Everything About Rex Reed Begins With Movies
Today is Rex Reed’s birthday. When I called him Sunday to ask how he planned on celebrating, we covered the usual—movies, politics, being generally exhausted by many things, and being specifically exhausted by certain things—before returning to a topic that’s increasingly present in our conversations: the end. Specifically, his end.
“I am beginning to see into the crystal ball, you know, and the end is coming soon.” He confides this as he’s done so many times before. It’s a lamentation of his that I never hope to hear but that I also feel remarkably lucky to receive. His old-school Manhattan drawl has a sharp, theatrical flair, every word carrying the unmistakable lilt of wit and authority—the essence of a critic who knows he’s the star of the show. “It’s all going to be over soon, and I don’t want the last impression to be: Film Critic Found Dead at Computer Reviewing a Bad Movie.” He doesn’t want to be written into history as a curmudgeon, and I know the concern is valid because the first question everyone asks about Rex is, “Is he really that mean?” And then, “Is he really that angry?” He’s not. Reducing anyone in this way is an easy story—and it isn’t the story of Rex.
Rex Reed is the product of a mother who encouraged her only son to move through a world without limits. Rex is the product of a father’s unconditional love, even when his father didn’t understand him—which was often. He is the product of the confidence that grows from both those things: a self-awareness that emerged so early and developed so deeply and has manifested for almost a century as relentless ambition. He is one of the hardest-working people you could ever hope to meet. Despite firm instructions to do anything other than worry about Observer! after breaking his ankle this summer, Rex sent near-daily updates on the status of his assignments, which he takes no less seriously today than when Peter Kaplan hired him as our film critic in 1987. Rex was four days shy of his 49th birthday when his byline first appeared on our pages. By then, he’d written for seemingly every publisher in the city with “New York” in its name—The New York Times, New York Magazine, New York Daily News, New York Post—plus GQ, Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily and more. He was an actor, an author and a TV host with every accolade to his name and no plans to slow down. That was nearly 40 years ago.
Rex hasn’t stopped seeking the pleasures of beauty, terror and connection. Though he’s quick to confirm that such thrills have escaped him for decades, when he finally admitted (to himself) that he’d miss the Toronto Film Festival for the first time in 25 years, his heartbreak was palpable.
I am still struggling badly with my foot. It is swollen twice its size, and although I can walk, I don’t think I can travel to two airports and get into taxis and get to the hotel and then prepare to walk 3 or 4 times a day to screenings 3 or 4 blocks apart. I can’t do all of that and drag luggage and press books and a ton of notes around Toronto on one foot. I have been covering that festival for about 25 years, and I really don’t want to miss it, but sensibly and pragmatically, I know I am seriously tempting fate. I do not want to fall and end up in some Canadian hospital.
Rex has lived an almost unbelievable life, but most of what you’ll find, if you go looking, is what he’s said about others. A few of those words have offended some people.
“I think I’ve been severely misjudged. I want to be remembered as somebody who really, really tried to make things better. Or at least respected the things that were good when they happened.”
I can’t think about Rex not being on the other end of the line without a lump rising in my throat, promising to eventually erupt in waves of hot tears—a practically volcanic physical reaction because I know he’s right, that our time is limited, and that I’ll miss every last layer of him terribly when he’s gone. And so he’s agreed to let me record (and publish) our conversations. This is the first.
Has there ever been a time that you felt there were more good movies than terrible ones?
Well, yes—but not when I was actually writing. Even after I started writing professionally about movies, I did have periods of very good movies. But those people—the directors and actors and screenwriters—are all dead. I saw wonderful movies all through the ‘60s and maybe even a few in the ‘70s, but the greatest movies were all in the ‘40s. There were great movies in the ‘50s, too. It wasn’t a great period in the world, but the movies reflected higher thinking.
What’s the first movie that moved you?
I saw Gone with the Wind when I was two years old. Of course, the things that I remember most about it are the things that would affect a child: Bonnie dying on the horse and all of that. Oh, gosh, I was hysterical. The other movie that I saw around the same time was Tarzan’s New York Adventure. There was a terrible storm in that movie, and I kept tugging at my mother and saying, “We have to go and roll the windows up in the car. We have to roll up the car windows because it’s pouring rain!” She said, “It’s just a movie.” But you see how impressionable I was at a very young age.
There were limitations as to how much my mother could tolerate. She didn’t have all the free time in the world to go to movies like some housewives did. And so I didn’t get a chance to see all the things I wanted to see. But when I was old enough to go to the movies by myself, I saw everything. That’s why I ended up living in New York City, working for the New York Times, and doing all of those Sunday profiles. I knew everything all of those people had been in, every role they had ever played, and that impressed artists so much that they gave me a lot of information they would not have otherwise given a journalist.
