But Enough About Me: A Memoir

by Burt Reynolds

  So Jackie said “sumbitch” in the picture and it became part of the Southern lexicon. For a long time, whenever Smokey aired on television, the censors overdubbed “sumbitch” with “scum bum,” which became so popular with kids that Hot Wheels put it on the tail of its Trans Am.

  Jackie was a master. He said, “I can’t be in the car alone. Put someone in there with me to play off of.” So we got a Rams linebacker named Mike Henry to play Jackie’s doofus son and they were terrific together. I’ve always prided myself on being able to make chicken salad out of chicken shit, but Jackie could make it into cordon bleu. He never did anything the same way twice on-camera, and he put everyone on the floor. We had to bite our lips to keep from ruining takes. I watched him ad-lib his way through the whole movie. He never said a single word in the script. (Every once in a while, Hal would say, “Okay, I guess that’s a cut.”)

  I loved every minute of it, and it was a great lesson: When you’re with somebody that good, just fly with them. Hal was smart in that regard. He didn’t let his ego get in the way. I don’t think many other directors would have given Jackie such free rein. The result is an amazing performance, and I think Sheriff Buford T. Justice is right up there with Jackie’s other great characters: Ralph Kramden, Joe the Bartender, the Poor Soul, and Reginald Van Gleason III.

  Jackie started drinking at eight in the morning and drank all day, but he never got drunk, he just got funnier. He had a guy named Mal working for him. When he wanted a drink, he’d say, “Mal, hamburger!” That meant “Bring me a huge glass of vodka.”

  I asked him, “Why do you call it ‘hamburger’?”

  “I don’t want the crew to know I’m drinking,” he said.

  One day Jackie and I were sitting outside in director’s chairs. He was telling a story like he always did, with a “hamburger” in his hand. He was leaning back in the chair, and all of a sudden he tipped over backward and disappeared into the tall grass.

  “Jackie, Jackie, are you all right?” I said.

  A hand shot straight up holding the glass skyward and a triumphant voice shouted, “Didn’t spill a drop!”

  —

  JERRY REED was a guitar player and singer-songwriter who’d signed his first record contract when he was seventeen. He had a string of hits in the 1970s and ’80s, including “Amos Moses,” “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” and “The Bird.” He was a natural comedian who could also play heavies because he had the smarts to do it in a charming way.

  Nobody could talk faster than Jerry—he was like a sewing machine. He was fun to work with and gave you everything he had in a scene. At night he’d go out and get wasted, but he’d be right there the next morning ready to go, and he always knew his lines. We wound up doing half a dozen pictures together.

  Jerry had promised to write a song for the movie, but by the end of filming, he still hadn’t come up with it.

  “What are you gonna do about the music?” Hal asked.

  “I’ll give you something in the morning,” Jerry said.

  He was out all night as usual, but the next morning he sang “Eastbound and Down” for Hal, who was so blown away he couldn’t speak.

  “If you don’t like it, I can change it,” Jerry said.

  “If you change one goddamn note, I’ll fuckin’ kill you!” Hal said.

  As Hal liked to say, “Eastbound and Down” was real “gettin’-down-the-road-truckin’ music,” and it was perfect for the movie. It became a monster hit and was Jerry’s theme song from then on.

  Pat McCormick played Big Enos and Paul Williams played his son, Little Enos. The two of them were like a polished comedy team, though they’d never met before. On the Smokey set they’d go away for ten minutes and come back with a scene. If you didn’t like it, they’d go away for ten minutes more and come back with a better one.

  I knew Pat from The Tonight Show—he was one of Johnny’s top writers. I always thought he was hilariously warped. I’d met Paul at parties and liked him enormously. Besides being a popular singer-songwriter, Paul had a wicked sense of humor. Pat was six-seven, 280; Paul was all of five-two. The first time I saw them together, I broke up.

