While out to dinner one night at the popular LA eatery Nicky Blair’s, Burt Reynolds caught the eye of Frank Sinatra, who was dining with his entourage.
Summoning Reynolds, Sinatra invited him to a poker game he and his friends would be holding in the restaurant’s kitchen after their meal.
When he joined them, he found them “seated at a big round table in the middle of the kitchen, with all the waiters and busboys rushing back and forth.”
As Sinatra called five-card stud, there was a “big crash,” as “an unlucky busboy had dropped a tray of glassware.”
As Reynolds recalls it, the owner, Nicky Blair, came in “yelling at the poor busboy,” and Sinatra did not approve.
“How much do those glasses cost?” Sinatra asked his host.
“I don’t know, Frank, a few bucks apiece.”
Sinatra nodded to his two bodyguards, and one at a time, each counted out $3,000 in cash and handed it to Blair. “Now bring me three grand worth of glasses,” he said.
The confused restaurateur started sending in busboys with trays full of empty glasses. Sinatra asked one for his name — it was Hector — and said, “Hector, break ’em!” The busboy did as he was told “until the floor was covered with broken glass.”
“Frank told Nicky, ‘If I ever come in and don’t see Hector, I’ll never come back.”
At that point, before a card had been dealt, Reynolds got up to leave.
“ ‘Where the hell are you going?’ Frank said.
“ ‘Home,’ I said. ‘I got my Sinatra story.’ ”
A world of Burt
Reynolds’ new book, “But Enough About Me” (Putnam), is an unconventional memoir. Rather than a complete and chronological account of his life, Reynolds, the top box-office attraction for five straight years in the 1970s, worked with co-author Jon Winokur to compile chapters about people in his life, telling his own story through the often-wild tales of those around him.
Reynolds seemed destined for sex-symbol stardom. In 1957, when he was 21, he appeared on Broadway in “Mister Roberts.” One night, the playwright, William Inge, invited him to a party at Inge’s apartment on Riverside Drive.
There, Inge introduced Reynolds to a “stunning,” somewhat familiar-looking older woman, who wore “a bright yellow silk blouse with nothing underneath.”
She wouldn’t leave Reynolds’ side all night, and asked him to go home with her. He declined, and realized only the next day that he had refused the advances of Greta Garbo.
Reynolds befriended Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman around this time, and one night, Woodward brought him to dinner at Gore Vidal’s home, where it was the three of them and Vidal’s companion, Howard Austen.
As Vidal got drunker, he began verbally abusing Reynolds, realizing Reynolds had feelings for Woodward, Newman’s wife. He flung barbs Reynolds’ way, like, “What do you plan to do, drive a truck or what?” And, “You’re not an actor. Paul’s an actor, but you’re not.”
Enraged, Reynolds could only think to call him an a- -hole, and went into the kitchen to collect himself. As he did, Austen sneaked up behind him, put his arms around him, and said, “I think I love you.”
“Are you nuts?” Reynolds said, then “picked him up and threw him into the living room.”
Reynolds also formed a close, long-term friendship with Bette Davis. The actress was proud of being known as “difficult,” telling him, “Until you’re known in my business as a monster, you’re not a star.”
She shared with him the details of her nasty feud with Joan Crawford.
When they worked together on “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” Davis delighted in torturing her and once “accidentally” hit her in the forehead, causing a cut that required stitches. For a scene in which Davis’ character served Crawford’s a rat, they were set to use a fake, but Davis surprised Crawford during filming by replacing the fake rat with a real one.
Davis and Reynolds attended a party the night Crawford died, and Davis greeted him, in front of other partygoers, with, “Well, the c- - - died today!” Reynolds had been talking to a journalist, and when he quickly made introductions, Davis added, for the journalist’s benefit, “But she was always on time.”
Later, she told reporters, “You should never say bad things about the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good!”
A ‘squeal’ doozy
Reynolds’ most notable performance came in the 1972 film “Deliverance,” in which four men on a rafting trip find themselves embroiled in a nightmare, attacked by nature and rednecks.
The film’s pivotal scene features Ned Beatty’s character being raped.
Seeking an actor with “an authentic Southern accent and no front teeth” to play the rapist’s accomplice, Reynolds brought in Herbert “Cowboy” Coward, whom he had met at a Wild West tourist attraction where Reynolds had worked as a stuntman.
Reynolds writes that when the director, John Boorman, asked Coward whether he was OK “taking part in the rape of a man,” Coward, who had a small stutter, replied, “Hell, I’ve d-done worse things than th-that!”
As for the sodomizer, he was played by character actor Bill McKinney, whom Reynolds calls “one strange dude.”
“Every time you looked at him, he was examining the veins in his forearm, and early mornings I’d see him running nude through the sprinklers on the golf course,” Reynolds writes.
The movie’s most famous line, “Squeal like a pig,” was a McKinney ad lib.
As for the scene itself, Beatty had trouble letting go of it afterward, saying to Reynolds, “When am I going to get this out of my brain?” He also, after a few drinks one night, confessed that “he regretted ever doing the movie,” saying, not incorrectly, “All they’re going to remember is that I was the guy who got boogered.”
