Sally Field is glad Burt Reynolds didn't get a chance to read his memoir
To the public, Sally Field is Gidget and the Flying Nun. This is union organizer Norma Rae. She is the occasionally single, usually exasperated mother in Steel Magnolias, Lady. Doubtfire, and Forrest Gump. She famously proclaimed: I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me! as she accepted an Oscar for Places in the Heart. Field has remained a relatively healthy, all-American star, but in a new interview with The New York Times, she opened up 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 abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather, which she 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 the name Jocko. , in 1952 when Field was about five years old. As she writes in her memoir, it would have been much easier if she had only felt one thing, if Jocko had been nothing but cruel and terrifying. But it was not like that. He could be magical, the Pied Piper with our family as the enchanted followers of him. (Mahoney died in 1989 and divorced his mother nearly two decades earlier.) She writes about an abortion in Tijuana at 17 and about compromising situations she encountered with certain men in the industry.
Field later dated the late Burt Reynolds, who starred with her in Smokey and the Bandit, and who died last week. Field told the Times that she saw her romance with Reynolds as a means of recreating her relationship with Mahoney. She was somehow she was exorcising something that needed to be exorcised, she said. She was trying to make it work this time.
She writes about Reynolds' prescription drug use and his controlling nature, saying that a balm for the death of him is that she won't get a chance to read the book. This would hurt him, she said. I was glad that he wouldn't read it, that he wasn't going to be asked about it, and that he wouldn't have to defend himself or lash out, which he probably would have. He didn't want to hurt her anymore.
