Field: ‘I worried this book would have hurt Burt’
When Sally Field met Burt Reynolds in 1976 while filming “Smokey and the Bandit,” she was surprised when the handsome actor asked her out on a date.
“He said he hadn’t seen ‘Stay Hungry’ but always liked me in ‘Gidget,’ ” Field wrote in her journal at the time, which is reprinted in her new memoir, “In Pieces.” “And that’s why he wants me to sit opposite him in a car for five weeks?”
Field, then grappling with a looming divorce and two small children, had just filmed the miniseries “Sybil,” about a teenager with multiple-personality disorder. Field was 29, three years away from winning her first Academy Award for “Norma Rae,” but had acted on TV (“Gidget,” “The Flying Nun”) since the 1960s. Reynolds’ bodyguard picked Field up in Atlanta, where “Smokey and the Bandit” was shooting, and dropped her off at the actor’s hotel. “He sauntered over, grabbed me,” Field wrote in her journal. “He must have felt my heart. I could no longer be responsible for it.”
Field, who will discuss “In Pieces” during “An Evening With Sally Field” on Monday, Oct. 22, at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, writes that her attraction to Reynolds was “instantaneous and intense.” But with Reynolds, who died Sept. 6 in Jupiter at age 82, the fouryear relationship became toxic, Field admits in a phone interview this week. When Field later won an Emmy for “Sybil,” she wasn’t at the ceremony to accept the award. She was home, watching with the sound turned down so it wouldn’t disturb Reynolds’ sleeping in the next room. “Go if you want,” he’d told her. “But be prepared to lose again.”
It’s one of many Burt Reyn- Ryan Heavyside of Boynton Beach, left, and Tom Warnke, trustee of the Palm Beach County surfing history project, look at surfboards on display at the Delray Beach Historical Society, which serves as the temporary home of surf history project.
olds anecdotes she now regrets publishing, Field says, but “In Pieces” is full of intimate confessions. She devotes much of her 400-page book to her childhood, including childhood sexual abuse from her stepfather, actor Jock Mahoney and her early acting career through 1980. In the Q and A below, Field recalls her relationship with Reynolds, her mother and why “In Pieces” took seven years to write.
You’ve just started your book tour. Considering
the personal subject matter, such as your stepfather’s sexual abuse, have you been feeling any anxiety?
I haven’t really felt anxious, and I don’t know why. Sometimes, I wonder to myself if I haven’t registered what’s happening. It feels comfortable that I’m talking to one moderator onstage [South Florida writer Ana Veciana-Suarez] about my whole life. The good news is I come in without any expectations and go with the flow of what I’m feeling from the crowd and moderator.
You spent seven years writing “In Pieces,” after
a crucial conversation you had with your mom right before her death [in 2011]. What motivated you?
When she passed, it created this urgency in me to write it and find the missing pieces I needed. Why was I not at peace yet? Why wasn’t I grieving? I couldn’t see it. But I realized that so much of my life was in boxes and cartons that I’d dragged around with me and never examined. It felt to me if I was really willing to go all in and write it down, I would be able to move on in my life, and find out what was left for me after age 65.