But Enough About Me: A Memoir

by Burt Reynolds

  The next morning it hurt like hell. I had a blinding headache and ringing in my ears. I could barely open my mouth, and every time I tried to speak my face clicked. My bite was so lopsided I couldn’t chew. I could only drink liquids, and I began losing weight. But I willed myself to keep working. A few nights later I took a break to lie down in my bus (we had buses instead of trailers) and Clint came in.

  “How ya doin’?” he said.

  “I’m okay.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “No, I’m not. But I’ll make it.”

  “Well, I’m not feeling too hot myself. I’m going home.”

  It was typical of Clint to pretend he was tired just to give me the chance to rest without having to admit I was hurt. He didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I tried to thank him, but he just walked away. He didn’t want credit.

  A day off didn’t help. I should have gone to the hospital, but that would have shut the production down, and I didn’t want to disappoint Clint. So I popped pain pills and finished the job. The public wanted Boom Town. They got Dirty Harry vs. The Wimp. I ruined the movie. Clint never complained about it, of course, and didn’t allow it to affect our friendship.

  I didn’t work again for two years.

  —

  THE 1980S BROUGHT a deadly new disease: acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Though doctors assured the public that it could not be spread by casual contact, the nation was gripped by hysteria. There wasn’t much knowledge about AIDS, just a lot of misinformation and fearmongering. Anyone suspected of having it became untouchable.

  A nine-year-old hemophiliac named Ryan White who had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion was barred from school because parents were keeping their children home. The Social Security Administration banned AIDS patients from their offices. Catholic churches stopped using communion cups. Hollywood actors started private blood banks and actresses refused to do love scenes with gay costars. When an actor who was thought to have AIDS did a cameo in a feature film, the makeup artist burned all the brushes.

  A rumor started that I had AIDS. I told everyone it was a broken jaw, but nobody believed me. They wanted to think that I was dying of AIDS. It wasn’t just the usual assholes; it was people I thought were my good friends.

  My makeup man and my dentist refused to touch me. I lost forty pounds, which only added fuel to the fire. I wasn’t well enough to work, but nobody wanted me anyway, and I couldn’t blame them. Why would you hire someone who was terminally ill?

  “Let’s give him $5 million and see if he makes it till Friday.”

  One night I began hyperventilating, and my heart was pounding so fast, I thought my chest would explode. I called for an ambulance and gave them my address. I was on all the movie star maps, so every tourist in the world found my house . . . but not the ambulance driver. I watched from the window as he passed by three times. I dragged myself onto the lawn and began waving as he went by the fourth time. He still didn’t see me. I had to crawl into the street to get him to stop.

  When I got to the hospital, they did a bunch of tests and put me in a room with three old Jewish guys. I was finally dropping off to sleep when one of them came over and said, “You play pinochle?”

  “I’m dying,” I said.

  “We’re all dying,” he said.

  So we sat there in our wheelchairs playing cards.

  In the hospital I met a girl with the same symptoms. She was in terrible pain and we commiserated with one another. I could tell she was on the edge. I kept trying to encourage her, but a week later, I heard that she’d killed herself.

  I wasn’t suicidal—never have been in my life—but if I had died at that time, it would have been okay with me. It was the lowest point in my life. I was so depressed I just wanted to curl up in the fetal position. I couldn’t go out in public to deny the rumors because I was exactly what they said, a bag of bones. But not because I had AIDS.

  I had temporomandibular disorder (TMD or TMJ), which affects the joint that connects the lower jaw with the skull. It messes with your balance and your sensory perception. It’s like being seasick all the time. I couldn’t lie down, I couldn’t stand bright light, and if the phone rang, I’d fall on the floor with a pillow over my ears. It felt as if I had an army of people in my head and they were trying to get out through my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. I kept losing weight and I looked like a cadaver.