Reynolds also reveals that before the film’s release, Barbra Streisand called Boorman asking to see a rough cut, because, she said, “I want to see a man raped for a change.”
Divorce disaster
Reynolds doesn’t spare those closer to him, including ex-wife Loni Anderson, with whom he had one of the more contentious divorces in Hollywood history.
“The truth is, I never did like her,” Reynolds writes. “It would be nice and all that, but I’d be thinking, ‘This is not the person for me. What the hell am I doing with her?’ I don’t remember actually asking her to marry me. There was just pressure . . . coming from her direction.”
During their marriage, he claims, she “bought everything in triplicate, from everyday dresses to jewelry to china and linens. She bought designer gowns for 10,000 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.’ ”
When they finally pulled the plug after five years of marriage, Reynolds received a thank-you note from Princess Diana for “keeping her off the cover of People magazine.”
Reynolds gives generous space in the book to stars he loves — such as Jon Voight (who wrote the book’s foreword), Dom DeLuise, Dinah Shore and Sally Field — and to those he had problems with.
Early in his career. Reynolds bore a remarkable resemblance to Marlon Brando, and even played an actor based on him on “The Twilight Zone.” Reynolds grew his trademark mustache primarily to differentiate himself from Brando, but the star felt that Reynolds was capitalizing on their similar good looks. When they finally worked together, Brando let him have it.
“He was rude,” Reynolds writes. “After about two minutes of small talk, he accused me of trying to capitalize on my resemblance to him.”
“I’ll tell you right now: I’m not having surgery because you don’t like the way I look,” Reynolds said to him, adding, “But I promise not to get fat.”
His take on “Boogie Nights,” which he disparaged after shooting it, then was nominated for an Oscar for his role in it, is slightly more measured than his earlier attitude conveyed.
He admits that part of the problem was director Paul Thomas Anderson’s age — then 27. “I wasn’t crazy about being told to turn left at the couch by a guy who’s younger than some sandwiches I’ve had,” he writes. But he also admits to admiring Anderson’s deep knowledge of, and respect for, film history.
Nonetheless, he says Anderson’s arrogance got to him. After arguing about a line Reynolds didn’t feel comfortable saying, and having Anderson tell him, “You’ll have to find a way to say it. It’s what you were hired for,” Reynolds reached out to punch him before someone held him back.
He wound up with great admiration for co-stars Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Mark Wahlberg, despite Wahlberg getting “very Methody and . . . walking around the set with a fake erection all the time.” But Thomas Jane riled him by getting physical with the cast, showing off his martial-arts moves too aggressively.
He also had problems with Heather Graham.
“Just like in the film, [she] wore roller skates the whole time . . . but no bra,” he writes. “I was more enthralled with the skates. She’d come to the set with half her clothes off. I don’t think I’m a prude, but I didn’t find it sexy.”
Bond. Burt Bond.
As rough as Reynolds can be on others, he’s equally rough on himself. In one fascinating section for Hollywood obsessives, he reviews the roles he tried for and didn’t land, and, worse, those he was offered and turned down.
After Sean Connery gave up playing James Bond the first time, Reynolds says Bond producer Cubby Broccoli offered him the role, and he turned it down because he thought, “An American can’t play him. The public won’t accept it.”
He also turned down Bruce Willis’ role in “Die Hard,” throwing shade at the actor by saying, “That’s OK. I don’t regret turning down anything that Bruce Willis took.”
Also refused by Reynolds, he says: Richard Gere’s role in “Pretty Woman,” Jack Nicholson’s parts in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Terms of Endearment,” and the role of Han Solo in one of the “Star Wars” sequels. He was also up for Adam West’s title role in the “Batman” TV series, but it’s unclear if he was considered for the part or actually offered it.
He acknowledges that taking on a string of car-chase films, from “Smokey and the Bandit” to “Cannonball Run,” was a mistake, as he prioritized having fun over furthering his career.
He also acknowledges something few actors do — that at the height of his popularity, he was often exactly as insufferable as the worst gossip has portrayed him.
“I was Number One at the box office five years in a row, which I don’t think anybody has done since,” he writes. “In 1978, I had four movies at once playing nationwide. If I met you then, I’m sorry.”
Sorry, Trump!
Donald Trump doesn’t have Burt Reynolds’ vote.
In his memoir, Reynolds talks about the short-lived United States Football League, a spring-summer league that kicked off in 1983.
Reynolds blames Trump for the league’s failure.
“There are always guys who come out of the woodwork and take everything they can. Donald Trump was one such offender,” he says.
He says Trump alone wanted to compete directly with the NFL in the fall, which the other owners and officials saw as unrealistic.
Trump, Reynolds believes, “was angling for a merger with the NFL so he could wind up with an NFL franchise for a song.”
“[Trump’s] personal ambition sank the USFL,” he says.
“I pray he never gets the chance to do to the USA what he did to the USFL.”