Burt Reynolds finally admitted the five racist stars he utterly despised in Hollywood history. For 60 years Burt Reynolds sat at the center of American entertainment and watched the industry up close. From his earliest days as a struggling contract player in the late 1950s through his explosion into superstardom in the 1970s with Deliverance and Smokey and the Bandit all the way to his final interviews before his death in 2018.
Across those six decades Burt earned a reputation no other leading man of his era managed to build. The reputation of being the most brutally honest movie star in Hollywood. Reynolds was southern, born in Michigan but raised in Florida as the son of a police chief and by every demographic and cultural marker he should have fit comfortably into the conservative leading man tradition John Wayne and Charlton Heston represented.
Burt chose the opposite path from the very beginning of his career. Close personal friendship with Sammy Davis Jr. came at a time when that friendship cost white stars opportunities and he spoke openly about the racism he witnessed in the industry. His Tonight Show appearances and his press tours became platforms not just to promote his films but to call out the people he believed had betrayed everything Hollywood claimed to stand for.
A close colleague who worked with Reynolds across multiple decades recalled that Burt collected grudges the way other stars collected awards holding on to every slight, every injustice, every moment when he watched a fellow performer treated badly because of their race or their faith. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he found himself constitutionally incapable of letting those moments go.
When Burt sat down to write his 2015 memoir But Enough About Me, he made a decision that shocked his publishers and his agents and his lawyers. The decision to finally say out loud what he had been saying privately for 50 years about the people in Hollywood he could not forgive. Howard Stern got an interview in 2014 that became infamous among entertainment journalists for the names Burt dropped.
Vanity Fair received an exit interview in 2015 that crossed lines other actors his age refused to cross. Talk shows in his final years pushed back at producers who warned him against answering questions about his contemporaries with such directness, and Burt did not care because as he reportedly told one interviewer, he had reached 80 years old and the people he was discussing were either dead or beyond hurting anyone else.
And if he did not tell the truth now, there would be nobody left who knew it. What Reynolds finally admitted in those final years was that five names in particular had haunted his entire career. Five stars whose racism had cost his friends opportunities and dignity and sometimes their careers, and he wanted them remembered for who they actually were and not for the carefully maintained images their publicists had spent decades constructing.
These were not minor figures or forgotten contemporaries. The names included the suave Oscar-nominated leading man whose elegance hid a willingness to destroy other actors’ careers for political points, the gossip columnist whose words reached 35 million readers and whose poison built the blacklist that ended dozens of careers, the studio head who threatened the life of one of America’s greatest black entertainers because that performer dared to date a white actress, the closest friend of John Wayne who
enforced racial hatred with his fists and his casting decisions, and the swashbuckling movie star whose Robin Hood image hid an admiration for fascist policies that even his own studio bosses found disturbing. These were the five Burt Reynolds finally named, the five he wanted the world to remember the way he remembered them.
The racist stars he utterly despised in Hollywood history, starting with number five. Number five, Adolphe Menjou. Hollywood’s best-dressed man, Adolphe Menjou’s name surfaced in industry discussions during Reynolds’ early years with a particular kind of reverence reserved for the actors who had defined Hollywood elegance.
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Because Menjou had earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance in The Front Page in 1931, appeared in over 150 films across 40 years, and collected the title of best-dressed man in Hollywood multiple times during the 1930s and 1940s. The mustache, the tailored suits, the cosmopolitan manner all combined to create the impression of a man who embodied everything sophisticated and worldly about American cinema.
Burt heard the stories about who Menjou actually was almost from the moment he arrived in Hollywood because Menjou’s reputation among working actors stood in direct contrast to his public reputation among film critics and audiences. The elegant gentleman of the screen had spent the late 1940s and early 1950s as one of the most aggressive and willing collaborators with the House on Un-American Activities Committee.
October of 1947 brought his voluntary testimony as a friendly witness where he named colleagues he considered communists or sympathizers including performers whose only crime had been supporting civil rights or attending integration meetings. What set Menjou apart from other cooperative witnesses was that he enjoyed the work.
Co-founding the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American ideals in 1944 placed him at the center of an organization that became the primary mechanism for enforcing the Hollywood blacklist throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Publicly attacking colleagues including Katherine Hepburn for their political views came easily to him and he once declared that applauding the great black singer and activist Paul Robeson constituted evidence of communist sympathy worthy of investigation. Burt
finally said out loud in his 2015 memoir what working actors in Hollywood had known for half a century. Menjou’s elegant exterior concealed a man who took genuine pleasure in destroying other people’s careers, who relished his role as a witch hunter, who used his position to attack performers whose only offense had been caring about racial equality at a moment when caring publicly required real courage.
