All’s Farrah In Love
Four
years after Farrah Fawcett’s death, her alma mater and her former
partner, Ryan O’Neal, went to court over an Andy Warhol painting of the
blond pop icon. In December a jury settled the case, but it had no hope
of deciding on the question at the heart of the dispute: Whom did Farrah
really love?
Warhol
painting: Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin,
Bequest of Farrah Fawcett, 2010 (c) 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts, Inc./Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York Photograph
by: Rick Hall
photo illustration by randal ford
It was a Monday morning in mid
-December at the Los Angeles County Superior Court, the day of closing arguments in the matter of the
Board of Regents of the University of Texas System v.
Ryan O’Neal,
and the show was just minutes from getting under way. Outside the
courtroom, the players milled about. O’Neal was strolling down the
courthouse hallway in a navy blazer, an open-collared light-blue shirt,
and dark pants. Seventy-two years old and still impossibly youthful,
with only a touch of graying hair, he wore gold-rimmed sunglasses and
held a plastic water bottle, which he wiggled before him as if he were
going for a birdie putt on the eighteenth green at Riviera. “God, I’m
nervous,” he said.
Then here was 68-year-old actress Jaclyn Smith,the brunette from
Charlie’s Angels,
and she too seemed impossibly young, dressed in a sweater and tight
pants that showed off her still-curvy derriere. “I am just hoping that
justice will be done,” she told a cluster of reporters. She was about to
say something else when tears began streaming down her perfectly lifted
face. “I’m sorry, this is so emotional,” she murmured as she headed
toward the courtroom, accompanied by two thin men who seemed to have had
a little facial work done themselves.
Over by the stairwell stood O’Neal’s attorney, the bespectacled and barrel-chested Marty Singer, a Hollywood legend whom the
New York Times once
described as a “guard dog to the stars.” “I think the University of
Texas is going to be very interested in what we have to say,” he said,
letting out a chuckle that sounded more like a low growl. “Let’s get
this going.” He adjusted his tie and strode into the courtroom, where
UT’s attorney, David Beck, of Houston, sat quietly studying his notes. A
slim man, the 72-year-old Beck was wearing a pin-striped suit that
matched his sober demeanor. Beck is one of the state’s most
distinguished litigators, a methodical and brilliant man who made his
reputation representing Fortune 500 corporations in high-stakes trials.
On this morning, he faced what was surely one of the most challenging
legal maneuvers of his long career. In his closing argument, he was
going to attempt something that no one—absolutely no one in history—had
ever successfully done before. He was going to try to penetrate into the
heart of that greatest of American sex symbols, Farrah Fawcett.
As you probably by now know—for the bare bones of this story
have been reproduced by just about every media outlet imaginable—Farrah,
who died of cancer in June 2009 at the age of 62, decided to bequeath
her art collection, including one or possibly two large paintings done
of her by Andy Warhol, to the University of Texas, where she’d been an
undergraduate in the late sixties. Shortly after her death, O’Neal, her
longtime companion, had gone and retrieved one of the Warhol paintings
from her home, later claiming that it was his. In 2011, after learning
that O’Neal had taken the painting, UT filed suit.
Initially, the lawsuit appeared to be nothing more than a simple
contract dispute, one that O’Neal didn’t seem to have any chance of
winning. Farrah had amended her living trust in 2007, leaving all her
“artwork and art objects” to UT, and the language was ironclad. Yet from
the moment he was hired, Singer had been relentlessly reframing the
case. He snarled to the media that the university was driven only by
greed. (The paintings are estimated to be worth as much as $12 million
each.) “Apparently for this university, one iconic Warhol portrait is
not enough,” he said. He also claimed that UT cared nothing for the
paintings and sculptures Farrah herself had done, which made up the bulk
of her gift. “They’ve stuck all her own work in some basement catacomb
somewhere and have not even inventoried or catalogued the art.” As to
the question of who owned the paintings, Singer said that Warhol had
made it clear that he was doing one painting for Farrah and one for
O’Neal, and that Farrah herself had said many times that the second
Warhol belonged to O’Neal.
