The Farrah Fawcett poster

from the Miami News, March 17, 1977

Thirty-nine years ago this week, posters of actress Farrah Fawcett were flying off the shelves in Miami and elsewhere. The price: $2.

A clerk at Vibrations II in North Miami told the Miami News, "The teenagers buy them. They think she's cute."

At the time, it was the largest-selling poster in history.

In 2009, photographer Bruce McBroom, told TIME Magazine "how an innocuous photo shoot — in which Fawcett posed at her Hollywood home in a red swimsuit — resulted in the 1976 poster that wound up plastered on millions of bedroom walls."

Like any photo shoot, we did a lot of different stuff. But it was just Farrah and myself. It was before the days where you had to have stylists and hair and makeup and background art directors and assistants. It was just me and Farrah and my Nikon, at the home she shared with Lee Majors, a house on Mulholland Drive overlooking Hollywood, with a beautiful view.

Farrah didn't like the way she looked in a bikini and didn't have one on her. So she would go in the house and come out in a swimsuit and say, "What do you think of this?" Any photographer will tell you that when you're given an assignment, it's like going fishing — you know when you got the pictures, and you know when you missed them. I shot rolls of film, and it just wasn't happening. She's a beautiful woman, but there wasn't anything that I would put on a poster. I just didn't feel it. By now we're running out of backgrounds — we used the swimming pool, etc. I said, "Farrah, are you sure you don't have a bikini? Something different?"