THE PIECES OF SALLY And her defining relationships
THE ACTRESS LIFTS THE LID ON HER HEARTBREAKS
Sally Field – America’s sweetheart, a Flying Nun and a multi-Oscar and Emmy award-winner – is laying her life out bare for the world to see, somewhat terrifyingly.
“Can I just pull this back?” she said of her very recent fears leading up to the book’s release. “Can I change my mind? Can I say, never mind? But I didn’t.”
At the age of 71, Sally has a seemingly endless list of phenomenal roles behind her – Norma Rae, M’Lynn Eatenton in Steel Magnolias and Abraham Lincoln’s mother Mary Todd – but taking up the new skill of writing in her seventies was something she pre-empted as needing to take “many a sore ride in the saddle”.
“It was never a matter of making myself write,” she admits. “It was a matter of being terribly irritated when anything else got in the way.”
Her memoir, In Pieces, has taken her six years to write and delves into heartbreaking aspects of her life that many may know of, such as the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather Jock Mahoney up until the age of 14 and her revelation of getting a secret abortion in Mexico at age 17.
She’s been married twice and has three sons between the two marriages, but one of her most defining Hollywood love affairs was with none other than the late Burt Reynolds.
Depicted by media at the time as a happy relationship, Sally does go into detail, and reveals the romance in hindsight was anything but. Instead, she tells honestly that it was “confusing and complicated, and not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful to me”.
The relationship, she writes, was dealt blows by Burt’s frequent and heavy drug use, and believes happened as a result of the past abuse she experienced. But with Burt’s death occurring in the days before the book’s release, Sally said she was glad he wouldn’t get to see it.
“This would hurt him,” she says. “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 or lash out, which he probably would have. I did not want to hurt him any further.”
Many of Sally’s stories paint a picture of a woman’s rise in Hollywood, navigating the demands of powerful men that ran the show, and in this #MeToo age, she is aware that she is adding her account to the many already on record. “People should tell whatever story they want to tell,” she says. “This is just my story and it happened the way it happened.”