There was no Internet; you couldn’t search for these things.
Search for anything! I had seen things.
Was your mother a movie buff?
No, and that’s why I didn’t see as many films at that age. But that’s also why I remember the ones I did see. I was very, very influenced by Gone with the Wind. Growing up, we moved all the time. I was in 13 different schools before I graduated from high school. And by the time I was old enough to know anything, I was going to the movies every day after school. My father did not approve of this, but my mother let me go because I made very good grades—straight As and everything.
You moved around so much. Were the movies a more reliable companion than friends?
The connection is simply in being in an agrarian environment when your interests are more cultural. I was not interested in the things that other kids were interested in. I was not interested in playing baseball. One of the towns we lived in was Natchez, Mississippi. The old antebellum part of Natchez had great plantation houses, and the newer part—well, there was a brothel. I wasn’t interested in riding my bicycle to the park. I was interested in riding past that brothel.
To watch people going in and out?
Yes, I watched them. I wanted to know. I wanted to know who their customers were. I knew the kinds of things that went on inside because my mother was very indulgent with me. In the South, there were always people who were shocked—by anything—and a lot of books were forbidden. The library had a section of books that children were not allowed to borrow, but my mother would check things out for me. I remember reading From Here to Eternity when I was 12. I thought it was one of the most fascinating books. My mother said, “If there’s anything you don’t understand, show me where it is in the book, and we’ll discuss it.” But I didn’t really have to; I knew everything that went on. I knew all about prostitutes. I knew what they were there for. I knew what that club was. And then, of course, I saw the movie, and I was very impressed by it. And that had a lot to do with structuring my life towards fiction, movies, books, plays, all that kind of stuff. Because when you’re in a basically agrarian environment—which I was in all these 13 towns that I lived in—you seek information wherever you can find it. We didn’t have the Internet, but I had the movies.
My mother allowed me to ride my bicycle downtown to the movies after school, and I saw every one of them. I knew every movie that Barbara Stanwyck was in, and when I finally met her years later, we became great pals. I have letters from her, Doris Day, all these people. It’s because I saw their movies when I was a kid. I knew what to ask them. I asked them things that interested them.
Do you remember the first movie you hated?
There are certain kinds of pictures and certain genres of filmmaking that I never had any interest in. I never cared for cowboy movies. I don’t like shoot ‘em ups. I hate all of those westerns, and I hate country western music. That’s all from childhood; the things we experience follow us into maturity. A good shrink can bring all of this out and explain to you where it’s coming from. In my case, everything comes from the movies.
You once wrote in a review, “If the movie has alligators in it, I’m in.” Where did that come from?
Alligators were all over Louisiana, in the swamps and everything. Naturally, they became symbols of terror to me. They became the things that I was really frightened of. Truman Capote was the same way. He loved crime. He was attracted to all kinds of murders and wrote marvelous books about them. I’ve always been fascinated by that, too—by things that terrorize you. When I went to India, I wasn’t as interested in the Taj Mahal as I was in the cobras, who would spit at you while you were watching them. I was just fascinated by all of that.
“I cannot begin to explain what it is, but I was always different.”
Do you like being scared?
Yes. That’s why I always have had a thing about horror films.
Is horror your favorite genre?
No—and certainly not now, because the people who knew how to make good horror films are all gone.
What makes a good horror film?
I like horror movies in which all of the fears are very real. I’m very attracted to the unknown. I’ve always had a thing about vampires. They scare me. I love Dracula. I loved Bela Lugosi. I thought he was really frightening. You can imagine how thrilled I was when, after ten years in New York, I had enough money to move into the Dakota, which has always had an aura of gothic mystery and horror because of Rosemary’s Baby.
It was one of my great fantasies, living in the Dakota. So when I was able to live here and discovered that my neighbor was Boris Karloff, you can imagine that this was just a dream come true. I used to find his fan mail in the garbage! I collected some of it. He died pretty soon after I moved in, but I still was thrilled to be in the building where Boris Karloff lived. That’s what you must understand: It comes naturally because my mother was from Oklahoma; her family lived among the outlaws. Her second cousins were the Dalton gang. I never met them—they were long gone when I was born—but she remembered, and all of those stories were fascinating to me. And my grandfather, my mother’s father, was rocked as a child by Jesse James.
How does that happen?
They all knew these people. They all lived in Oklahoma.
What about your dad’s side?
My father’s side was full of military heroes and things like that. I was named after General Zachary Taylor (my middle name is Taylor). But no, they were not as interesting. My mother’s side? That’s why I love film noir and movies about gangsters. One of my favorite movies in the last ten years was that terrific movie about the private lives of the people who ran the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Zone of Interest.
Yeah, Zone of Interest.
So, you love Nazi movies and gangster movies, but not Westerns.
