Originally appeared in the New York Times, August 8, 2010

ONE Sunday a month, this column seeks out creative thinkers and tells their stories. You might think that finding these folks would be easy, and we acknowledge that the Prototype in-box is often flooded by readers’ suggestions. But finding entrepreneurs whose sagas say something insightful about business culture — other than just “Buy my product!” — isn’t always a cinch.

That’s why Jules Pieri and Joanne Domeniconi inspire awe. What Prototype does 12 times a year, these women do five times a week at their e-commerce start-up, Daily Grommet. Their goal is to promote innovation by endorsing what they call “nice companies,” ones with well-made products and impeccable service. If those products preserve a craft or protect the environment, they say, all the better.

Here’s what distinguishes Daily Grommet from other Web marketplaces like eBay or Etsy: To be featured on Daily Grommet, you have to be chosen. In the tradition of the seal-of-approval judges at Good Housekeeping, the 15-person Daily Grommet team does its own research and features only products and companies it has battle-tested.

The women behind Daily Grommet say their goal is to enable consumers to find products that support their values. That doesn’t mean every item on the site claims to do good; there’s plenty of whimsy for sale. But by offering a curated list, the site seeks to help people patronize innovative companies that its team believes will treat customers well. Ms. Pieri calls this link between buyers and inventors “citizen commerce.”

Amid recent blunders and betrayals in corporate America, consumers have “a burning hunger for real leadership and access to authentic experiences and trustworthy people,” Ms. Pieri says. Daily Grommet’s solution is to highlight inventive products that often don’t have the marketing muscle to promote themselves.

What, you must be wondering, is meant by the use of the word “grommet”? The site, whose logo is a drawing of the real thing (a metal ring used to reinforce an eyelet), explains: “It’s a wonderful product still waiting in the wings, just ripe for discovery. It comes from a designer, or inventor, or artist or manufacturer who is clearly passionate about what they create.”

Every weekday at noon Eastern time, the site, based in an 1880s Victorian house in Lexington, Mass., posts “Today’s Grommet,” products like a hands-free flashlight, a newfangled pogo stick and an embroidered Peruvian belt. There are pictures and prices, as well as a video made by the site that shows how to use the product and often introduces its creators.

“We are seeing an unprecedented democratization of innovation, but existing retail and distribution systems don’t give everyday people access to the fruits of that trend,” Ms. Pieri says, noting that new, cheaper prototyping tools have made it easier to become an inventor. Of Daily Grommet’s chosen partners, she says, “We raise their game.”

Then the site makes that game — or salad bowl, or bracelet adorned with a USB drive — easy to buy. Ordering is simple, and Daily Grommet promises buyer satisfaction and a money-back guarantee. “We’re responsible for the customer’s experience,” Ms. Pieri says. In return, the site gets a cut of the revenue; she won’t say how much, though it’s enough to enable the site not to carry advertising.

The lack of ads is important because the Daily Grommet team seeks to be more than a buying platform. It wants its endorsement to stand for quality, which won’t happen if customers perceive that praise is for sale.

Not long ago, Ms. Domeniconi, whose title is chief discovery officer, drove three hours north to visit Custom Cordage, a company in Waldoboro, Me., that weaves doormats out of recycled fishing line, or “float rope.”

In the resulting video about “the most beautiful doormats you’ve ever seen,” she explains that the colorful rope has been banned because it harms marine life. She lauded Custom Cordage for helping the lobster industry and for keeping people employed year-round.

Daily Grommet started in October 2008, in a week when the financial markets plunged. The site, whose investors include Geraldine Laybourne, founder of Oxygen Media, was the brainchild of Ms. Pieri, an industrial designer with a Harvard M.B.A. who’s worked at companies like Stride Rite and Keds. She grew up in Detroit, the daughter of an autoworker. From childhood she was interested in how products were designed, engineered and made.

By Amy Wallace

Originally published in More June 2010

SHARON STONE is shameless. The actress considers it a skill to have no shame. She thinks everyone should try it, though she cautions that if you’re female, shamelessness can cost you. Her refusal to feel guilty, she says, has gotten her labeled difficult, or worse.

