Sally Field Finally Reveals Her Long Kept Secret About Burt Reynolds
Sally Field Finally Reveals Her Long Kept Secret About Burt Reynolds
I was actually the time I did that the first time that you just saw. I went I went back there and went, “What have I done? What What came over me? Who am I?” >> Burt Reynolds called her the love of his life. He said it again and again for almost 30 years. But Sally Field never answered him the way people expected.
She stayed distant. She stayed silent. And for a long time, nobody understood why. Then she finally revealed something she had buried since childhood. Something that explained the whole relationship in a way no one saw coming. It wasn’t the romance the cameras showed. It was something far more personal and far more painful.
What was she really protecting all those years? The answer is not what anyone imagined. The woman nobody took seriously. To understand what Burt Reynolds meant to Sally Field in 1976, you first have to see what Hollywood had already done to her. She became famous very young, but the fame came in a form that worked against her.
First, she was Gidget in 1965, the bright teenage surfer girl. Then she became Sister Bertrille in The Flying Nun from 1967 to 1970. A young nun whose oversized cornette let her fly. Both shows were successful. Even so, the success came with a cost. In the minds of casting directors, those roles turned Sally Field into a joke.
She became the silly sitcom girl. She became the actress no one took seriously. For years, she was pushed aside. That rejection cut deep. It was strong enough to make her question whether she even had a future in the business. She was still working, still trying, still hoping. Yet the industry had already stamped her with a label she could not escape.
She was still in her 20s, but to Hollywood, she already felt finished. She had been a star at 18, and now she could not even get a meeting for the kind of role she wanted. That was the state she was in when the phone finally rang. Then came Sybil in 1976. She played a woman living with dissociative identity disorder, a character split into 16 personalities.
The performance was raw, fearless, and impossible to ignore. It changed everything. She won an Emmy, and suddenly the people who had once dismissed her started paying attention. Directors called. Famous actors called. Big names who had never bothered to call her back were now reaching out. One of them was Burt Reynolds.
That detail matters because Sally Field did not meet him from a place of safety or certainty. She was not standing there as someone fully secure in her position. She had just fought her way out of a long stretch of professional silence. She needed reassurance. She needed proof that this new respect was real and would last.
She was still afraid it could all disappear. Then into that fear stepped the most desired man in movies, offering attention, excitement, and approval. The imbalance existed before the relationship even began. In her memoir, Field later explained what Reynolds represented at that point, not just to her, but to the whole culture around them.
He was the fantasy. He was the man people wanted to be near, wanted to be like, wanted to dream about. In 1976, he was close to being the biggest movie star in the world. He had come off Deliverance and a run of major hits. He carried that easy grin, that swagger, that version of American masculinity people instantly recognized. And now, he wanted her.
They met on the set of Smokey and the Bandit in 1977, and the attraction hit fast. Later, speaking to Diane Sawyer, Field said they had only known each other for three or four days, yet it already felt like four years. She said you could see it in their faces on screen. They were already deeply tangled up in each other.
The film became a phenomenon, and that says everything about Reynolds at that moment. Smokey and the Bandit was a playful car chase comedy about a bootlegger hauling Coors beer across state lines. It cost about $4 million to make, and became one of the highest-grossing films of 1977. At the American box office, only Star Wars made more that year.
For a time, Reynolds was the most bankable star in the world. A big part of the film’s success came from the chemistry between him and Field. Audiences loved them together. They saw charm, heat, and fun. What they could not see was the deeper pattern already taking shape beneath the sparkle. Because even in the beginning, Field sensed the thing that would define the relationship and eventually destroy it.
Years later, she said it was never just a simple love affair. There was something else inside it, something tied to her caretaking and his need to be taken care of. She was 30. He was 40. He was the biggest star alive. Yet from the start, the relationship was never built on equal ground. She slipped into the role of caretaker, and he settled into the role of the powerful man who needed constant emotional tending.
Much later, Sally Field came to understand why that role felt so familiar. She had been prepared for it since childhood. The training. This part changes the meaning of everything that came before it. >> >> And it needs to be faced with care because Sally Field herself said this was the truth that helped her finally understand her own life.
In her 2018 memoir In Pieces, Field revealed for the first time that she had been sexually and emotionally abused as a child by her stepfather, the actor and stuntman Jock Mahoney, known as Jocko. She wrote that the abuse continued through her adolescence, that he would call her into his bedroom, and that it stopped after she turned 14.
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Her mother divorced Mahoney in 1968. He died in 1989. What made the abuse so damaging, she explained, was that it did not come from a person who was cruel all the time. That would have been easier to recognize. Mahoney could also be charming, magnetic, and exciting. He could light up the room and pull people toward him.
Field described him as almost magical, a Pied Piper figure with the whole family under his spell. That is what made the experience so confusing. The same man who caused fear could also bring warmth. The same person who hurt her could also make her want his approval. That is how this kind of abuse works. It teaches a child to connect pain with affection.
It teaches them to believe that love must be earned from the very person who causes the hurt. Later, Field realized that this was exactly the pattern she entered again with Burt Reynolds. In a 2018 interview with NPR, she said she fell back into old patterns when she started dating him. In her memoir, she put it even more plainly.
She wrote, “I had been carefully trained to fall into this.” That line carries enormous weight. She was not saying the relationship simply reminded her of her stepfather. She was saying something much harder. She had been shaped by childhood abuse to move toward this kind of man. A man who was charismatic and controlling.
A man who could be warm one minute and punishing the next. A man whose approval always felt precious because it never felt fully secure. Reynolds did not invent that pattern. He stepped into it. And by her own painful account, she was ready to mistake that fit for love. There is another painful detail that shows how early this conditioning began.
In the memoir, Field revealed that at 17, before her career had even started, she had an abortion in Tijuana. She also described a 1968 encounter with singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb. After they smoked a hash-filled joint, she woke up to find him on top of her. Even when speaking about that experience, she was generous.
She said she believed he was not acting with malice and that he was stoned out of his mind. Still, the larger pattern remains. Her early life taught her again and again that her body and her boundaries were not fully hers to protect. By the time Burt Reynolds entered her life, that lesson had already sunk deep.
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This is the hidden center of the story. The romance that Reynolds later talked about for decades as the great love of his life was, for Sally Field, something far more complicated and painful. On her side, it reopened an old wound. She was not simply swept up by a movie star. In some quiet and devastating way, she was returning to a familiar form of suffering.
It would take years and one role that changed her from the inside out before she could finally see it clearly and walk away. The control. Once you know what to look for, Sally Field’s account of the relationship becomes painfully clear. Across interviews and in her memoir, she described the control with striking detail.
He used his stardom as a tool. In the memoir, in a passage later quoted by Vanity Fair, she wrote, “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.” His fame did more than surround him.
