Last night, news broke that Burt Reynolds had passed away at the age of 82.

Burt suffered a cardiac arrest, was transported to a Florida hospital in an ambulance, and died with his family at his bedside.

As news outlets broke the story, that image above started to do the rounds. Taken back in April 1972 for a Cosmopolitan centrefold, it shows a naked Burt reclining on a bearskin rug, and made him the first man ever to be photographed naked for a major magazine.

Here’s the thing – Burt hates that bloody photo, so it’s the last time we’ll ever use it.

Details via GQ, in an article published back in March of 2016:

Last November, Reynolds told Cosmopolitan that it didn’t take much for the magazine’s then editor, Helen Gurley Brown, to sell him on the idea. “Helen believed women have the same ‘visual appetites’ as men, who’d been looking at naked women in Playboy since 1953. She wanted the same prerogative for women,” he said. “I was flattered and intrigued. I wish I could say that I wanted to show my support for women’s rights, but I just thought it would be fun.”

Fast forward about four months, and Reynolds now thinks posing for the picture was “really stupid.”

“I really wish I hadn’t done that,” he said during an interview with AOL at South by Southwest. “I have to be truthful, I was totally zonkered when I did the picture. That stupid smile, that’s what it is, you know.”

…The actor also admitted to Cosmo that he bought two quarts of vodka on his way to the shoot and finished one before the photographer got to work.

Sounds like quite a bit of Dutch courage went into that shoot.

There were even rumours that the picture ended up harming his movie career, as covered by the Daily Beast:

Over the years, there were whispers of him disdaining the pictorial and claiming that the industry didn’t take him seriously after it was published. He went so far as to blame the photo when he failed to garner an Oscar nomination for his performance in Deliverance, which came out three months later.

He elaborated at a 2016 South By Southwest Festival event in support of The Bandit, a documentary about his career, saying, according to UPROXX, “It was really stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking. Probably, knowing me, it was like, ‘You won’t do that, you chicken,’ or something and I went, ‘Well, that’s all I had to hear,’ of course. I said, ‘Yeah, I will.’”

We’ll throw the Reynolds fans a bone here with this delightful tale:

A hat, a dog, and Reynolds’ hand were all shot as modesty alternatives by photographer Francesco Scavullo. An inebriated Reynolds fooled around a bit, going so far as to wrestle with the world’s luckiest bearskin. The deal was that all the outtakes would be burned and Reynolds himself would have control of the negatives…

Smutty fan mail poured in, including from one woman in Nova Scotia who regularly shipped him her pubic hair. The Catholic Church condemned him.

Not sure the Catholic Church has much of a moral high ground on anything these days.

RIP Burt, and his glorious moustache.

[sources:gq&dailybeast]