In March of 1980, The National ENQUIRER go the inside scoop on how Burt Reynolds turned around his wayward teen years:
Beefcake superstar Burt Reynolds was a two-fisted loser who was headed, by his own admission, for life as a bum before he discovered acting. In a fascinating look at the real Burt Reynolds, Bernhardt J. Hurwood strips away the super-macho image and paints a startling picture of the man behind the myth.
Here, in an ENQUIRER installment from his book, “Burt Reynolds,” the author tells how a teenage Burt wound up on a chain gang — and how a near-fatal car crash dramatically changed the actor’s life.
By Bernhardt J. Hurwood
When Burt Reynolds was growing up in Riviera Beach, Fla., he was constantly being pushed into proving his masculinity by the other kids.
He was known as “Buddy,” but the kids called him “Mullet” because he lived in a neighborhood made up predominantly of fishermen. They also named him “Greaseball” because his mother was Italian (his father was half Cherokee).
Buddy frequently got into scrapes. “I was a wild kid,” he recalls. “Restless and rebellious. My dad was police chief of West Palm Beach and somehow that made me resentful.”
Unfortunately for Buddy, his father was not a demonstrative man. “Going to hug him,’ Burt recalls today, “was like trying to hug a statue of Lincoln. You just didn’t … My whole family was undemonstrative. My mother, my brother and sister and I — we never touched each other or expressed our affection.”
And between the cool atmosphere of disciplined no-nonsense at home and the continuous need to be defensive at school, the pressure finally built up to the breaking point.
When he was 15 Buddy Reynolds ran away, determined to make his way in the world alone.
Very quickly he discovered what the outside world was like. Although he managed to make it all the way to South Carolina, he was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to serve a week on a chain gang as a water boy. Since he was a juvenile, he was sent back to West Palm Beach. Instead of going home, he went to live at the house of his girlfriend.
Actually he was hoping for some sign of acceptance from his father. He wanted to be asked to come home. He’d even have been happy if he’d been ordered to return.
But both father and son were unbending and neither would give in.
When they met on the street the elder Reynolds invariably greeted his son with a cool, “How are you, boy?”
Looking back, Burt recalls, “I wanted to prove something to my father, but, of course I didn’t. There’s a saying in the South that you’re not a man until your father tells you so.”
Buddy’s father wasn’t ready to tell him yet, and Buddy knew it, so he went home after about a year.
Meanwhile, at Palm Beach High, Buddy plunged into athletics.
“If I hadn’t been a jock,” he said, “I never would have finished high school. I was having a severe identity crisis. We didn’t have then, but if we had, I sure Would’ve been into it.
“One day I found out I could I outrun everybody in the school. I scored a touchdown and they didn’t call me ‘Mullet’ anymore. They were all saying, ‘Hi, Buddy!’ Amazing, isn’t it? One day I was ‘Mullet’ and the next day I was Buddy. In the back of my mind I thought, Boy! If there ever comes a time when you can’t outrun everybody — if you don’t score — you’ll go back to being a mullet.” That was my incentive to go to school.”
At Florida State College, he was a football star and was even signed by the Baltimore Colts. But then came a near-fatal car accident that altered his life. His knees were injured so badly, it put an end to his football career.
He quit school and headed for New York where he did odd jobs such as washing dishes.
“I was depressed, I was unhappy, I was drinking. I was well on my way to becoming a bum,” he said.
He started hanging out with actors in Greenwich Village. He also worked as a bouncer.
“I had no eyes to be an actor,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what they were talking about most of the time. Somebody asked me if I ever read ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ Hell. I was 21 years old, and I had never read any book at all, so I read ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ and I thought, hey, this is good. That book got me interested in reading – it changed my life.
“I bumped into this guy at a bar and he asked me if I could read. I almost slugged him. What he meant was could I read lines. He was a writer.”
The writer was Conrad Hopkins, now an English professor, who got the young ex-jock interested in books and plays.
So Burt went back to Florida to study drama at Palm Beach Junior College.
In 1958, his performance in a school production of “Outward Bound” won him the Florida Drama Award and a scholarship to the Hyde Park Playhouse on Long Island.
While Burt was an apprentice there, Joanne Woodward played a leading role in one of the playhouse productions.
Looking back, Burt says, “I was an apprentice and she was a star, but she helped me secure my very first agent so I could get some real jobs.
“It certainly wasn’t because of my talent. I did look like Marlon Brando, but I think it was because Joanne just took an interest in this shy man who was always peering around the curtains.”
But eventually Burt Reynolds made it in television with two of his own series — “Hawk” and “Dan August.”
Heartache followed. Both series got canceled … and his marriage to actress Judy Carne ended in divorce in 1965.
He was the first member of his family ever to have undergone a divorce, and to him it symbolized failure on a grand scale. He was devastated. He thought about how hurt and angry his father had been when he dropped out of Florida State College. All he could think of now was failure — football, two TV series, and now, in marriage.
In a fit of depression he picked up the phone, called his mother, and said, “Tell Dad he was right about me. Tell him I’m a quitter.”
Before anyone could speak, Burt’s father, who had picked up the extension phone, said, “Come on home. I’ll tell you about all the things I’ve quit in my life.”
Recalling the incident with emotion, Burt says, “My father and I would still be strangers if he hadn’t said that to me. Thank God he did. I caught the first plane home.
“In the house he offered me a drink. “My father and I took a bottle of cognac outside and talked all night long. We got smashed together and then I hugged him and he hugged me.
“He started talking about the mistakes he’d made.
“Suddenly he was a totally different man. I cried. And he got tears in his eyes. Now my dad and I are embarrassing — running around and grabbing each other in airports. We always hug and kiss each other.”