  In my first shot of the picture, I’m in a hammock with my cowboy hat down over my face. The two of them come over, and I lift the hat up to see them standing there dressed in matching suits, and I burst out laughing. It’s the most visceral, most natural, most satisfying laugh I’ve ever had, on or off the screen.

  —

  TWO DAYS BEFORE the cameras rolled, the studio cut the budget from five million to four million. Hal spent the next forty-eight hours revising the script. He had a professional movie dog all lined up but fired it to save money, so when we got to Georgia to begin shooting, we needed a replacement. Hal put an ad in the paper that I’d be judging a contest to pick a dog for “a major motion picture,” and the next day there were two thousand dogs in the park. I put my hand over each of the “finalists,” and a basset hound won. That’s how Fred became a movie star. Jackie was the only one who could steal a scene from him.

  We filmed mostly in Lithonia, McDonough, and Jonesboro, Georgia, but a few key scenes were shot in and around Ojai, California. Hal broke every day at five o’clock, and the cast and crew would be in the local bar by five-fifteen. Jackie would hold court and Jerry would sing country songs into the wee smalls, but at six the next morning everybody would be on the set ready to go.

  Hal saw a picture in a magazine of a 1976 Pontiac Trans Am, the model with the T-top and the gold Thunder Chicken decal on the hood. He thought I’d look cool in one, and that it might make a good product placement, so we went to Pontiac and they gave us four Trans Ams for me and two LeManses for Jackie’s cruiser. We wrecked ’em all. When a car couldn’t run anymore, we kept it handy to scavenge parts. For the last scene we filmed, the one Trans Am we had left wouldn’t start and we had to push it into the shot.

  After Smokey came out, Trans Am sales went up 700 percent, and the president of Pontiac promised me a new one every year for life. A few years later a car didn’t come. I didn’t want to complain, but I thought something might have happened in delivery, so I called Pontiac and spoke to a very businesslike lady.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “this is Burt Reynolds. I guess there’s been a mix-up. The Trans Am didn’t arrive. Maybe it went to the wrong place.”

  “No,” she said, “we didn’t send one.”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t mean to be pushy, but the president of the company said I’d get one every year.”

  “We have a new president now,” she said. “It was our former president who made the promise, the one who likes your movies.”

  —

  THE SMOKEY CAST and crew were watching rushes one night and a couple of the outtakes were hysterical.

  “Hal,” I said, “what if we run these at the end of the movie?”

  “Ya think?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “The great thing about it is that everybody’s in character, so you’re not hurting the movie. The audience finds out that these people laugh at each other.”

  So that’s what Hal did. Instead of putting The End after the last scene, he let the screen go black and rolled outtakes next to the credits. For a long time afterward, everybody was doing it.

  We did something else that wasn’t done. We broke the fourth wall between the actor and the audience. I got behind the wheel of the Trans Am and eased into frame. I stopped in front of the camera, looked into the lens, and winked. I was saying to the people, “I hope you’re having as much fun as we are.”

  And I meant it. It was the best time I ever had making a movie.

  —

  UNIVERSAL DECIDED to open Smokey and the Bandit at Radio City Music Hall in New York. We told them they were crazy, but they went ahead and it didn’t make enough money to pay the Rockettes. They went to plan B and opened it wide i
n the South, and it found its audience.

  I was in Florida when Smokey opened there. I wondered if anybody would go to see it, so one night I slipped into a mall theater that had five screens. Smokey was playing on all five, and there was a line around the block. With word of mouth behind it, Smokey was a smash hit. Universal was amazed at the business it did everywhere, including in Boston, Philadelphia, and even New York.

  I’ve always been blue-collar, not white-collar. I can count on one hand the times I’ve played a college graduate. But I’ve played a lot of Southerners, from Lewis Medlock to Bo Darville, and I hated the labels the critics gave my films, like “hick flicks” and “redneck movies.” They thought the IQ of everyone who saw them dropped ten points. This made me angry. They weren’t “hick flicks,” they were movies about the South.

