In Pieces(76)
August 26, 1976
I’m on an airplane on my way to Atlanta for five weeks. I’m to do a picture with B. Reynolds called Smokey and the Bandit. The script stinks but when I talked to Burt he told me we would “improv” our way through it. I can’t figure out why he wants me. I don’t seem like his kind of leading lady. He said he hadn’t seen Stay Hungry but always liked me in Gidget. What?? And that’s why he wants me to sit opposite him in a car for five weeks? I feel guilty about leaving the kids, of course. I hope they’ll come to see me. Coulter is still in Montana. Everything always happens at once. I just sold the house. Was it for enough money? I don’t know. I guess if you make a mistake it’s not the end of the world.
August 27
I arrived in Atlanta yesterday thinking he would be here to meet me. Wrong. He doesn’t arrive until today. He called this afternoon, ‘Hello, Burt Reynolds movie star here. What are you doing for dinner tonight?’ I tried to spar with him on the phone to cover my nerves. God, Field, get a hold of yourself. This was the conversation.
‘Pick you up at 8:00, or someone will. I won’t be able to come to your room to get you.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s hard for me to walk through that lobby.’
Oh, of course, I thought. How stupid of me.
‘You drive by the hotel at 8:00 with the car door open and I’ll dive in.’
Nothing but crickets on his end, which didn’t matter because I couldn’t hear anyway, my hand was shaking so badly the phone was never fully on my ear, always beside it or under it, pressed too hard, too soft. I tried to keep it still by holding my elbow with the other hand. Maybe his hand was shaking too. I doubt it.
‘My bodyguard will come get you.’
A bodyguard? Ugg, he just called again. He’s going to be late. Swell.
‘I’m a gentleman, thought I’d call my date.’
‘Is this an actual date?’
‘Yes!’
‘Are you gonna bring me a corsage the color of my dress?’ And there was nothing.
Now I wait… tick-tock, tick-tock. I wonder how many actual dates I have been on in my life? Not many.
August 28
Then the curtain went up. I walked through the dreaded lobby with the bodyguard, Pete… something or other, out the hotel entrance into the parking lot. I was standing on the top step. Where was he? There, leaning in a car window talking to the people inside, part of our group. I had imagined we would be alone. He seemed much smaller than I had thought, maybe ’cause I was standing on three stairs. He’s handsome but different. Wearing my black velvet pants and orange—slightly see-through—blouse I stamped my feet in a wide “come and get me” stance. He sauntered over, grabbed me. He must have felt my heart. I could no longer be responsible for it.
He was incredibly charming, adored at the time for being who he was: a funny, self-deprecating good ol’ boy. A normal guy on a big ride and getting one hell of a kick out of it. But he was also a man engulfed by a massive wave of seemingly instant notoriety, a sex symbol, and when this tsunami of the collective unconscious slammed into him, he couldn’t breathe. He also couldn’t talk about it, couldn’t articulate how it made him feel both empowered and terrified. He had been brought up by his very southern, well-meaning parents to act like a man, and he spent his life trying to prove to his father that he was a man worth loving. He once told me that when he was a senior in high school, the varsity football team—of which he was a proud member—won the state championship. It was a hard-fought, emotional win, and when Burt—or Buddy, as he was called—stood on the field with his victorious team, he started to cry. That inflamed Big Burt, his father, who thundered onto the field to slap his son upside the head. Buddy needed to act like a man, a real man.
And now that man had become the heart’s desire of all the people who wanted a dream figure, the quintessential definition of masculine pulchritude to emulate or fantasize about. But the human inside that dream figure was just a good-looking, ordinary person, frantically trying to fulfill everyone’s expectations and always waiting for the Big Burts of the world to smack the daylights out of him if he failed. He tried to hide everything about himself that he saw as being imperfect, to camouflage himself, which meant that he got locked into the stressful trap of faking it. In my own way, I knew what that kind of public pressure felt like, but my solution had always been to isolate myself, or to hide behind my children or in the Actors Studio, or just to put my head in the sand. But Burt seemed to wallow in it, both loving the focus and spinning from its assault. 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.
It was instantaneous and intense. Blindly I fell into a rut that had long ago formed in my road, a preprogrammed behavior as if in some past life I had pledged a soul-binding commitment to this man. On our second date we were no longer with a group of his friends but had dinner in his suite—at a more expensive hotel than mine—and except for Norman, his wardrobe man, who constantly walked in and out of the connecting rooms, we were alone. Burt started to fill me in about his life, the kind of thing you do when you want someone to know who you are. And as I started to tell my side, little bits of me, I began to get subtle—or not-so-subtle—hints that he didn’t want to know. That he wanted me to be who he thought I was, and not who I truly was. Immediately, I started clamping down on myself, stuttering when I admitted I’d been living with someone, as if confessing a transgression. Seeming caught off guard, he paused, then said that he was unaware, not discouraged but disappointed. And whether he meant it that way or not, I interpreted his disappointment as disapproval, and felt embarrassed. Without hesitation, I threw sweet Coulter under the bus, telling Burt that I hadn’t been happy with my live-in entanglement for some time, as if the situation had been thrust upon me against my will.