PEOPLE Celebrate the 70's: 1976 Edition

By The Editors of PEOPLE

Rocky! Farrah! Carrie! Sonny! Cher!

Get out your disco shoes, feather your hair, and tie up your wrap dress: 40 years after the debut of ""Charlie's Angels,"" Rocky Balboa, and film's bloodiest prom queen, People celebrates America's bicentennial year with a special issue jam-packed with photos and throwback fun. Happy 40th to Stevie Wonder's masterpiece, ""Songs in the Key of Life,"" to goofy variety shows from Donny & Marie to the singing Brady Bunch, to Blondie, Taxi Driver, ""The Bionic Woman,"" and to that Saturday morning cartoon classic, ""I'm Just a Bill.""

Exclusive interviews, including Jaclyn Smith on the making of Charlie's Angels. Memories from rocker Peter Frampton, Olympic gold medalist Dorothy Hamill, best-selling Interview with the Vampire author Anne Rice and more. The headlines, fashions, trends and inventions (hello, first Apple computer!) that make 1976 a year to remember. Just ask Charo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: People
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781683304760

Book preview

1976: NEVER A DULL MOMENT

LIZA MINNELLI The Cabaret star was promoting Lucky Lady and in Rome filming with her director father, Vincent.

The war in Vietnam had ended. Watergate was behind us. Could America be blamed for just wanting to celebrate a big birthday and relax in front of a corny TV variety show? But the relative calm that swept in with 1976 concerned at least one devoted People reader who, as the time neared for the annual Most Intriguing People issue, wrote editors to say: Good luck in picking . . . with this dull year, you’ll need it.

Dull? There were two Olympic Games, a fiercely fought presidential election and the bank robbery trial of heiress hostage Patty Hearst. Dull? Moviegoers could choose between a sweaty, triumphant Rocky and the sweet transvestite of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, at midnight. Stevie, Elton and Diana towered in music, even as American punk took off with the Ramones, and disco took over the radio. Not that rock was dead: Peter Frampton had the top-selling LP. Then there was the tube. With fewer networks (and the VCR only just arriving), we watched together. Still devoted to the Fonz and Meathead, we also fell for Charlie’s Angels. (They don’t smoke, hardly drink and won’t do nude scenes. God bless America, cheered another People reader.)

The events and personalities of ’76 still resonate today. If you use an iPhone, thank two guys who launched Apple in a garage 40 years ago. If you know how a bill becomes a law, it’s likely you learned it from a singing bit of legislation in a 1976 cartoon. Wrap dresses? Totally wearable now. Sylvester Stallone? Won a 2016 Golden Globe for playing Rocky in Creed. Rocky Horror? Remade. An election, the Olympics—familiar, yes. Dull? Never.

LEE MAJORS/FARRAH FAWCETT At home with the Six Million Dollar Man and his wife.

DIANA ROSS The Mahogany star had a great husband, three kids and a hit flick.

PENNY MARSHALL/ROB REINER Laverne and the All in the Family star: love and a ratings war.

WOODY ALLEN The filmmaker was editing Annie Hall and writing a comic strip.

HENRY WINKLER His Fonz was tops on TV; if only the brainy Yalie could enjoy it.

JIMMY & AMY CARTER All about the future President from Plains, Ga.

PAUL LYNDE He was TV’s most successful nonseries comic, but the game-show regular felt trapped in Hollywood Squares.

MARY TYLER MOORE The Bolshoi’s bicentennial brought ballet fan MTM to Moscow.

LOUISE LASSER Woody Allen’s ex-wife starred in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

STAR TRACKS

DO THE HUSTLE! Two years after defecting from the USSR, ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov—here with Judith Jamison of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater—offered some disco moves while announcing the premiere of their collaboration.

BACK ON BROADWAY After rapturous reviews in London, Shirley MacLaine brought her one-woman show to New York’s Palace Theater, where she combined dance, monologues, comedy and song—including Sweet Charity’s Big Spender.

SHE’S SO HIP! At the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Mo., Betty Ford, who studied dance with Martha Graham, joined enter­tainer Tony Orlando onstage and did the Bump.

NEW TITLE FOR THE DIVINE MISS M Hot on the heels of her LP Songs for the New Depression, Bette Midler went to Cambridge, Mass., where Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club named her Woman of the Year.

OUT FOR THE WIN The night he took home his first Oscar (for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Jack Nicholson celebrated with Anjelica Huston and his daughter Jennifer, 12 (with former wife Sandra Knight). He and Huston dated until what she called a painful breakup in 1990. She later recalled him in People as interesting, amusing, handsome, elusive.

GOLDIE’S GUY Just off playing Warren Beatty’s bubbly gal in 1975’s Shampoo, Goldie Hawn wed Bill Hudson (with Hawn) of CBS’s The Hudson Brothers Show. Son Oliver arrived soon after, and then daughter Kate, before the pair split in 1980.

BEFORE BRANGELINA Jon Voight, of Midnight Cowboy fame, attended an L.A. film festival with his then wife, actress Marcheline Bertrand. Parents of son James Haven and daughter Angelina Jolie, they split the same year, reportedly owing to Voight’s infidelity.

NOTE-ABLE COUPLE Carly (You’re So Vain) Simon and James (Fire and Rain) Taylor were four years into their 11-year marriage when they attended a charity gala hosted by the Bee Gees at Gracie