For his part, Beck said that both paintings had always belonged to
Farrah and that she did not want O’Neal to have one, mainly because she
had never forgiven him for cheating on her in 1997. Though they hadn’t
married and kept separate homes, Farrah and O’Neal maintained a
monogamous relationship for decades, beginning in 1979. Then one day she
paid him a surprise visit at his house in Malibu and found him in
flagrante delicto with a 25-year-old redhead, directly underneath the
watchful eyes of the very same Warhol painting now in dispute. Beck
noted that Farrah was so hurt by this that she took the Warhol from
O’Neal’s home and kept it with the one she already had until her death.
What’s more, Beck charged, Farrah had not left O’Neal a single penny in
her will, whereas she had bequeathed $100,000 to her old college
boyfriend, former Longhorn football star Greg Lott.
Lott, in fact, was a central figure in the drama. After a spectacular
couple of years in the late sixties, during which he was both Farrah
Fawcett’s boyfriend and Darrell Royal’s starting quarterback, Lott had
fallen on hard times, spending a few years in prison for selling drugs
before finally pulling himself together. Last October, about a month
before the trial commenced, he went on
Good Morning America and
proclaimed that he and Farrah had reunited in 1998 and carried on “a
loving, consensual, one-on-one relationship” until her death. He took
aim at O’Neal, calling him a coward and a liar who had known all along
that Farrah owned both of the Warhols. He shared love letters Farrah had
sent him, one of which the
GMA producers could not resist quoting in large type on the screen: “Great food, great weather, great sex, great great you.”
Suddenly a straightforward estate struggle had become one of the most
talked-about celebrity trials of the year—and one of the most
interesting. As in all estate fights, the essential argument was over
who had the authority to speak for the dead. Yet since the person in
question was Farrah Fawcett, a pop icon whose heart and mind (and face
and hair) had been coveted by, well, everyone, this was no easy question
to answer. Had she always remained a UT sorority girl, forever bound to
the Forty Acres? Or was that just a minor chapter in a biography that
now included decades as one of the most famous women on earth? The
battle lines had been drawn—to some extent by Farrah herself—as Texas
versus Hollywood, Lott versus O’Neal. “She was the love of my life, and
vice versa,” Lott insisted, while O’Neal simply said, “She was my soul
mate.”
During the two-week trial, a parade of Farrah’s associates took
the stand, from her hairdresser to her chiropractor to the producer of
her reality television show to such Hollywood personalities as Alana
Stewart (another Texas gal turned Hollywood sweetheart). All of them
claimed to have known Farrah intimately, and day after day they solemnly
offered their opinions about sex, infidelity, fame, the true meaning of
art, and, of course, whether love really means never having to say
you’re sorry. By the time the closing arguments rolled around, the jury
was not just going to have to decide whether UT owned the disputed
Warhol. One way or another, it was going to have to decide whether
Farrah had truly loved O’Neal or whether, deep down, she had always
wanted to be back in the arms of her college sweetheart.
The University of Texas had first become involved
with Farrah’s estate several months after her death, when a letter
arrived on the desk of Randa Safady, the vice-chancellor of external
relations for the UT System. Safady opened it to find a note from the
trustee of the estate, stating that the star had left her art collection
to her alma mater. This was unexpected news, since no one could
remember Farrah making a gift to the university before. Safady later
received an inventory of the works of art—among them, a bronze sculpture
titled
Reclining Nude; another bronze, titled
Farrah’s Patina; and a painting titled
Two Faces.
Most of the art had been done over the years by Farrah herself and was
likely of limited financial value, but at the bottom of the list Safady
noticed that an Andy Warhol portrait of Farrah was included as well.
A posthumous gift from Farrah may not have been expected by the
university, but it wasn’t entirely out of left field. As Marty Singer
would later say, Farrah was “one of the most famous nonathletic alumni
of the university.” It was during her time as a coed that she had been
discovered, when a Los Angeles publicist noticed her on a list of the
school’s ten most beautiful women and encouraged her to give show
business a try. Yet the gift suggested that UT had been important to
Farrah in another regard—that it was, as it has been for generations of
students, the place where she had discovered herself.
