But Enough About Me: A Memoir

by Burt Reynolds

  As Carol said, it’s a shame we don’t have a system where the losing team has to pay the winning team’s lawyers. But she did accomplish one thing: The paper left her alone after that.

  The Enquirer was headquartered in Lantana, about twenty-five miles from Jupiter. They bragged about how they had the tallest Christmas tree in the United States, and tourists came from everywhere to see it. On Christmas Eve my pilot and I loaded a bucket of horseshit under my helicopter, flew over the Enquirer building, and dropped it on the tree. I thought it was fitting, given the crap they were writing about us.

  —

  THE FIRST TIME I called Loni “The Countess,” she beamed, and from then on it was in her contract.

  She bought everything in triplicate, from everyday dresses to jewelry to china and linens. She bought designer gowns for ten thousand dollars a pop and wore them only once. “I never wear a dress after it’s been photographed,” she said. “I have to dress like a star.”

  I gave her a platinum American Express card with a $45,000 credit limit. She maxed it out in half an hour. Her spending was plunging me into debt, but my attitude was, whatever makes her happy is okay. But eventually the well ran dry.

  We called it quits after five years of marriage. When we announced the separation, the press went into high gear. Princess Diana sent me a thank-you note for keeping her off the cover of People magazine. For a long time after the divorce, the tabloids were still calling Loni and me “cheesecake and beefcake.”

  The worst part of the divorce was losing custody of Quinton. He was only six at the time, and the judge decided he’d be better off with his mother. We got Quinton when he was three days old. We named him for Quint Asper, my character in Gunsmoke, and for the great Quentin Reynolds, the radio journalist I idolized when I was a boy.

  I fell in love the second I laid eyes on Quinton. I took him everywhere with me, carrying him around like a football. I didn’t want to let go of him. When it came to showing affection, I was determined to be the opposite of my dad. I was always demonstrative with Quinton and made sure he knew how much I loved him. It would embarrass him sometimes when I’d hug and kiss him, but he got used to it and I think he even came to like it.

  Quinton knew he was adopted from an early age because somebody close to us decided to tell him so. He never asked me about it. If he had, I would have said, “I was lucky. I got to pick you.” He was a bright child with a precocious sense of humor. One Sunday when he was four or five, I got up late, and when I walked into the kitchen he said, “Daddy! What are you doing up? It’s still daylight.”

  When Quinton was in preschool he learned to say the blessing for lunch: “God is great, God is good.” One day I was driving him and a friend home from school and gave them a snack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The other boy said, “Wait! We gotta say, ‘God is great, God is good,’ and Quinton said, “It’s only a sandwich.”

  When he was twelve he said, “When you go to an actor’s house, there’s a picture of the actor and other actors. If you go to a producer’s house, there are Picassos. I think I’ll be a producer.”

  I tried to keep him out of the spotlight when he was growing up, and the last thing I wanted was for him to have his heart broken in show business. But he wound up in the business after all, as a film editor, and he’s doing great. He edited his first picture in 2011, and the film editor Nick McLean, who I’ve worked with a lot over the years, made Quinton an assistant editor. He’s done several films with Nicky in the last couple of years.

  It’s been hard because he lives in California, across the street from his mother. I don’t think he’s heard the greatest things in the world from her about me. We talk on the phone, but it’s not a great relationship. I love him so much and I think he loves me. It’s just hard. When I’m in L.A., we have dinner, but we don’t get to spend as much time as I’d like to.

  Quinton never had the chance to know my dad. He met him when he was little, he sat on his grandfather’s lap and all that stuff, and Big Burt thought Quinton was terrific, but they didn’t bond the way I would have liked.

  Big Burt never told me I was a man, but Quinton did.

  One of the hardest things I ever had to do was tell Quinton that Loni and I were separating. We went for a walk on the beach, but I couldn’t say it. Finally, Quinton looked up at me and said, “Daddy, is the dance over?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Mommy and I started the dance together, but the dance is over and now she’s going to her side and I’m going to mine.”

  “It’ll be all right, Daddy,” he said. “You’re a man.”

  Ossie Davis

  Hattie McDaniel was the first African-American to win an Academy Award. It was a Supporting Actress Oscar for playing a slave in Gone with the Wind (1939), and she had to sit in the back of the auditorium at the awards ceremony. It was more than twenty years before Sidney Poitier became the first black to star in a Hollywood film and the first since Hattie McDaniel to win an Oscar (for Lilies of the Field in 1963).

  When I was studying acting in New York in the 1950s, there were blacks in my acting class, and coming from the South, I was surprised they were working in the theater and stunned to see them playing “white” parts. Growing up watching movies, I was used to seeing African-Americans only playing slaves or domestics.

  There was a young black actor named Ossie Davis in the class, and I was so impressed by his talent and his manner, I tried to do as many scenes with him as I could. We became friends, and Ossie told me that he always felt he had to conduct himself with dignity because he knew that whenever he was seen, he would be judged.

