But Enough About Me: A Memoir

by Burt Reynolds

  “I know a guy!” I said. Herbert “Cowboy” Coward. I’d met him at Ghost Town in the Sky, a Wild West tourist attraction in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina where I’d worked as a stuntman, doing staged gunfights and high falls every hour on the hour for a hundred bucks a week.

  Cowboy was in character from the moment he arrived on the set wearing clodhoppers and bib overalls. He stuttered a bit, but he said some funny things. When Boorman hired him, he asked, “Now, Cowboy, are you okay taking part in the rape of a man?” and Cowboy replied, “Hell, I’ve d-done worse things than th-that!”

  When Cowboy was handed the script, it was obvious he couldn’t read, so I ran the lines with him until he had them down. But with the camera rolling, they didn’t always come out as written.

  When he couldn’t manage a word he ad-libbed around it, so that “Go over by the tree and pull down your pants,” became “Get over by that sa-a-a-plain and take your p-panties down.” The line “You ain’t goin’ nowhere” turned into “You ain’t a’goin any damn wheres.” But one of his lines was right from the script: “He got a real purty mouth, ain’t he?”

  Off the set Cowboy kept to himself. Every night back at the Heart of Rabun Motel, he’d put a case of beer on ice in the bathtub and work his way through it while sitting on the toilet seat.

  Bill McKinney, the one who sodomizes Bobby, was a veteran character actor and a hell of an athlete—very fit and health-conscious. But he was one strange dude. Every time you looked at him, he was examining the veins in his forearm, and early mornings I’d see him running nude through the sprinklers on the golf course. After Deliverance he made some pictures with Clint Eastwood, always playing sickos.

  But Bill was a pro: He had to play dead in the long sequence where we decide what to do with his body, and he went a full two minutes without blinking or breathing, despite a mosquito that landed on the white of his eye. Complete concentration. Told they needed substitute dialogue for the TV version, Bill ad-libbed a line that stayed in the movie: “Squeal like a pig!”

  Forty years later, people on the street still yell that at Ned. The whole business had a powerful effect on him, and he couldn’t stop talking about it.

  “When am I going to get this out of my brain?” he kept saying.

  One night he had a drink or two and confessed that he regretted ever doing the movie. “All they’re gonna remember is that I was the guy that got boogered.”

  Ned’s performance in that scene is devastating. He should have won the Oscar.

  —

  DELIVERANCE WAS a rough shoot, an adventure that mirrored the plot of the movie, with more than our share of accidents and injuries, including a couple of near drownings. It was so dangerous, we couldn’t get insurance for the production.

  The Chattooga is one of the most treacherous rivers in the United States, with more average drop per mile than the Colorado. Rated too difficult to navigate in an open canoe, it’s recommended for kayaks only. We learned that you had to be very precise negotiating rapids with names like Corkscrew, Bull Sluice, and Screaming Left Turn. You had to enter each set at exactly the correct angle or you were in trouble.

  It was the most fun I’ve ever had.

  On the first day of filming, the whole company set off downriver in a fleet of rafts and canoes. Half of them capsized within the first mile. Nobody got hurt, but a camera and sound equipment went down with one of the rafts.

  That’s when I heard the prop man say, “We’re gonna be here a long, long time.”

  For the whitewater scenes, Boorman would be in a little rubber boat with the cameraman and his assistant. (But no sound man: You couldn’t hear what we were saying over the roaring river, so we dubbed the dialogue later.) We had a top-notch cinematographer in Vilmos Zsigmond, who, as a nineteen-year-old film student in 1956, had shot famous footage of Soviet tanks entering Budapest. Boorman figured that a man who’d been fired on by the Russians wouldn’t be intimidated by a river.

  There were other complications. Trees and rocks would get in the way and we’d have to retake the simplest shots again and again. The Chattooga formed the state line between Georgia and South Carolina, so if we filmed on one side of the river, we were under the jurisdiction of the New York union, but on the other side we had to use a Chicago crew. Union rules also forced Boorman to hire a separate cameraman, but because Vilmos was his own operator, the other guy spent most of his time at the motel.