  Lots of movies ridiculed Southerners, and I resented them. I wanted to play a Southern hero, a guy who was proud of being from the South. Smokey gave me the chance to do that. And to make a movie for people in “flyover country”—the Midwest, the Northwest, and especially the South. Most of those folks are middle-of-the-road, not left or right. They believe in God, they work hard, and they love their country. They’re the people I grew up with, and I like them.

  Most of the critics panned Smokey. The best reviews came from the audience, and the only movie that grossed more that year was Star Wars. So if you want to know about a film, don’t read the reviews, listen to the word of mouth from people who’ve seen it.

  Alfred Hitchcock was quoted as saying—and his daughter later confirmed it—that Smokey and the Bandit was his favorite movie. But Billy Bob Thornton had the last word. “You know,” he said, “down South, we consider Smokey and the Bandit a documentary.”

  Sally Field

  When I told Universal that I wanted Sally Field for Smokey and the Bandit, they said, “Why would you want the goddamn Flying Nun?”

  “Because she has talent,” I said.

  “She isn’t ready to star in a feature film, and she isn’t sexy.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “Talent is sexy.”

  The execs still weren’t convinced, so I went to Lew Wasserman again, and he made it happen.

  When I called Sally to ask her to be in the picture, she wasn’t exactly thrilled. “I know your movies are commercial, but it’s not the kind of thing I want to do,” she said. “Then again, my agents tell me I need a commercial movie . . .”

  I wasn’t exactly overjoyed at her reaction, but I decided to take it as a left-handed compliment.

  We didn’t meet until the first rehearsal, and I was taken with her immediately. She was strong and funny and spectacular in the cold reading.

  One of the things people say about Smokey is that you watch two people fall in love on the screen, and it’s true. If ever the old cliché “chemistry” applied . . . I mean, the sexual tension was bouncing off the walls! But there was friction, too. Throughout the filming, Sally would get pissed off because we weren’t doing the work. She hated that we were giggling and laughing and never saying the dialogue in the script. I tried to make her laugh in a scene whenever I could, and I succeeded now and then. It was a big deal for her to break character like that, because she was such a pro. She’d get mad at herself and mad at me because, I think, she was afraid of it.

  “There’s no script here!” she’d say.

  “We’ll wing it,” I’d say.

  “I’m not from the improv school!” she’d say.

  “Trust me,” I’d say.

  And she did, a little. She loosened up to the point that in one scene, out of nowhere, she broke into a marvelous improvisation. We were in the car, and she put her feet on the windshield and started dancing and talking about how she’d always wanted to be in a play. She went on and on with funny, open-book kind of stuff that was brave and real. That’s when I realized I was falling in love.

  —

  SALLY GREW UP in Hollywood. Her mother was an actress and her dad was an army officer. They divorced when Sally was four, and her mom married the actor-stuntman Jock Mahoney. Jock had doubled for Errol Flynn, and I remembered one incredible stunt he did in Adventures of Don Juan (1948). He’s at the top of a staircase sword fighting, and a bunch of guys run up the stairs to get him. He dives off, flies through the air, lands on three guys, gets up, and fights his way out. The first time I saw it on the screen, I knew it was a lot tougher to do and a lot more dangerous than it looked.

  It was hard for me to hate Jock because I had such respect for him as a professional. But I was angry at the way he’d treated Sally. There were two girls, Sally and Jock’s natural daughter, Princess. Jock treated her . . . well . . . like a princess. When he wasn’t being mean to Sally, he was ignoring her. Until she started winning awards. That pissed me off. And I can’t prove it, but he may have been physically abusive. Sally never said so, but I could read between the lines.

  While we were together, I tried to guide Sally’s career, and one day she asked me to read a script. “What do you think?” she said.

  “Nomination!” I said. “This is your chance to stick it in their ear and show what you can do. Don’t pass it up.”

  The script was Norma Rae (1979), and it would be her breakout film.

