Sally Field’s memoir IN PIECES was seven years in the making. She wrote it without the help of a ghostwriter. The book is quite revealing, intimate, and depicts incredibly haunting childhood memories that are revealed for the first time publicly. Sally Field's memoir has a gross story about The Monkees. I am currently reading Sally Field's new autobiography, In Pieces (which is excellent, if anyone's interested in celebrity memoirs.) Anyway, there's this story she tells in chapter nine about filming The Flying.
NEW YORK (AP) — Oscar winner Sally Field is writing a memoir.
The actress has an agreement with Grand Central Publishing for “In Pieces,” scheduled for next fall.
The publisher announced Wednesday that the book will cover her private and professional lives, notably her rise from the teen star of “Gidget” to her acclaimed performances in “Places in the Heart,” ″Norma Rae,” ″Lincoln” and other films.
Field said in a statement that she will write about how acting helped her manage the transition from a “complicated childhood.”
The 71-year-old has also appeared in such films as “Smokey and the Bandit,” with then-boyfriend Burt Reynolds, “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Forrest Gump.”
Burt Reynolds dies aged 82
Burt Reynolds says Sally Field was the love of his life.Source:Supplied
SHE had the Sixties’ sunniest smile and her talent saw the all-American teen TV star grow up to win two Oscars.
But now, aged 71, Sally Field has finally revealed the anguish behind that famous girl-next-door warmth, The Sun reports.
The actress, now best known for her roles in Forrest Gump and Mrs Doubtfire, has spoken for the first time about being sexually abused by her stepfather as a child.
She has also told how she suffered an eating disorder and was hooked on powerful diet pills during her time as a national sweetheart — and had an abortion aged 17.
And in new memoir In Pieces, out in Australia next month, Sally describes how her troubled past made her submit to an emotionally abusive relationship with actor Burt Reynolds, who died earlier this month.
She writes of her Smokey And The Bandit co-star: “Gently, Burt began to housebreak me, teaching me what was allowed and what was not.”
Burt Reynolds says Sally Field was the love of his life.Source:Supplied
“We were a perfect match of flaws. It was instantaneous and intense. Blindly I fell into a rut that had long ago formed in my road, a pre-programmed behaviour.
That pre-programmed submissive behaviour had begun after her mother, sci-fi B-movie actress Margaret Field, married her second husband in 1952 — two years after divorcing Sally’s soldier father Richard.
Sally’s stepfather, Jacques “Jocko” Mahoney, was a 6ft 4in US marine turned Hollywood stuntman. He later took the title role in 1962’s Tarzan Goes To India.
To begin with he was a perfect father figure to the five-year-old, teaching her to ride a bike and carrying her around on his broad shoulders.
Sally Field Memoir Is Very Selfish
But soon he began a special “game”, calling her into his bedroom and asking her to walk across his back. Sometimes he would be naked — and would turn to face upwards.
Sally Field Memoir
She recalled how she would try to keep her feet to his stomach area, but: “He’d whisper instructions, Lower, lower”.
Sally Field promotes her book 'In Pieces' in New York this week. Picture: GettySource:Getty Images
He also danced inappropriately with the youngster, holding her waist and telling her to move her hips.
And then when she was 13 he sexually assaulted her.
Sally describes a horrible scene where Jocko got her naked and then wrapped plastic bags from a dry cleaner’s loosely around her and asked her to lie on the carpet.
After he emerged from the shower he kissed her and assaulted her.
She writes: “He loved me enough not to invade me. He never invaded me. In all the many times. Not really.
“It would have been one thing if he had held me down and raped me, hurt me. Was that because he loved me?” Sally recalls that her confusion left her in “a kind of fog” that only ever lifted when she was acting in school plays.
By high school she says she enjoyed a “sexual awakening”, leading to pregnancy and a harrowing abortion, aged 17.
