"It's a love story. I just don't know how to play this one. I won't know this world without her," O'Neal said. "Cancer is an insidious enemy . "
Farrah Fawcett made the news for what might be the last time this past week, when Ryan O'Neal announced that her cancer had become terminal and all treatment had been stopped.
Fawcett and O'Neal have both had plenty of bad publicity moments in recent years, but as soon as this announcement was made, it was as though time was rewound like a cassett tape. YouTube tributes to Ms. Fawcett were montages devoted to her "Charlie's Angels" years- the fluffy hair, the famous red swimsuit poster, the perfect white teeth.
It made me think about Mr. O'Neal in his prime. It made me wonder how he felt, now that he was essentially living out his most famous movie role in real life.
Whatever his shortcomings, the situation is weirdly cruel.
Love Story made O'Neal's career. The movie, a film version of Eric Segal's novel, elevated O'Neal from soap-opera actor to matinee idol. He was handsome young Oliver Barrett, watching his beautiful young wife, Jenny Cavalleri, die of cancer.
I'm just a little too young to have seen Love Story in its first release- I had conservative parents and back in those days people actually paid attention to the movies they let prepubescents see. So I browsed the internet for clips and trailers to resurrect my memories of that era.
If you haven't watched any early O'Neal footage in over a decade (like me), the first clips of Love Story can hit you like a punch in the solar plexus.
My first thought: What a preposterously beautiful young man.
It was an era of astonishingly pretty male ingenues: Redford, Beatty, O'Neal. A flock of fluttering eyelashes and feathered locks employed to repackage Sensitivity as a masculine trait.
It worked. And it wasn't bad idea: it pushed both acting and writing in interesting new directions.
Daniel Craig might never have fit in with this lot, but the angst in his portrayal of Bond would not have been possible without them.
To say nothing of Jude Law's eyelashes.
Love Story was also the prototype of a new genre: The Cancer Tearjerker. It would become a stereotype of 70s Pop Culture, from Brian's Song to Bang the Drum Slowly.
In some ways this was also a good thing. It opened up a national discussion about cancer that fed- and was fed by- advances in research. It gave Americans a vocabulary to apply to terminal disease, a vocabulary would eventually facilitate public understanding of AIDs and Alzheimer's.
Suddenly, dying people didn't have to be hidden away and whispered about.
Without the success of Love Story, Away from Her would never have been filmed.
But it did some harm, too. In selecting only the young and beautiful as victims, the Cancer Tearjerker glamorized and misrepresented the disease. The most common cancers often prey on those who are middle-aged and older. I'm reminded of the way a young acquaintance summed up her first trip to the oncologist: "It was just me and a bunch of 60-year-old guys."
It can be difficult to get Dad in for that prostate checkup if cancer is only presented as a disease of beautiful young starlets.
That films in the 70's were awash in the young, beautiful and dying makes a kind of sense. It can be taken as sign of the times. Youth Culture was at its height, loudly rejecting everything the last generation had built. Maybe some of these films were a way of demonstrating that young people would literally rather die than inhabit their parent's society.
But let's get back to beauty for a moment before we finish. If you're my age, you're already much older than O'Neal was when he was cast in Love Story, much older than Ms. Fawcett was in her famous poster. It's comforting to look back and be reassured that they really were as beautiful as we remembered. Maybe it means we were, too.
And that's something. Whenever a truthfully examined memory doesn't disappoint, it's something.
Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind.
William Wordsworth
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