Burt Offerings

It's been more than a decade since the former sex symbol, 1972 Cosmopolitan centerfold, and star of such films as Deliverance and Smokey and the Bandit guest-hosted The Tonight Show. Since then, he's lost a wife, the four-year sitcom Evening Shade, and an estimated $30 million fortune (through bad investments). ''But I'm not bitter, and I'm not angry,'' he insists. It wouldn't fit with his image of himself as a good ol' Southern boy who believes in ideas like honor and romanticism. He vows, ''I've never hit a woman, and I never would,'' and promises, ''If I were (on a cruise) to Europe and I didn't fall in love, I'd kill myself.'' When asked about chivalrously questionable excerpts from his book, like his comment on Raquel Welch — ''She has a good heart, which she hides under beautiful boobs'' — he is bewildered at the taking-him-to-task tone. ''But she does. What should I have written — 'mammary glands'? ... I say she's a wonderful lady, and that I wish I'd gotten to know her better.''

Perhaps Reynolds' biggest regret is that it took him so long to get to know himself. ''I feel like a grownup now. I wish I could have been a few years ago... I've made bad judgments in terms of people, not cherishing and loving and giving my soul to the right ones,'' he says, his voice catching as he refers to Dinah Shore and Sally Field. ''And I regret that I do not have the dignity of Ricardo Montalban, the class of Dean Martin, or the humor of Bill Cosby. But,'' he adds, suddenly brightening, ''I do have the heart of a lion.''

Which may be why he feels so wounded by the fallout from his ''final crash and burn,'' the media coverage of the divorce, which he says resulted in his losing lucrative endorsements for the Florida Citrus Commission and Quaker State oil and becoming a tabloid bad guy. ''I don't understand why I'm suddenly seen as one step up from Ted Bundy,'' he says. Murderer comparisons notwithstanding, Reynolds — who has recently finished playing a psychotic kidnapper in The Maddening, out early next year — is optimistic about the future: ''My best work is still ahead of me.'' As for his ideal character, it's someone ''enormously capable of feeling compassion and tenderness, who's funny, and slightly dangerous. Yeah,'' he says, smoothing his graying hair, ''it does sound familiar.''