When I saw Joan Collins move through the crowd towards Rex Reedand by default, I had that peculiar queasy feeling you get when you’re friends with a famous critic who’s known for mixing unfiltered opinion with unbridled literary flair that—like nuclear meltdown—creates a lot of unpredictable energy.
Joanna walked up to him – draped, bejeweled, with a dazzling smile and raising a manicured finger at Rex.
“Hi Joan,” he drawled from Louisiana.
She waved her finger and smiled even wider.
(Was she crazy?)
“Rex, you bad, bad boy,” she shouted in English, stroking his cheeks.
(Yes.)
“I should be very, very angry with you.”
“Oh, Joan,” he laughed.
Then she kissed him, conveying displeasure at his review of her last night with one person.
He didn’t think he had said anything wrong.
(Though there was that line, “You can accuse her of being beyond her years, but if you meet her in a dark alley, bring Mace.”)
Then they hugged. They were friends since the 1960s.
It was like being trapped in an episode of Dynasty.
Rex Reed, who died on Tuesday at the age of 87was the last of the great American cultural writers of the 20th century, as famous in his own right as the celebrities he often profiled. He emerged in a class of energetic literary cultural observers who included Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron AND Patricia Bosworth. In publications like New York Times, Search, GQ, Vogueand later, for Reed, a decades-long run in the New York Observerthey held a mirror to the heyday of the second half of the American century.
Reed’s profiles of mostly movie stars from Warren Beatty THE Marlene Dietrich it had a literary heft and an alchemy that produced stories that were at once impressive, witty, witty, and culturally sharp: pastrami flicks in the middle of the night and starry-eyed tempers Barbra Streisandfirst television special at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (she would never speak to him again); Elizabeth Taylor AND Richard Burton on the Rome set of the doomed film Cleopatra; and the clinically devastating portrait of Georgia governor Lester Maddox depicting the baseball bats given to young workers at his fried chicken joints to keep out black customers. (Maddox vowed never to speak to a reporter again, much to Reed’s pride.) His first book of collected writings, Do you sleep naked? it was a bestseller, as were later books.
The star of the film, handsome, he appeared in the infamous 1970 cult-flop Gore VidalS ‘ Myra Breckinridgeplaying the transgender male counterpart Raquel Welch. Jet-setting with Melina Mercouri, Studio 54-hopping with Liza Minnellihe maintained lasting lifelong friendships with Golden Age Hollywood stars such as June Allyson, Jean Simmons, Polly Bergen, Angela Lansbury and Ali McGraw
His writing may be caustic. THINK. Sometimes meaning. He was completely unrepentant. His pact was with his readers, for him glisten AND entertaintell me as he saw itsupported by expertise and taste. Loyalty was not to the people or the hundreds of million dollar movie productions he was writing about. He believed passionately that‘What critics are for: to curate for the public.
Not so long ago, critics of legacy media held sway. We were, in the end, fantasizing: “Why I DO do we need criticism?” Why can’t everything be like that? bawlwhere the audience just rates what they like?
Spoiler alert. The world Rex leaves behind is a world consumed by everyone speaking their thoughts and truth directly to others. Influencers whose credentials are the number of people they convince to follow them. Critics are no longer the gatekeepers of cashiers or sales. Expertise is out there. Treatment of your medical condition is in. Be careful what you wish for.
Deborah Grace Winer is a culture writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Town and Country, and many other publications. The Wall Street Journal named her book on songwriter Dorothy Fields one of the five best books about American singers. She knew Rex Reed for more than three decades.
