What are the odds that two icons would pass away on the same day? Mere hours after Farrah Fawcett lost her battle with cancer, Michael Jackson died suddenly. It was unfathomable.

The world watched, deeply saddened, and prayed as Farrah Fawcett battled cancer. Near the end her longtime love, Ryan O’Neal, proposed marriage and she agreed. Sadly, they never got to exchange vows. Fawcett’s only child, son Redmond, wasn’t with his mother when she passed away since he was being held in a drug recovery program. Redmond, who is still battling to overcome his drug addiction, said his goodbyes to his mother weeks before her death is a heartbreaking scene that had him crawling into bed with her and cuddling her until he was forced away. Her last days were documented by her best friend, Alana Stewart, is a touching docu-drama called “Farrah’s Story,” which earned Fawcett her first Emmy nod.

I never watched “Farrah’s Story.” I couldn’t, it seemed too painful. I could bear to see my “Angel” in deteriorating health at the end of her young life. I know they say that every pimple faced teenage boy had her poster on their wall, well I wanted one too. I wanted to wear the red bathing suit, frost my hair and be on “Charlie’s Angels.” I watched the show religiously, wore the bell bottoms and bib tops. I remember the day my Mom took me to the mall to have my hair professionally “feathered” so I could copy her look. Somehow, my long, limp locks never managed to look at bouncy and full as Farrah’s. I could never copy her luscious hair and nobody could ever replace my iconic screen siren.

Fallen Angel

Photographer Julian Wasser shot Charlie’s original Angels on Stage 21 of Fox’s Century City Lot in October 1976, when Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson, and Jaclyn Smith were Hollywood’s ultimate dream girls. Last week, Wasser looked over his pictures of the iconic Fawcett, then 29 years old, and reminisced about the shoot with VF.com’s Claire Howorth.

Leslie Bennetts on Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neal: “Beautiful People, Ugly Choices”

Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neal were the Angelina and Brad of their day—dazzling sex symbol meets Hollywood hunk—until their stars were tarnished by drugs, infidelity, and family pathology. In the last days of Fawcett’s life, as cancer stripped the masks from an all-too-human drama, contributing editor Leslie Bennetts shared O’Neal’s vigil, learning the true struggles and breakthroughs of their 30-year romance.

For “Beautiful People, Ugly Choices” – one of two cover stories in Vanity Fair’s September 2009 issue – Bennetts also spoke to dozens of Fawcett’s associates and intimates, from actor George Hamilton and agent Sue Mengers to Fawcett’s best friend, Alana Stewart, and O’Neal’s children Tatum and Griffin. The result is a definitive portrait of Fawcett’s meteoric rise, turbulent second act, and tragic final chapter.

The truth was that Fawcett had always been more complicated than the clichés, the realities of her life far darker than the sunny image she projected. The gap between her public image and private reality was wide: “I’m always more comfortable when I have on hardly any make-up, my hair is brown and I’m very unattractive,” she said.

The work that brought her solace in later years was a love of art that had nothing to do with fame, a private passion that inspired her to sculpt female nudes with an obsessiveness that seemed like an attempt to understand the world’s fascination with her own body. The documentary [Farrah’s World] that became her last appearance violated every rule of Hollywood image-making; no other star had ever exposed herself to a viewing audience while moaning in pain, vomiting, and losing her famous hair to chemotherapy. But Fawcett’s final triumph was to integrate the public and the private at long last, imbuing her death with a larger meaning and finding redemption in baring her head along with her soul.

Fawcett’s private reality was dominated by her three-decade relationship with O’Neal, an Oscar-nominated actor with a well-earned reputation as a Lothario. She and O’Neal met in 1979, split up in 1998, and then reconnected in 2001, when he was diagnosed with leukemia. “We pulled apart, but we never popped loose,” O’Neal told Bennetts.

O’Neal cites several reasons for his breakup with Fawcett, starting with menopause. “I believe Farrah was going through some kind of life change,” he says. “I didn’t have a change of life. I was always a jerk. But they’re hard work, these divas; I was sick of it, and I was unappreciated. I just don’t think she liked me very much. So I excused myself, and I was lucky enough to meet this young girl. She was more a daughter to me than a lover, and my own daughter had flown the coop, so here was this replacement.”

Leslie Stefanson, a beautiful actress less than half his age, may have been a daughter substitute, but she and O’Neal were in bed together at his Malibu home when Fawcett made a surprise Valentine’s Day visit and walked in on them. “It was terrible,” O’Neal says. “I didn’t expect to see her down there. I tried to put my pants on, but I put both legs in one hole.”

While it’s clear that O’Neal is no angel, he’s at least willing to cop to his own flaws. At one point, he describes himself as “a hopeless father” and offers as evidence this anecdote from Fawcett’s funeral:

“I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me,” Ryan told me. “I said to her, ‘You have a drink on you? You have a car?’ She said, ‘Daddy, it’s me—Tatum!’ I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it’s my daughter. It’s so sick.”

“That’s our relationship in a nutshell,” Tatum said when I asked her about it. “You make of it what you will.” She sighed. “It had been a few years since we’d seen each other, and he was always a ladies’ man, a bon vivant.”

To read the whole story, pick up a copy of the September 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, available on newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on August 5 and nationally on August 11.