“I’m like a Prohibition-era flapper. I’m like a juke-joint hussy,” Stone says over lunch at an Italian restaurant near Beverly Hills. But better to be called names than to be pressured into not being herself. Feeling ashamed, she says, “is not an organic state of being, so shamelessness is closer to godliness. You have to put shame down.”

Minutes later, as if to prove her point, she responds to a question about the watch on her wrist by yanking it off and flinging it onto the cement patio. “That’s the Dior Christal,” she says of the pricey timepiece, made with sapphire crystals, that she’s just tried to kill (Stone says she often does this stunt, which “shocks people but is the reason I am so proudly Dior’s spokeswoman”). She crouches to retrieve her bauble, emerging with a big smile on her makeup-free face. “How about that? It keeps on ticking.”

It’s tempting to say the same about Stone herself. Life has flung her to the hard ground more than once in recent years: She survived a brain hemorrhage in 2001, a bruising divorce in 2004 and, in December, the loss of her 78-year-old father, Joseph, to esophageal cancer. But listen to her tick, tick, tick.

“I’m detached from my celebrity. I don’t need to be ‘it’ anymore,” she says, announcing with what sounds like relief that her days as “a great big movie star” may well be behind her. Not that she isn’t busy. In the spring, she shot a four-episode guest stint on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and headed to Europe to film the sequel to Largo Winch, based on a Belgian comic book series. Still, Stone has a point: Her last movie, Streets of Blood, went straight to DVD. But no matter. When I compliment her poignant portrayal of a hairdresser in Bobby, released in 2006, she pronounces herself happy to be seen no longer as a babe starlet but as “a very fine character actor.” Indeed, Stone reports she is happy with her work, her kids (she has three adopted boys, ages 10, five and four) and her sense of style (“I’m always going to wear leopard; leopard is a neutral for me”). Without sounding too “woo-woo”—a term she invokes when discussing her interest in Eastern -spirituality—she would like you to know she’s been thinking a lot lately about getting older, about womanhood and about lost love. What she’s concluded may surprise you.

“Life and love is like the ocean,” she tells me between bites of a Caesar salad. At 52, she is stunning up close—blue eyed, lithe and radiant in ripped jeans, a white T-shirt sans bra and a linen vest. “Sometimes the tide is in and sometimes the tide is out, and sometimes it’s like the frigging Mojave.” Where’s the tide now? “For me? Mojave! Fortunately, I like the desert. I’m a desert flower.”

But flattering as it is to be courted by men half her age, right now she says she’s going solo. “I’ve reached this period in my life when I feel particularly feminine,” she says, her eyes suddenly filling with tears. She is thinking of her father, who with her mother moved in with Stone seven years ago, after he received his diagnosis. “He was a very tough cat,” she says fondly, dabbing her eyes with tissues she’s retrieved from her bag. Watching a parent fight to live, she says, has changed her sense of self—in a good way.

Originally appeared in April 2010 More

By Amy Wallace

Photographs spill out of big manila envelopes, making a mess of Dana Delany’s coffee table. There’s one of Dana at about age five, chubby and jubilant, a Mexican hat on her head and dish of M&M’s in her hand. There’s the actress at 16, with frosted hair, and another snap taken a few years later, after she opted for a perm. She grimaces, but fondly, as she appraises them: the head shots (doe-eyed ingenue, strong-jawed heroine, and one that she calls her Shannen Doherty look); the captured moments from her film, theater and TV work; the Polaroids from countless photo shoots and a pile of candids with her family and friends.

As she shows me a group portrait of her father, uncle and paternal grandfather (“I identify with all of them. We’re all Irishmen”), I start to divine a pattern, which continues to emerge as she offers up shots from her fiftieth birthday party four years ago, which was hosted by her best friend, who happens to be male. “I was his best man at his wedding,” she says, and I’m tempted to comment, but Delany beats me to it.

“The thing I notice is I’m hanging with the boys,” she says, fanning the photos in front of her. Only later will I realize she is leading up to the most surprising moment of our interview.

No conversation with Delany is dull, and during my time in her high-ceilinged modern house in West Los Angeles she will sound off about sex after 50, menopause and swimming with dolphins. She will discuss her ongoing spiritual search and talk about remaining unmarried while truly liking men. Still, I’m caught off guard when Delany reveals that in her dreams, she imagines being a man. And not just any man, but—wait for it—George Clooney.

