Sally Field was not Burt Reynolds’s true love.
Reynolds officially referred to her as such in 2015, three years before his death. He expressed regret for not making their romance, which began on the set of 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit, work, and raved about how much he missed her.
The actress’ perspective is markedly different.
“He was not someone I could be around,” she said in a new interview. “He was simply not right for me in any way.”
Field, 75, claimed Reynolds, who died of a heart attack at 82, “somehow invented in his rethinking of everything that I was more important to him than he had thought, but I wasn’t. He desired what he did not possess. I did not want to deal with it.”
Field’s memoir, In Pieces, was released on September 18, 2018, 12 days after Reynolds’ death, and it detailed their complicated relationship. She described him as dominating and abusive, and she went into detail about his drug use, stating he used Percodan, Valium, and barbiturates while working on Smokey and the Bandit.
Field and Reynolds dated on and off for five years and collaborated on four films. In retrospect, Field writes that her relationship with Reynolds was an attempt to reproduce a version of her relationship with her stepfather, Jock Mahoney, a stuntman and actor who she claimed sexually assaulted her until she was 14 in the book. “She was exorcising something that needed to be exorcised,” she explained.
Field, who had two marriages that ended in divorce, delivered a touching statement following Reynolds’ death. She did not, however, attend his funeral.
Field said she didn’t worry about writing so openly about her connection with Reynolds in her memoir, which she worked on for seven years, “because I didn’t think I was going to publish it.”
Field, who is currently working on the road trip film 80 for Brady alongside Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Rita Moreno, commented on her long career in Hollywood, calling it a job that “can kick the poop out of you.”