Background
Fahey was born in Carmel, Maine, near Bangor in 1933, but grew up in Southwest Harbor near Bar Harbor, Maine, where she was a cheerleader at Pemetic High School.
Fahey was born in Carmel, Maine, near Bangor in 1933, but grew up in Southwest Harbor near Bar Harbor, Maine, where she was a cheerleader at Pemetic High School.
She appeared in episodes of 37 television series from the 1950s into the 1970s, including Bonanza, Wagon Train, Straightaway, The Time Tunnel, Maverick, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, The Adventures of Superman, Kraft Suspense Theatre,Daniel Boone ( television series )and Batman. She began competing in local beauty pageants in the early 1950s. She acted one season at the Pasadena Playhouse before breaking into television, and became an avid skier in California.
She invested in stocks and one of her contracts stipulated that she have a stock ticker in her dressing room.
Besides Joe DiMaggio, she also dated George Hamilton. She died on May 6, 1973, at age 40 at Saint Johns Hospital, Santa Monica, California, after a long battle with cancer.
She is buried in Mountain. Pleasant Cemetery in Bangor, Maine
Fahey complained in a 1960 interview that she was being typecast in "good girl" roles because of what directors called her "moral overtones", even though she wanted to play darker and more complicated characters.
She had worked in many Westerns in the late 1950s, usually in the role of the sheriff"s daughter, including an appearance on Gunsmoke in 1958 (the episode entitled: Innocent Broad). She also appeared in "Duel at Sundown", a particularly famous episode of Maverick with James Garner, featuring Clint Eastwood as a trigger-happy villain.
She starred in two episodes of Wagon Train: "The Jane Hawkins Story" (1960) and "The Melanie Craig Story" (1964). Her image branched out in the 1960s, helped by House of Usher and a role on the Boris Karloff-hosted television series Thriller that same year entitled "Girl With A Secret".
Even her Western parts became "darker".
After a rough love scene in Bonanza in which she cut her lip, the cast presented her with an award for "Best Slapper in a Filmed Series". Fahey"s most sustained television work was a starring role in the one-season (1961-1962) series, Father of the Bride. The series was based upon a film of the same name starring Elizabeth Taylor.
Fahey was not flattered by the comparison, however, telling one interviewer "the fact that I"m supposed to look like Elizabeth Whats-Her-Name had nothing to do with my getting, because we don"t really look alike I don"t think, we just happen to have the same colorings." Fahey wanted to be released from the show even before it came up for renewal, reportedly feeling too much emphasis was being placed on the "father" character and not enough on her "bride".
Fahey became the subject of death threats while dating Joe DiMaggio in 1964. The Federal Bureau of Investigation determined the threats came from a patient at the Agnews Developmental Center, a mental hospital in San Jose, California.
Apparently the patient could not bear to see DiMaggio with anyone other than Marilyn Monroe, who died in 1962. In 1966, she played Blaze in the Batman episodes, "True or False Face" and "Holy Rat Race".