“It might sound funny, but I wouldn’t mind being the female version of him,” she says, explaining that she doesn’t know Clooney, really, unless you count the time 23 years ago when he was on The Facts of Life and Delany was doing a sitcom called Sweet Surrender and they shared a makeup room. “I wish we shared a dressing room!” she jokes. “I can’t honestly say I know him, but I’ve watched him from afar, and I really admire what he does.”

It is clear, as she ticks off Clooney’s charitable works, his savvy acting choices, his reputation for being a great, loyal friend and, yes, the fact that “he honestly says, ‘I’m not getting married. It doesn’t interest me,’ ” that this perpetually single, politically active Emmy-winning actress has thought through the Delany/Clooney comparison. She has also thought about how it will sound.

“I know—people are going to say, ‘Oh, she wants to be a playgirl,’ ” she says. “But that’s not what I mean. I like him because he’s a responsible human being who loves his life. Who is totally true to himself.”

You don’t have to spend much time with people who know and love Delany to understand how precisely her description of Clooney also describes her. Delany is warm, open and supremely comfy in her own skin, her friends and colleagues say, and that gives her easy access to a generosity that can be uncommon in Hollywood.

“She’s just a doll,” says Marc Cherry, the creator of ABC’s Desperate Housewives, who considers Delany one of his five leading ladies despite the fact that she didn’t join the show until its fourth season. (Delany was his first choice for the role of Bree; she turned it down, three times. Now she plays Katherine Mayfair, a divorcée who this season was accidentally shot and spent time in a mental hospital.)

“Dana knows she’s talented, and that gives her an inner peace that a lot of people in this town don’t have,” Cherry continues. “She doesn’t take herself so seriously, and she’s genuinely interested in people’s lives. A lot of actresses can be narcissistic. Not so with our Dana.”

By AMY WALLACE

JEN BILIK sells wit for a living.

Since 2002, when she founded her gift and stationery products company, Knock Knock, with a $750,000 windfall from a Manhattan apartment sale, Ms. Bilik, a 40-year-old entrepreneur, has been churning out cleverness in abundance. There are the sticky notes saying things like “Useless Info” and “When Pigs Fly”; list pads titled “All Out Of” and “Things You Must Do to Make Me Happy”; flashcards for parenting, slang use and sex; and kits to aid in decision-making, dating, and even decision-making during dating.

She has also written “The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You” and designed a series of guided journals with names like “I Can’t Sleep” and “My Dysfunctions.”

Along the way, her annual revenue has grown to more than $6.3 million. Her company motto is, “We put the fun in functional,” but she acknowledges that the company’s voice is more confessional than practical.

“A core aspect of Knock Knock’s identity is justifying my own inadequacies, which has, I think, struck a chord in our customers,” she says, sitting in Knock Knock’s headquarters in Venice, Calif.

But oh, the lessons she’s learned. Like this one: “Great, creative inspiration feels so good. But translating that into a good business decision — well, it’ll probably take longer than your inspiration did.”

Ms. Bilik is a businesswoman who never planned to go into business — or, as she puts it, “an artist who looked at the guys with the polyester suits buying ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ in the airport as such chumps” who then became a chump herself. (But she does wear all-natural fibers: “I put my foot down on the polyester.”)

She is also a funny lady who has successfully leveraged her sense of humor, but not without skinning her knees a few times. By her reckoning, she has made “a thousand and a half mistakes” and at least a few “über-mistakes.”

Notably, though, many of the very things that led to her mistakes also yielded her successes. It’s the old “your strength is your weakness” paradox: Ms. Bilik has been known to spend 20 hours writing a greeting card about the history of Valentine’s Day, for example, because it made her happy to do so. Without that off-center sensibility, she wouldn’t have anything worth selling.

And without that drive to create — a passion that, for her, borders on devotion — she wouldn’t have had the energy to start Knock Knock in the first place. But the fact remains: 20 hours spent on a card that will earn her company only $10,000 — “at most!” — isn’t smart business.

“We put so much into the products, which is part of the problem with our business model,” she says. “We put too much work into them for the amount of money we’re getting out of them. We’re really trying to address that right now.”

