Burt Reynolds wasn’t always a ladies’ man. Long before the late actor, who died Thursday, became a symbol of American machismo and one of the biggest movie stars of his generation, he was a 22-year-old hitting and missing a rare chance to romance Greta Garbo.
In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Reynolds recalled the time he went to a party and began chatting with a “beautiful, extraordinary looking” woman in a canary yellow blouse. They began flirting and toward the end of the conversation, the woman asked if Reynolds could give her a ride home. The young actor, who didn’t have a car, offered to hop into a taxi with her.
“She was charming and mysterious, as you would expect,” he recalled. “Just before she got out of the taxi, I said, ‘Sorry, you didn’t tell me your name?’ And she said, ‘My name is Greta Garbo.’ And I said my name is Bud. What an idiot I am.”
Reynolds told the story so frequently later in his career that word eventually got back to the Swedish star herself. “I got a note from her saying ‘You were an idiot,’” Reynolds said. “I thought maybe she was going to give me a second chance, but it didn’t happen.”
The actor’s life was brimming with stories like this, close brushes with some of the most famous women in the film industry. Reynolds also had a particularly bittersweet anecdote about taking an acting class with Marilyn Monroe as an up-and-comer in the late 1950s. He would walk with her from 58th Street to the Actors Studio, he said, surprised by the blonde icon’s quietude. “She didn’t say much, but she didn’t have to,” he recalled in a March interview with Conan O’Brien. He was also surprised to see that one of the most famous women in the world wasn’t getting swarmed on the street. “How come they don’t jump up and down?” he asked her, referring to the people breezing past her. “She said, ‘Oh—do you wanna see her?” And with that, the actress threw her shoulders back and started strutting with purpose. Within 20 feet, she was “surrounded by about 40 people,” Reynolds said. “I liked her so much . . . she was so real and sweet and kind.”
In his 2015 memoir, But Enough About Me, Reynolds also revealed that he had been close friends with Bette Davis, the famously sharp actress who gave him this memorable bit of career advice: “Until you’re known in my business as a monster, you’re not a star.” Davis would also give Reynolds the dirt on her feud with Joan Crawford and the stunts she would pull on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Reynolds was also surprisingly forthcoming about his past romantic relationships, gushing repeatedly about former girlfriend Sally Field. The pair worked together in the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit, and dated for the next five years. On several occasions, Reynolds referred to the breakup as one of his biggest regrets, calling Field the “love of my life” in a 2015 interview with Vanity Fair. “I miss her terribly,” he said. “Even now, it’s hard on me. I don’t know why I was so stupid. Men are like that, you know. You find the perfect person, and then you do everything you can to screw it up.” In an interview the next year, Field said that she and Reynolds didn’t talk that much. When told that Reynolds often referred to her as the one that got away, Field smiled and replied, “Well—yeah.”
