Once upon a time, there were three little girls who went to the police academy...and forged a lifelong friendship. Though Farrah Fawcett's job at the Charles Townsend Detective Agency as sunny P.I. Jill Munroe ended after only one season, her Charlie's Angels co-stars, Jaclyn Smith (Kelly Garrett) and Kate Jackson (Sabrina Duncan), never left her side. After Fawcett was diagnosed with cancer three years ago, the trio reunited more frequently—the last time was in February at a party in a Los Angeles home where ten people gathered to celebrate Fawcett’s birthday. The day Fawcett died, Smith and Jackson shared a good long cry over the phone. Through their tears, they reminisced about their thirty-three year love affair with an angel.

Beginnings
“It was a year or two before Charlie’s Angels when we were doing a Max Factor commercial,” Smith recalls of her first meeting with Fawcett. “It was winter and we were jumping into a freezing swimming pool. They’d send us back to a sauna to warm up... She was not like a typical actress. We had a shared history of Texas and love of parents.” It was Jackson's very first celebrity party when she spied “the most stunningly gorgeous women I'd ever seen in my life” standing next to then-husband Lee Majors. “She rather enjoyed not letting people know how smart she was,” Jackson says. “Nobody really likes a very smart woman in Hollywood, and she was smart enough to know that [playing dumb] gave her a little bit more edge.” Smith was particularly fond of the “soft little girl quality” in Fawcett’s voice. “Just the way she said ‘Charlie’ was different.”

Chained at the Hip
Like many fans, the actresses' favorite episode of Charlie’s Angels was ‘Angels in Chains,’ which found Charlie sending his nymphs into a women’s prison where they were strip-searched and sprayed down before escaping into the wild as a mini-chain gang. “We stayed chained all day—talking and giggling, even when one of us had to use the bathroom,” Jackson says of the 1976 episode. “We didn't have to worry about hair and makeup for that show, so we had time to just sit out in the sun.” Adds Smith, “Farrah and I have very curly hair, so when we were sprayed down, we said, ‘Oh good, we don't have to straighten it out.’”

Bye Bye Jill
When Fawcett's fame eclipsed that of her husband Lee Majors, who starred in the Six Million Dollar Man, he asked her to leave Charlie’s Angels. And she did. “They were adorable together,” Smith says. “Lee had his perfect wife—a gourmet cook and a homemaker, and all of a sudden she was working 18 hours a day. He was used to her being home. I think Farrah really wanted what her parents had. I wanted her to stay because we were best friends, but what do you say?” Jackson was most stung by Fawcett's abrupt exit after the 1977 season. “I just hated it—I was devastated,” she says. A lawsuit filed on behalf of Aaron Spelling Productions required Fawcett to make a series of six total guest appearances during Seasons 3 and 4. To welcome her back for her first return visit, Jackson had two dozen long-stemmed red roses waiting in her trailer: “I knew it was going to be a little embarrassing for her. And when the episode was over, I went into my trailer and there was a chilled bottle of Cristal Champagne with a note saying, ‘Now that I'm not here, you're going to need this.’” The three angels remained close. Jackson attended Fawcett's art exhibits and flew to New York City to see her perform in the off-Broadway play Extremities. “We really liked each other and had something outside of the show,” Smith says. “When I got pregnant with my son Gaston, both of the girls were there for my baby shower and Farrah came to the hospital when he was born.”

Failed Reunions
Numerous attempts were made throughout the years to reunite the angels on screen. Drew Barrymore desperately wanted Fawcett to appear in her big-screen "Charlie’s Angels" remakes in 2000 and 2003, but only Smith came aboard. “Bringing us all together was always a drama,” Smith says. Before the release of the second movie, all three women signed letters of intent to appear in a TV reunion special and movie. “But they wanted us to do something that was so embarrassing,” says Jackson, who fled with Fawcett from a business meeting into a bathroom. Then in 2006, Henry Winkler tried to produce a reunion, but that also fell apart. “Now I feel regret—why didn't we do it?” Smith says. “We'd have that forever.”

Emmy Night
After the 2006 death of their Charlie’s Angels boss, Aaron Spelling, all three women reunited on stage for a surprise tribute at the Emmys. “The audience was on its feet—screaming and beating their hands together and they didn't stop,” Jackson says. “We wanted to give the audience all over the world a little present—to see what they had wanted for so long.” But disagreements continued backstage until just before the curtain rose. “It was not easy," acknowledges Smith. “But once we got it together on how we were going to do it, it was really fun and a memory we will all cherish forever. I know Farrah had fun. It was important we did it.” All three hoped their warm reception would finally lead to that long-anticipated grander scale reunion, “but barely two weeks after that,” Jackson says, “Farrah was diagnosed.”

The Angels Part
“My last time with Farrah was right before she left for her last trip to Germany (for experimental treatment),” Smith says. “I took her to acupuncture... You never would have known she was sick that night if you didn’t know one leg was four times the size of the other. We were laughing like true girlfriends.” Driving Fawcett to one of her cancer treatments, Jackson fondly recalls their good-natured bickering. “She made me so darned nervous—telling me to turn left,” Jackson says. “Farrah said, ‘Get in the left lane—no not for another two blocks!’ Someone honked their horn because they almost hit us and Farrah started laughing. She said, ‘See—this should be an episode.’ I believe she was looking back on that wonderful glorious year when we were three little cocoons who turned into butterflies and she was the most beautiful, gorgeous, sexy, funny, wonderful well-known woman in the world."

For more with the Angels, pick up our special tribute issue, on stands Thursday, July 2.