Because cancer doesn't give a rat's ass how pretty you are

I had just graduated from college in 1977 and started work as an assistant buyer at the Newark, NJ headquarters of a department store chain when I saw it behind the security desk at the employees entrance: The Poster. Even I, a straight woman, couldn't take my eyes off the image of the tawny blonde, all hair and teeth, with the kind of looks I knew I could never, ever have, no matter how much work I did with the curling iron to create the "wings" we all wore in front in the late 1970's in an attempt to be Farrah Fawcett. I never looked like that. NOBODY looked like that. Farrah Fawcett was like a sun-kissed alien goddess from the Planet Spectacularion. Even her name was strange and alien and gorgeous: Farrah. It even SOUNDED like some kind of ethereal water nymph.

But here's the thing: you couldn't even hate her. In her Charlie's Angels days, when her fame was at its peak, there was always something, well, nice about her. I remember a radio shampoo spot she did where she would talk to "callers." Who knows what she was like in real life, but on screen she never seemed aware of her own beauty, and in a strange way that made her less intimidating.

When you don't grow up pretty in our society, you tend to believe that pretty people live charmed lives. With the wreckage of pretty people littering American pop culture history, it's kind of surprising how tenacious this myth is. And so it seemed particularly cruel that this most gorgeous of women, who remained gorgeous well into her fifties, should be stricken not just with cancer, but with a particularly ugly cancer.

I didn't watch the recent NBC documentary about her battle with cancer. I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to. I love a good bout of schädenfreude as much as the next person, but there was no joy in knowing that the great beauty from when I was young was wasting away while I was enjoying a long-duration marriage, interesting work, and good friends. I only felt incredible sadness. It's been said that she felt her story would be an "inspiration" to other cancer sufferers, but I hardly see how any cancer patient watching a former beauty icon waste away and puke into a bowl would respond with anything other than wake-up-screaming terror and dread.

And today, the great beauty icon of the 1970's is gone. The disease finally won, because cancer doesn't care how pretty you were, or how well you've held up, or how glamorous you can still look, or how famous or talented or special you may have been. All cancer knows is to eat everything in sight until it kills its host.