Knock Knock, whose products are sold in about 5,000 stores in the United States alone, has at least two philosophies that drive sales. One is aspirational organization, the idea that if you offer people a way to keep tidy track of their takeout menus or their home maintenance projects or their pets, they will enjoy buying it even if they don’t ever put it to use. One big seller is the Personal Library Kit, which equips the buyer with checkout cards and a date stamp to make sure that books they lend to friends will be returned.

Another guiding philosophy is that people enjoy having the last word — and will pay to do so. Knock Knock makes a self-inking stamp that says, “Deal With This,” followed by five checkable boxes: For Me, Now, Quietly, Correctly and Or Else. A “Complaint” sticky offers boxes for “Whose Fault” (Mine, Yours, Ours, Other) and “Desired Outcome” (Apology, Explanation, Litigation, Change).

An instant-apology pad lists types of infractions (Behavior, Words, Action or Inaction) and “Reasons for My Behavior,” ranging from “I forgot” to “I was drunk” to “I was traumatized in childhood.” A new set of fabric-bound books, “Lines for All Occasions,” offers suggested excuses, lies, insults, comebacks, pep talks, pick-ups and come-ons.

Originally appeared in More Magazine February, 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

Ground zero for Meg Whitman’s campaign for governor of California is a suite of rooms modestly tucked into a colorless cookie-cutter office park—all sprayed stucco walls and fluorescent lights. I’m ushered into a conference room so unadorned there is not even a campaign poster on the walls. Whitman sits at the head of a white meeting table, and as I sit down beside her, two handlers pull up chairs as well. The space offers no clues to Whitman’s personality, and she doesn’t reveal much herself. In her black suit and black-and-white sweater, the former CEO of eBay, now 53, is still the picture of a put-together corporate titan. And her approach is all business. Seeming energized by an earlier discussion of the state budget with her campaign staff, she tosses numbers around with confidence. When I ask where she’ll find the votes to win the race (the primary is in June, the general in November), she breaks down the research in a tone so self-assured that I can almost see a thought bubble forming over her head: Statistics may scare some women, but not me.

Over the months that I reported this article, I often heard the candidate and her staff say that they want people to know “the real Meg Whitman.” Jillian Manus, the chair of Whitman’s women’s coalition (dubbed MEGaWomen), told me, “Everyone knows what she’s done. I want to let people know who she is. To feel her, get her, touch her.” But Whitman is hard to know, much less touch. She’s quiet, understated and more wonky than ebullient after a career spent largely in Silicon Valley tech circles—in all, not the type that seems born to storm the political stage. Unlike Sarah Palin, Whitman doesn’t wink or quip or let go with unscripted rants; unlike George Bush, she doesn’t give people funny nicknames; and unlike Bill Clinton, when she tries to show she feels your pain, she sounds a bit wooden. Forget your pain; she seems at times not even to feel her own.

But with her high-level Republican connections (she counts Mitt Romney and John McCain as friends) and her jaw-dropping personal fortune ($1.2 billion, by a 2009 Los Angeles Times estimate), Whitman is a candidate no one can ignore. Having left her job at eBay in 2008, she is now pursuing politics as a second act and at this moment is in mid-leap—committed to her new calling but, with no experience running for elected office, uncertain of her odds. Her political future boils down to this: Will she persuade voters—especially women—that the talents she parlayed into a billion bucks can guide California through the recession’s perfect storm?

If only every voter Whitman is courting could meet her mother. While the candidate seems all discipline and reserve, Margaret Whitman, 89, does not, and the stories she tells about the young Meg hint at what lies beneath the candidate’s cool. “When she was little, she was extremely determined. Whatever she decided to do, she was going to do,” says Margaret, recalling that swim meets in particular brought out the competitor in her younger daughter. “Meg was a pretty good swimmer. But at meets, I had to be there, because if she wasn’t at least first or second, she’d be screaming with rage. There was no second best for her. She has always loved to win.”

During the summers, while Whitman’s father stayed behind at his financial services job on Long Island, her mother took the three kids—Whitman and her older sister and brother—on cross-continental adventures. They traversed the western U.S. one year and Alaska the next; on that trip, they drove the desolate, partially unpaved Alcan Highway. Whitman was only six, but the image of her mother lashing four spare tires to the roof of the family camper, just in case, stays with her. Whitman recounts how in the 1940s, before having kids, her mom volunteered to be a war mechanic in New Guinea. “She’d never looked under the hood of a car or fixed anything with a wrench,” Whitman says. “But she knew that’s where the critical need was and where she could make the biggest contribution. The learning curve didn’t stall her. In fact, it fueled her.” To Meg Whitman, the parallel is clear: “I am my mother’s daughter.”

