But Enough About Me: A Memoir

by Burt Reynolds

  “Yes,” he said, “he’s a director’s actor because he does everything you ask and he does it perfectly.” I never thought Ray Collins was a great actor, but Orson was right, he gave just the performance needed.

  It’s a shame we didn’t get the work we might have from Orson. I think a lot of it had to do with his insistence on total control over his pictures, which the studios refused to give him. He didn’t help himself, either. He wouldn’t kowtow, and his reputation for not being able to finish a picture was a curse he couldn’t overcome.

  Orson got to be kind of a joke toward the end of his life. It was those damn wine commercials as much as anything else. (“We will sell no wine before its time.”) It bothered me, because I idolized him as an actor, as a director, and as a man. He was always generous with compliments and showered goodwill on people he liked. He never gave me advice, but he would visit the set when I was directing and whisper encouragement. He was always patting me on the back. What a thrill it was to get an “attaboy” from Orson Welles!

  Students

  John D. MacArthur made two fortunes, one in the insurance business and the other in Florida real estate, especially in Palm Beach County, where my dad worked for him building houses. I think Mr. MacArthur is best remembered as a great philanthropist. His foundation supports Public Television and awards MacArthur Fellowships, the “genius grants,” to encourage creativity in America. Though he was one of the richest men in the country, you never knew it. Instead of buying Bermuda shorts, he’d cut down old trousers. He drove a beat-up Lincoln and lived at the seedy Colonnades Hotel in Palm Beach Shores, where he conducted business from a booth in the bar. I got to know him through my dad and he gave me business advice over the years. One of the things he said was “Never open a restaurant or a theater.”

  I did both. In the same place.

  My dream of having my own theater came true in 1979, when I opened the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre in Jupiter, Florida. I wanted to give something back to the community where I grew up, and I wanted an alternative to the snooty and expensive Palm Beach Playhouse. I wanted a theater for people who’d never seen live actors on a stage, at prices they could afford. (I imagined half the audience climbing down out of pickups.) I wanted a place where actors could come and have fun without having to worry about being clobbered by the New York critics, and where apprentices could earn their Equity cards. I spent two million dollars to build it.

  Dinner theater had a bit of a stink to it. It got laughs on The Golden Girls and other shows, and before we opened people wanted to know what kind of plays we were going to do—“Smokey and the Bandit IV”? But the first season was a sellout even before Sally Field, Tyne Daly, and Gail Strickland started rehearsing for our first production, Vanities.

  It was wonderful to see film or television actors who’d never been on the stage before come there and fall in love with theater. Farrah Fawcett made her stage debut in Butterflies Are Free and proved she could do wonderful work in the right vehicle. Robert Urich was a sensation in The Hasty Heart, and we took the production to Washington, D.C. Julie Harris in Death of a Salesman and Charley Durning in Mass Appeal both won Florida Drama Awards. Ossie Davis did I’m Not Rappaport. Sally and I did The Rainmaker.

  But it wasn’t ALL sweetness and light. Jim Nabors came down to do The Music Man, and it was a disaster. He sat there with tears in his eyes and I said, “Jim, you can either quit and go home, or you can stay and try to make it work.” He had the guts to stay and it did get better. He realized that you’re not an actor until you’ve been on the stage. Jim has that magnificent singing voice. That’s the surprise: You think you’re getting Gomer Pyle and all of a sudden he breaks into one of those wonderful songs.

  He came back the following year in another show and it sold out. They were out there screaming and hollering for him, and he loved every minute of it.

  We were able to attract the likes of Martin Sheen, Vincent Gardenia, Elliott Gould, Ned Beatty. If they were reluctant—the singers wanted to act and the actors wanted to sing—I’d ask, “What’s your favorite play?”

  Carol Burnett has been a pal for a long time. Her comedy show on CBS ran for ten years with that marvelous ensemble—Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence, and Lyle Waggoner. I had a ball guesting on an episode where I played the Lavender Pimpernel and sang “As Time Goes By.” Carol returned the favor by coming to Jupiter and doing Same Time Next Year with me, directed by Dom DeLuise.

