Jaclyn Smith, the last surviving original star of “Charlie’s Angels,” has broken decades of silence to reveal the untold story of her final months with Farrah Fawcett, describing hours spent rubbing her dying friend’s feet in a hospital room as the two women talked about their children and their Texas childhoods while cancer consumed the most photographed body of the 1970s.
The revelation, shared as Smith turns 80, strips away the glamour that has defined both women for nearly half a century and exposes something far more intimate than any red carpet or magazine cover ever captured. It was not the famous swimsuit poster that Smith remembers most. It was not a single scene from the landmark ABC series that made them global icons overnight.
It was a quiet room near the very end, where Fawcett was in so much pain she could not lie still, and the only thing that helped was her old friend sitting silently by the bed, working the pain out of her feet for three straight hours.
“She was in pain and couldn’t stay still,” Smith has recounted. “I was rubbing her feet, trying to make her feel better, and that relaxed her. We must have talked for three hours about our lives, about our children, about growing up in Texas.”
It was not a conversation about fame. It was not a conversation about the show that turned them into household names. It was two women from the same state, bound by more than three decades of shared history, holding on to each other while everything else fell away.
Jaclyn Ellen Smith was born on October 26, 1945, in Houston, Texas, to a father with Russian Jewish roots and a mother of English, Scottish, and Irish descent. It was a loving home, but not one that pointed toward Hollywood. She enrolled at Trinity University to study psychology and drama before abruptly dropping out and chasing a different dream in New York City, where she trained at the School of American Ballet.
Dance did not stick. Modeling and print ads followed, along with small, often uncredited roles in films like “Goodbye, Columbus” in 1969. It was a long, uncertain climb through an industry that handed her nothing.
The break, when it finally arrived, was not glamorous. A hair commercial caught the attention of television producer Glenn Larson, who cast her in the detective series “McCloud.” “Hair got me my first acting job,” Smith has said.
“Somebody saw the commercial, Glenn Larson, and said, ‘Hey, you’re going to be starring in McCloud.’ I thought, ‘This is going to be fun.'” It was steady work, not stardom.
Then, in 1976, a pilot script landed on her desk for a new ABC series about three women working as private detectives for an unseen boss named Charlie.
Smith read for the role of Kelly Garrett. Joining her in that pilot were Kate Jackson and a relatively unknown actress and former poster model named Farrah Fawcett. None of them, by Smith’s own account, walked in thinking they were about to become the most photographed women in America.
“I don’t think we did,” she said, looking back. “We were having fun. We were like college roommates.
We didn’t want to work the 18-hour days.”
“Charlie’s Angels” tested through the roof before it ever aired. Though the network dismissed the early numbers as a fluke, once it hit the air in September 1976, it became an instant phenomenon, pulling in a staggering share of the national television audience and turning all three actresses into instant celebrities. Kate Jackson, despite playing the team’s more serious member on screen, was, according to Smith, very much the real-life boss of the group off camera.
Smith has told a story from the set that captures the dynamic perfectly: the three of them were scheduled for a Time magazine photo shoot during their lunch break, and when Kate flatly refused to give up the hour, she marched the group into her trailer and locked the door behind them, joking that it was jammed and someone would have to cut a hole in the roof and hand them a hammer to get out.
They eventually did the shoot anyway, but the story has stayed with Smith as a perfect snapshot of who these three women really were to each other behind the cameras. Not just co-stars, but something closer to sisters who bickered, laughed, and looked out for one another in equal measure.
Farrah Fawcett, born Mary Farrah Leni Fawcett on February 2, 1947, in Corpus Christi, Texas, had already lived an entire chapter of struggle before “Charlie’s Angels” ever found her. She had been voted most beautiful all four years of high school, dropped out of the University of Texas at 18 to chase acting in Los Angeles, and spent years doing shampoo commercials and print ads while casting directors passed her over again and again. Her 1976 red swimsuit poster, shot almost by accident to help promote the new series, would go on to sell more than 12 million copies, becoming the bestselling poster in American history and turning her into a cultural symbol overnight.
