The actor who tried to destroy Burt Reynold’s career
Acting can be a cutthroat business. Everyone’s either trying to secure their fame or desperately clinging to the fame they have left. The result is an industry rife with jealousy, oneupmanship and rivalry, as Burt Reynolds knew all too well. Here the celebrated actor recalls how one of his contemporaries did his utmost to snuff out his career before it had fully taken off.
In the late 1950s, Burt Reynolds was was relatively unknown, having abandoned his blossoming career as a football player to tread the boards in theatre productions such as Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound and Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy. After landing a part in the stage revival of Mister Roberts and embarking on a series of failed film auditions, he worked every job a man of limited means could work at that time, including as bouncer at the Roseland Ballroom, a waiter, a truck driver and a dockworker, where he was spotted by a filmed executive and offered $150 to jump through a glass window on live TV.
It wasn’t until 1959 that Reynolds bagged his first major TV role in Riverboat, which follows Captain Grey Holden — played by Darren McGavin — and his crew as they sail along the rivers of Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio. Reynolds took on the role of Holden’s partner, co-pilot Ben Frazer, who he portrayed in 20 episodes between 1959 and 1960.
Recalling his experience of making Riverboat in an interview with TV Guide, Reynolds said that McGavin tried to intimidate him on set in the hope of destroying his career. “He is going to be a very disappointed man on the first Easter after his death,” he said of McGavin.
By the time Reynolds landed the Riverboat role, he’d only been in Hollywood for “a few months when suddenly I got this series. Lew Wasserman [president of MCA, Inc.] had brought me out from New York and had told people I was going to be a big star. You know what that means at MCA–if Lew Wasserman says it’s going to rain, everybody puts up an umbrella.”
McGavin likely spotted Reynolds’ potential and attempted to sabotage his career before he became a threat. “I was a green kid so far as film was concerned,” Reynolds said. “Instead of helping me, McGavin looked on me with contempt. He did everything but destroy me on camera. Like we’d run through a scene a couple of times, and then, just before the camera rolled, he’d say to me under his breath, ‘You’re not going to play it that way, are you?’ and what little confidence I had would go right down the drain.”
Thankfully, Reynolds didn’t let McGavin’s hostility get in the way of his performance. The actor would go on to make a name for himself in the highly successful series Gunsmoke, later appearing in ’70s blockbusters like Deliverance and Smokey and The Bandits.
