Burt Reynolds’ New Love Undergoes Sex Surgery . . . For Him!
Politics makes strange bedfellows—so the saying goes. But, sometimes, so does love! Often, two people who seem to have nothing in common find themselves embroiled in a hot and heavy romance—that no one else can fathom. How often have you heard comments like “I don’t see what he sees in her,” or “I don’t give it a chance in fifty to last”—especially about famous couples like Henry Kissinger, in his.pre-married days, and actress Jill St. John or Margaret Trudeau’s recent rompings with Rolling Stone Mick Jagger. Incongruous couples, yes—but how about adding to that list Burt Reynolds and older flame Dinah Shore, or even Burt Reynolds and his latest choice for his romantic escapades? Burt’s intended has made it quite clear that the actor is extremely special, that whatever he asks for is not too much, that his whim is, in fact, her command.
Only recently Burt claimed that despite what everyone thinks of him, he’s really just a regular guy, that he’s “ready to get married. I know I have a playboy image—but that’s not the real me. I’ve always basically been a one-woman man. I’ve never enjoyed playing the field.”
Well, if you will forgive a very bad pun, Burt is enjoying playing the field right now—Sally Field, that is. And hardly anyone who knows the two of them can believe it’s acutally happening! They met when co-starring in the film Smokey And The Bandit—a very shaky time in Burt’s life. Still a bit weak from his recent health problems, Burt worked himself right back into being a candidate for the hospital during the film. A close friend on the set says: “Burt was very sick because he’s been working too hard and has this hyperventilation problem. He grew to depend on Sally a lot. She’s a lovely, friendly person and she kept him going. She’s involved, herself, with things like health and breathing properly. She’s trying to help Burt with his breathing problems by teaching him to breathe differently. It was obvious they were very close and ever since hey’ve been going out on dates together and seeing each other.”
As for Sally, well she merely says in typical Hollywood style: “Our friendship is really very private. To talk about it any more would be like telling a secret just between you and your children. . . . We’ve tried to keep it a secret. But it’s true. Right now, Burt is the man in my life.”
Indeed, Burt is the man in Sally’s life—and it seems he might be a force behind some of her non-romantic decisions also. You see, Sally is at a crossroads in her life, a time where she has decided she must shed one image and go on to another. That’s the irony in her and Burt’s relationship—no one understood how Burt, who has always claimed he liked older women, could fall for someone like Sally with her Flying Nun and Gidget image. To tell the truth, Sally’s not too wild about that reputation, either, and claims that she’s never been that comfortable with it. “When I was growing up in the San Fernando Valley,” she recalls, “my half-sister, Princess Melissa O’Mahoney, was the kind of girl boys couldn’t take their eyes off. I used to walk around with her, and to be honest, it was painful. The fellows didn’t even know I existed. . . . When you are eighteen and look like thirteen, when you feel a great surge of inner strength and are treated like a baby doll, this can cause an identity crisis.”
Unfortunately the identity crisis lasted longer than most, as Sally was molded into sexless, cute-as-a button roles—that is, until she put her foot down and convinced director Bob Rafelson to use her, nude scene and all, in his R-rated film Stay Hungry. Sally claims it was “a challenge I’ve wanted to meet for a long time and I’m grateful for an opportunity to express myself. . . . It was first written as a basic sexy girl who walks into a room and all the men want to jump on her. That’s not the Sally Field type. But I insisted that sex wasn’t just a look, or just rolling around in bed. Sexuality isn’t just one way. Bob became intrigued with the idea of playing a flatchested girl with an asexual image, and he went along with it. Sensuality doesn’t come out of a cookie cutter. It’s what’s cooking underneath.”
Well, Burt has found out what’s cooking underneath—and he’s obviously stirred something in Sally’s heart. As a matter of fact. Sally is pursuing something that seems to smack of Burt’s influence, if not his pleasure. Though Sally fended off her nude scene-versus her concave chest good-naturedly, she’s desperately trying to expand her horizons, to “not perpetuate the idea that I am an eternal virgin, who doesn’t have a belly button. I have two children and I do have a belly button!”
What Sally is trying to prove to herself and to Burt is that she’s a sexual woman, a whole woman, and you must admit that Burt probably is a major concern in her decision to undergo sex surgery, surgery to increase the size of her bust—and possibly her ego, too.
Burt seems to be in full accord with Sally’s decision, for he has often claimed: “I like a woman with a great sense of humor, obviously. I like a woman who thinks she’s sexy—that’s important to me. I like a woman who’s vulnerable. A romanticist. Not possessive. Her own woman, looks like she doesn’t really need me at all from the outside, could get along very well without me. Self-sufficent. . . . The rest is kind of important to me. I’m very bod conscious. But not in the sense of having something to jump on, only in the sense that I think it’s important that a woman thinks she’s sexy. . . . I’d like a woman who could be a classy, sophisticated lady and .a total whore in bed . . . who’d be intelligent enough to know when to be quiet and when to talk, . . . I want a woman who can go into an affair—as an affair—with her eyes open. This takes a mature woman. Sure I like beauty, too, but looks aren’t enough . . . neither is sex. Nothing is more boring than a girl who is terrific in the sack and that’s it—period. If you get into bed too soon, where do you go from there? Anticipation is half the fun. A woman who thinks she’s sexy usually is . . . to me.”
-Perhaps that’s the key to Sally’s problem. All too long she’s been’.considered the little girl next door, Gidget, The Flying Nun, and now at the age of thirty she’s rebelling, finally feeling the stirrings of a more complete womanhood that lay dormant all this time. Burt has brought out those feelings, at least he’s encouraged her to admit them and feel them and accept them—and enjoy them. Naturally, if Sally feels better about her body, about her physical sexiness, it will improve her opinion about herself—and probably help her career, too. It took Stay Hungry to show the Hollywood type-casters that Sally was determined not to play the virginal ingenue for the next twenty years, but it took Burt Reynolds to help her understand her own feminity, her own desire to be a woman, not a little girl!
THE END
See Universal’s Smokey And The Bandit.
It is a quote. SCREEN STARS MAGAZINE JULY 1977