  Like everybody else, I had a crush on Ossie’s wife, Ruby Dee, and I tried to do every scene I could with her, too. (I don’t think Ossie was crazy about that.) Ruby was a talented actor and a wonderful person, and she and Ossie were devoted to each other. Their marriage lasted almost sixty years, until Ossie’s death in 2005.

  I once told Ossie that at Florida State I was the fastest guy on the team in the 100, 220, and 440.

  “How many blacks did you have?” he said.

  “None,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “that might have had something to do with it.”

  When I was growing up in Florida, football, along with just about everything else, was segregated. There were white schools and black schools, and they didn’t play against each other. At Palm Beach High we played our games on Friday night. The black high school, Roosevelt, played on Saturday night, and I went to their games. I’d be the only white in the stands. The black students returned the favor by coming to my games, though they had to sit in the end zone. If I scored a touchdown, I’d go over and throw them the ball. The place would go crazy, because you weren’t supposed to do that. People kept telling me to stop making waves.

  I didn’t play against a black player until college, and even then almost all the teams were completely white, and there were no black coaches. Jake Gaither was legendary in our part of the country. As head coach of the all-black Florida A&M University from 1945 to 1969, he invented the split-T formation and was a great motivator of players. “I like my boys to be agile, mobile, and hostile,” he liked to say.

  Gaither won six black college national championships and achieved an incredible .844 winning percentage, to this day one of the all-time best records of any college football coach. But he could never get a job at a white university.

  —

  OSSIE USED TO tell me, “You know, you’re the only actor in the world liked by both African-Americans and the Ku Klux Klan.” I didn’t like to think that the Klan part was true, and I wanted to remove any doubt about where I stood.

  Early in 1965, I asked Ossie if I could join the planned march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery to protest the state’s denial of voting rights to African-Americans.

  “Of course you can,” he said. “
But are you sure you want to get involved? You might lose friends.”

  “The hell with ’em!” I said.

  As the date approached, it turned out that I had to go to Thailand first, to shoot Operation C.I.A. When the production wrapped, instead of going home I flew straight to Alabama, but when I landed in Birmingham I collapsed and wound up in the hospital.

  At first the doctors thought it was Hodgkin’s disease, but they eventually diagnosed schistosomiasis—snail-parasite eggs in the bloodstream! I’d almost certainly contracted it shooting a fight scene in a polluted Thai river. The problem was, the eggs were beginning to hatch. They brought in a microscope and showed me the little buggers wriggling around in my blood. It might not have been so severe, they said, if I’d had a spleen to purify my blood. Luckily, a cure for schistosomiasis had been discovered a few years before. They gave me a series of shots and I gradually recovered, but not in time for the historic march.

  —

  IF THERE’S ANY CONFUSION about my birthplace, it’s my fault. I was born in Lansing, Michigan. We moved to Florida when I was five. I grew up a Southern boy who didn’t want to be a Yankee, so for a long time I told people that I was born in Waycross, Georgia.

  Why Waycross, Georgia? I liked the sound of it.

  I still live in Florida. That’s where I feel at home. Though I thrived on the excitement of New York when I was starting out as an actor, I was never comfortable living there. And I wasn’t crazy about L.A. I prefer the South. I feel about it the same way I feel about America: I love it, but there are things about it I’d like to change.

  —

  I NEVER GOT into golf and never wanted to. I don’t understand why people are so passionate about it. But I occasionally used to sneak on a local course and play nine holes, more for the walking than the game itself. The members would see me and they didn’t seem to care; some of them were downright friendly.

  One day I took football greats Bernie Casey and Rosey Grier with me as my “guests” and we played the back nine. A couple of days later two club members came by and said, “You’re welcome to play if you join and pay dues, but we don’t want any of your friends.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked, knowing full well what they meant. I just wanted to make them say it.

  “We think you know what we mean.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “Tell me. Does it have anything to do with the color of their skin?”

  They didn’t answer. They just politely excused themselves and left.

  I never went back. I was damned if I’d sneak into a place like that.

  —

  EVENING SHADE (1990–1994) was the most satisfying thing I’ve done on television. Ossie hadn’t done a sitcom, and when I called to ask him to be on the show, his response was poetic. “I’m afraid I’m too heavy,” he said. “My feet are too big and my head is too solid. I can’t float on the surface that the sitcom tends to generate.”

  Fortunately, Ossie overcame his reluctance, and he became the backbone of the show. Whenever my character had a problem, he’d go to Ossie’s Ponder Blue character for advice and he’d have the answer. Ossie was like that in real life, too.

  The budget was high because of the quality of the cast. Marilu Henner played my wife and Hal Holbrook played her newspaper-publisher father. Charley Durning was the cranky town doctor, with Ann Wedgeworth as his wife. Ossie played the owner of the barbecue joint where we all hung out, and he was also the narrator of the show. When he summed up every episode at the end, it was like hearing the voice of God. We were also lucky to have Elizabeth Ashley, Michael Jeter, and a young Hilary Swank.

  Hillary Clinton, then the first lady of Arkansas, was a friend of the producers, Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. Hillary suggested we name the show Evening Shade, after an actual town in the state, but it was really based on the small town in Missouri where Linda Thomason grew up.

