The only time I ever met Farrah Fawcett, she wasn't Farrah Fawcett yet. It was pre-Charlie's Angels, pre-poster, pre-phenomenon. She was one of umpteen clients for a p.r. and management firm that had me writing some of its press releases, and I think I rewrote her official bio, which didn't take long. She hadn't done much of anything and there was no reason to suspect she would. She seemed nice enough but had the attention span of one of those insects with a two-hour life span.
She had just been signed as regular on one of my favorite TV shows, Harry O with David Janssen. I don't recall if she'd filmed her first episode yet but I do remember that she'd never seen the show. Nor was she all that interested in it. It was just a matter of what the exposure might do for her career. I gather that at some point later in her life, she decided to pay some attention to the acting part of her profession…and she wasn't bad at it.
I never quite understood why, apart from the old right time/right place luck, she became so famous. Beautiful she was….but so were thousands of others who never got those breaks. My sense was always that she was the answer…and the question, pondered by some powerful folks in Hollywood, was "Can we create a superstar?"
Apparently, they could. But the sad part of that is that it usually doesn't last long…these days, about as long the aforementioned insect's life-span.