Reynolds told an interviewer in 2014 that the saddest part of the whole Menjou story was how completely Hollywood had laundered his reputation in the decades after his 1963 death allowing the carefully maintained image of the best dressed gentleman of the screen to overshadow the documented reality of a man who had spent the most important years of his career feeding colleagues to a government committee designed to punish anyone who believed black Americans deserved equal treatment.
A former colleague who knew Byrd for decades recalled him observing that Menjou wore the finest suits in Hollywood and used them to cover the dirtiest hands in the industry and that the man earned Academy nominations for playing characters with integrity while spending his real life proving he had none.
Number four, Hedda Hopper. The most powerful voice in Hollywood. For 30 years Hedda Hopper wielded more cultural power than almost any actor in Hollywood. Her syndicated gossip column reached 35 million readers across the country at its peak. Her radio show carried her opinions into millions of additional homes and her ability to make or break a career with a single mention meant that even the biggest stars in the industry feared her and courted her favor.
Hopper functioned as no traditional critic. She operated as an enforcer of social and political orthodoxy and the orthodoxy she enforced was explicitly and aggressively conservative. Byrd encountered the Hopper machine during his early career when he was still a contract player trying to build a name and what he witnessed shaped his view of the gossip press for the rest of his life.
Hopper used her column not just to report on Hollywood but to punish performers whose politics or personal lives she disapproved of and the politics she punished most aggressively involved support for racial equality. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s she publicly opposed the NAACP, dismissed civil rights organizations as communist fronts and used her column to attack performers including Charlie Chaplin and others whose progressive politics she identified as threats to American values.
As a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals alongside John Wayne and Adolphe Menjou, Hopper helped construct the institutional machinery of the Hollywood blacklist which targeted progressive performers and civil rights supporters with particular intensity. What Byrd finally admitted in his memoir was that the damage Hopper inflicted on black performers and on white performers who supported them remained incalculable because her column carried the power to end careers before they began. The mere
mention of a performer being friendly with civil rights organizations or supporting integration could destroy that performer’s chances at major roles, and Hopper used that power deliberately and consistently across three decades of column writing. Reynolds described in his 2015 book and in subsequent interviews how Sammy Davis Jr.
lived in genuine fear of Hopper during the height of her power because Davis understood that a single hostile column about his interracial relationships or his civil rights activism could devastate his career, and the fact that he had to navigate her venom while simultaneously trying to build a career in an industry that already excluded black performers from most leading roles compounded an already impossible situation.
A close colleague recalled Burt observing that Hopper killed more careers from her writing desk than any executive ever killed from a corner office, and that the most powerful racist in Hollywood history never appeared in a single film, never directed a movie, never produced a show, but used 35 million readers a week to enforce a vision of America where black performers stayed in their place, and the white performers who befriended them paid the price.
Number three, Harry Cohn, the king of Columbia. Of all the names Burt Reynolds finally admitted to despising, no entry generated more visible emotion in his interviews than Harry Cohn. Because the Cohn story involved Sammy Davis Jr. directly, and Davis was not just a colleague but a man Burt loved like a brother.
Columbia Pictures fell under Cohn’s control from the 1920s until his death in 1958, and he built it from a poverty row studio into one of the major Hollywood powers. Throughout the industry, he became famous for his vulgarity, his cruelty, his mob connections, and his absolute control over every aspect of his studio’s productions.
When Cohn died in 1958, the funeral drew enormous crowds, and the comedian Red Skelton famously observed that giving the public what they want explained the turnout, a line that captured exactly how the industry felt about a man who had terrorized his employees for 30 years. What separated Cohn’s case from other studio head racists, and what Burt could never forgive, was the threat Cohn made against Sammy Davis Jr.
in the late 1950s. Because Davis had begun seeing the actress Kim Novak, who happened to be one of Columbia’s biggest stars and Cohn’s most carefully protected property. And the moment Cohn learned about the relationship, he moved to destroy it using methods that exceeded anything resembling normal studio interference.
According to multiple documented accounts, including those from people close to both Davis and Novak, Cohn ordered his mob associates to threaten Davis with violence if he continued to see Novak, and the threats reportedly included specific warnings about what would happen to Davis physically if he did not end the relationship immediately.