  Linda was a brilliant writer. She wrote the pilot and about every third or fourth show herself, and you could always recognize her episodes because they were funny and had lots of heart. And she knew how to write for an actor’s rhythms.

  As the creative force behind the show, Linda supervised all the scripts, and she was open to suggestions. She even let us improvise a little. At one point early in the series I ad-libbed a line and the script girl told Linda about it and she said, “That’s all right, he writes ’em better than I do anyway.” I’d never, ever heard her give me a compliment like that. It was so generous. I was floored . . . and grateful.

  We’d have a meeting and she’d say, “We need a joke here.” And I’d make a suggestion and she’d say, “That’s great!” and we’d do it. I’d meet with the writers every Monday and we would talk about what I thought might be a good story for each character. Like Jim Arness on Gunsmoke, I wanted everyone to have a show.

  With the exception of The Tonight Show, Evening Shade was the first time I worked in front of a live audience and I loved it. Everything seemed to click. We’d do a run-through with an audience as a kind of dress rehearsal, and it was usually so good we didn’t do a second one.

  I stayed friends with everybody in the cast. I talk to Marilu all the time. Fabulous girl. She’s got that twinkle in her eye and she knows how to twist men around her finger. I always had fun with her and have always thought she’s one of the sexiest women in the world. We used to say to each other that we just missed. When she was going with somebody I was loose, and when I was going with somebody she was loose, so we never got together. When she started having kids she told me, “I waited as long as I could, but you didn’t ask me.”

  The character I played in Evening Shade, Wood Newton, is me. Making him a coach was my idea. If I hadn’t been an actor, I’d have been a football coach. I love football, and I love young people and think I can communicate with them. But I didn’t want Wood to be a successful coach. He’d been All Pro himself, but you can’t coach without decent players, and he never won a game the whole time we were on the air. I also wanted him to be an ex–Pittsburgh Steeler because they were tough guys and I had friends on the team. Terry Bradshaw and some of his teammates even came on the show, and it was great fun. We also got Bobby Bowden to come on.

  Bobby was one of the greatest college football coaches of all time. In his thirty-three seasons at Florida State, he won two national titles and twelve Atlantic Coast Conference championships. His career record of 377-129-4 is second only to Joe Paterno’s of Penn State. One of the keys to his success is that he was a father figure to a lot of his players who didn’t have dads in their lives. He had outlaws on his teams, but they behaved themselves because he was a straight arrow with them.

  Just as we were about to shoot Bobby’s episode, the director told me, “He doesn’t know his lines!” I got the cast together and said, “If he messes up his words, just go with it.” And they did, and he was wonderful.

  Afterward Bobby said, “I ought to do more of these shows!”

  —

  THE THOMASONS had a big hit with Designing Women (1986–93) and wanted to do something that showed that not all Southerners are rednecks. They wanted the warm relationships of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, but with a layer of sophistication. The way we treated Ossie and the way he treated us was different from anything I’d ever seen on television. Nobody seemed to notice he was black, and that’s the way it should be.

  Jack Horner

  Boogie Nights revived my career, but I did my best not to do it. In 1997, a twenty-seven-year-old director named Paul Thomas Anderson called to say he was making a film about the porn industry and that he wanted me to play Jack Horner, a director of adult films. I thought that glamorizing pornography was a terrible idea, and I told him so. But he kept calling. And I kept turning him down.

  Finally, just to get rid of him, I agreed to a meeting. He came to my hotel room and I said, “Look, you don’t get it. Th
e answer is NO!” He made a smart-ass remark, and I blew up. At the end of my tirade he said, “If you can do that in the movie, you’ll get nominated for an Academy Award.”

  His composure impressed me as much as what he said.

  At first I didn’t like Jack Horner, and not just because of how he makes his living. I don’t respect a man who doesn’t respect women. And I still didn’t like the subject matter of the film. But I liked the challenge. I thought about it and finally decided that a real actor should be able to play any role, so I went after it with everything that I had.

  But it was a challenge. It took a long time and a lot of work to “get” the character. I searched for something positive in him: a sense of humor, a desire to do good work even though deep down he knew it wasn’t appreciated. I began to think of Boogie Nights as a family saga, with Jack as the father figure. I think he enjoyed that role. He also thought of himself as an artist. I suppose he was also a voyeur, but I didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t realize it when I finally had him. I never talked to anyone about it, but one day I noticed that people were looking at me differently.

  Paul was mild-mannered and kept a loose rein on the set, without letting anyone forget that he was in charge. We had disagreements, but none of them were his fault, they were mine. I just couldn’t say the lines he wanted me to say. I couldn’t say, “Okay, fuck her in the ass.” I asked for a meeting with Paul and our producer, John Lyons.

  “I don’t think I can deliver that line,” I said.

  “Well, we’ll be here until you can,” Paul said.

  “Can’t we do it another way?”

  “No, I like it the way it is.”

  I thought, Where did this hard-ass come from? But I tried to reason with him. “I can say the line, but I don’t think I can say it very well, because I’m not comfortable with it, and I thought that since you wrote it, you might have another way of doing it.”