  Movies are almost always shot according to the logistics of the production and the scenes are later cut into the correct order. But Deliverance was shot in sequence.

  When I asked John why, he said, “In case one of you drowns.”

  He had a notation right there in his script—“Lewis drowned today”—and I wasn’t sure he was kidding. The drawback of shooting in sequence was that we all knew the rape scene was coming and we got more and more anxious as it approached.

  Jon and I each lost ten pounds during the filming. We came in soft, but slowly built ourselves up, and by the end we were like rocks. We did a lot of training before the cameras rolled, learning how to climb rocks and shoot a bow and arrow.

  I was having trouble finding the character and Boorman suggested I read Zen in the Art of Archery, which says that you don’t shoot the arrow, the arrow shoots you. You don’t consciously release it; rather, you pull it back and it goes where it’s supposed to go by itself . . . when the time is right. I thought, Well, no harm in trying it.

  If you see the movie, you hear dialogue over the titles that we actually shot at an archery range.

  When it came time to shoot that scene, Boorman said, “Let’s not rehearse, let’s just fire the arrows,” and he started rolling.

  The target was fifty yards away, which meant that you had to kind of arc the arrow. The bow had a 65-pound pull. I was in great shape by then, but 65 pounds . . . it’s hard not to quiver a bit. But I didn’t quiver at all; I had it right there, steady as could be. I was saying my lines and all of sudden I noticed the arrow was gone. So I took another arrow out and talked some more and it was gone and I talked some more and another arrow was gone.

  When Boorman called “Cut,” all the arrows were in the bull’s-eye.

  Freddy Bear, who was our expert—Bear Bows are named after him—said, “I’ve never seen shooting like that in my life!”

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  When we broke for lunch, I wanted to try it again and nearly shot myself in the foot. I could hardly pull the string all the way back and couldn’t come close to the bull’s-eye. I was only good between “Action” and “Cut,” when I was Lewis. As Burt, I couldn’t hit the side of a barn.

  We also took canoeing lessons. Of the four of us, Ned, whose character Bobby was the worst canoer in the group, was the only one who’d ever paddled one before.

  Boorman let us pick our own canoes. There were a few Indian-style wooden canoes and one made of aluminum. The wooden ones looked authentic, but the aluminum was kind of drab and industrial.

  I told Jon to go first, hoping he’d take a pretty one, and he did! He told me later that he took it because it was “homey.” Exactly what Ed would have done. It was an artistic choice that Jon came to regret, because it was too fragile for the rapids. Every time it hit a rock, he had the sickening feeling that it was breaking up under him.

  By the end of the shoot we’d destroyed half a dozen wooden canoes but only dented the aluminum one. (Later I sent Jon a miniature wooden canoe with “Voight’s Choice” painted on it.)

  —

  ONE MORNING I had a late call but couldn’t understand why, because Lewis was scheduled to go over the waterfall that day. I got to the set at ten o’clock, just in time to see them filming a dummy (dubbed No Balls by the crew) going over the falls.

  It looked like shit.

  In those days I was fearless . . . to the point of insanity. I wo
uld take on anything, anybody, anywhere.

  I went to Boorman and said, “John, I can go over the falls at least as good as that thing.”

  Boorman didn’t doubt you. If you told him you could do something, he’d let you try.

  There was a hydroelectric dam about four miles upriver and we had control of it. We could close the water down to a trickle to allow us to set up the stunt, then open the gates and release a torrent for the shot. In preparation, I had them pound a spike into a rock at the top of the falls and attach a rope to it. I swam out, grabbed the rope, signaled to let the water go, and lay out flat. Within a minute I heard a terrifying sound. I looked up and a mountain of water was on top of me. I ducked just as it hit, but it turned me head over heels under water and slammed me against the rock, cracking my tailbone. I surfaced long enough to gulp air, then plunged back under and did an involuntary triple axel, landing on my head. I’d been swallowed by a hydraulic, an underwater whirlpool that spins you around like a cement mixer.

