Burt and Loni Pair Up

Say it straight out, get it over with: Burt Reynolds has another girlfriend. Clutches at the heart, doesn’t it? Feel those stabbing pains? The compassionate citizen, standing at the checkout counter with a six-pack of cat food and a bottle of celery tonic, learns this unsettling news from the front page of Popular Falsehoods, and is filled with foreboding. He feels the way he did when he heard that Muhammad Ali was going to fight again: “Don’t go into that ring, gallant old champ. You were the greatest, but you’ve done enough for us. Your reflexes can’t pick off the jabs now. Go, feel proud, erode in peace.”

Reynolds, of course, does not heed these telepathic Mailgrams from his millions of distraught admirers. Gallant old champs—he is 46 now—never do. And although his press representatives try to cloud the issue, like squids squirting ink eradicator, the story emerges. The new lady is Loni Anderson, 35, who played the dizzy blonde on TV’s recently canceled, widely mourned WKRP in Cincinnati.

In February they were sighted together at his friend Jim Nabors’ house in Hawaii. At some point during the spring she began spending weekends at his Malibu fortification. Then one day Burt and Loni, who had been skulking blissfully about Los Angeles on wings of Rolls-Royce, drove to his house, only to have a photographer spring out of the underbrush and begin to shoot. Infuriated that the cameraman was on his property, or so his explainers explained later, Reynolds leaped from the Rolls, tongue-lashed the varlet and chucked his camera over the fence. The film survived, however, and deniability perished.

Burt is not one of Hollywood’s garden-variety womanizers, the kind of self-loving predators to whom female conquests are simply a way of keeping score in a game that is essentially solitaire. Still, since his divorce 17 years ago from Laugh-In’s sock-it-to-me girl, Judy Carne, there has been a lineup in his life that by any measure merits a raising of the eyebrow. First he kept company with a Japanese actress, then fell hard for the much-older Dinah Shore. That lasted four years and was followed by four years with Sally Field, and there were innumerable flings (a dozen, by one semiexpert accounting) between and during all of the above.

The point in worrying about these developments, instead of, say, killer bees or the melting of the polar ice-caps, is not that there is anything wrong with Loni Anderson. No one says that. She is a true-blue lady, all agree, who is uncommonly intelligent and talented and a good mother to her 17-year-old daughter, Deidra, the product of Loni’s first marriage, at 18. Divorced at the same age (and again recently from actor Ross Bickell), she has come up the hard way. “A loner, I had to grow up fast,” she explains. “I had a baby, put myself through college, got work and supported both of us. It wasn’t always easy but it was instructive.” None who know her find the slightest likeness to the gaga bimbo she played in WKRP, Burt least of all. “She is very, very bright,” he says. “I was never interested in her public image. I’m only interested in the girl that I met and like.”

The problem is that there is only so much of Burt to go around, and around. A workaholic who has been starring in an average of two or three films a year for more than a decade, he is almost obsessively involved in his acting career (in 1982: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Best Friends). “These are the vintage years for me as an actor,” he says, meaning as a romantic lead. “Tom Selleck is running right up my back, so it won’t be long now before I’ll be put out to pasture.” And there’s his second career, as a director (Sharky’s Machine), not to mention his stewardship of the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre in Jupiter, Fla. “I don’t know how to relax,” he admits. “I know how to work hard, and how to play hard, but I’ve never learned to relax.”

Asked for his priorities, he lists family and friends first, and indeed, all these years he’s scarcely missed a Christmas at home with mother Fern and dad Burt Sr., a retired Florida police chief. He remains extraordinarily close to his sister, Nancy, and his brother, Jim, a movie production manager. On everyone around Burt Reynolds, family and friends alike, gifts shower down: To his father last Christmas came a handmade silver-tooled saddle, to his mother a diamond ring. Says Jim: “With Burt, it’s Christmas every day. He gave me a watch that I’m afraid to wear.”

Friends become his family too. His entourage comprises men (mainly) who knew him when. His PR man has been a friend since the 1950s, and Burt still phones his college drama coach. Norman Fell has been a close companion since their days on the 1970-71 TV series Dan August. “A typical evening with this worldwide sex symbol,” says Fell, “is to go to his house, sit in the den, watch some old movie like Flying Down to Rio on his home screen, and eat cold Chinese food out of paper containers.” Other participants at these Spartan non-revels are Dom DeLuise, Mel Brooks and his wife, Anne Bancroft, assorted stuntmen and makeup men—and, oh yes, Dinah may stop by.

Workmates become intimates and vice versa in Burt’s driven life, perhaps because work is one place where his fabled shyness does not get in the way of forging friendships. Some time before their first date, Loni confided to a friend, “Burt’s been having friends feel me out about whether or not I would like to go out with him.” She remained cool. “I figure if a man wants to ask me out he should do it himself.”