Davis, who had already lost an eye in a car accident in 1954, took the threats seriously and ended the relationship under duress, and the incident haunted him for the rest of his life. Reynolds learned the full story directly from Davis himself, because Davis confided in Burt about the Cohn threats during their long friendship, and Burt finally went public with the details in his 2015 memoir and in subsequent interviews.
He wanted the world to understand exactly what kind of man Harry Cohn had been and what kind of price Sammy Davis Jr. had paid for daring to love a woman of a different race in an industry that pretended to celebrate his talent while privately treating him like property. The Cohn case did not stand alone, because the studio head carried a long history of using his power to enforce racial and ethnic hierarchies throughout his career, limiting opportunities for black performers, treating his Jewish employees with the contempt of a man
ashamed of his own heritage, and using his mob connections to discipline anyone who challenged his authority on questions of who deserved which roles and which relationships. A former colleague recalled Burt becoming visibly angry whenever the Cohn name came up in conversation, telling friends that Sammy Davis Jr.
had survived losing an eye and rebuilt his career and become one of the greatest entertainers in American history and Harry Cohn had used hired thugs to threaten the life of that brilliant man for the crime of falling in love with the wrong woman and that some things in Hollywood history were not just business but evil dressed up in a studio executive suit.
Number two, Ward Bond, the sheriff of John Ford’s stock company. When Burt Reynolds arrived in Hollywood as a young actor in the late 1950s, the John Ford stock company was still operating as one of the most powerful informal networks in the industry and at the center of that network alongside John Wayne stood Ward Bond, the broad-shouldered character actor who had appeared in more than 200 films across 30 years and who functioned as Wayne’s closest friend and most loyal enforcer.
Bond appeared in It’s a Wonderful Life as Burt the cop, in The Searchers, in The Quiet Man, in dozens of John Ford westerns and starred in his own television series Wagon Train from 1957 until his sudden death in 1960. To the audiences who watched these productions, Bond represented the gruff but ultimately decent American character actor who anchored countless films and television shows with his solid presence.
What Burt learned from working actors who had been on Ford productions across the 1940s and 1950s was that Bond’s on-screen warmth concealed one of the most aggressive racists in the industry, a man who used his physical size and his political connections to enforce a vision of Hollywood where Jewish performers, civil rights supporters, and anyone whose politics did not align with the conservative wing of the industry faced consequences both professional and physical.
The most documented incident involving Bond came from his confrontation with the actor Martin Landau and what nobody expected was the brazenness of it. Bond physically attacked Landau for being Jewish, an assault confirmed by multiple witnesses including the labor leader Sid Cronenthal who documented the encounter in detail.
The attack was no casual altercation but a deliberate act of anti-Semitic violence from a man who held enormous power in the industry and the result was that Bond faced no professional consequences for the assault which revealed exactly how protected he was by his association with Wayne and Ford and the broader network of conservative Hollywood power brokers.
Bond served as one of the most active members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals alongside Wayne and Menjou and he used his position within that organization to enforce the blacklist with particular enthusiasm. Identifying colleagues he believed were communists or sympathizers became his routine using his influence to ensure those colleagues lost work and the colleagues he targeted included multiple performers whose only documented offense had been supporting civil rights. Reynolds finally said out
loud what working actors had whispered for decades that Ward Bond used his fists and his political connections to enforce racial and religious hatred in Hollywood and that John Ford and John Wayne both knew exactly what Bond was doing and continued protecting him because his enforcement work served their shared political vision.
A former colleague recalled Bert observing that Bond beat up a Jewish actor for being Jewish and went on to star in his own television series the following year and never lost a day of work and that the only thing more disturbing than what Ward Bond did was the silence of every powerful man in Hollywood who knew about it and decided his usefulness mattered more than his violence.
Number one, Errol Flynn, the swashbuckling hero of American cinema. There was no contradiction in the history of old Hollywood more cinematically devastating than the one Bert Reynolds finally laid out about Errol Flynn because Flynn had been the swashbuckling adventure hero of an entire generation, the dashing Captain Blood, the Sherwood Forest Robin Hood who literally embodied on screen the romantic ideal of fighting for the oppressed against the powerful.
The Australian-born matinee idol, whose performances in Warner Brothers adventure films had taught millions of children what heroism looked like. The Robin Hood of 1938, directed by Michael Curtiz, remained one of the most beloved films in Hollywood history, with Flynn’s Robin standing up to tyranny, defending the persecuted, robbing from the rich to give to the poor, and refusing to bow to oppression in any form.
