The Dark Truth Behind Burt Reynolds and Sally Field's Legendary Romance
In 2015, Burt Reynolds told Vanity Fair that Sally Field was “the love of my life,” sparking a whole new generation of interest in their late 1970s love story.
The actress offered no comment at the time, but after Burt’s death on September 6, 2018 at 82, she opened up about their relationship in her memoir, revealing that it wasn’t exactly the fairytale romance the public believed it to be.
Burt and Sally met in 1977 on the set of the hit movie Smokey and the Bandit, and dated for nearly five years. In her memoir, In Pieces, released less than two weeks after Burt’s death, Sally described the actor as controlling and distant.
“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,” she wrote. “Blindly I fell into a rut that had long ago formed in my road, a pre-programmed behavior as if in some past I had pledged a soul-binding commitment to this man.”
Although Sally said her relationship with Burt was “really complicated and hurtful” to her, she acknowledged that it was also “not without loving and caring.”
She said she was initially drawn to Burt’s swagger and charisma and described their connection as immediate and intense.
“We had known each other about three days, four days at that point [during the filming of Smokey and the Bandit]. It was instantaneous, and four days felt like four years,” Sally, 73, said in a Good Morning America interview.
“You can see it in our faces. We were sort of, you know, deeply entangled,” she told Diane Sawyer. “That nature of it wasn’t just, ‘Oh, this is a love affair.’ There was some ingredient between us having to do with my care-taking and him needing to be taken care of.”
Sally told Closer Weekly that Burt also made her feel desirable and “gave me a feeling that I was sexy, and I wanted to be everything he ever wanted.”
But Sally said that dynamic ultimately took a terrible toll on her sense of self.
“What happened is that I stopped existing. I dressed for him, looked for him, walked for him. He asked me to marry him many times, [but] I knew his heart wasn’t in it,” she said. “We’d have ended up just feeling terrible."
In Burt’s final years, he seemed to have deep regrets about how he behaved toward Sally. “I miss her terribly,” he told Vanity Fair in 2015. “Even now, it’s hard on me. I don’t know why I was so stupid. Men are like that, you know. You find the perfect person, and then you do everything you can to screw it up.”
He echoed those sentiments in 2016 to The Daily Mail, saying, "I did four movies with Sally and spent five years with her. She was the love of my life and I screwed the relationship up. That sense of loss never goes away. I have no idea what Sally thinks about it. She could pick up the phone and speak to me but she never does. I spoke to her son recently. He said that his mom talks about me all the time. Maybe she’ll phone me one day. I’d love to have that conversation."
After Burt’s death, Sally told The New York Times that she was “flooded with feelings and nostalgia” about him.
She added that she was relieved that Burt wasn’t around to read her book. “This would hurt him,” she said. “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.”
You Might Also Like
