Hidden agony of America’s sweetheart
Abused by her film star stepfather. A secret abortion at 17. And how her famous lover Burt Reynolds was a drug-taking bully. A bombshell memoir by Sally Field reveals the...
With her big brown eyes, button nose and endearingly sad smile, Sally Field carved out a glittering career as America’s sweetheart — the future double- Oscar winner who found fame as a squeaky- clean teenage tV star.
it has taken more than 50 years for Field, the love of Burt Reynolds’s life no less, to finally reveal that her early years were actually blighted by appalling darkness.
her stepfather, Jock Mahoney, hollywood’s top stuntman and the star of Westerns and two tarzan films, sexually abused her for years when she was a child.
‘it would have been so much easier if i’d only felt one thing, if Jock Mahoney had been nothing but cruel and frightening,’ she recalls. ‘But he wasn’t. he could be magical, the Pied Piper, with our family as his entranced followers.’ the abuse stopped after Field turned 14. She recounts in an astonishing new autobiography, in Pieces, how Mahoney would call his petite, pretty stepdaughter to come alone to his bedroom.
‘i knew,’ she writes. ‘i felt both a child, helpless, and not a child. Powerful. this was power. And i owned it. But i wanted to be a child — and yet.’
if that didn’t already paint a disturbingly complicated picture of her mixed emotions, she also reveals that in her celebrated love affair with Burt Reynolds, she was trying to recreate a version of her twisted relationship with her stepfather.
‘i was exorcising something that needed to be exorcised,’ she told the New York times. ‘i was trying to make it work this time.’
Reynolds died only last week and Field says she is glad he was spared her revelations, apparently including drug-fuelled sex and undergoing a secret abortion in Mexico when she was only 17.
the sex symbol superstar actor probably wouldn’t have been overjoyed to learn that the woman he adored equated their relationship with the one she had had with a paedophile stepfather, either.
FieldIELD also reveals the extent of what she says was Reynolds’s drug-taking while they were making the 1977 action comedy Smokey And the Bandit together, and that — despite his easy-going reputation — he was controlling and emotionally abusive. She describes their five years together as ‘ really complicated and hurtful’.
the petite, smiley actress — now 71 — rose to fame as the chirpy star of two sitcoms, the Flying Nun and Gidget, and went on to win two Oscars for Norma Rae and Places in the heart, in which she played tough but caring women.
Field, who has described herself as shy to the point of being hermitlike, says it took years to overcome her natural reticence and her internalising of her abuse.
‘Something was growing in me, this urgency that felt gangrenous, and i couldn’t locate it,’ she says in an interview to promote her book. ‘i could hardly breathe and i couldn’t settle down.’
She is a champion of women’s rights but only told her mother, the actress Margaret Field, what Jock Mahoney had done to her shortly before her death in 2011.
Field’s father, Richard Field, was an army captain but he and Margaret divorced in 1950 when Field was four. Margaret married Mahoney a year later.
‘Jocko’ was hollywood’s most successful stuntman (doubling for errol Flynn, Gregory Peck and John Wayne) before the industry saw his acting potential. he starred in two Western tV series and played tarzan in two films.
the 1978 film about stuntmen, hooper, in which Field starred with Burt Reynolds, was largely based on Mahoney’s career.
Margaret Field divorced Jocko — with whom she had a daughter, Princess — in 1968. he died in 1989. Field doesn’t reveal why Mahoney stopped abusing her when she reached 14, but in previous interviews she has indicated this was about the time when she started having screaming matches with him.
A decade ago she told Oprah Winfrey that Mahoney was so volatile he once hurled her across their garden. She never mentioned sexual abuse and insisted physical violence was rare. ‘he was really big and handsome — i was both terrified of him and madly in love with him,’ she said.
‘Unfortunately, that stayed with me as i grew up: i was attracted only to men i simultaneously feared and loved. My stepfather was both cruel and loving, and therefore our relationship was very confusing. i felt i was in danger all the time.’
the emotional abuse was worse, she added. ‘When i was 14 or 15, i would literally stand on the coffee table to look this 6 ft 5 in man in the face and scream at him. during my adolescence, that was the only communication that could go on between us.’
