Oil, to the Hunt family connection to the Bush political hierarchy, to Preston Hollow, to the Right Winger of Northern Ireland, Feherty's rants of wishing Speaker Pelosi dead. Clearly, in the past or present climate of hate in Dallas, TX, there is no way of explaining away an idle threat or fantasy no matter how many degrees of separation there are. History knows better.