  Somehow I remembered one of the old-time stuntmen saying years before that if you get caught in a hydro, don’t try to swim out because you’ll drown fighting it. Instead you swim to the bottom and the current will shoot you out from there. I swam down, and sure enough, it launched me like a torpedo. I finally surfaced a hundred yards downstream. The rocks had skinned me alive and the hydro had torn off my boots, socks, pants, everything.

  Boorman said, “I saw a fit thirty-year-old actor go over the falls and a naked old man stumble out of the water.”

  Later that day, when he came to see me in the hospital, I asked him how it looked. “Like a dummy going over the falls,” he said.

  —

  FOR THE SCENE where Lewis breaks his leg, I told Boorman that I didn’t want the special effects guy or anybody else doing it. “Let me try something and if you don’t like it we won’t use it,” I said.

  I went to a local butcher, got the backbone of a lamb, and snapped it in half. I asked the butcher if he had any blood and he said, “Oh God yeah, I got me a lotta blood,” and gave me three jars of it.

  It looked real, not like Hollywood blood, and between takes I’d pour it over the “wound.” It looked so bad, it almost made Ronny sick. Boorman loved it.

  Ronny returned the favor. In the script they find Drew washed up on the rocks with his arm grotesquely bent around his neck. In the film it wasn’t faked because Ronny was double-jointed and could throw his shoulder out at will. He didn’t do it much because it hurt like hell, but he did it for the scene and it was gold. The sight of it shocked everyone but Boorman.

  It isn’t clear whether Drew is shot or commits suicide. Half the people I talk to think he was shot; the other half think he bailed because he couldn’t accept the decision to cover up the killings. Lewis believes Drew was shot, but Ed thinks he killed himself. Ronny later told me that he’d decided for his own purposes that Drew was neither shot nor a suicide, but the victim of some kind of accident.

  —

  DELIVERANCE DEALT WITH issues that Hollywood hadn’t yet touched: the destruction of the natural world by humans, and something that was never discussed at the time: homosexual rape.

  I saw a cut of the movie with Boorman from the back of the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. The place got so quiet between the action sequences, it was like being in church. When it got to the rape scene, he said, “I can’t watch this. I didn’t think it would be this powerful. I didn’t think it would grab hold of you like that.”

  We went outside, and soon there were half a dozen men who couldn’t watch either, and one of them was throwing up on the sidewalk. But the women in the audience were fine. Their reaction seemed to be “Okay, now you know what it’s like!” (Before the release Barbra Streisand called Boorman and asked to see a rough cut because, she said, “I want to see a man raped for a change.”)

  —

  IF I HAD to put only one of my movies in a time capsule, it would be Deliverance. I don’t know if it’s the best acting I’ve ever done, but it’s the best movie I’ve ever been in. It proved I could act, not only to the public, but to me.

  Just before Deliverance was released, I went to a screening at Warner Bros. with Lee Marvin, who took me aside and gave me some unsolicited advice: “Don’t let ’em fuck you up, pardner! You’re gonna be under a microscope and it’s gonna change your life forever.”

  “I sure hope so,” I said.

  Lee grabbed me by the lapels. “No, listen to me! It’s gonna change everything and you’ve got to be careful. Don’t let ’em fuck you up!”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Goddamn it! You’re not listening!”

  And I wasn’t.

  I had no idea.

  Helen Gurley Brown

  I think Deliverance deserved more recognition from the Academy than it got. It was nominated for Best Picture of 1972, but The Godfather won the Oscar. John Boorman was nominated for Best Director, but Bob Fosse won for Cabaret. Tom Priestley was nominated for Best Film Editing, but David Bretherton got it (Cabaret). Even though it was a tough year, I was surprised that Jon Voight and Ned Beatty weren’t even nominated. Nor was Vilmos Zsigmond for cinematography. And I confess that I thought I had a shot, too.