  I saw a dozen dentists who had no idea how to treat it. One of them sawed all of my bottom teeth off. It didn’t help my condition, but I could stick my tongue through the gap with my mouth closed. Another one prescribed a new drug called Halcion. It was the only thing that would relax my jaw. Of course you didn’t feel pain, you didn’t feel anything. It put you out. I was a zombie but didn’t care. I would have done anything for relief. I kept taking Halcion and my tolerance went up. It got to where I was taking fifty a day and I was sleeping longer and longer.

  I finally found a retired dentist in San Diego named Gus Schwab. He was a cranky old coot, but he knew what he was doing. I drove down from Los Angeles every other day and he realigned every tooth in my mouth. It cost a fortune, but I would have sold my house at that point if it meant that I would feel better.

  And wouldn’t you know it? Very slowly, I began to get better.

  So many friends had deserted me, I joked that I was saving lots of money on Christmas cards. I’ll never forget the people who stood by me: Dom DeLuise, Ann-Margret, Charles Nelson Reilly, Charley Durning, Angie Dickinson, Jon Voight, Hal Needham, Clint Eastwood, Johnny Carson, Elizabeth Taylor, and about five hundred stuntmen.

  Elizabeth had gone through the same thing with her jaw and she told anyone who’d listen: “He can’t eat! That’s what it is. At one time or another, all of us fat broads wish we had TMJ.”

  Johnny kept calling and telling me to “get up and get out.” He made it clear that I was welcome on the show to dispel the rumors whenever I was ready. But I was still concerned about my appearance. I’d lost so much weight, I didn’t want a camera in my face. But I knew it was time to fight back, so I finally accepted Johnny’s invitation.

  When I walked on The Tonight Show, I had a prop with me, a little black address book. I held it up and said it contained the names of all the people who had deserted me through the illness, the AIDS rumors, the tabloid headlines. I said, “It’s always nice to know who your friends are.” Then I opened the book and began tearing pages out. That’s when Johnny said, “You know, I’ve done that, too. It makes a hell of a fire.” The audience erupted, and for the first time in months, I felt hope for the future.

  Pretty soon I got hired for a show where I had to kiss a girl good night. Her name was Gigi, and I’ll never forget her. She really planted one on me—if I’d been a slot machine the eyes would have been spinning. Later I told her how touched I was by the fact that she wasn’t afraid and she said, “Oh, people are full of shit. Besides, I’ve been waiting a long time to kiss you.”

  That was just what I needed.

  Looking back, I feel as though it all made me stronger in the end. But I still can’t forgive the people who deserted me.

  The AIDS hysteria eventually died down. I think it began to change when Rock Hudson came out as the first celebrity with the disease. He went on television and he looked horrible. Doris Day stood next to him when he made the announcement and she seemed to be holding him up. A few weeks before Rock died, Elizabeth asked me to appear at a fund-raiser for AIDS Project Los Angeles, and I was proud to be one of the hosts for the evening. When I got up to read a letter of support from President Ronald Reagan, the audience booed because they felt he hadn’t done enough to fight the disease.

  Afterward I got calls from reporters asking me why I would appear at an AIDS fund-raiser. I’d done benefits for lots of causes and nobody had ever asked that before.

  “If it had been a benefit for
cancer victims,” I said, “nobody would be asking such a stupid question.”

  Unfortunately, it took me longer to get off Halcion than it did to cure my TMJ. My doctor wanted me to check myself into the Betty Ford Clinic, but at that time it was important to me not to be seen as a drug addict, so I went cold turkey. I fell into a coma, and at one point the doctors thought I might die, but after about eight or nine hours I regained consciousness. I never took another Halcion. Years later I became dependent on prescription painkillers following back surgery. I was in denial for a long time, but finally realized I couldn’t beat the problem on my own and checked myself into rehab. It’s a good thing I did, because I wouldn’t be here otherwise.

  Hal Needham

  Hal was a pioneer and an innovator who made stunt work into an art form. He worked as a stuntman or stunt coordinator on three hundred feature films and three thousand television episodes, and beginning with Smokey and the Bandit, he directed nine feature films.