Farrah grew up in Corpus Christi, where her father worked in a
refinery. She was extraordinarily beautiful from an early age, but it
wasn’t until she arrived at UT, in 1965, that she understood quite how
powerful her beauty was. Stories abound of fraternity boys from other
universities going to Austin on weekends and driving past the Tri Delt
house hoping to get a look at her. When she finally settled on Lott, at
the start of her sophomore year, the two made such a stunning couple—he
with his soft brown eyes and big smile and she with those long legs and
blond tresses already going in a dozen directions—that when they walked
across campus, other students literally stopped in their tracks and
gaped.
It wasn’t just that Farrah was pretty, it was that she seemed to be a free spirit, someone who played by a different set of rules from
all the other girls at the sorority house. Some of that had to do with
the fact that she thought of herself as an artist. At UT she studied
with Charles Umlauf, a nationally renowned sculptor. She wore cutoff
shorts to class and unabashedly painted and sculpted female nudes. “When
you were with her, it was like you were next to a bright light,” Lott
once told me. “There was simply no one else like her.”
It was that quality that set the entertainment world on fire when, in
1968, she dropped out of UT and moved to Los Angeles, where she
immediately began to get cast in television commercials. She posed in a
red swimsuit for a poster that sold 12 million copies. She then appeared
for just a single season on
Charlie’s Angels, and her sex
kitten voice and braless T-shirts put half the country into a trance.
Lott made several futile trips to California to win her back, but in
1976 she married Lee Majors, the
Six Million Dollar Man, then in 1979 left him for O’Neal, who had risen to fame in the sixties television soap opera
Peyton Place and had received an Oscar nomination for best actor for the 1970 tearjerker
Love Story.
Farrah and O’Neal were the Brangelina of their day—the
glamorous Hollywood king and queen whose every move was captured by the
tabloids. One of their fans was Andy Warhol, who became obsessed with
the couple. He gave them a drawing on a tablecloth of two hearts coming
together, and in 1980 he painted two nearly identical silk-screen
portraits of Farrah, in which she stares intently, her red lips pressed
together, her eyes bright green, and her hair brushed behind one
shoulder. One painting went to O’Neal’s Malibu beach house, the other to
Farrah’s home in the hills above Bel-Air.
Meanwhile, Lott’s life was going south. A knee injury had ended
his football career, and after college he drifted aimlessly. He served
two stints in prison for drug dealing: one for selling marijuana, the
other for selling cocaine. Among UT football fans, he became a legend of
sorts: the all-American boy who had nearly destroyed himself because he
couldn’t get over the loss of Farrah. Eventually, he got sober, married
a woman he had met in a twelve-step program, and opened a small
flooring-and-design company outside Austin.
That’s where I found him in 1996, when I was working on a story for
Texas Monthly
about Farrah turning fifty. Lott had never talked publicly about his
relationship with Farrah, but he finally agreed to meet me for lunch. He
seemed happy, but as the meal progressed, it became clear that he still
held a torch for his old girlfriend. He relished telling me stories
about how she made every college boy who met her feel like she genuinely
liked him. He also told me that Majors and O’Neal weren’t good enough
for her.
And then came one of those funny coincidences. The article ran
as the cover story of the February 1997 issue, and within days of its
being published, Farrah caught O’Neal in bed with the redhead.
Devastated, she decided to call Lott. She hadn’t spoken to him since the
early eighties, but reading the article had reminded her that he was a
man she knew would never betray her. About a year later, I got a call
from Lott. He was in a convertible headed down the Pacific Coast Highway
between Malibu and Los Angeles. “Hey, guess who wants to talk to you?”
he said. He handed the phone to Farrah, who cooed, “Thank you, Skip, for
helping bring us back together.”
Lott divorced his wife, and he and Farrah began seeing each
other periodically—at one of her homes in Los Angeles, at her parents’
home outside Houston, at Lott’s home in Lubbock. (While there, she
worked out at the Texas Tech football team’s gym.) But they were almost
never seen in public, especially in Los Angeles. “She didn’t like going
out,” Lott told me last year, before the trial began. “The crush from
her fans was so huge it was like being with Elvis.”
As a result, the tabloids remained unaware of Farrah’s
relationship with Lott. They believed she had reconciled with O’Neal in
2001, when he was diagnosed with leukemia. And when she was diagnosed
with cancer in 2006, it was reported that O’Neal was the first person
she called. Lott insisted, however, that this was just for show.