  Then again, I also advised her to do Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979). I thought she needed to do another commercial film to balance it all out. It was one of those “disaster” pictures that was guaranteed to make money. She did it reluctantly, and she was not happy with me or with her performance.

  Sally has spent most of her professional life working for respect. She started in television, first as Gidget (1965–66) and then as The Flying Nun (1967–70), and spent the next ten years trying to live those roles down. That explains why, when she won her second Oscar, for Places in the Heart (1984), she said, “I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect. The first time I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it—and I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!” She was making a reference to a line in Norma Rae, but nobody got the joke, and Sally got slammed for it. To make it worse, people misquoted her as saying, “You like me, you really like me!” That line has been dogging her ever since.

  Since then, I think her acting has been interesting and full of truth. I just wish she’d work more often. It may have something to do with the lack of roles for older women, but Sally’s not like a lot of older women. She’s able to get past it on the screen. Unfortunately, a lot of producers can’t get past it. To this day they don’t realize how good she is. I know her well enough to know that she won’t accept a role unless she’s certain it’s the right thing, and that she’d rather sit at home than have people think she sold out. But sometimes doing nothing can be a bad choice.

  —

  SALLY AND I proposed to each other more than once, but every time I wanted to get married, she didn’t, and every time she wanted to get married, I didn’t. It was more than just bad timing. She didn’t like the work we did. In all, Sally and I made four pictures together: Smokey and the Bandit (1977), The End (1978), Hooper (1978), and Smokey and the Bandit II (1980). She’d had no eyes to do the original Smokey, yet it turned out to be a huge success, and she never forgave me for it.

  Usually the biggest problem when two actors marry is that they’re constantly fighting over the mirror. That wasn’t an issue with us, but we did have doubts about whether we could keep our relationship going when we’d be working in different cities or on different continents, or when one would be more successful than the other. And we’d both been married and divorced, and neither of us wanted to make another mistake. If we had married, I think it would have been a dangerous situation, like fire and gasoline, but there would have been wonderful moments, too. And I would have been determined to make it work.

  We never actually lived together. We kept our
own homes. Sally had two boys and they were great kids. I adored them both and had a lot of fun with them. It wasn’t until I had my own son that I realized what a gift she’d given me. I don’t know how she did it. She’d send them off to school, prepare their meals, help them with their homework, tuck them in bed, and still have the time and energy to cater to me. Inside that little body is one of the strongest people I’ve ever known.

  —

  AFTER WE BROKE UP, I wanted to see her again, but she refused and I fell apart. I wrote her a letter saying: “Could we just go to dinner?” The answer was no. I still wanted to see her, but my pride stepped in and I gave up.

  Later, when I was sick and under fire, Sally did the Playboy interview. When they asked whether I had AIDS, she said she didn’t know when she should have said, “That’s ridiculous, there’s nothing to those rumors.” Then, in the same answer, she said, “There’s always been something going on around Burt.”

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? I was shocked and hurt, and I still don’t know what possessed her to say it. She sent me a halfhearted note of apology, saying she’d been “flippant” with her answer. I don’t know how many people read the interview, but I’m the only one who read the note, so I don’t think it balanced out.

  We haven’t been in touch since. I wish I could turn back the clock. I’m sorry I never told her that I loved her, and I’m sorry we couldn’t make it work. It’s the biggest regret of my life.

  John Bassett and Donald Trump

  In 1982, John Bassett had a vision for a new professional football league at a time when the NFL had a monopoly and a reputation as a stodgy, “no-fun” league. John wanted to make pro football fun again. He cofounded the United States Football League and formed a team in Tampa Bay, Florida. I became a partner and we took the name Bandits, after Smokey and the Bandit.

  John had been one of the founders of both World TeamTennis and the World Football League, where he made a landmark deal to bring Miami Dolphins superstars Jim Kiick, Paul Warfield, and Larry Csonka to the league. The WFL lasted only two seasons, and John’s franchise went belly-up. He could have declared bankruptcy, but he insisted on paying off all the team’s debts.