Celebrity Dominatrix

Among submissive men — about 85 percent of the population; most of the rest are gay — the name “Morgan Fairchild” has an arresting, almost talismanic quality.

Fairchild was launched into the global consciousness by her role as Constance in Flamingo Road. Series, we thought, underrated. Fairchild? Unforgettable as a scheming bitch with a knowing smile in her eyes, a cruel smile on her lips, and legs that reached all the way from her hips to the ground and then some.

A few weeks after the first episode, Fairchild later reported, a member of the Saudi royal family contacted her offering six figures for her to dominate him at his fetish playpen in Paris. “He’d have been better off,” she mocked, “sending me a dozen roses.”

(Aside: For the cogniscenti, of course, her roles on Search for Tomorrow and A Man Sloane must also be counted as femme fatale fetish classics. Still, it was Flamingo Road that launched a 20-year-plus run as the woman most men in the world would probably do just about anything for.)

Fairchild’s name on any DVD or video, according to a Hollywood producer we talks to, adds about 10 percent to the value of the same product without her name. Name and a picture? 25 percent. Bob McGowan, call our office.

It was just a few years later that Fairchild appeared on the cover of One Woman magazine, another landmark in both her career and the history of femdom art. The magazine was short-lived, even after the initial Fairchild issue dominated New York newsstands.

“One Woman was right,” a reporter at the New York Post chuckled. “I think they found her with Morgan Fairchild. It’s all downhill from her.”

Well, one woman — but when it’s Morgan Fairchild, there’s so much more to be said. And say it we will, in a forthcoming series of posts on Morgan Fairchild, the most dominant woman of the last quarter century.