Oprah Winfrey has revealed the biggest mistake she ever made in an interview, and it’s awkward AF.
The superstar interviewer shared that she once asked Sally Field about rumors Burt Reynolds slept in his toupee but the actress was, understandably, not impressed.
Speaking on Rob Lowe’s podcast Literally!, the 67-year-old said: “My big mistake: I asked her, ‘Does Burt sleep with his toupee on?’ I even say now, I cringe to even think that I asked that question. But I asked it because the producers are like, ‘You have to ask, you have to ask, you have to ask. That’s what everybody wants to know.’ And so I asked it, and she went cold on me. She shut down, and I could not get in again.”
Oprah added: “It was like, ‘Whoa, Sally went cold on me on live TV.””
But the TV star acknowledges now that she “deserved it because that is such an inappropriate question.”
Burt, an icon of American pop culture, dated Sally between 1976 and 1982 on-and-off, and later claimed she was the love of his life. They appeared in four movies together: Smokey and the Bandit, Smokey and the Bandit II, The End, and Hooper.
He had never been afraid to admit his hair was a toupee, but in 2015 he admitted to GQ that “if I had it to do over again, I would do it naturally, not wear a toupee.”
“Most guys with toupees overcompensate. They want too much hair. They end up piling it high, looking like a weird flower,” he said. “But if someone offered me a movie now—and I’m still waiting for one—I’d go back to my natural look. With whatever I have left up there.”
Burt passed away in 2018 at the age of 82.
