At 86, Lee Majors FINALLY ADMITTED The DEVASTATING TRUTH About Farrah Fawcett. | HO

LOS ANGELES — For decades, the story of Lee Majors and Farrah Fawcett lived where myth and memory blur: a golden Hollywood romance that dazzled on camera and unraveled off it. He was the stoic action icon of The Six Million Dollar Man.

She was the sunlit phenomenon of Charlie’s Angels, her red-swimsuit poster defining an era. Together, they were the couple that made America believe in forever. Then fame — and a betrayal that made headlines — broke them apart.

At 86, after a lifetime of near-silence, Majors has finally acknowledged what many suspected but he never publicly confirmed: the love he couldn’t forgive was also the love he never stopped carrying.

Their beginning read like a studio fable. In the late 1960s, Majors, a rising TV star with a steel-eyed calm, met Fawcett, a Texas newcomer whose warmth and luminous smile disarmed every room.

He called her “Sunshine Girl.” She teased him as “the man who blushes when he lies.” They married in 1973, a moment set against Majors’s ascent on The Six Million Dollar Man and Fawcett’s fast climb from ad work to national recognition.

By 1976, as Charlie’s Angels detonated into a cultural event, Fawcett became a phenomenon: millions of posters, wall-to-wall press, and a new kind of TV stardom for women.

But behind that surge, the couple’s time together evaporated. Shooting schedules ballooned. Two careers peaked in parallel, rarely intersecting. In a later interview, Majors understated the distance: “We only saw each other two days a week, and it wasn’t quality time anymore.”

The gap soon widened into a rupture. While Majors filmed on location, rumors linked Fawcett with his friend Ryan O’Neal, the Love Story star who moved easily through the same Hollywood circles. Tabloids pounced. One morning, as the story goes, Majors opened a newspaper and saw the photos. The betrayal, splashed across front pages, became a national spectacle: the golden angel, the best friend, the blindsided husband.

Majors did not lash out in public. He withdrew. He canceled interviews, stepped off red carpets, avoided comment. Their 1982 divorce arrived without theatrics—no courtroom fireworks, just signatures and silence. In the years that followed, Fawcett’s relationship with O’Neal turned tumultuous and enduring in equal measure.

Their son, Redmond, was born in 1985. Fawcett searched for reinvention, shedding the “poster girl” image with hard-edged roles like The Burning Bed (1984), earning Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.

Hollywood’s carousel spun, but Majors stayed largely apart from it. He worked — notably returning in The Fall Guy (1981–86) — and retreated from the tabloid churn. He remarried, found quiet, and rarely said Fawcett’s name aloud.

When she was diagnosed with a rare cancer in 2006 and died three years later at 62 — a death overshadowed the same day by Michael Jackson’s passing — Majors issued a restrained statement: “Farrah was a special woman. I wish her peace.” There were no public eulogies, no televised tears.

Now, in the reflective cadence of advanced age, Majors acknowledges the truth he long kept private: He never stopped loving her.

In recent conversations with friends and at small fan events, Majors has spoken with unusual candor about the cost of silence and the fault lines that fame opened in their home. “If I could go back,” he said at one such appearance, “I’d take her away from Hollywood. Maybe then we’d still be together.”

He doesn’t rewrite history. He doesn’t excuse. He admits the distance, the jealousy, the grinding schedules that left them with empty nights and missed dinners. He admits the pain of the headlines that told him what he wasn’t ready to hear. And he admits that walking away was the only way he knew to preserve what was left of the memories.

Friends describe Majors’s stance less as confession than as acceptance. “He never forgave, but he never stopped loving her,” one longtime acquaintance said. “He protected what remained by saying nothing.” That deliberate quiet, they argue, was Majors’s way of keeping the early years untouched — the private nicknames, the shared hope, the vow he once made at their wedding: “I’ll protect you even if the world turns against you.”

