“Oh, Burt Reynolds!” Winfrey replied, adding, “Oh, gosh! I have a Burt Reynolds story.”
She explained that when she was much younger and interviewing Sally Field, (who costarred with Reynolds in “Smokey and the Bandit” and also dated him) she asked a bad question.
“My big mistake: I asked her, ‘Does Burt sleep with his toupee on?'” Winfrey recalled. “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.'”
She continued, “And so I asked it, and she went cold on me. She shut down, and I could not get in again.”
Lowe said he knows Field personally from their time on “Brothers & Sisters,” and said, “She’s one of the most amazing actors I’ve ever known.”
“But when Sally goes cold, it’s like Khrushchev in the Cold War,” he said. “She will bury you.”
But Winfrey stressed that she deserved what she got.
“It was like, ‘Whoa, Sally went cold on me on live TV,'” she said. “I deserved it, I deserved it, I deserved it, ’cause that is such an inappropriate question.”