Originally appeared in More Magazine December/January 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

Standing behind her in the supermarket line, I could see the girl was pretty. Slightly built, her dark hair cut in a bob, she evoked an Asian Audrey Hepburn. Then I saw the scar. Perfectly straight, it bisected her upper arm about six inches below the shoulder of her sleeveless blouse. More than anything else, it was the color that hit me: Against her suntanned skin, the gash was bright purple.

Tough break, I thought, as the cashier scanned her saltines, her soy milk and her fifth of Jack Daniel’s. (I live in Hollywood; this is what passes for groceries among wannabe actresses.)

Maybe it was the tabloids staring vacantly from the rack, but my mind jumped to the cause of the girl’s wound—a late-night car crash, perhaps, or a sledding accident involving a barbed wire fence. In my head, I saw the girl in the ER, bravely biting her lip as a handsome surgeon mended her bicep. I imagined the argument she’d had with herself: Dare I, or dare I not, go sleeveless ever again? I admired her for answering yes, purple scar be damned.

Then she turned to swipe her debit card. This is the moment in the daydream where you hear the screech of a phonograph needle yanked across vinyl or the screen goes black. Because suddenly I saw that the thick purple line wasn’t a scar at all. It was a tattoo—a tattoo of a little bald-headed boy in footie pajamas drawing a fat, straight line with a huge purple crayon. It was a tattoo of a boy I recognized, a boy whose name I had known almost all my life. Harold.

In that moment, I thought: Maybe there is a God.

There is a photograph of me, age two and a half, lying on my stomach on a quilted pink bedspread. I am wearing a white nightgown and resting on my elbows, a book propped open in front of me. I have raised my head to look at the photographer, and although I am not smiling, I am very happy. I know this for two reasons. One, I’m kicking my feet in the air. Two, judging by the picture of a hot-air balloon clearly visible on the page I’m reading, I’m two thirds of the way through my first favorite book: Harold and the Purple Crayon, written and illustrated by Crockett Johnson.

Originally published in 1955, seven years before my birth, the book contains just 64 pages, many of them with only a few words. But the story’s impact on me—on how I see the world—could not be bigger.

I was raised not to believe in God. I’ve never turned to any religious text for solace, for guidance, or to make sense of my life. But at the age of 47, I still seek out Harold.

He’s easy to find. Open the book, and he’s on every page. Plunked down in an all-white landscape with only his wits and his crayon, he is nothing if not resourceful. “There wasn’t any moon, and Harold needed a moon for a walk in the moonlight,” the book says. So he draws a crescent in the sky. When he needs direction, he lays out a purple path so he won’t get lost. By his own hand, Harold always saves himself.

For me, Harold’s story has been a parable about making your own way in the world. Harold’s teachings are simple. His hand is steady. You could call him my guru. But that’s not quite right.

I guess you could say I worship in the church of the purple crayon.

“And he set off on his walk, taking his big purple crayon with him.”

When I was four years old, my mother put me in a borrowed yellow Karmann Ghia with a man I’d never met and pointed the car west.

We had been living in New Jersey for only a few weeks when my mom decided on this course of action. She believed my father, a young philosophy professor who was just starting at Princeton, had cheated on her. But that wasn’t all. At the local supermarket, she saw other faculty wives trudging from aisle to aisle, screaming children in tow. Suddenly, she knew she didn’t want to be one of them. How much her moment of clarity had to do with the fact that she’d met someone else—a graduate student back in California—I guess I’ll never know.

Originally appeared in More Magazine, July/August 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

As the toughest, lustiest cop on TV, Holly Hunter loves to explode expectations—about women, morality, aging and the need to always be in control.