Audiences who watched that film came away believing the man who played Robin Hood must himself believe in the values his character died defending. What Burt heard across his career, and what he finally documented in his memoir and his late interviews, was that Flynn’s private politics ran in exactly the opposite direction from the heroic characters he played on screen.
Flynn had developed a documented fascination with fascist policies during the late 1930s, including specific admiration for the anti-Semitic policies the Nazi regime was implementing across Europe. The most damning evidence emerged from a letter Flynn wrote that was later obtained by the Central Intelligence Agency and made public decades after his 1959 death, in which Flynn expressed direct admiration for the racial purification policies being enacted by Hitler’s government. And the language of that
letter left no room for the kind of contextual excuses defenders of other compromised Hollywood figures often deployed. Flynn had not misspoke or been misunderstood. He had written down his admiration for fascism and signed his name to it. The damage extended beyond private correspondence, because Flynn used his enormous power at Warner Brothers to enforce his prejudices on his productions.
Telling studio head Jack Warner that he did not want Jewish performers on his films became part of his standard contract demands, and Warner himself, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, documented his discomfort with Flynn’s demands, while ultimately accommodating them because Flynn ranked as Warner Brothers biggest box office draw of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the studio’s economic dependence on his appeal outweighed Warner’s personal objections to his anti-Semitism.
What made Flynn’s case the most painful entry on Burt’s list was not just the gap between his on-screen heroism and his off-screen prejudices, but the specific cruelty of the choice he made. Because Flynn played a character whose entire identity was built around defending the persecuted and then used his position of enormous power and beloved fame to actively persecute the Jewish performers and crew members whose only crime was wanting to work in his films.
Reynolds reportedly told Howard Stern in 2014 that Errol Flynn appeared in the most beloved film about fighting tyranny in Hollywood history while privately admiring the worst tyranny of the 20th century and that there existed no greater betrayal in cinematic history than the man who taught American children to stand up for the oppressed using his real-life power to oppress them when the cameras stopped rolling.
A former producer recalled Burt observing that Flynn played Robin Hood and lived like the Sheriff of Nottingham, and that the saddest part was watching Warner Brothers reissue those films for new generations of children decade after decade without ever telling those children that the man on screen had spent his real-life believing the opposite of every word his character spoke.
What Burt Reynolds finally said out loud. 60 years Burt Reynolds spent inside the entertainment industry watching the men who held the power, the columnists who shaped the public taste, the actors who built their fortunes on images carefully designed to hide who they actually were. Across those six decades Burt collected the grudges that other stars would not allow themselves to carry.
The memories of every injustice he had witnessed his black colleagues and his Jewish colleagues and his progressive colleagues endure at the hands of the people who ran Hollywood. Five names. The best-dressed gentleman of the screen who spent his real career destroying other actors’ lives from a government witness chair.
The gossip columnist whose 35 million readers a week gave her the power to end careers with a single sentence, and who used that power most aggressively against the performers who supported civil rights. The studio head who used mob connections to threaten the life of Sammy Davis Jr. for the crime of falling in love with a white woman.
The Wayne ally and Ford regular who beat up a Jewish actor and starred in his own television series the following year. The swashbuckling Robin Hood whose private admiration for fascism made him the cruelest contradiction in Hollywood history. Reynolds finally admitted what other stars his age refused to admit because he believed silence was complicity, because he had watched too many of his friends pay too high a price for the racism of people who never paid any price at all, and because he had
reached an age where he no longer cared who he angered as long as he told the truth about what he had seen. He named them in his 2015 memoir. He named them on Howard Stern. He named them in his Vanity Fair exit interview and on every late-night appearance where a host had the courage to ask the right questions.
The result was that the people he named could no longer hurt him, and the friends he was defending could no longer be hurt by the people he named, and Burt Reynolds went to his 2018 death having finally said out loud the things he had been saying privately for half a century. The cameras showed America one version of these five icons, and Burt Reynolds saw another version entirely.
And what he witnessed across 60 years was that the most carefully protected reputations in Hollywood were almost always the ones with the most to protect, that the people who built their fame on heroic images were sometimes the ones whose private lives most contradicted those images, and that the only way to make the lie stop was for someone who had been there to finally tell the truth out loud.
Which revelation shocked you most? Did you know about these documented accounts before today? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and if you found this exploration of Hollywood’s hidden history valuable, do not forget to like and subscribe for more untold stories from entertainment’s complicated past.