“Everything she did with Ryan, including all of those so-called reality
shows they made together, was just Hollywood fantasy, something she had
to do to keep up her image,” Lott told me. “When we were together, she
would call O’Neal ‘the fat f— from the beach.’ She despised what he had
done to her. Her heart was always with me.”
Farrah did write a number of love letters to Lott, which he still
possesses. In one, she gushed, “You are my North, my South, my East, my
West, and you know the rest. I love you forever and more.” After the
cancer got worse, she wrote him love letters from her hospital bed in
Germany, where she was getting experimental treatments (“I miss you so
much and sometimes the loneliness makes me cry. . . . Thinking of you
always and love you forever”). She even wrote that she hoped the two of
them would someday be able to meet for a rendezvous in Acapulco (“Let’s
both stay positive and count the days until our Mexican vacation”).
Just before she died, a distraught Lott tried to see her,
attempting to sneak into the high-rise where she was living, but he was
escorted away. He said O’Neal cut off all his access to Farrah, even
blocking his phone calls. Several months after her funeral, Lott flew to
Los Angeles and confronted O’Neal on the street. The two men were
inches apart, bellowing like old bulls. O’Neal said that it was Farrah
who wanted Lott kept away. “You’re a liar!” shouted Lott, who was
wearing a UT T-shirt. “She was the love of my life!”
Lott seemed destined to become a small footnote in the Farrah
Fawcett story. Yet he still had one card to play. When he heard from an
associate of Farrah’s that O’Neal had taken one of the Warhol paintings
out of Farrah’s home, he called his old Longhorns teammate Gene Powell,
who was now the chairman of the UT Board of Regents. Lott told Powell
that Farrah had mentioned several times that she owned both of the
Warhols, that they were worth millions, and that they should go to UT.
School officials, who had no idea there even were two Warhols, promptly
hired a private investigator to look into the matter. He didn’t have to
look very hard. In a scene from the 2011 reality show
Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals, which ran on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network, everyone could see the second Warhol hanging over O’Neal’s bed at his beach house.
“I talk to it,” O’Neal told the jury, his eyes
welling with tears as he spoke about the painting. “It’s her presence,
her presence in my life, in her son’s life. We lost her. It would seem a
crime to lose it too.” He briefly glanced at the jurors, giving them a
magnificent woe-is-me look. The courtroom was so quiet that you could
hear a cellphone vibrate.
Beck was unimpressed. During his cross-examination, he drilled
O’Neal over the pain that his affair had caused Farrah. “Was Farrah
furious?” he asked. “Farrah was hurt,” O’Neal replied. “She was in
shock.” He said that she had packed up all his belongings that were at
her home and sent them to him but had never asked for the Warhol. “About
a year after the incident, I asked her to keep the portrait with her,”
he said, “because my young friend was uncomfortable with Farrah staring
at her.”
Beck shook his head in disbelief. “So as I understand it, you
told Farrah that your new girlfriend felt uncomfortable with her
painting over your bed, so you asked her to keep it and you’d be back
for it? ” he asked.
“I would be back, yes,” said O’Neal.
Beck presented evidence that Farrah had kept the second Warhol
from at least 1998 until her death (long after O’Neal and his new
girlfriend had broken up), that she had insured both paintings, that she
had once signed documents loaning them to the Warhol Museum in which
she said she was the owner of the paintings, and that in one reality
television show she had referred to the two paintings as “my Warhols.”
Then it was time for the jury to hear from Lott. In a
videotaped deposition, Lott talked about meeting Farrah at UT, their
life together, the love letters she had sent him, their last telephone
conversation a couple of months before her death, and his street
encounter with O’Neal after Farrah’s funeral. “As a man, I needed to
confront him with what he had done to me and my girlfriend,” Lott said.
The jurors, amused by Lott’s bluster, tittered. And Singer had a
field day with him. He had the manager of Farrah’s high-rise testify
that Farrah was actually the one who had ordered that Lott be kept away
from her. He portrayed Lott as a pathetic figure: a fabulist who had
completely invented the story of his “exclusive relationship” with
Farrah during the last years of her life because he didn’t want to admit
to himself, and to others, that he had been rejected by her again. The
only reason Farrah left him $100,000, several witnesses said, was
because she felt sorry for him.
On the day of closing arguments, Singer was at
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