Field also confided to Oprah that Mahoney and Burt Reynolds were ‘similar . . . in so many ways’.
the actress has raised three sons through two marriages (first to her high school sweetheart Steven Craig and then to film producer Alan Greisman) that both ended in divorce.
She might have had more children, she now reveals, if she hadn’t gone to the Mexican border city of tijuana at 17 to have a secret abortion (it was then illegal in the U.S.). She recalls ‘how terrified i was and how i might have died’. Just weeks later, she took over the role of Gidget, a sweet — and virginal — teenage surfer girl.
Field says the termination was the culmination of a sexual awakening in her late teens in which she felt she was ‘breaking out of my own brain’.
her problems with men were by no means over with her stepfather gone. She recounts a disturbing incident when she was 21 with the singer- songwriter Jimmy Webb. After they shared a cannabis joint, she woke up to find Webb ‘on top of me, grinding away’. She told the New York times she didn’t believe Webb had acted with ‘malicious intent — i felt he was stoned out of his mind’. Webb, whose songs include the Glen Campbell hits Wichita lineman and Galveston, complained that his lawyer had requested unsuccessfully to read the passage in Field’s forthcoming book. ‘All i can do is recount my memories of dating Sally in the Swingin’ Sixties,’ he said. ‘Sally and i were young, successful stars in hollywood. We did what 22-year- olds did in the late Sixties — we hung out, we smoked pot, we had sex.’
HE SAid he had ‘great memories of our times together and great respect for Sally’, so much so that he had never himself revealed ‘our stories of drugs and sex’ so as not to ‘tarnish’ her wholesome image.
Field also provides another story that will fire up the # Metoo movement, recounting how Bob Rafelson, director of the 1976 comedy drama Stay hungry, made a sleazy demand before giving her a starring role.
At the end of her audition, he told her he couldn’t hire anyone ‘who doesn’t kiss good enough’, she says. ‘So i kissed him. it must have been good enough.’
As a single mother at the time, she says she had to do whatever she could to support her family.
Rafelson says her accusation is ‘totally untrue’.
Field didn’t need any inducement to kiss Burt Reynolds. The rugged sex symbol wanted her to star alongside him in Smokey And The Bandit, over- ruling producers’ objections that she wasn’t ‘sexy’. They went on to have a five- year relationship, of which the final two years were ‘on-andoff’, says Field.
Reynolds, whose conquests included Faye Dunaway and Farrah Fawcett, described Field as ‘the love of my life’, and the failure of their affair — which he admitted was his fault — as ‘the biggest regret of my life’.
Although Field concedes she was ‘flooded with feelings and nostalgia’ about him when he died last week at 82, she makes clear she doesn’t share his sunny memories.
She described their relationship this week to a radio station as a ‘perfect match of flaws’. Field says she felt her immediate, intense connection to the charismatic, strutting Reynolds was rooted in his similarity to her overbearing stepfather.
Reynolds had been a ‘preformed rut in my road — and I couldn’t see it coming and I didn’t know how to get out’, she says.
Because of her abusive relationship with Jock Mahoney, ‘in my mind, to be seen, to be loved, I also had to be terrified and I couldn’t ever say what I was really feeling’.
Reynolds admitted he fought a long battle against drugs. Field recalls how the actor was using a variety of strong, potentially addictive opioid painkillers while making Smokey, and sometimes received mysterious injections to his chest.
When she used to have therapy for stress and anxiety, he dismissed it as ‘self-delusional poppycock’. She says she became ‘invisible’ with Reynolds, who even insisted she should not attend the 1977 Emmy Awards — where she won a Lead Actress award for her role as a mentally-ill teacher in the TV drama Sybil.
Instead of speaking up for herself and demanding she attend a ceremony for a role she considered her finest, she watched it alone on TV with the sound turned down so as not to offend her lover.
Field, it seems, who liked to claim that she was just an ‘ old- fashioned girl’, has finally come clean about the old-fashioned ugliness of Hollywood.