  I was asked by a reporter who I’d like to take on a deserted island and I said, “Carol Burnett.” It got back to Carol and she sent me a picture of herself in a bathing suit. On the back of the picture she wrote: “When?” I sent her a box of candy and she took a bite out of each piece and sent them back. I sent her flowers and she kept them for two weeks and returned them with a note: “Your flowers died.”

  We did a revival of Mister Roberts with Josh Logan directing and Marty Sheen in the title role. Josh later said that Marty was as good as Henry Fonda, who’d created the role on Broadway, and we also had the original captain, William Harrigan. It was quite an evening at the theater, and I could have run it for a year. It was way above other dinner theaters.

  We had problems with audiences until we got tough. I’d told the ushers, “Look, we’ll have people who’ll talk over the actors, put their feet up on the back of the seat in front of them, and generally act like they’re home watching TV. You’ll have to hush ’em up and make ’em behave, or make ’em leave.” It worked. The audience learned how to behave themselves.

  We didn’t pay the actors a lot, but we treated them royally and I think they had a good time. We kept ticket prices low, so we had to fill the theater to break even. We were able to do that in the winter, but attendance dropped off in the summer. Even though we kept the overhead as low as possible, we almost never turned a profit. Anybody who’s been around the theater knows that you don’t do it for money, you do it to feel good and to sharpen your craft. Hal Holbrook took three months off of Evening Shade to do King Lear, and the money he was paid didn’t cover half his hotel bill. (When Hal came back to the show, I said, “Now you’re gonna get to work for a good writer.”)

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  WE HAD WONDERFUL people who worked without pay because they loved the theater. There was a lovely lady named Barbara—very classy-looking, with short snow-white hair—who volunteered for everything. She was always asking if we needed help at a party. She’d cook and do just about anything we asked.

  One day she said, “I have a son who’s an actor.”

  “Oh God,” I said, “this has been such a great relationship until now . . .”

  “No,” she said, “I think you’ll like him.”

  “What’s his name?” I said.

  “Jon Voight.”

  I fell over.

  She never told me or anyone else that she was Jon’s mother, even though she knew that Jon and I had been friends since Deliverance. I should have spotted it, because you could see Jon’s face in hers. Jon had no idea of the connection either, and when I told him his mother had been working anonymously for us, he almost fainted.

  Sally Jo Wagner was the matriarch of the theater and my hero, not just because she worked tirelessly for us. I’ve never met anyone braver than that little lady. She had a serious spinal condition, but I never once heard her complain. She never asked for anything, and if you did something for her, she’d turn around and do something twice as nice for you. She went all over Jupiter with the flags flying on her wheelchair. Friends would bring her to the house and we’d sit and talk for hours. She was my psychiatrist! Everyone loved Sally Jo, but no one more than I.

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  I STARTED the nonprofit Burt Reynolds Institute for Film & Theatre when the dinner theater opened in 1979. Acting has been the one constant in my life since I was nineteen years old. Looking back, I see an unbroken line from the day Watson Duncan told me I was going
to be an actor until now, and one of the reasons I teach acting is to pay Mr. Duncan back. I wanted a drama class for aspiring actors who couldn’t otherwise afford training. Charles used to say that everything goes in circles, and it’s strange that our classes are held in the Mirror Ballroom, the big auditorium in Lake Park. There are ghosts there. It’s where I first took the stage in Outward Bound.

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  I’VE KNOWN Frank Eberling since he was a young journalism student at Palm Beach Junior College. That’s when his mother heard that “an actor from Gunsmoke” would be speaking at the college and suggested he interview me, and he did. I remember his reel-to-reel “portable” tape recorder. Not long ago he reminded me that even then I was talking about starting an acting school.