Field’s first TV role, in 60s sitcom Gidget.Source:News Limited
Download pcware driver. The teenager was dispatched to a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, for the procedure — during which the male anaesthetist groped her breast.
Only six weeks later she won her first TV role as a surfer girl in Sixties sitcom Gidget.
In turn that led to her first massive hit The Flying Nun — about a nun who used her uniform’s huge headgear to soar on the wind.
She writes: “I was no longer a member of the club any more. The Human Club. I was a celebrity.’ But she hated the nun role and turned to food for comfort.
She says she was “unable to stop eating even when I was in physical pain.” Sally tried to vomit the food up but could not manage it, so instead she flipped between gorging and self-starvation.
Field as The Flying Nun.Source:News Limited
At one point she ate nothing but cucumbers for a week.
Family friend Dr Luke — who had also helped arrange her abortion — prescribed her Dexedrine, very strong amphetamine diet pills.
They left her wired and wild — all while she was playing the sweet-faced innocent nun.
In 1968, in the middle of the sitcom’s three-year run, the 22-year-old star married her high school sweetheart, Steve Craig.
The same year her mother divorced Jocko, who died in 1989. Steve was a big marijuana user and Sally followed suit — even smoking with The Monkees in the band’s “bong shelter” at their TV studio lot.
She also smoked a joint with songwriter Jimmy Webb, famous for Up, Up And Away and Wichita Linesman.
She passed out in the bathroom and claims she woke to find him “on top of me, grinding away to another melody”. After having two sons with Steve, the couple divorced in 1975.
Soon Sally had fallen for the charms of leading man Burt Reynolds. Although they never married, they reigned as Hollywood’s ultimate couple for five years, starring in four movies together. He called Sally the love of his life.
But she says he became domineering as her own film career took off — even banning her from attending the Emmy Awards in 1977, when she won the best actress award for mini series Sybil, about a woman with multiple personality disorder.
Submissive as always, she agreed.
Field and Reynolds were a volatile pairing.Source:Supplied
He did not even stay up with her to watch the TV broadcast of the moment that transformed her career.
She writes: “I ended up sitting alone with the sound turned down so as not to disturb the man who perhaps didn’t know, or maybe didn’t care, how much it meant to me.”
But slowly her confidence grew. So when Burt tried to prevent her going to the Cannes Film Festival in 1979 after she was nominated for her role in Norma Rae, telling her, “You don’t expect to win anything do you,” she ended the relationship.
She went to the awards and won the gong — and later got her first Best Actress Oscar for the same role.
Her second came with Places In The Heart in 1984, the same year she married “tall and gentle” second husband Alan Greisman, an actor and producer.
They had a son, Sam, before divorcing in 1993. In the book, Sally also describes the era of the casting couch — describing one director telling her to take her top off and kiss him “as I can’t hire anybody who doesn’t kiss good enough”.
Field with her second Oscar, for Places in the Heart.Source:News Corp Australia
Looking back, Sally wonders if she was repeating the behaviour learned from her stepdad.
She writes: “I was an grown-up version of the child wrapped in plastic dry-cleaning bags. I had won the role, yes. But I had lost something important, something I was also fighting for: my dignity.”
Despite being so deeply affected by her stepfather’s behaviour, Sally did not confront her mother about his abuse until seven years ago. She was filming Lincoln at the time, playing the wife of the president portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis.
Field was filming Lincoln (pictured) when she finally confronted her dying mother.Source:Supplied
Her mother was 89 and dying of cancer and Sally finally told her what had happened under her nose.
It was a traumatic conversation but Sally writes that they finally cleared the air, with tears and hugs, and concludes: “My mother blinked when I was a child. She was my devoted, perfectly imperfect mother.
Sally Field Memoir Release Date
“I know when I close my eyes for good then she will come to get me.”
This story originally appeared on The Sun and is republished here with permission.
EXPLAINER: Hollywood veteran Burt Reynolds dies at 82..
EXPLAINER: Hollywood veteran Burt Reynolds dies at 82