One wonders what Burt Reynolds may have expected the newspapers to cover in the wake of his death. It could have be his late-career, award-nominated resurgence in Boogie Nights, perhaps the force with which he burned during the late Seventies or simply that indefatigable moustache.

But deep down, he probably knew that his greatest career regret would be what was proliferating on Twitter: the 1972 Cosmopolitan centrefold in which he poses drunk, smoking and totally nude on a bearskin rug.

“He did it first. And best. And naked,” wrote Ryan Reynolds, sharing the sepia-drenched picture. “You’ll never be lying naked on a bearskin rug cool. RIP,” posted another fan, while another quipped: “thank you for starting Casual Fridays.”

It’s easy to see the appeal: even if the snap wasn’t the first male nude centrefold in publishing history, the photograph has the kind of woozy Seventies appeal that, come 2018, makes for internet gold.

Reynolds is propping himself up on one elbow rested casually on a dead bear’s face, his mouth held in a suggestive grin, and nothing but his muscular forearm covering his bits. Forty years on, it’s still funny and sexy in equal measure.

So why did Reynolds hate it so much? It took several decades for Reynolds to admit the true extent of his suffering. In 2016, when he was on the promotional trail for The Bandit, a documentary about 1977 action film Smokey and the Bandit, he said of the shoot: “I really wish I hadn't done that."

“It was really stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking,” he told AOL, adding that he was “totally zonkered when I did the picture. That stupid smile, that's what it is you know.”

Reynolds told Business Insider that he believed he’d missed out on an Oscar nomination for Deliverance, released two months after the shoot, because the photographs meant he “wasn’t taken as a serious actor”.

“I think Deliverance suffered because of it and a lot of other things, and I wasn't pleased that I did it, but at the time I wanted everyone to understand the humour of it."

Just how Reynolds got into this predicament is one of those giddily booze-soaked footnotes of Hollywood lore. Helen Gurley Brown had been radically reshaping Cosmopolitan for seven years when she and Reynolds, who had knocked back a few cocktails in the green room, appeared on The Tonight Show together in 1972.

During the commercial break, the feminist publisher told Reynolds that she wanted to be the first editor to put a naked man in a magazine to sate the “visual appetites” of her readers.

“It would,” Reynolds later recalled in his 2015 memoir But Enough About Me, “be a milestone in the sexual revolution, and she said I was the one man who could pull it off.” Reynolds later found out that Gurley Brown had, in fact, asked Paul Newman first - but he turned her down.

A “flattered and intrigued” Reynolds had said yes before the end of the break, and a shoot was arranged with photographer Francesco Scavullo in a “freezing cold” studio, which, Reynolds noted in his book, was “bad for a naked man’s self-esteem”.

He had some comfort in a beer jacket – he’d finished a quart of vodka before he got to the studio, and had picked another up en route. Hundreds of photographs were taken on the agreement that the outtakes - such as of Reynolds wrestling the bear rug, or covering his modesty with a dog – would be burned and the star would get to keep the negatives.

The centrefold appeared in the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan, 1.5 million copies of which sold out rapidly. As a beleaguered Reynolds observed through gritted teeth 45 years later: “Huh, I didn’t get a cent”.

What he did get, however, was a career transformation and dozens of pairs of underwear thrown at him. “He had been a movie star; now he was a celebrity," Gurley Brown said at the time. As far as Reynolds was concerned, though, it was a “fiasco”.

Lascivious fans would turn up at performances of The Rainmaker, in which he was starring in Chicago, and catcall him. So much merchandise was made with his image that he would check into hotels, only to find his bed covered in sheets printed with his own naked body.

"Did women send you their underwear?" Katie Couric asked him in 1994. "Yes," he replied, "constantly". 

That's not to say Reynolds didn't try and capitalise on "the fuss", which he did admit to "enjoying". In 1972 he fanned the fan mail flames by publishing the forgettable title: Burt Reynolds Hotline: The Letters I Get…and Write! The book was essentially a collection of erotically charged fan mail of dubious origin complete with snappy, innuendo-laden replies – purportedly written by a 36-year-old Reynolds, and not a well-practiced hack.

It also contained 16 pages of photographs of Reynolds in a range of singlets and no-underwear-T-shirt combos, surrounded by amorous groupies.

The centrefold may have lasted but Gurley Brown’s anticipated sexual revolution didn’t: a topless man starring in a BBC One period costume drama still makes the front pages of newspapers today.

Few followed in Reynolds’s nude footsteps, and the fevered founding of Playgirl – a feminist response to Penthouse - the same year failed to acquire anywhere near as starry emperor’s clothes.

For Reynolds, the picture is merely a bad mistake that failed to die with the internet age: “I look back on it and I shudder, I just shudder,” he said in 2017. “What an ass. What an egomaniac would do something like that.”