Jealous Burt belittled me and pinched my face, says Sally Field
SALLY Field has claimed Burt t Reynolds was controlling and d jealous during their stormy y five-year affair.
In a memoir, the actress says the e Hollywood heart-throb was manipulative – and even implies he was physically violent towards her.
Reynolds died on September 6 aged d 82 from a heart attack. Oscar-winner r Miss Field, 71, has said she is glad he is s not alive to read her book, In Pieces.
She writes that from the first time they met in 1976 Reynolds began to ‘housebreak’ her, telling her ‘what was s allowed and what was not’.
He belittled her acting career and was so jealous whenever they saw a man she knew he would pinch her face, demanding to know who he was.
She even suggests he was physically abusive, saying that as she tried to assert herself ‘he tightened his grip, sometimes literally’. She does not elaborate.
The disturbing effect was that she ‘eliminated most of me, becoming a familiar, shadowy version of myself, locked behind my eyes, unable to speak’.
The actress says her relationship with Reynolds, with whom she co-starred in 1977’s Smokey And The Bandit, was a replay of that with her stepfather, who sexually abused her from the age of around six to 14.
Miss Field describes how being with Reynolds was ‘ exorcising something that needed to be exorcised’ and ‘trying to make it work this time’.
From the beginning Reynolds was presumptuous and arrogant, introducing himself as ‘Burt Reynolds, movie star’ on the phone to her in 1976 when he was the biggest star in the world thanks to films such as Deliverance.
Miss Field writes: ‘By the time we met the weight of his stardom had become a way for Burt to control everyone around him, and from the moment I walked through the door, it was a way to control me. We were a perfect match of flaws.’ Their affair was ‘instantaneous and intense’, she writes, adding: ‘Blindly I fell into a rut that had long ago formed in my road, a pre-programmed behaviour as if in some past I had pledged a soul- binding commitment to this man.’
On their second date, dinner in his hotel suite, Reynolds told her about his life but when she tried to tell him about hers she got ‘not-so-subtle hints that he didn’t want to know’.
Miss Field learned not to talk about ex-lovers and later became ‘terrified’ of running into any man she knew, regardless of whether or not she had been in a relation- ship with him. ‘Burt would pinch my face in his hand, demanding I tell him who the guy was and what kind of relationship I’d had with him,’ she writes.
Another shock for Miss Field early on was Reynolds’ health. She writes how he would sometimes have odd ‘attacks’ where he would bend from the waist, push his fingers into his rib cage and belch while gasping for air.
During the filming of Smokey And The Bandit his ‘mysterious and painful’ health episodes escalated and a doctor would appear and give Reynolds an injection of ‘God knows what’ directly into his chest.
Reynolds also routinely used Valium and the painkiller Percodan to get through the day.
As the months went by Reynolds became ‘louder, shorttempered and impatient, constantly snapping as if I’d piddled on the floor’, she writes.
She was paying for everything from her own pocket but when she asked Reynolds for money he refused, saying: ‘My business manager gives me only $1,000 a week. If I give you $200 that’ll leave me with almost nothing.’
When reports of Reynolds’ cheating emerged, Miss Field’s grandmother made sure she knew about it, calling her to tell her what was in the national enquirer that week, including describing the photos.
Miss Field tried to brush it off but secretly ‘knew it was all true’. She ‘felt duped and a fool’ – but stayed with Reynolds.
When she called him to say she was going to the Cannes Film Festival he ‘asked in a huff what the hell I intended to do there’.
When she couldn’t be ‘bullied’ out of going, he said: ‘You don’t expect to win anything, do you?’ and slammed the phone down.
At Cannes she won the Palme d’Or for best actress in norma Rae, going on to win the best actress Oscar that year.
After Reynolds died Miss Field told the new York Times she was ‘flooded with feelings and nostalgia’ and was glad he would never read the book.
She said: ‘This 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 or lash out, which he probably would have. I did not want to hurt him any further’.