  Hal doubled for me on Riverboat and Gunsmoke on TV, and in a bunch of features: Lucky Lady, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, White Lightning, Gator. He did everything with style. In a fight you could always recognize him because he had a unique way of throwing a punch and then coming back across his chest with the same hand. Stuntmen call it a Needham.

  I’ve always had great affection for stuntmen, and many of them are among my best friends in the business. Most of the stuntmen I’ve known were jocks, and a few were rodeo performers. I’d go out to Hal’s house in Thousand Oaks on weekends and there would always be four or five stunt guys there, with Hal coaching them. They’d rehearse fights and work up new gags.

  The first time I went there, Hal said, “Let’s go out back and do some high falls.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I said, “Sure!”

  Behind the house there was a tree that must have been sixty feet high, with a rope on it and a net below. Hal said, “Go on out, swing back and forth, and let go of the rope. Just before you hit the net, do a flip and land on your back.”

  Sounded easy enough, and I did it, and it was easy. I graduated to tree fights: Another guy would get up in the high branches and we’d swing at each other forty feet in the air and try to knock each other into the net. It was crazy. But I have to admit that it was fun.

  We’d also work on fights. Hal taught me how to give and take a punch on-camera. A lot of actors don’t do that well.

  We all had motorcycles—mostly Harleys—and we did crazy stuff with them. They were junk bikes—pieces of this and pieces of that. You could tell they’d been in crashes. A guy would go over a hill and disappear, and when you followed him over, he’d be upside down. Everybody crashed and burned sooner or later. It was a miracle that nobody got seriously hurt. And everybody had a dirt bike. We raced them out in the desert. We’d map out a track through the cactus and rattlesnake nests. We chipped in to buy a trophy. I thought it was a big deal to win a stuntman’s trophy. When we weren’t practicing gags or racing bikes, we’d play touch football. I had a team made up mostly of stuntmen and we beat everybody.

  Those guys were the best in the business. It’s a tight-knit community and they trusted me, which is the greatest compliment anyone can get from them. I never saw a real fight between stuntmen, I think because they respect each other so much.

  When a real fistfight breaks out on a movie set, it’s usually the actor’s fault, not the stuntman’s. The actor makes a stupid remark about the right way to do a fall, or he complains that a stuntman hit him on purpose. Whenever I saw that, I’d take the actor aside and say, “Don’t you understand? If he hit you on purpose you’d be asleep now. Just keep your mouth shut.”

  Some actors feel insecure around stuntmen, who can do all the things the actor is supposed to be doing himself. (There are actors who use a stunt double to open a car door for them.) It’s worse when the actor’s wife or girlfriend is on the set. Some actors can’t handle it and they get belligerent.

  —

  HAL WAS ONE of only two stuntmen to ever receive an Academy Award. The other was Yakima Canutt. They both took stunt work to new levels. Yakima was a rodeo rider who went into acting. He did leading roles in silent Westerns, but he had a high voice, so when talkies came in, he was reduced to playing quiet villains. He began to do stunt work, and by the mid-1930s he was the lead stuntman at Republic, where he doubled for Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger, and Zorro. Since Zorro wears a mask, Yakima did almost all the nonspeaking scenes himself.

  Yakima was the first to plan and prepare stunts carefully, which made stunt work less dangerous and the stunts more thrilling. He also invented a bunch of riding tricks, like the Crupper Mount, a leapfrog into the saddle from the rear. Over his long career he stunted for Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Henry Fonda, Randolph Scott, Tex Ritter, and Roy Rogers. He taught Duke Wayne how to fall off a horse, and Duke once admitted that he’d studied Yakima to see how a real cowboy walked and talked. Having known them both, I can attest that Duke’s famous rolling stride is pure Yakima.