In a detail Smith has laughed about in interviews ever since, that now-iconic photograph very nearly was not Farrah’s moment at all. “It should have been Farrah in the bathing suit,” Smith has admitted, referring to the far more famous image of herself in a swimsuit that magazines have reprinted for 50 years, a photo she still signs constantly to this day, even though by her own telling, the flat stomach and the fame it brought her were never really the point of who she was.
Fame arrived for all three women at once, and it arrived enormous. They were paid a fraction of what the show earned. They worked brutal hours.
They became almost overnight the kind of celebrities who needed round-the-clock security just to travel for a season premiere in Hawaii. Smith still lights up describing what those years actually felt like day to day long after the cameras stopped rolling. “We had laughs.
We had so many laughs,” she said in one interview, remembering silly details like being handcuffed together for an action scene or something as ordinary as eating lunch together between takes. “It was an education and it was eye-opening because each girl was so unique with her own personality and style. And these are my friends today.
That bond is what I really remember.”
The fashion on the show, she has noted, became just as much a phenomenon as the plots themselves, form-fitting silhouettes and effortless glamour that decades later Smith would credit as the spark that eventually led her into building her own fashion label. “The fashion was incredible,” she said. “That was one of the highlights of the show.
I think we related to all age groups, young, old, men, women.”
But Farrah, unlike her two co-stars, wanted something the show was not built to give her. She wanted to be taken seriously as an actress, not just celebrated as a poster. After only one season, she left “Charlie’s Angels” to chase film roles, a decision that shocked the industry, cost her a lucrative contract, and triggered a bitter public lawsuit from the studio that dragged on for months.
Smith, watching a friend walk away from the biggest phenomenon in television, never treated it as a betrayal. “When Farrah decided to leave after one season, we all supported her,” she said years later. “She wasn’t afraid to say, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’
She marched to her own drum.”
It is a small detail, but it says everything about the kind of friendship the two women actually had, one built on respecting each other’s choices even when those choices meant one of them stayed and the other walked away. Jaclyn Smith did stay. She remained with “Charlie’s Angels” for its entire five-season run, the only member of the original trio to do so, watching Farrah and later Kate Jackson cycle out while a rotating cast of new angels came and went around her.
It would have been easy for that kind of divergence to quietly end a friendship. Instead, the two women’s lives kept circling back toward each other off camera in the moments that mattered far more than any magazine cover.
Both of them, it turned out, were navigating remarkably similar storms in their personal lives throughout the years that followed. Smith’s own marriages were far from the fairy tale her public image suggested. After her first marriage to Roger Davis ended in 1975, she married actor Dennis Cole in 1978, a relationship that collapsed just three years later amid struggles with drugs and alcohol and ultimately infidelity.
Her third marriage to cinematographer Tony Richmond brought her two children, Gaston and Spencer, but it too eventually buckled under financial strain and betrayal, ending in a costly, painful custody settlement in 1989.
Farrah, meanwhile, was living through her own version of the same turbulence, a headline-making marriage to Lee Majors that dissolved amid his jealousy and control, and then decades of an on-again, off-again relationship with actor Ryan O’Neal that brought her a son, Redmond, real love and real heartbreak in almost equal measure. That same difficult stretch brought darker moments, too. In 1997, film director James Orr assaulted Farrah during an argument, an attack serious enough that he was later arrested and convicted.
Farrah testified about it publicly at a time when very few actresses were willing to speak up about violence from powerful men in the industry.
Both women, in other words, were living out very public versions of very private pain. And having a friend who understood that pain from the inside without needing it explained mattered more than either of them likely said out loud very often. One of the moments Jaclyn Smith returns to most fondly was not from a soundstage at all.
When her son Gaston was born in 1982, Farrah was the very first friend to show up at the hospital. “The first one, first girlfriend to visit,” Smith recalled. “She said some funny things, and Ryan was waiting downstairs.
She wanted it just to be us.” It is a small, quiet image. No cameras, no premieres, no red carpets.
Just one new mother and her old friend wanting a private moment before the rest of the world came in.
Everything changed in September 2006 when Farrah was diagnosed with anal cancer. Smith remembers with striking clarity, even now, the exact moment her friend told her. “She said, ‘I always thought I might get breast cancer or heart disease, but never this,'” Smith recalled.
