Sally Field writes about being molested by her stepfather in her new memoir, “In Pieces.”
Her late mother, Margaret Field, divorced Sally’s father, Richard, in 1951. The very next year, she married actor Jock Mahoney (aka Jocko), according to a New York Times Interview.
The molestations were a recurring event in Field’s childhood until about age 14.
“It would have been so much easier if I’d only felt one thing, if Jocko had been nothing but cruel and frightening,” Field, 71, said. “But he wasn’t. He could be magical, the Pied Piper with our family as his entranced followers.”
She detailed the encounters writing, “I knew. I felt both a child, helpless, and not a child. Powerful. This was power. And I owned it. But I wanted to be a child — and yet.”
After 16 years of marriage, Field’s mother divorced Mahoney. He later died in 1989.
Elsewhere in her memoir, Field explained her complicated relationship with the late Burt Reynolds, who died last week. Looking back, she believes her romances with Reynolds was an attempt to recreate a version of her relationship with her abusive stepfather.
“I was somehow exorcising something that needed to be exorcised,” the Emmy-winner added. “I was trying to make it work this time.”
She added that in Reynolds’ death, she’s a bit relieved he won’t be reading memoir and her thoughts on their time together.
“This would hurt him,” Field said. “I felt glad that he wasn’t going to read it, he wasn’t going to be asked about it, and he wasn’t going to have to defend himself or lash out, which he probably would have. I did not want to hurt him any further.”