  Why were we snubbed?

  It was my fault.

  One night early in 1972, after Deliverance was in the can but before it was released, I was on The Tonight Show with Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan and author of the bestselling book Sex and the Single Girl. During a commercial break she invited me to be the first male nude centerfold of the magazine.

  Though no one had ever shown a naked man in a magazine before, Helen believed that women have the same “visual appetites” as men, who’d been looking at naked women in Playboy since 1953. She wanted the same prerogative for women. It would be a milestone in the sexual revolution and she said that I was the one man who could pull it off. I found out later that she’d asked Paul Newman first, but he turned her down.

  Helen didn’t have to talk me into it. I was flattered and intrigued. I wish I could say that I wanted to show my support for women’s rights, but I just thought it would be fun. I said yes before we came back on the air. (I may or may not have had several cocktails in the greenroom before the show.)

  Everybody I respected told me not to do it. Friends and relatives pleaded for self-restraint. My agent warned that it would cancel out whatever Deliverance might do to establish me as a serious actor.

  Ned couldn’t believe it: “You’re gonna be nekkid?” he said. “They’re gonna see your tallywacker? What the hell are you trying to prove?”

  I did it anyway. I thought it was a big joke. I wanted to do it as a takeoff on the Playmate of the Month. I’d list my hobbies and favorite colors, there’d be a black-and-white shot of me pushing a supermarket cart, and a quote: “I love sunsets and hate mean people.”

  On the way to the photo shoot, I stopped for two quarts of vodka and finished one before we got to the studio, which was freezing cold (bad for a naked man’s self-esteem).

  The famed Francesco Scavullo photographed me on a bearskin rug. He took hundreds of shots: with a hat in front of my . . . tallywacker, with a dog in front of it, with my hand in front of it. (If I was trying to prove something, why would I cover it up with my hand? I have very small hands.) They promised to burn the outtakes and give me all the negatives.

  The magazine hit the stands in April 1972, three months before Deliverance opened, and quickly sold all 1.5 million copies.

  Suddenly my life was a carnival. I couldn’t go anywhere without women asking me to sign their copies, each one a painful reminder of my stupidity. I did The Rainmaker in Chicago and the audiences were rowdy: instead of applause there were hoots and catcalls. While most of the mail was positive and polite, I also got some of the filthiest letters I’ve ever seen, many of which included Polaroids. I
received regular shipments of pubic hair from a woman in Nova Scotia. (I worried about her in that cold climate.)

  I was in Denmark promoting Deliverance and there I was on the cover of a Danish porno mag pretending to hump the bearskin rug. It was one of the outtakes that were supposed to have been destroyed.

  The Catholic church condemned me.

  And I got “Hey! I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on” fifty times a day.

  A cottage industry sprang up. I wasn’t paid for the photos or for any sort of merchandising rights, but my centerfold appeared on panties, T-shirts, key chains, coasters, floor mats. The low point was when I checked into a hotel and found myself imprinted on the sheets. (The manager said he’d bought them at Macy’s.)

  It was a total fiasco. I thought people would be able to separate the fun-loving side of me from the serious actor, but I was wrong. I’m still embarrassed by it and I sorely regret doing it. It’s been called one of the greatest publicity stunts of all time, but it was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made, and I’m convinced it cost Deliverance the recognition it deserved.

  Lee Marvin

  Lee Marvin was a master storyteller. He had that wonderful deep voice, and he invented his own words, like vicaries, for vicarious thrills. He would also express himself without words, using a combination of gestures and whistles. He had an offbeat sense of humor and would say anything to get a reaction. Which is why journalists loved him: He gave great interview, with choice tidbits like “Reporters don’t make actors sound stupid; they take care of that themselves.” He once told me that he didn’t care what was written about him, whether true or false, as long as it was interesting.