Sally Field waited until age 76 to publicly confront the truth about one of Hollywood’s most iconic romances. In her 2018 memoir, “In Pieces,” released just days after Burt Reynolds died, she described their relationship not as a fairy tale but as a dysfunctional bond marked by control, jealousy, and emotional entanglement. Field and Reynolds first met in 1977 on the set of “Smokey and the Bandit. ” Their on-screen chemistry was undeniable, and off-screen, the connection was immediate and intense.
Field later described it as something deeper and less controllable than love at first sight, a bond that blurred the lines between character and reality. Reynolds, for his part, spent his final years publicly declaring Field the love of his life. In a 2015 interview, he said he had been infatuated with her since childhood. But Field’s account of their time together was far less romantic.
She said his affection often felt like control and that his repeated declarations of love came too late to undo the harm. Field wrote that Reynolds disapproved of her rising stardom. When she landed critically acclaimed roles, he responded with distance or disapproval. She recalled that he would not attend major events, such as the Oscars, because the spotlight would be on her rather than him.
His jealousy, she said, became an invisible leash that she did not realize was tightening until years later. “He couldn’t emotionally hold my success,” she wrote of that period. Field acknowledged that the relationship mirrored deep wounds from her own past. In the memoir, she revealed that she had been sexually abused as a child by her stepfather, actor Jock Mahoney.
She said the trauma shaped her tendency to gravitate toward powerful men who made her feel small but needed, and that her dynamic with Reynolds reenacted old patterns of submission and survival. As her career grew, the relationship frayed. Field described the time as confusing, complicated, and hurtful. She said Reynolds became emotionally distant and manipulative, using his stardom as both a shield and a sword when her success threatened to outshine his.
In 2022, Field appeared on a talk show and was asked about her most disappointing on-screen kiss. She answered without hesitation: “Burt Reynolds. A lot of drooling. ” The audience laughed, but the comment pointed to a deeper truth about a relationship that never felt equal, even at its most romantic.
For the final 30 years of Reynolds’s life, Field never spoke to him directly again. She said the distance was not about bitterness but about self-preservation. Reynolds referenced her often in interviews, calling her the one who got away. She never responded.
She said she had made peace with walking away and did not want to rekindle an emotional fire she had worked hard to extinguish. Field was glad Reynolds never read her memoir. She said the book was not written to condemn him but to tell her truth, and she feared he would have misread honesty as an attack. In his final years, she wanted to protect him from that pain, even while keeping her distance.
The memoir sparked immediate commentary. On “The View,” co-host Ana Navarro called the relationship a textbook example of fragile male ego, Joy Behar described it as old-school Hollywood chauvinism, and Whoopi Goldberg said, “When a man can’t handle a woman’s success, that’s not love, that’s insecurity. ”
Field said writing the book became a form of liberation. Each chapter, she said, was a wound reopened and finally cleaned.
For the first time, she was not performing. She was reclaiming a narrative that had gone unnamed for decades. She admitted there was real love, at least for a while. But the kind of love they shared, she said, was not built to last.
It was the kind that consumes first and collapses after. “He was not someone I could be around,” she wrote, a line she described as a realization rather than a dig. Walking away, she said, was not an act of revenge but of clarity. She said staying would have meant shrinking and giving up parts of herself that had only just started to bloom.
By leaving, she broke a cycle of accepting less and confusing intensity with intimacy. Field said she no longer feared being misunderstood. With Reynolds gone, she said, there was no longer a risk of backlash or a man waiting to twist the narrative. “It’s time,” she said simply.
“Time to be open. Time to be whole. ”
Her story, she said, was not meant to tear anyone down. It was meant to tell the truth about a young woman finding herself in an industry that often asked her to disappear, and about a relationship that was riddled with imbalance.
She wanted other women to hear her voice and know they were not crazy, not wrong, and not alone. At 76, Field finally confirmed what many had long suspected. Her love story with Reynolds was not a Hollywood fairy tale but a tangled emotional reckoning. Behind the charm was control.
Behind the silence was survival. She said her truth now stands not as scandal but as strength.
