MY UNTOLD STORY
The veteran actress opens up about her childhood, troubled past and relationships in her new book
Sally Field reveals
She was once portrayed as a boy-crazy teen named Gidget, on a short-lived comedy series of the same name in 1965. Over the decades that followed, Sally Field’s acting career took off and brought her international acclaim. She appeared in several TV series before going on to star in numerous Hollywood blockbusters.
Now, the 71-year-old has published her new memoir, In Pieces, in which she details the events of her life – including explosive claims that she was sexually abused by her late stepfather. Field says, “I knew I had a story to tell and I knew I had to tell it.”
The Steel Magnolias star spoke with WHO in March about her book. “I have this life that no-one really knows … or at least I didn’t even know truly,” Field said. “This is incredibly raw and intimate and personal. [The memoir includes] things I never thought I wanted to say out loud.”
In her memoir, Field candidly reveals that she lived with the deep, haunting secret for most of her life, until coming clean to her mother when she was dying of cancer in 2012. The actress alleges that prior to turning 14, her mother’s second husband, actor Jock Mahoney would call his stepdaughter into his bedroom alone and abuse her. Field’s mother, the late actress Margaret Field married Mahoney in 1952 and stayed with him until their divorce in 1968. He passed away in 1989. According to The New York Times, Field’s memoir reads: “I knew – I felt both a child, helpless, and not a child. Powerful. This was power.”
She writes in her book that she told her mother it wasn’t a single incident with the stepfather she called “Jocko”. “It would have been so much easier if I’d only felt one thing, if Jocko had been nothing but cruel and frightening,” Field confesses. “But he wasn’t. He could be magical, the Pied Piper with our family as his entranced followers.”
The book also recounts two more instances of Field’s sexual abuse in Hollywood, one where the Oscar-winning actress alleges that director Bob Rafelson demanded she kiss him for a role in the 1976 movie Stay Hungry. Rafelson called these allegations “totally untrue.”
Explaining that the book took her seven years to write, Field also focuses on her troubled and oppressed childhood. “There was a very tight parameter you had to live within,” she said in 2016. “How you dressed, how you sat, and who you were.” She says that being able to act gave her an emotive outlet. “When I got on stage, it was the only time I felt that all the pieces could come together,” Field added. “It wasn’t that I was being somebody else, it was that I’m finally me.”
The actress also addressed her on-and-off relationship with Burt Reynolds, who passed away aged 82 on Sept. 6. Reynolds spoke of his adoration for Field in 2015, in an interview with Vanity Fair. The Smokey and the Bandit star said she was the “love of my life. Even now, it’s hard on me. I don’t know why I was so stupid.”
He then went on to tell WHO that, “It was real. She’s very, very special. Her mother and I … I loved her mother.” He then added that Field’s mum had told him that she knew he would break her daughter’s heart but to “please be gentle”. Reynolds replied, “I said, ‘I don’t know how you could break somebody’s heart and be gentle, but I don’t intend to break her heart.’ You never intend to.”
After hearing the news of Reynolds’ death, Field wrote a statement to WHO: “My years with Burt never leave my mind. He will be in my history and my heart for as long as I live.”
Now, in an interview with The New York Times, Field has confessed, “[My book] would hurt him. I felt glad that he wasn’t going to read it, he wasn’t going to be asked about it, and he wasn’t going to have to defend himself.”
She described her five-year-long relationship with Reynolds to the publication as “confusing and complicated, and not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful to me.”
“I felt glad he wasn’t going to read it”