“And now, I’d like to strip and show you my six pack,” said George Hamilton, 85 years old but still looking like a silver-haired charmer who took the Love Boat to Fantasy Island. The famously tan actor was onstage at the Rustic as part of the Farrah Fawcett Foundation’s Tex-Mex Fiesta on Thursday. He did not, in the end, show the audience his six pack, though he did offer an invitation for anyone to check it out after the show.
It was a playfully surreal moment in an evening that was alternately celebratory and somber, centered as it was on both cancer and Farrah Fawcett, the “It Girl” of the ‘70s who catapulted to stardom with her role on Charlie’s Angels. About 350 people came to the Rustic, whose bar area featured huge portraits of Fawcett in her prime, for a laid-back fundraiser that started in Los Angeles in 2015 but moved to Dallas in 2022.
The evening brought vintage celebrity to a city that loves proximity to fame. “Hollywood and charity, my two favorite things,” said Libby Hunt, who co-chaired the event with her husband, Petro-Hunt executive David Hunt.
Eighties’ stars dotted the restaurant during cocktail hour. Lake Highlands grad and Falcon Crest bombshell Morgan Fairchild still had those piercing blue eyes that startled in their prettiness. Hamilton was milling about, causing a stir, and I watched as a guest asked if she could take a selfie with the most handsome man in the room, which of course he couldn’t refuse. Linda Gray, raised in California but forever tied to the city as Dallas’ Sue Ellen Ewing, chatted with me about researching her famous role by lurking at Neiman Marcus. “I thought, I’m playing a Texan, and she used to be Miss Texas, so I went to the beauty salon and listened to everyone.”
The unseasonably hot day had turned cool and breezy, and guests headed to the outside patio for a Tex-Mex buffet. I stopped Jason Garrett, former Cowboys coach, on the way to his table to ask if he had memories of Fawcett. “Oh my God, absolutely,” he said. “Watching Charlie’s Angels was like an event for everyone in the country.”
Fawcett always seemed kissed by the gods, the girl from Corpus Christi who grew up to boast the most famous mane in pop culture. That poster in a red swimsuit kick-started many an adolescence, selling more than 12 million copies. But her fortunes shifted. “In September 2006 I heard three words I thought I’d never hear — malignant, tumor and anal,” she told the camera in Farrah’s Story, a 2009 documentary about her grueling final days. A clip from that film launched the evening’s awards presentation on the outdoor stage.
The diagnosis turned Fawcett into a different kind of poster girl, not merely for cancer, but also cancer related to HPV. A statistic repeated a few times from the stage: HPV causes about 5 percent of cancer, and it’s highly preventable since there’s an HPV vaccine.
Fawcett began her foundation in 2007, and she’d planned to run it herself, but she died in 2009, at the age of 62. In her will, she set up a fund to cover all future operating expenses, meaning that 100% of the money raised by the foundation goes to charity — in this evening’s case, Stand Up to Cancer and Dallas’ Hope Lodge. The foundation is run by Fawcett’s best friend Alana Stewart, who filmed the intimate footage that became that 2009 documentary.
“At the most vulnerable moment of her life, she made a profound decision,” said Stewart, speaking from the stage. “She said, in the face of excruciating pain and uncertainty, I never lost hope, and it never occurred to me to stop fighting, not ever.”
Stewart grew up in Nacogdoches and Houston and quickly bonded with Fawcett over their Texas childhoods. Although she worked as an actress and model, Stewart is better known for her ex-husbands: She was formerly married to Rod Stewart as well as the apparently six-pack-wielding George Hamilton. She clearly keeps on good terms with her exes, since both donated to the event. During the fundraising auction, a chance to meet Rod Stewart at Caesars in Vegas went for $12,500. Hamilton had already lightened the mood with his appearance onstage, but then he stood in the audience, offering to auction an afternoon in his company that included a $5,000 shopping spree at Neiman Marcus.
The bid inched up to $15,000, but Alana Stewart tried to nudge it higher. “He’ll tell you all the stories, he’ll go on for hours until your eyes bleed,” she said, but the bidder stayed firm. “Well, at least he beat Rod Stewart, so that made his night,” she joked.
The specter of loss hovered over the event, as several people onstage spoke about cancer’s impact. The evening’s host Lawrence Zarian, LA-based fashion expert and frequent guest on The Kelly Clarkson Show, took a moment to remember a trio of deaths: his mother from esophageal cancer, his father (one-time Glendale mayor Larry Zarian) from multiple myeloma, and his sister, who had died earlier in the week from breast cancer. Anne and Steve Stodghill, two Dallas lawyers who received an award for their philanthropy, talked about stepping up their charity work after the death of Steve’s sister to colorectal cancer. Linda Gray spoke off-the-cuff at the podium, which we know because she admitted, somewhere between lighthearted whimsy and low-grade panic, that she couldn’t read the teleprompter.
“I recently lost my son to cancer, and it just shocked me to the core,” said Gray, whose son Jeff died at 56 of leukemia in 2020. She’d also lost her sister and ex-husband to cancer. “And I thought, this disease has got to be stopped. It devastates families. It devastates lives.”
Celebrity and fatal disease are a strange combination — one part escapism, one part reality check. But if you have the collateral of fame, why not do something with it? Fawcett could have remained in the locker rooms of our collective imagination as that ‘70s golden girl, everybody’s angel, but she wanted a different legacy. Fifteen years after she died, her foundation has raised nearly $6 million. The gathering has become a way to keep her memory alive, but also convert that loss into gain.
“I had that poster when I was 13,” admitted Wynonna Judd, who capped off the evening with a brisk set. She swaggered onto the stage in a black cowboy hat that cast shadows over her face, her silky auburn hair spilling down her back. She tore through ‘90s hits like “What It Takes” and “Rock Bottom” with a commanding voice, a sultry-smooth alto that slid from soulful twang to rock growl.
“For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the survivor of a crazy dysfunctional family,” she said, which is one way to describe the most famous mother-daughter duo in country music. “Mom committed suicide,” she continued, referring to her mother, Naomi Judd, who died in 2022. “People don’t like to hear that. But that’s life. And I show up, and I sing these songs so the legacy lives on. So that why I’m here tonight. I stand with you in this gap between heaven and earth.”
It was one more moment where grief bumped against celebration, where the gloss of stardom shared space with ugly reality. Judd closed her set with a rollicking version of “No One Else on Earth,” and people got up from their tables to gather in the pit in front of the stage, waving their arms, singing the lyrics. Life is heavy; sometimes, you just have to dance.
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