Once his advances have been safely accepted, Burt’s women are inundated not only with such tokens of affection as flowers and jewels (even short-timers have been known to get expensive baubles) but also with a kind of patrimony: Reynolds corralled several of his friends to guest on Dinah, and between The Flying Nun and her breakthrough in Norma Rae, Sally Field did three Burt Reynolds movies. Already he’s helping Loni, now that she’s lost her TV slot. He’s planning to star with her in one of his movies, Stand on It, to begin filming next summer. Other leading ladies of his life have played his dinner theater; their pictures line the walls. Burt’s mom is there too, with a plaque reading “First Lady of the Theatre, Fern Reynolds.”

Besides acting, directing and more or less full-time bonhomie, Reynolds has another line of work, a kind of hobby: Since shortly after World War II, it seems, he has been indulging in a roguish sort of psychological streaking on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Some time after Burt’s two-year marriage to Carne ended, for example, he appeared on the show with her, and the two of them sparred nervously for a couple of rounds. She observed that he liked them older now (he had begun keeping company with Dinah, who is 19 years his senior), and he said the difference wasn’t so much age as class. Memory insists that he has been on Carson’s couch at least once a week from that time to this, although that can’t be true.

Still, we have learned much via Johnny of Burt’s toupee, his view of critics and why he posed nude for Cosmo‘s centerfold (he was poking fun at Playboy). He has also talked graciously about his ladies, and, perhaps trying to talk himself into something, he has spoken mistily about fatherhood. Carson, who is indulgent but not endessly so, finally had had enough of this last February, when Reynolds celebrated his birthday on the show. Johnny noted that he was sick of hearing Burt whine about how much he wants a kid, so he’d gone out and got him one. At that, a staff member dressed as a nurse appeared, bearing a live baby, and handed it over to Burt with a big smile.

What Reynolds has not done since his long-ago first marriage, on or off the Tonight Show, is get married again. So far he does not seem to have come close. “Timing,” he explains. “Just timing. Whenever I asked, they said no, and possibly whenever they wanted to, I didn’t. Timing is everything.”

Yes, but: His relationships have been tender, they have lasted longer than most in Hollywood, and he seems serious about them. “I would hope that I would be half as successful in my marriage as my parents have been,” he says, “and half as good a father as my father was.” In limning a text as momentous as Burt Reynolds’ love life, may we be forgiven a little psychobabble? Is marriage for Reynolds so much a patriarchal act that he, still boyish and still a son in his 40s, can’t carry it off? Is his reluctance perhaps tied up with the profound love and fear he feels for the imposing Burt Sr., who once knocked out Burt Jr. (“Buddy” at home) for saying “Shut up” to his mother, and who, as police chief, jailed him overnight for a school prank? And who, not incidentally, has been married to Buddy’s mother for five decades? Does Burt think it takes that kind of rocklike toughness to be a husband? Even macho actors can’t be rocks; they must be as changeable as clouds. Does Reynolds not measure up in his own eyes?

But then, who does? Unlicensed psychoanalysis aside, there is no denying that Burt has been carrying a killing burden for the rest of the males in the country, somehow finding the time and the energy, after his obsessive commitment to his work and Johnny Carson, to live out our fantasies of being fatally attractive to women. He has said that he really cares for women, and clearly this is true. But he has also said that he thinks most other men don’t, and this is not so much true or false as beside the point. Most men his age are dragging themselves through life like wounded bears. They would like to care about women, but after worrying about how to pay the phone bill and about whether their teenage children will be caught stealing hubcaps, they haven’t the strength.

So he does what most of us cannot, and still he is single. How can this be? To Barbara Walters, in December 1980, Reynolds said, “The hardest lesson I ever had to learn in my life was that the person that you fall in love with…can be the worst person to spend the rest of your life with…. It takes a real adult to say…’We have to go our separate ways even though I love you and you love me.’ ” This came from the heart; Reynolds and Field had broken up earlier that year, and apparently it had been she who, regretfully, made the decision.

“Of course I’d make room for marriage if I was in love and wanted to get married and have children,” Burt says. “I would make room, and do the best job I could of being a good father and a good husband. But that’s not happening.” For that, Burt places partial blame on the media. “Whether this relationship will go any further than it has right now, I have no idea. Loni and I are both trying very hard to get acquainted and to like each other without too many explosions and broadsides from the press.”

While it’s hard to see that the press is to blame for either the high or the low points in the loves of Reynolds and his several ladies, that’s an argument that can well be tabled. Is it too simple, at this point in the procession, when neither onlookers nor principals know whether Burt and Loni are headed for marriage or merely taking their doubts for a stroll, to raise a celery-tonic toast and wish them a long and happy double-billing?