“And she started to cry. I never saw her cry after that.” From that day forward, Farrah fought her illness the way she had once fought the studio system that tried to define her, on her own terms, refusing to be defined by fear and eventually opening up her private battle to the entire world through the documentary “Farrah’s Story,” which nearly 9 million people watched when it aired in 2009.
“Who would have dreamed,” Smith later marveled, “that this girl who was known for the smile and the hair and the glamour would open up the depths of her soul to share with the world.” As the cancer progressed and eventually spread to Farrah’s liver, the friendship between the two women only deepened. Smith has described visiting her near the very end when the pain had become so constant that Farrah could barely stay still in bed.
The time I spent with Farrah at the end, Smith has said, was the best because we appreciated the friendship.
Even in those final months, Smith says her friend never lost the qualities that made her who she was. “Farrah never lost her humor and never lost her hope and never was poor me,” Smith told one interviewer. “She did say, ‘I never thought this would happen to me.’
But she never gave up.” Farrah Fawcett died on June 25, 2009, at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, surrounded by Ryan O’Neal and her closest friends.
She was 62 years old. Her death came less than three years after her diagnosis, and it landed especially hard on those who had watched her fight so openly and so publicly, refusing right up until the end to be defined by the illness the way the world once tried to define her by a swimsuit poster.
Her son Redmond, who had struggled with addiction for years and was in prison at the time of her final decline, was granted permission to visit her near the end, though by then she was so heavily medicated for pain that she barely recognized him. One more heartbreak layered onto an already devastating chapter for a mother who by every account never stopped loving him fiercely.
For Jaclyn Smith, the loss was by every account devastating, but it did not erase what the two of them had built over more than three decades. In the years since, Smith has continued showing up quite literally at the Farrah Fawcett Foundation’s fundraising events, keeping the memory and the mission of her friend alive in a way that goes well beyond nostalgia. “I saw the best of Farrah at the end,” Smith said in one interview years after the funeral.
“I saw a person that just fought for life and fought to be here for her family, her loved ones.”
And when asked even a full decade later what she misses most, her answer has never needed much embellishing. “Oh, I miss the friendship,” she said simply. “She was a loyal friend to girlfriends and you only have on one hand those kind that go the distance with you and share history.
We were family girls.”
That, more than any poster, any lawsuit, or any single season of a hit television show, is the real story Jaclyn Smith carries with her at 80 years old. Long after “Charlie’s Angels” ended in 1981, Smith kept working steadily and deliberately in a way that quietly outlasted most of her peers from that era. She played Jacqueline Kennedy in a television movie, appeared in more than 50 television films across four decades, and even returned for a cameo in the 2003 feature film “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.”
But her most surprising second act had nothing to do with acting at all. In the early 1980s, she launched a clothing line with Kmart that would go on to be worn by more than 100 million women, later expanding into skin care, home furnishings, and fragrance and eventually moving her fashion label to Sears, where it remains today, more than three decades after it began. She still speaks about that business with genuine pride, noting that 30-plus years of consistent sales is its own kind of equity, its own kind of legacy, one built entirely apart from the fame “Charlie’s Angels” first handed her.
It is a detail that says something important about who Jaclyn Smith turned out to be once the cameras moved on to other stars. Not a woman clinging to a single iconic role, but someone who kept building, kept working, and kept showing up. The same quality her old friend recognized in her decades earlier.
“Charlie’s Angels” made both women famous almost overnight, turned them into pop culture symbols whose faces sold lunchboxes and posters and magazine covers by the millions, and then just as quickly sent them down very different paths. One who stayed for all five seasons and one who walked away after just one to chase something harder to hold on to. What never changed, through marriages that fell apart, through custody battles and public scandals, and a cancer diagnosis that eventually took her friend far too soon, was the bond between two women from Texas who found each other on a studio lot in 1976 and simply never let go.
Smith still signs that iconic bathing suit photo almost every single day of her life. But if you ask her what she actually remembers when she thinks back on those years, it was never really about the swimsuit at all. It was the girls.
It was the friendship. It was three hours in a hospital room near the end, rubbing a dying friend’s feet and finding even then something worth appreciating in all of it.
