In her new memoir In Pieces, actress Sally Field opens up about her decades in Hollywood, and says she was sexually abused by her stepfather, the actor and stuntman Jock Mahoney. In a New York Times interview about the book, Field details a conversation where she told her mother about the abuse, shortly after she booked her role in Lincoln. Her stepfather, Field says, would call her to his room until she was 14. “I felt both a child, helpless, and not a child. Powerful. This was power. And I owned it. But I wanted to be a child — and yet,” Field writes in her memoir. Field’s mother, the actress Margaret Field, and Mahoney divorced in 1968. Mahoney died in 1989.
In Pieces includes abuse allegations against other men in Hollywood. In 1968, Field says she smoked hash with the singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb, and woke up with him having nonconsensual sex with her. During Field’s audition for the 1976 movie Stay Hungry, the director Bob Rafelson (known for Five Easy Pieces) told her he “can’t hire anyone who doesn’t kiss good enough,” so Field kissed him. Both men denied the allegations: “It’s totally untrue,” Rafelson told the Times. “That’s the first I’ve ever heard of this. I didn’t make anybody kiss me in order to get any part.” Webb, who told the Times the publishers haven’t allowed him to read Field’s book, said he remembers them dating. “Sally and I were young, successful stars in Hollywood,” he told the Times. “We dated and did what 22-year-olds did in the late 60s — we hung out, we smoked pot, we had sex.” Field told the Times she didn’t think Webb had “malicious intent,” but was “stoned out of his mind.”