  Frank is an accomplished author, teacher, and filmmaker. He made a wonderful documentary about Watson Duncan, Good Night, Sweet Prince, and I was honored to be part of it along with another of Professor Duncan’s “discoveries,” Monte Markham, who also narrated the film.

  Over the years Frank has done a lot to help my students learn about film acting technique—camera angles and movement, lighting, master shots, close-ups. If the camera is the most important “person” on the set, the cameraman is a close second. I always tell the kids to make friends with him. (I call all my students “kids,” even the old ones.) “I don’t care if the other actors think you’re sucking up to the cameraman,” I say. “I don’t care what they think, and you can’t care what they think. It’s important that both the camera and the cameraman like you.”

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  MY STUDENTS are enthusiastic, and I’ve had success with all kinds of people, from cops to schoolteachers to business executives. I watch them become actors before my eyes.

  When we take a break, they’ll ask about my early days in New York, and as I tell them stories, I think to myself, My God, was I that brave?

  It may seem like a contradiction, but a lot of actors are shy. They don’t seem to be because they have two different personalities: the real human being and the actor. They discover that they’re more comfortable as the actor, so they never go back to the shy individual they really are. They figure the actor is a better person than they are, and a lot of them are right.

  Peter Sellers was like that, to an extreme. Liza Minnelli told me she had a date with him once, and over the course of the evening he was three or four different people. It drove her nuts.

  “Didn’t you find him amusing?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “There was nothing amusing about him. He was scary.”

  Peter was so talented. The only character he couldn’t play was himself.

  Some characters are easier because they’re closer to home. I had no problem playing detectives. I think I did decent work on TV as Dan August, though it was pretty basic. Dan had two expressions: mean and meaner. It was a gritty show. A lot of our guest actors were in Broadway shows, so they weren’t available until eleven at night. We wanted a noir look anyway, and you could do anything you wanted in New York at three a.m., so we filmed all night and never saw the light of day.

  Hawk was an Iroquois detective in the big city. We shot it in Harlem. I used to drive up there, and one night I was circling the block looking for a parking space when a couple of guys came over and said, “You da Hawk?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’m da Hawk.”

  “We like da Hawk. Just leave your car here and we’ll watch it.”

  They watched that car like it was theirs. I never had to worry about it. I tried to give them money, but they wouldn’t take it. They were insulted.

  B.L. Stryker is an ex-cop who lives on a broken-down houseboat in West Palm Beach. The boat was just a shell, no heart, no guts—just like Hollywood. We named the guy B.L. Stryker for my first initials, Burton Leon. (Leon is my middle name, after my grandpa.) My dad didn’t like war pictures, but he liked Duke Wayne, and Stryker is the name of the character Duke played in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949).

  It was easy to slide into those detective parts because I was playing my father. All actors are thieves. I’m no exception. I often used Big Burt’s walk, his gestures, his speech patterns.

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  I LOVE TEACHING, but I couldn’t do it without the skill and dedication of certain people.

  Todd Vittum was a student of mine before he came to work for me. He’s competent and personable, and knows how to handle himself in a pinch. Todd is also a good teacher, especially with people who are just starting. His improv class helps them develop muscles they never knew they had. When he decides that a beginning student is ready, we boost them up to my class. Todd’s a good man. I’m lucky to have him in my corner.

  Carmen Magri is our unofficial historian. At eighty-five, she’s a bundle of energy. While most people slow down at that age, she’s speeding up. She just got back from her annual European vacation. Until recently she owned a jaguar (the cat, not the car) and rode an Indian motorcycle. A year or two ago Todd finally got Carmen on the stage for the first time, and she loved it.

  Jim Lynch was a student who became an assistant director. He was a movie encyclopedia. We’d be talking about who was in this film, who was in that one, and he’d go all the way through the cast. Our mutual love of films was a great bond. He was shy, but we finally got him up on the stage and he was terrific. Jim wasn’t much past forty when he passed away, God love him, but I think the last few years of his life were happy.

