Burt Reynolds names the biggest regret of his career: “I wish I hadn’t done it, but I did it”
Anybody who enjoys a career in show business that lasts more than six decades is bound to experience some ups and downs. It’s just the nature of the beast; no one can be constantly on top forever. Naturally, these peaks and troughs can sometimes lead to questionable decision-making, especially if a star has a lot of competing voices in their ear. Burt Reynolds, for instance, was talked into doing something in the early ’70s that he later regretted – even admitting he wished he hadn’t done it. In fact, he was synonymous with it to his dying day, for better or worse.
In 1972, Reynolds was gearing up for the release of Deliverance, the harrowing John Boorman thriller that was the biggest film he had made up to that point. He accepted a slot on The Tonight Show to promote the film, and in the green room, he met another guest on that particular episode: Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.
When the show went to an ad break, Brown had a proposition for Reynolds, one of Hollywood’s prime exponents of movie masculinity. To his surprise, she wanted him to do a nude photoshoot, and she planned to use the best photo as the magazine’s centrefold. As a deal sweetener, this would make him the first male centrefold in magazine history, a major milestone in the sexual revolution. In her opinion, he was the only man for the job.
While Brown didn’t mention that Paul Newman had already turned her down before she approached Reynolds, everything else she told him was above board. She truly wanted to use Cosmopolitan to break new ground and fully believed women wanted to see naked men as much as men loved looking at nude ladies in Playboy.
In 2015, Reynolds wrote a column for Cosmopolitan about the centrefold, and he admitted Brown didn’t have to give him the hard sell. He’d imbibed a couple of cocktails in the green room and was flattered by her offer, so he was already in a prime position to say yes. He wrote, “I wish I could say that I wanted to show my support for women’s rights, but I just thought it would be fun. I said yes before we came back on the air.”
On the day of the shoot, Reynolds came to the studio prepared – and by prepared, we mean he drank two pints of vodka before even walking through the door. Photographer Francesco Scavullo took hundreds of shots of his well-oiled subject as he lay on a bearskin rug in a freezing-cold studio. Reynolds chuckled about the different things they used to obscure his “tallywacker”: a dog, a hat, his hand. He joked, “If I was trying to prove something, why would I cover it up with my hand? I have very small hands.”
In the iconic final centrefold photo, Reynolds has a cigarillo dangling from his lips and a grin on his face, while his body is almost as hairy as the rug beneath him. The magazine was a sensation when it hit newsstands in April 1972, quickly burning through its 1.5million print run. Deliverance still wasn’t due for release for three months, yet its star had already become the most famous naked man in America.
In truth, the image of a nude Reynolds and that bearskin became inseparable from his public persona over the coming decades – and this wasn’t always a good thing. In his autobiography My Life, Reynolds admitted it wasn’t as fun to be a sex symbol ogled by women as he might have imagined – especially when it detracted from his acting. Indeed, when he took on stage roles after the magazine’s release, “Standing ovations turned into burlesque show hoots and catcalls. They cared more about my pubes than they did the play.”
In 2016, an older and wiser Reynolds told Business Insider, “I wish I hadn’t done it because I wasn’t taken as a serious actor. I think Deliverance suffered because of it and a lot of other things. I wasn’t pleased that I did it, but at the time, I wanted everyone to understand the humour of it.”
However, Reynolds wasn’t one to live with regrets, so he just put it down to experience and got on with things. As he told The New York Times, “You do stupid things. I wish I hadn’t done it, but I did it. And I rose above it, I guess. Or I didn’t, I don’t know.”
