Melville House Books

Ayn Rand, showing an affinity for cheesecake, early and late

Poor Farrah Fawcett — even at the end, she couldn’t hold on to a news cycle, losing out to a guy who had even worse influence on hair culture and cosmetics than she did. However, thanks to a posthumous revelation (pointed to by that great smarty-pants Michael Schaub in his new/old guise at Bookslut), she has made a contribution to literature probably more lasting than anything Jacko ever did: she proved the thing that can’t be proven enough, which is that Ayn Rand was an idiot (and I wish someone would pitch me a short book saying so).

The story, according to Fawcett herself in an email exchange conducted shortly before her death with Amy Wallace, reprinted in The Daily Beast, is this: “Ayn contacted me with a personal letter (and a copy of Atlas Shrugged) … she seemed to think we must have a lot in common since we were both born on the same day: February 2nd.”

Rand, it seems, wanted Fawcett to star in a film version of Atlas Shrugged. She told Fawcett “she never missed an episode of the show. I remember being surprised and flattered by that. I mean, here was this literary genius praising Angels. After all, the show was never popular with critics who dismissed it as ‘Jiggle TV.’ But Ayn saw something that the critics didn’t, something that I didn’t see either (at least not until many years later): She described the show as a ‘triumph of concept and casting.’ Ayn said that while Angels was uniquely American, it was also the exception to American television in that it was the only show to capture true ‘romanticism’—it intentionally depicted the world not as it was, but as it should be.”

I rest my case.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.