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Farrah's Sexy Secret
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Splash News / Newscom
If you never decoded the secret message in Farrah Fawcett’s pinup poster, it means you did not stare at it long enough.
PLUS: Photos, Video, and an Interview with Farrah
Being 13 years old is one of the worst things that ever happens to a person. Kidnapped from innocence, we are attacked by hormones, acne, and algebra, and thrown into that pit of human suffering known as junior high. When my turn came in 1977, I sought out what solace I could, only to find it hanging right over my head.
Farrah Fawcett was the Mona Lisa of the mid- to late ’70s. Her famous poster sold 12 million copies, and three decades later there are 12 million stories to tell. Mine began when I brought home a copy of the poster from the Spencer’s Gifts in the Nanuet Mall and stuck Farrah to my bedroom wall by penetrating her with the little prick of pushpins. Like the Mona Lisa, Farrah also seemed to have a secret she wanted to reveal. And so I stared relentlessly at her image struggling to decipher whatever message she had for me.
Like the Mona Lisa, Farrah also seemed to have a secret she wanted to reveal.
My few good hours of 1977 were spent lost in the dizzying details of that image: the Technicolor horizontal lines that create sharp angles of tanned, toned skin. A shimmering red bathing suit showing off this tempest in a C-cup. The double rows of a dozen straight teeth that seemed to promise that the gambit of orthodontics might actually pay off. But a full third of the poster was filled with long, blond ropes of magnificent hair, and my time gazing was split loosely along these lines: one-third hair, one-third nipple, one-third the other nipple.
The secret message of the mammaries was easy enough to decode—it must have been pretty cold in the studio where this picture was shot—but it was the hair that presented the most alluring mystery. One day I was lost in its labyrinth when I noticed that one of the ropes her blond hair yielded to her taut shoulder in a way that formed a sloping curve that bent back on itself.
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Just off to the right a teased curved strand that oscillated into another.
From there, my eye landed on a perpendicular intersection of strands that marked a spot at the bottom of her long neck.
“C’mon!” She seemed to be saying, “Do I have to spell it out for you?” Evidently, yes.
Finally, the mystery of her allure was revealed, all spelled out in hair and light. You don’t sell 12 million posters by subliminally suggesting “homework” to 13-year-old boys.
Plus: Check out The Daily Beast’s full coverage on Farrah Fawcett.
A former political operative, recovering copywriter, and failed sitcom writer, Mark Katz is now the founder and principal of the Soundbite Institute, a creative think tank that specializes in on-message humor. His essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time magazine, and he is the author of CLINTON & ME: A Real Life Political Comedy, an account of eight years as the in-house humor speechwriter of the Clinton White House.
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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A former political operative, recovering copywriter, and failed sitcom writer, Mark Katz is now the founder and principal of the Soundbite Institute, a creative think tank that specializes in on-message humor. His essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time magazine, and he is the author of CLINTON & ME: A Real Life Political Comedy, an account of eight years as the in-house humor speechwriter of the Clinton White House.
So spell it already! What am I reading this for if not for the revelation? Geesh!
"Sex," I think. But I'm not sure the revelation was worth reading this. Now, if she'd spelled it with a cloud of dust against a silent jungle sky....
It is Sex, I worked at Pro Arts, the company that manufactured the poster. We were inundated with phone calls about that word in her hair! lol
Thanks td. But Beast's little boxed crop - if you look at it as a 13-year-old would - is even more suggestive in imagery than the word.
Often the most sexual adds and posters show very little. (As is the case with Farrah and her very famous poster...) The whole thing is so sad.
This article is silly!
Of course it is. It's about sex and being 13. It's supposed to be silly.
Take a look at her hair just before she lost it to chemo -- it still falls the same way.
This is as puerile as any man's reminiscence of his wet dreams can be.
Editor please! This doesn't even belong on the Daily Beast.
I can't believe this guy thought anyone would be interested in hearing about what he stared at when he masturbated when he was 13 years old. If this were a humor piece, okay, but this is just a stone cold dull remembrance of things jerked.
My guess is he's just desperate to see his byline appear - anywhere, for anything - and Farrah's death presented an opportunity. Ick.
That ball bounces in two directions. In one direction it makes slave of persons. In the other direction, it makes some persons Free.
In my own case, it was a simple reaction, at the time. "Oh gee, another pin up girl?" "Oh dear, isn't it sad that she isn't the bomb that Greta Garbo was." "Why do these women always seem to have nothing better to do, or to contribute, other than seeking to profit from their unnatural vice?" "Gee, I wonder if there is anything of value in womanhood if this is the best that they can do?"
You see, there are women of vice and there are women of virtue. Idolizing women of vice wouldn't be my first choice, especially if I were trying to create something known as CIVILIZATION. Where are the Women of Virtue? Or, is that question simply well past it's time, women having insisted in this generation on describing themselves emphatically as being completely devoid of any Virtue whatsoever and completely without the Will to assemble anything remotely associated with the attainment of CHARACTER.
And they disgrace themselves such as this IN PUBLIC and seek to hide from the consequences of doing such? How is this even remotely reasonable or intelligent?
Party on Garth!!!
A writer who doesn't know the difference between "it's" and "its" is the last person civilization needs to lecture anyone about anything.
I know, I know: You were Hooked on Fonix.
Your virtue is bull, and your morality is shit, and if you want to build a civilization out of that, do so, but leave me out of it. My civilization will approach when people stop pretending that the sight of a human unclothed threatens anybody. When Vice is used to identify actions that actually harm others rather than speech and actions that are merely found offensive to the insular, and when Disgrace is used to describe those who would attempt to force their personal hang-ups on everybody else. The future is now; Men And Women of the Future, do as you please, save it do no harm.
A secret. I don't think so. Hope you don't go to work for the CIA.
You were staring at her hair, huh?
...that came later...after spending hours of staring at her nipples and thighs...and...well..you know...
Actually, only after moving past the raging hormones of teenage boys. probably when he was 25-30 and his bride asked him to take the poster down.
I've saved my poster and will put it back up once my teenage boys shuffle off to college.
Wow. A trip into the masturbatory history of a 13 year old boy. It isn't Farrah Fawcett this guy was interested in, it was the use of her body. Sickening and pointless unless simply meant to disgust.
Poor Mark! All he's doing is writing a fun piece, a bit of nostalgia, an attempt to inform those too young to know what the Farrah phenomenon was all about and he gets denounced and pilloried. Sweet as she was, there was no more vacant and vapid creature than this poor girl; she would have been flattered--not offended--in the least. Society has lost its sense of humor.
Thank you.
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