The world, in its way, did. Fawcett’s image whipsawed between icon and target. Her poster haloed millions of teenage bedrooms; her personal life became a tabloid currency she could never fully reclaim. She pushed back with craft, taking roles that bruised and mattered. “I don’t need to be loved anymore,” she said during that pivot. “I need to be recognized.” Hollywood obliged, if inconsistently. The public’s appetite for redemption was real, but so was its fixation on scandal.

Majors’s admission does not seek to relitigate those years. It reframes them. He talks of an orphan’s resolve — he was born Harvey Lee Yeary in 1939, losing both parents to accidents by age two — and a life rebuilt more than once: a football career ended by injury, a move to Los Angeles with $200 and a headshot, a breakout in The Big Valley, and the global blaze of The Six Million Dollar Man.

“They turned me on when they needed a hero,” he once said. “Then shut me off when I was tired.” He now concedes that living like a machine cost him presence at home. The schedules that made him a household name also made him a stranger at his own dinner table.

What remains, at 86, is not a scandal retold but a paradox owned. The devastating truth, Majors says, is that love and pain arrived together and never fully parted. He could not forgive what happened. He could not forget the person it happened with.

“Some doors, once closed, are best left that way,” he told a mutual friend in the early 2000s when asked about a possible meeting with Fawcett. Today, he admits that behind that refusal was fear — not of anger returning, but of breaking the one fragile thing he’d kept intact: the memory of who they were before the world intruded.

Fawcett’s final years were complex and public. O’Neal stayed by her side through treatments; their son struggled in and out of the headlines; her documentary exposed both courage and vulnerability. Those closest to her insist she carried private regrets — not as penance, but as part of a life lived at full brightness. She wanted to be seen clearly, flaws and all. She was. She paid for that honesty with scrutiny few could bear.

Majors, by contrast, chose a different currency: quiet. He remarried in 2002, to Faith Cross. He moved through work and fan conventions with humility and little appetite for catharsis. At Comic-Con in 2023, when a crowd roared “We love you, Steve Austin,” he smiled and answered gently, “Thank you, but today I’m just Lee.” The line landed not as deflection but as a thesis. The man rebuilt on television was always, in life, rebuilding — from grief, from career upheaval, from a marriage that began in promise and ended in a silence he curated on purpose.

What his admission changes is not the record but the reading. It asks audiences to hold two truths at once: that Farrah Fawcett was more than a poster and more than a scandal, and that Lee Majors was more than a stoic hero and more than a wounded ex-husband. They were two people lifted and crushed by the same lights. They loved each other fiercely. They hurt each other deeply. And then they lived with what remained.

Hollywood still prefers clean endings. Their story resists one. There was no late-life reconciliation, no final embrace, no televised absolution. There was, instead, a short statement at her passing and a long quiet after. Now, in the gentler light of his late eighties, Majors offers the closest thing to a coda he ever will: he never stopped loving Farrah Fawcett. He could not forgive what happened, and he will not apologize for that. But he understands, better than he once did, the machine they were both trapped inside.

On some mornings, friends say, he waters the garden and lets an old episode play for a minute or two — the music rising, the slow motion run, the words: “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” Then he turns it off. The man on screen is an artifact. The man in the yard is the survivor of six million little breaks that never fully healed and didn’t need to, to keep going.

If there’s a lesson in Majors’s late-life candor, it is not about scandal or blame. It is about the price of making dreams for public consumption. Red carpets are bright enough to blind the very people walking them. The applause fades to the hollow echo of shoes in a corridor. And if you are lucky — or stubborn — you find a way to protect the few memories that still glow when the lights go down.

Farrah Fawcett remains pinned in time: a poster, a performance, a face that meant freedom to some and fantasy to others. Lee Majors is still here, quieter, smaller in the frame, finally saying out loud what his silence always implied. The devastating truth is simple, and for him, sufficient: he never stopped loving her. The rest, he leaves in the past.