Holly Hunter is talking about sex, and who wouldn’t want to listen? During her nearly three-decade career, after all, the Academy Award–winning actress has often plumbed the murky depths of the erotic. In 1987, playing the neurotic and conflicted producer in Broadcast News, Hunter moaned, “I am beginning to repel people I’m trying to seduce!” Six years later, as The Piano’s mute and unhappy bride, she made a tiny hole in her dirty black stocking more alluring than any Victoria’s Secret teddy—and won an Oscar for her work. In 2003, playing an emotionally insecure mom in the coming-of-age film Thirteen, Hunter emerged from a shower completely nude. (To do otherwise, she says, would have been to break a cardinal rule: Never step out of character while the cameras are rolling.) 

But as Hunter’s TNT series Saving Grace begins its third season on June 16, the 51-year-old star isn’t just naked (a lot). Her character, Oklahoma City major crimes detective Grace Hanadarko, is lusty. Hungry. Foulmouthed. “Feral,” as Hunter puts it. Oh, and she’s got a guardian angel—the kind who sometimes flashes big white wings and has a direct line to God. Grace is complicated, to say the least. Which is why playing her demands a lot more from Hunter than merely stripping off her clothes.

“There was an episode last season where I was tied up for the entire first act,” Hunter says, laughing as she describes the scene: Grace, buck naked and handcuffed, facedown, to her fourposter by a frisky one-night stand, gets stranded for hours after her new lover flees the house. The situation was at once steamy and hilarious.

“It was just such a gas,” she says, recalling how—before his abrupt exit—her paramour signs his name on her butt with red lipstick. Usually on TV, she adds, such a story line would resolve with a tasteful fade-out, if it got filmed at all. On Saving Grace, however, the camera lingered. And Hunter couldn’t have been happier.

“That’s something that I love—the iconic female in the act of surrender,” she says, sipping a cup of tea in a corner booth at Art’s, an old-school San Fernando Valley deli favored by Hollywood’s creative set. As she sees it, surrender is part of sex “for any female, unless you are a dominatrix. What’s interesting is to see someone go, god, I want to go off the cliff. Grace says yes to situations that are not about being a control freak. It’s the primitive versus the civilized. The raw versus the polished.”

As Hunter talks, her slim shoulders get narrower, making her seem even tinier than her five feet two inches. But the way her brown eyes flash gives her a forcefulness that transcends size. “Grace loves dealing with chaos,” she continues. “She thrives on it. There’s an enjoyment of walking into the center of maelstroms.”

As for Hunter . . . “How do I feel about chaos?” she says, her mouth going a little crooked as she repeats my question. “Well, you know, I’ve got plenty.” Her famous Georgia twang gets almost growly, and when she laughs, it’s a low, mischievous chuckle. “I’m at home in it. I could weep with how at home I am in it.”

She declines to get more specific, but some of the tumult may arise from relocating the family—her partner, actor Gordon MacDonald (The Thin Red Line, The Brave One), and their three-year-old twins—from New York to Los Angeles for six months of the year while she works onSaving Grace. Add to that a rigorous production schedule, made all the more so by Hunter’s unflagging devotion to all aspects of the show, from casting to wardrobe to sitting in the editing room. During the months of filming, Hunter—who is an executive producer of Saving Graceas well as its star—typically works 16-hour days, as many as six days a week.

“She really is doing a huge job,” says Laura San Giacomo, who plays Rhetta, the OCPD criminalist and Grace’s best friend. “She’s like Atlas with the world on her shoulders—but dressed really cool.”

June 25, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

A recent email exchange with the late Farrah Fawcett reveals the unlikely friendship between the Charlie’s Angels star and the novelist Ayn Rand, who helped the actress understand her place in culture—and longed to cast her in a TV version of Atlas Shrugged.

Her golden hair prompted a nationwide outbreak of “feathered” bangs. Her taut body—captured most famously in a red bathing suit on a poster that sold, by her own estimation, 12 million copies—set the standard for the sun-kissed athletic sexiness of the ’70s and ’80s. When Farrah Fawcett, the pretty girl from Corpus Christi, Texas, who became an icon of American beauty, died today at the age of 62, the world lost its favorite angel.

Her life often read like an open book. Her famous paramours (Lee Majors; Ryan O’Neal), her spacey affect (on display most memorably in a 1997 interview with David Letterman), and her troubled son (he recently was released from jail to visit her deathbed) were always a part of the daily celebrity news feed. In mid-May, she even teamed with NBC News for a two-hour prime-time special, complete with home videos, about her battle with the anal cancer that eventually killed her.

