Sally Field Is Glad Burt Reynolds Didn’t Get the Chance to Read Her Memoir
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Kenzie Bryant Richard Lawson Katie Herchenroeder Clive Irving Yohana Desta Tina Nguyen Sally Bedell Smith Eric Lutz Condé Nast
“I did not want to hurt him any further.”
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Vanity Fair
To the public, Sally Field is Gidget and the Flying Nun. She’s union organizer Norma Rae. She’s the occasionally single, usually exasperated mother in Steel Magnolias, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Forrest Gump. She famously proclaimed, “I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!” while accepting an Oscar for Places in the Heart. Field has remained a relatively wholesome and wholly American star, but in a new interview with The New York Times, she spoke about her new memoir, In Pieces—and the stories in it that will complicate that first descriptor, stories that are heartbreakingly in line with what it has meant to be a woman, and particularly one in Hollywood.

As the Times reveals, Field writes extensively about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather, which continued until she turned 14. (She first spoke publicly about it in 2012.) Her mother married Jock Mahoney, a stuntman and actor who went by Jocko, in 1952 when Field was about five. As she writes in her memoir, “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.” (Mahoney died in 1989, and divorced her mother almost two decades prior.) She writes about an abortion in Tijuana at 17, and about compromising situations she found herself in with certain men in the industry (with some denying the stories she tells).

Field later dated the late Burt Reynolds, who starred with her in Smokey and the Bandit, and who died just last week. Field told the Times that she saw her romance with Reynolds as a means of re-creating her relationship with Mahoney. “I was somehow exorcising something that needed to be exorcised,” she said. “I was trying to make it work this time.”

She writes about Reynolds’s prescription drug use and his controlling nature, and said that one salve to his death is that he won’t get the opportunity to read the 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.”

In Pieces will be released on September 18, and is now available for pre-order.

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