You are realizing your age today if you grew up in the 1970s or ’80s. Farrah Fawcett, whose iconic image was as ubiquitous on the bedroom walls of American teenage boys as Kim Il Sung’s was in the homes of North Koreans, died of cancer at 62 yesterday. Age is the cruel fate of all sex symbols. In Fawcett’s case, she not only contended with Father Time but with the public’s changing tastes that dated what once symbolized sex. Demographics, and Sir Mix-a-Lot, killed the pin-up girl monopoly of bleach-blond anorexics. But even twenty years after her heyday, ’70s postergirl Fawcett so symbolized sex that her 1995 appearance in Playboy became the bestselling issue of the 1990s. To put this in perspective, an over-the-hill Farah Fawcett beat Pamela Anderson, Jenny McCarthy, and Denise Richards in their primes.
Six years after Farrah Fawcett appeared on the bestselling poster of all time, Michael Jackson released the bestselling album in history. Thriller was so big that, not only did it inspire fashion and dancefloor trends, it outsold numbers two and three on the all-time list combined. Jackson, who before our eyes morphed from cuddly, precocious singing/dancing machine to the world’s biggest pop star to Howard Hughes, died yesterday too. For Jackson, life’s victory lap–that even an overweight and jumpsuited Elvis enjoyed–eluded him. The last image embedded in the public’s mind is that of Michael Jackson in a courtroom rather than on a stage. A court of law acquitted him of sexually abusing a minor. The court of public opinion convicted him of being strange. Seeing Farrah Fawcett in her red bathing suit, or Michael Jackson moonwalking, brings us back to a time when we were young. News of their deaths reminds us that we’re old.
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