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  I’VE REACHED the point where I teach “master” classes, even though I’m still learning myself. New actors ask me where the land mines are because they know I’ve stepped on them all. I can tell them where they are, but they’ll probably step on them anyway, so I take a different approach. Rather than tell them what not to do, I try to keep the advice positive, with a single exception. The one piece of advice I give again and again is from Spencer Tracy: “Never let them catch you acting.”

  An actor’s confidence is fragile. It’s easy for a teacher to bruise a young actor with the wrong words. I tell my students, “Don’t act; behave.” When I catch them acting, I say as gently as I can, “Let’s start again, and don’t let me catch you acting. You’re too good for that.”

  Dudley Remus and I go way back, to a little theater in Delray Beach. Dudley is a terrific actor, but he never had the guts to go to Hollywood or New York. I tried to talk him into it more than once, but he was afraid he’d get his ass kicked. “I’m not that good,” he’d say, and I could never convince him otherwise. He didn’t understand that you gain confidence by venturing into the most dangerous places. Every time you take a risk as an actor it makes you better. Besides talent and a so-called look, you need the courage to try in the first place. And you have to hang in when you’re told to quit and get a real job. Actors have to learn to be kind to themselves. They’re going to get beat up enough when they go to New York or L.A.

  I tell my students to try to work with actors who are better than they are and try to figure out why they’re better. And to think of themselves as part of a community. In Hollywood you’re only as good as your last picture, but in France you’re as good as your best picture, and I’ve been treated warmly by French audiences, critics, and especially actors. On my first trip to Paris I went to a club with a bunch of French actors and they were wonderful to me. I don’t speak French and most of them didn’t speak much English, but it didn’t matter, because actors are the same everywhere. We talked for hours and had a lot of laughs (I’d do a bad imitation of some famous actor and they’d be hysterical). The camaraderie was glorious. It was one of the highlights of my life.

  There are three stages of an actor’s career: young, old, and “You look good.” My advice to older actors, which I haven’t always followed myself, is to play your age. Leading men have a tendency to hang on too long. You can’t hold your stomach in forever.

  The man who’s made the best transition is Clint E
astwood. He’s done it with dignity and style. It’s worse for women: Whoever said that “actors get older, actresses get old,” was right.

  Robin Williams once told a young comedian: “If you’re gonna be a star, you’d better start acting like one. Do you think Burt Reynolds gets nervous? Of course he does.”

  Well, not really. I don’t usually get nervous on the stage or a movie set. I don’t see any reason for it. If a lot of time and money has been spent on a shot, that might make me a little tense, especially if it’s the one that you just have to grab before the end of the day. Generally speaking, though, acting doesn’t make me nervous.

  I’m usually fine with public speaking, too, but once in a while I do get nervous talking in front of a group, and for a long time I couldn’t figure out why. Then I realized that it depends on what’s at stake. If the occasion is in honor of someone I love and respect—if I’m speaking at a testimonial dinner or an awards ceremony for a friend—I do get a little nervous. It isn’t performance anxiety exactly; it’s fear of letting someone else down. But it doesn’t last. It’s kind of like football: the nerves disappear after first contact.

  I once gave a commencement address where I threw away my prepared speech. I started out trying to be whomever they thought they were getting that year, but found I couldn’t do it, so I put the speech away and said, “Do you mind if we just talk?”

  They applauded and that put me at ease.

  Listening is everything for an actor, and one of the first things I say to a class is “I don’t want to teach you how to act, I want to teach you how to listen. If you can really listen, they won’t even see the other actor.” Spencer Tracy did that better than anybody.

  I run Father of the Bride (1950) for my class. It stars Tracy with some good actors, including Joan Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor, and Billie Burke. (I love to watch other actors with him. You can see it in their faces: My God, I’m working with the master!) I tell my students to watch Tracy. He owns the picture. In some scenes he doesn’t have a laugh line, but he steals them anyway. He listens to the other actors, and they make him laugh, and when he laughs, we laugh. That’s the power of listening, and it’s Tracy at his best.