She was lithe and sexy without being flagrant or debased, or-the biggest no-no of all-sexually threatening. The housemaster (Birdy, we called him) was not an unreasonable man he conceded the technical point and let us keep the poster up-warning us, instead, and in face-saving generality, not to be "bad chaps." (To be sure, he was likely disconcerted by the one feature of the poster that is as eye-catching as Farrah Fawcett's hair, and which reveals itself upon closer inspection.) And so, Farrah Fawcett offered us a small escape from the limits and suffocations of our Indian boys' boarding school-and of the wider pruderies of Indian society-until some thieving scalawag made off with the poster halfway through term, leaving us bereft.įarrah Fawcett was the perfect practitioner of that most prized of American feminine arts: that of semi-wholesomeness. Since even brutal boarding schools have a semblance of the rule of law, we pointed out that this was inconsistent with the housemaster's own rule, which proscribed only bikinis. Our housemaster had a no-bikini rule for posters in dorms (nude posters on the wall would have led to immediate caning and confiscation) and yet, on his rounds, when he chanced upon our poster of Farrah Fawcett-in which, as you know, she wears a red, one-piece bathing suit-he asked us curtly to take it down. We uttered her name in full-FarrahFawcettMajors-and never said just "Farrah" (which, to our Indian ears, sounded too much like the name of the wife of the Shah of Iran). We were the only ones to possess a copy in our house, and so our dorm became a magnet for boys who wished to come and gaze at Farrah Fawcett-Majors, as she then was. Our little dormitory of five 15-year-olds in a boarding school in Rajasthan, in India, acquired a copy of the poster in 1977. Like millions of other boys of the time, I had my own relationship with Farrah Fawcett. embassies and State Department initiatives of the time put together. That one poster did more for America's image abroad-and for a sturdy Amerophilia-than all the U.S. (If the image hasn't quite attained the status of Che Guevara's, it's because most guys don't normally wear T-shirts with women on them.) Farrah Fawcett's poster, ineradicably luminous, irrefutably subversive, gave young males in joyless places-India, Egypt, Poland, Turkey, the Argentina and Chile of the generals, the barely post-Franco Spain, the dingy, strike-ridden Britain of James Callaghan, repressive South Africa, Catholic Ireland, seething Indonesia, robotic Japan and Singapore-a priceless vision of America, and of American happiness.
I'm talking, of course, about The Poster from 1976, of which, as Texas Monthly once reported, 12 million copies have sold worldwide.
I say this with only a trace of exaggeration: Farrah Fawcett was, in her heyday, a most potent ambassador for America, without so much as setting foot in many of the countries where she had her seismic cultural impact. In the 1970s, Farrah Fawcett embodied a certain vision of America, one embraced not merely by her American contemporaries, but by all those in other countries who watched America for signs and gestures-indeed, for rays of light.
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