Sally Field on troubled childhood and romance
ACTRESS Sally Field says she was sexually abused by her stepfather, and believes their relationship shaped her one with Burt Reynolds.
Speaking ahead of the release of her memoir, the Forrest Gump star said Jock Mahoney regularly summoned her to his bedroom when she was a child.
She said her tumultuous relationship with Reynolds, 11 years her senior, was an attempt to recreate a better version of the one she had with her stepdad.
Sally, 71, believed she was “exorcising something that needed to be exorcised” and “trying to make it work this time”.
And in her tell-all book In Pieces, she says of Mahoney, known as Jocko: “It would have been so much easier if I’d only felt one thing, if Jocko had been nothing but cruel and frightening.
“But he wasn’t. He could be magical, the Pied Piper with our family as his entranced followers.”
Her mum Margaret Field married the stuntman and actor in 1952 after divorcing Sally’s dad Richard.
The actress was six at the time. Describing the abuse, she writes: “I felt both a child, helpless, and not a child. But I wanted to be a child – and yet.”
The abuse continued until she turned MEMOIR Sally Field is releasing tell-all 14. Her mum divorced Mahoney in 1968. He died in 1989. Sally did not tell her mother about what had happened until 2011. Margaret told her she would “not be alone any longer in her pain”, according to the actress’s interview with the New York Times.
Sally’s book, out next Tuesday, outlines an award-winning career in which she scooped three Emmys and two Oscars, one for 1979 film Norma Rae.
Her other films include Smokey and the Bandit, Lincoln and Mrs Doubtfire.
But the book also claims Sally suffered abuse at the hands of many of the most important men in her life, including Reynolds, who died of a heart attack aged 82 last Thursday.
The pair began a five-year relationship in 1977. Sally writes that while making the Smokey and the Bandit films, co-star Reynolds used to get strange injections in his chest, and regularly used painkiller Percodan, Valium and barbiturates.
The actor previously described Sally as the “love of my life”, but they did not speak for years after their bitter split amid rumours of him cheating.
Sally writes that their relationship was “confusing and complicated, and not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful to me”.
Reynolds comes across in the book as “swaggering and charismatic” and their connection as “immediate and intense”.
But he is also “controlling of her, STORMY Sally with ex-lover Burt Reynolds only able to accept certain aspects of her life and personality while uninterested in or disapproving of others”.
The actress told the US newspaper that she was “flooded with feelings and nostalgia” after Reynolds’ death and was glad he would never read the book.
She added: “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.”
Another revelation is that the star had a secret abortion in Mexico at 17 during her sexual awakening, which she describes as feeling like “breaking out of my own brain”. It came just a few years before she rose to fame in the 1960s TV series Gidget and The Flying Nun.
Sally also claims that in 1968 she got stoned with singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb, passed out and woke up to find him “on top of me, grinding away to another melody”.
But she said he did not with “malicious intent, I felt he was stoned out of his mind”.
Mr Webb said: “I have great memories of our times together and great respect for Sally – so much that I didn’t write about her in my book because I didn’t want to tarnish her Gidget image with our stories of drugs and sex.”