Gentleman Burt
Here’s the truth. There’s a kind of Southern gentleman we don’t celebrate so much, mostly because they don’t exist anymore or they’re dying off as time lurches on. It’s a kind of celebrity born out of it’s time, when nobody expected much from the South beyond the hayseeds and rednecks propped up by Hollywood or a TV studio in Burbank. Burt Reynolds was one of those gentlemen, Kenny Rogers another. And I’m hard-pressed to remember many others.
These were men who either came up in the South or took to the South like a duck to better water. Once their heyday was done, they found a spot in Tennessee or Georgia or even Florida and did a little something to give back. Just having them as a neighbor was often enough.
I remember hearing from my parents and my aunts how Kenny Rogers had bought a home near Sweetwater in Tennessee. I never verified this, but knowing the Gambler had settled down within a Sunday drive from my own house was powerful and a little inspiring. It brought the remoteness of fame down to a level where I could see the seams and understand how some celebrities were just as accessible as a relative. Burt Reynolds stepped out of the limelight sometime around or after Sharky’s Machine and found a place to roost in Florida. He founded a theatre company. How ironic for a man not taken generally as a good actor to create a little incubator of acting talent.
But here’s the thing about Burt Reynolds and Kenny Rogers. Push aside the appearances on Golden Girls, the Cosmopolitan photo shoot. Take the rotisserie chickens out of the frame. They were masters of their fields and forces of change. One an amazing songwriter, perhaps the best crossover artist of the late 70s and early 80s, the other an actor who didn’t just break the fourth wall, but found the natural cracks and pulled you through, making his audience a co-conspirator in every caper. Everymen, both of them, and they live and lived their lives the same damn way.
Burt’s gone, but his way of life and his example remain. It is entirely possible to be a sex symbol and be aware of the ludicrousness of being a sex symbol. It’s one thing to accept being an object of desire, but something altogether other and better to never take the elevation too seriously. And somehow, that awareness of self only makes you more desirable for the knowing.
We should all be so aware of ourselves.