  Yakima doubled for Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind (1939). He staged the chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959) and trained not only the horses but also Stephen Boyd and Charlton Heston. (He told Chuck, “Just stay in the damn chariot and I guarantee you’ll win the race.”) As stunt coordinator on Cat Ballou (1965), Yakima was the one who got Lee Marvin’s horse to play drunk. He also did great work in Spartacus (1960), El Cid (1961), Where Eagles Dare (1968), A Man Called Horse (1970), and Breakheart Pass (1975). His most famous stunt is in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), where, as an attacking Indian, he jumps from his horse at full gallop onto a six-horse team pulling a stagecoach. He drops down between horses and allows himself to be dragged along the ground, then lets go as the horses and coach speed over him.

  Yakima was in a wheelchair by the time he came to visit me on the set of a picture I directed called The End (1978). We were shooting out at a big ranch with a bridge over a shallow creek. I could tell it was killing him to watch everybody doing stunts, so I said, “Yak, you wanna do something?”

  “YEAH!” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “How ’bout if I come by and knock you off the bridge?”

  “GREAT!” he said.

  We blocked it out, and we did it in one take!

  When I yelled, “Cut!” we all ran in. Yakima was sitting in the creek with a big grin on his face. Everybody else was standing around with their mouths open.

  Hal picked up where Yakima left off. He invented technology and stunts that were pure Needham. He was respected by everyone—producers, directors, actors, and above all, fellow stuntmen. He was the best there ever was in terms of versatility. I guess Dar Robinson was better at high falls, but Hal was the best at horse falls, the best at stair falls, the best at fights, the best at underwater stuff . . . He was just incredible.

  —

  HAL USED TO SAY, “I’ll never win an Academy Award, but I’ll be a rich son of a bitch.” Well, he did both. He made a bunch of money. He had profit participation on Smokey, which was unusual for a first-time director. And he received not one but two Oscars: a scientific and engineering award for technical innovation, and a Governor’s Award for life achievement on both sides of the camera. All that success didn’t change him one bit.

  Nobody has more respect for stuntmen than I do. I appreciate their athleticism, physical courage, and creativity. A good stuntman is a world-class athlete. Make that stunt person: women have come into their own since I started in the business, when small men would double for females.

  Everyone on a movie set works hard. Stunt people work hard and risk their necks. They crash vehicles, jump from buildings, set themselves on fire. Everybody in the business recognizes their importance. Except the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which refuses to give them their own Oscar.

  There are Oscars for costume design, makeup, set decoration, sound
mixing . . . but not for stunt work. Is it because the studios don’t want to bring attention to the fact that actors don’t do their own stunts? That’s not exactly a secret. Everybody knows it’s not the actor. They understand that insurance companies won’t let actors do dangerous stunts, because if the lead actor gets hurt, the production closes down, which costs money and puts people out of work. Stunts are the action in action films, which year after year are the biggest draw at the box office.

  Hal wasn’t a fan of computer-generated imagery (CGI), and neither am I. CGI creates scenes that aren’t physically possible. Yes, it’s convenient and cost-effective to be able to climb Mount Everest without leaving the studio, but I think audiences would rather have real stunts.

  That’s why the pendulum is swinging away from CGI and back to physical stunts. Because people can tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake, and they know what stunt performers do and they appreciate it.

  The Academy Awards show is already too long, so let’s give the stunt performers their Oscar in a separate ceremony along with the technical awards. It’s the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, right? Well, stunt coordinating is both an art and a science. It’s time we recognize these people.

  —

  HAL WAS BORN in Memphis during the Great Depression. His sharecropper stepfather moved the family to Arkansas when Hal was four. They lived so deep in the Ozarks that they “had to pump in the sunshine,” Hal said. No roads, just rutted dirt tracks. They couldn’t get a car within three miles of the place—not that they had one. Their transportation was their two feet. They were a family of seven in a two-room shack with a dirt floor and no electricity or indoor plumbing, just a two-holer out back. They had to carry all their water from a mountain spring five hundred yards down the hill, and they did all their cooking on a woodstove. Their only artificial light was from kerosene lamps, and the only heat was from a fireplace. Hal gathered berries, cut firewood, and hunted rabbit and squirrel to put meat on the table. He got his clothes from the Salvation Army and never saw a movie until he was ten.