Burt Reynolds' memoir doesn't disappoint
AT JUST a few weeks shy of his 80th birthday and with 80 movies under his belt, Burt Reynolds says he still believes his best performance is ahead of him.
But in the role of one-time superstar who had it all, lost most of it and couldn’t give a damn, this could well be it.
He plays the role convincingly in his new autobiography But Enough About Me, revelling in recalling his time as a wise-cracking womaniser, devil-may-care action hero and audacious sex symbol while arguing persuasively that he doesn’t mind that those days — and paydays — are all behind him.
The critics might say he’s trying a little too hard, with a script that’s a little too glib. Take the indignity of being forced to sell off his memorabilia — from his high school football trophies to his Golden Globe and Emmy — to pay off debts last year.
He brushes that off, declaring perhaps a little too jauntily: “I was sick of so many pictures of myself in my own home, and who needs two dozen pairs of cowboy boots?”
But what’s indisputable is that, whether he’s method acting on a grand scale or demonstrating true grit, he puts on a good show.
Reynolds wasn’t born to acting, only falling into it by accident when his promising football career was ended by the combination of a serious knee injury and a spectacular car crash while he was meant to be recuperating.
He thought he might become a parole officer and returned to college, taking an English class purely to fulfill a course requirement.
But a teacher got him interested in drama and the stage was set for a rollercoaster career on both big and small screens — much to the horror of his hard-as-nails police officer father, who believed football was no job for a real man, never mind acting.
Big Burt was in his nineties before he said a kind word to his son but junior won’t have a word said against him.
“He never said he loved me but he did finally say that he was proud of me. And that was enough.”
Reynolds isn’t so kind about all the characters he encountered in a career that runs from Roy Rogers to Mark Walberg, with everyone from Greta Garbo to Marlon Brando to Clint Eastwood in between, and his recollections are peppered with people who would be advised to take a detour if they happen to be passing his now modest Florida home any time soon.
But he is surprisingly forgiving of some who have trespassed against him, although he does warn against putting Donald Trump in the White House.
Because Trump is right wing, misogynist, belligerent and racist?
Nope — because he once ruined Reynolds’ football game. To be fair, it was potentially a lot of football games.
It was the early 1980s and Reynolds got involved in setting up a new American football league, the USFL, to challenge the monopoly of what at the time was the rather staid NFL.
The venture needed money and Trump came on board but it soon began to look like he was only interested in building the new league up enough so that the NFL would buy it out and he’d make a killing.
Reynolds and others tried to rein him in, but Trump “was like a shark in a tank full of guppies”.
The USFL didn’t make it past its third season.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Reynolds says. “I like Donald. I hold on to my wallet when we shake hands, but I like him. I just think his personal ambition sank the USFL.
“Every time Donald runs for president, I pray he never gets the chance to do to the USA what he did to the USFL.”
It’s a typical homespun analysis from Reynolds who often sounds like he’s still on the set of Smokey and the Bandit, the comedy caper for which he is best remembered.
As the outlaw trucker driving a consignment of illegal liquor and a tankful of one-liners across the American south, Reynolds’ brazen charmer was box office gold back in 1977.
It kick-started a period in his life characterised by the kind of stardom where: “All you have to do is say, ‘I’d like a Diet Coke’, and 48 people run to get it for you. If I’d wanted, I could have had three people pulling up my zipper in the john.” For many fans, even 40 years after Bandit, he’ll always be the cowboy who told Sally Field: “I take my hat off for one thing, and one thing only.” It was a landmark in his personal life too, for Field became his on- and off-screen lover and, in a rare moment when he allows a little hurt to show, he says parting from her was: “The biggest regret of my life.”
Not parting from Loni Anderson runs a close second. The actress became Reynolds’ second wife in the late 1980s (he’d had a short-lived marriage to comedienne Judy Carne in the 1960s) but apart from the joy of becoming a father when he and Loni adopted their son Quinton, the relationship was a disaster.
“The truth is, I never did like her,” says Reynolds. “I don’t remember actually asking her to marry me. What was I thinking? Obviously, I wasn’t thinking at all.”
Reynolds is generous in supplying other examples of when he failed to apply critical judgment. Like when he turned down the chance to play James Bond, Batman, the lead in Die Hard, the Richard Gere character in Pretty Woman and the part that won Jack Nicholson his Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — to name just a few. The Bond decision haunted him for a while. “I’d wake up in a cold sweat going, “Bond, James Bond!”.
But one of his greatest mistakes was failing to recognise how pivotal his performance in Deliverance could have been for him.
The John Boorman-directed story of four city friends forced into a fight for their survival during a canoe trip in the Georgia wilderness in 1972 remains a classic today.
Reynolds, who always did his own stunts, almost drowned and the entire crew were drained by the end of filming, but just as the critics were queuing up to heap praise on it, Reynolds accepted what seemed like a fun invitation from Cosmopolitan magazine to be its first male nude centrefold.
The photos of him sprawled naked on a bearskin rug went global, ending up on everything from bedsheets to coffee mugs. His next foray into theatre was ruined by catcalls from women in the audience; he couldn’t get an interviewer to take him seriously and Deliverance, though tipped for Oscars in numerous categories, left the ceremony empty-handed.
Reynolds blames himself for ruining his chances of becoming a serious actor and for robbing Deliverance of the recognition it deserved.
But self-loathing is not his style for Big Burt taught him well. “He taught me to accept the consequences of my actions like a man and to be the last one standing in a fight.”
Reynolds’ biggest fight may be with his own life’s choices but though he’s picked a formidable opponent, he’s certainly still standing.