Farrah told me, “Charlie’s Angels was never popular with critics who dismissed it as Jiggle TV. But Ayn saw something that the critics didn’t.”

But here are a few things that almost no one knew about Fawcett:

1) Fawcett and the writer Ayn Rand shared a birthday, February 2.

2) Rand, the inventor of the philosophical system called Objectivism, never missed an episode of Charlie’s Angels. She was such a Fawcett fan, in fact, that she sought to cast the actress as the lead in a planned TV miniseries version of her best-known work, the gargantuan novel Atlas Shrugged. (NBC later scrapped the project).

3) Rand, perhaps better than anyone else, helped Fawcett understand her place in American culture.

How do I know this? Because just months before Fawcett’s death, I had an email exchange with her about Rand. At the time, I was researching a possible article about the long—and as yet unsuccessful—effort to bring Atlas Shrugged to the big screen. I contacted Fawcett just to check a few facts. Instead, I got a glimpse I hadn’t expected of an intelligent woman with a savvy comprehension of her own cheesecake image.

Like most people, my sense of Fawcett had been marred by the 1997 Letterman interview in which she talked about “using my body parts to paint with”—particularly her gluteus maximus. And that was when she could get a sentence out. She twitched and lost her train of thought and interrupted herself. Her legs splayed. Her head bobbed. “Suddenly Farrah and I are playing charades,” Letterman said at one point, half fond, half exasperated.

But that wasn’t my experience of Fawcett. For all her wacked-out antics, she was no dummy. She knew people saw her as an actress who had never transcended “Jiggle TV” and she had made her peace with it. She had a sense of humor about herself.

Recently, when Letterman ended a bizarre exchange with the mumbling actor-turned-musician Joaquin Phoenix with the words, “We owe an apology to Farrah Fawcett,” I agreed. He may have meant it as a punchline, but after my interaction with her, I felt like saying: Farrah, I’m sorry.

Below, excerpts from our email interview:

How did you first learn of Ayn Rand’s interest in you? I gather she got in touch in the late ’70s, when Charlie’s Angels was one of the biggest hit shows ever to appear on TV?

Ayn contacted me with a personal letter (and a copy of Atlas Shrugged) through my agents. Even though we had never met (and never did), she seemed to think we must have a lot in common since we were both born on the same day: February 2nd.

Why did Rand say she was so determined to see you in the role of Dagny Taggart, the female heroine in Atlas Shrugged?

I don’t remember if Ayn’s letter specifically mentioned Charlie’s Angels, but I do remember it saying that she was a fan of my work. A few months later, when we finally spoke on the phone (actually she did most of the speaking and I did most of the listening), she said 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. Aaron Spelling was probably the only other person to see Angels that way, although he referred to it as “comfort television.”

Did Ayn have any favorite episodes of the show?

I have to admit that I don’t think Ayn was a big fan of the stories themselves because she kept saying that someday somebody would offer me a script (and a role) that would give me the chance to “triumph as an actress.” Ayn wanted that script to be Atlas Shrugged and that role to be her heroine, Dagny Taggart. But because of the challenges in adapting and producing the novel for television, several years went by and the script and role that Ayn hoped I would someday be offered turned out to be The Burning Bed and the role of Francine Hughes instead. And so, in an unexpected way, Ayn’s hope or expectation for me did come true. Looking back, she seemed to see something in me that I had not yet seen in myself.

Had you read Atlas Shrugged or any of her other famous books? What was your familiarity with the Rand world view?

At the time that Ayn contacted me about Atlas Shrugged, my only real familiarity with her work was the movie version of her previous novel, The Fountainhead, with Gary Cooper. I remember liking the movie because it was unique in that the characters seemed to be the embodiments of ideas as opposed to real flesh and blood people with interests and lives. Now that I think about it, I think that’s why Ayn was drawn to Charlie’s Angels. Because the characters that Kate, Jaclyn and I played weren’t really characters (the audience never saw us outside of work) as much as personifications of the idea that three sexy women could do all the things that Kojak and Columbo did. Our characters existed only to serve the idea of the show (even “Charlie” was just a faceless voice on a speaker phone).

But I also responded to The Fountainhead because, as an artist (a painter and sculptress) myself, I related to the architect’s resistance to make his work like everyone else’s—which was, of course, what Ayn’s own art was all about. And that resistance to conformity is probably one of the reasons that she was so determined to see me play Dagny: At the time I would have been the completely unexpected choice.

It sounds as if you and Rand got along pretty well.

Later, when I read Atlas Shrugged, I was reminded of my first and only conversation with Ayn and how some of the characters in her novel(s) take an immediate liking to each other, almost as if they had always known each other—at least in spirit. And this was the feeling I got from Ayn herself, from the way she spoke to me. I’ll always think of “Dagny Taggart” as the best role I was supposed to play but never did…

Bankruptcies Jolt a Ski Haven for the Superrich

Jeff Minton

Originally appeared in the New York Times June 14, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – Nine days after declaring personal bankruptcy — again — a barefoot Edra Blixseth pads excitedly around Porcupine Creek, her 30,000-square-foot estate here. Guests are coming, probably 125 in all. They’re due any minute. The zipper on her sternum-baring cocktail dress is jammed. Do you think it’s too tight? Can somebody help her?

Porcupine Creek is lavish, with a 240-acre private golf course and a pool guarded by bronze lions. Many visitors have seen all that, plus the automated fountain that splashes at the end of her 1,700-foot driveway.

But so far, only Ms. Blixseth’s good friends have wandered around the private space inside: the prayer room, the gym, the beauty parlor, the wet room, the cozy massage alcoves and the private theater adorned with murals; then there’s the 18th-century French furniture, the Italian stained glass, the bedroom suite from the Vatican, the ancient Tibetan Tankas. Until this day, she has never hosted a charity event inside her home. Given the circumstances, though, it’s the best she can do.

“I can’t write a check this year,” she says, referring to her usual gift to a shelter for battered women. Her Gulfstream IV has been grounded. Her jewelry, mostly sold. To help pay the bills, her boyfriend even had to sell his Bentley.

Edra Denise Blixseth, age 55, is tiny, barely 5 foot 3, but she is at the center of a huge financial mess. According to personal bankruptcy papers her lawyer filed in March, she owes $500 million to $1 billion and has assets of barely half that, almost none of them liquid. Earlier this month, the court approved the sale of one of her most prized possessions — the private ski resort in Big Sky, Mont., known as the Yellowstone Club — to the private equity firm of one of its members for $115 million. Just a year ago, that same buyer, CrossHarbor Capital Partners, had been willing to pay $400 million for the club.

The Yellowstone Club, a 13,600-acre playground 20 miles north of Yellowstone National Park, may be the world’s lone members-only ski resort. Its pristine natural beauty and remote location have attracted wealthy skiers who prize their privacy, including Bill Gates of Microsoft; Barry Sternlicht, the hotelier; and Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation.

In one of the signature, fin de siècle moments of our passing Gilded Age, the Yellowstone Club filed for Chapter 11 protection last November; four months later, Ms. Blixseth followed suit — a club and its doyenne, sucked into a financial downdraft that has wounded even once-untouchable elites.

Marketed with the phrase “Private Powder,” Yellowstone is the anti-Aspen — luxurious, sure, but discreet and child-friendly. Ask members what makes it so special, and more than one offers this simple fact: There, and nowhere else, the family of the world’s richest man can ski without bodyguards. One club member — who, like many Yellowstone members, requested anonymity so as not to be seen as violating the club’s tradition of not blabbing about one another — recalls Mr. Gates’s saying that his family once tried Vail but their need for security “made us look like jerks. Here, we don’t need it.” That’s because the club has long been kept safe by former Secret Service agents, and who can put a price tag on that?

“Once you ski there, you never want to go anywhere else,” says Burt Sugarman, a Beverly Hills businessman who with his wife, the “Entertainment Tonight” host Mary Hart, was among the club’s first members.

Steve Burke, the chief operating officer of Comcast, has a place at Yellowstone. As do Todd Thomson, the former head of Citigroup’s private banking unit; Robert Greenhill, founder of the investment bank Greenhill & Company; Greg LeMond, a Tour de France winner; Annika Sorenstam, the Swedish golf star; Frank McCourt, the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers; and about 250 other low-key rich folks.

Membership has its price: a minimum of $250,000 to join, plus the cost of a $5 million to $35 million mountainside home, plus annual dues of about $20,000, according to members.