No, not interested in that. That didn’t have anything to do with my life. And I was never interested in things that were religious—I couldn’t stand movies about the Bible, David and Bathsheba and all that. I hated those movies. They’re corny and terrible. I identified with big cities and underground crime and monsters. As a child, I knew all about World War II. To this day, I’m fascinated by anything that has anything to do with the Nazis. I think they were the most interesting manifestations of evil that ever existed in my lifetime. And I was just a baby, but I knew about the Nazis. I knew what they were.
When you think about how slow Hitler’s ascent really was, do you worry about where we’re heading?
Oh, I worry about it all the time. I worry about the political polarization of America and all of the parallels between what we’re going through now and what the German people went through and everything that happened during the Holocaust; I worry that all of that might happen again. And movies that say that to me really affect me. I wish more people were politically motivated and were more interested in drawing parallels between what has happened in the past and what is happening now. But that’s not the case. Young filmmakers don’t seem to care much about any of that.
I don’t want to waste our time discussing things you think are junk.
There’s a surplus of it.
“The first thing they taught everybody was the five W’s—who, what, why, when and where—that have to go into the opening paragraph. I hated that. I started stories about the color of the wallpaper.”
You’ve met so many of your idols. Have you ever been starstruck?
I was always confidently starstruck. When I moved to New York in 1960, I had just graduated from college. And the first 20 years of my life were really spent trying to figure out how to do that—how to get out of my life and get into a more interesting one. And so you can imagine how wonderful it was when I first started getting assignments from the New York Times.
Before I came to New York, I went to college in Baton Rouge. During that period, I interviewed anybody who came to the South to make a movie—and there were many of them because movies were being shot on location in plantation houses in Mississippi and Louisiana. I remember when Angela Lansbury and Paul Newman and Lee Remick and Joanne Woodward and Orson Welles came to Baton Rouge and made a film called The Long, Hot Summer. I got to meet every single one of those people. Angela Lansbury and I became great friends.
How exactly did you meet them?
Because I was writing about them for the school paper, I went to the set every day. And my little girlfriend—one of my girlfriends—in college was Elizabeth Ann Cole. She didn’t know anything about acting, but she was fascinated by movies and wanted to visit a movie set. She begged me to take her with me to the set of The Long, Hot Summer, and I did, and she became so bitten by the acting bug that she dropped out of school. We did a tape of something. She sent it to New York. She left Baton Rouge. I don’t think she even made it to her sophomore year at LSU. When she moved to New York, there was already a very elderly woman in Actors’ Equity named Elizabeth Cole, so she had to change her name to Elizabeth Ashley. And that’s Liz.
She became a huge star. A year after she moved to New York, she was on the cover of Life Magazine. We’re old friends. My life has been amazing.
Do you have any regrets?
I’m sorry that I didn’t appear in certain publications. I regret that I never wrote anything for the New Yorker, and I wish I had. I did write a novel, but I’m sorry that I didn’t write another one. I’m sorry I didn’t pursue the path of fiction. I do think I took the lowest form of journalism—which is celebrity interviews—and I did something with it. I think I elevated the genre in the pages of the New York Times and Esquire and New York Magazine and things like that. And for a little boy who had no money and didn’t know a living soul who was famous to come to New York and make a name in journalism, that was no small achievement.
You see the world differently. Do you remember learning, or trying to learn, how to do that?
It was always inside me. Nobody ever taught me anything about movies. Nobody taught me anything about jazz. Nobody taught me anything about singing. I cannot begin to explain what it is, but I was always different.
Your mother didn’t box you in. She let you explore. What about your father?
My father didn’t understand one single, solitary thing about show business; he didn’t know anything about any of this. But he also was intuitive and farsighted enough to let me be who I wanted to be. He never interfered. It didn’t bother him that I majored in journalism, but he didn’t have the faintest idea how to help me achieve any success in journalism.
Did your parents ever express how proud they were of you?
They ended up doing so. But, at first, they had a lot of trepidation about me leaving home and moving to New York. They didn’t really want me to do that, but they did not discourage me. That’s the great thing. That’s a quality that’s missing in so many parents when they find their children are different or they have talent, and then they fight them because they want them to live more conventional lives. My father, basically, deep down inside, thought that journalism was a way to get a job working for something like the Atlanta Constitution. I think he would have been very happy if I’d gotten a job working for a newspaper, but I didn’t. I wasn’t interested in that.
I wanted to write about show business, and I wanted to meet famous playwrights and actors. And I moved into a building in New York City (the Dakota) where my neighbors were Boris Karloff and Lauren Bacall. And the first night in my apartment, the doorbell rang. All I had was a sleeping bag and a shopping cart with books and records in it, and a wide-ribbed, lemon-yellow corduroy chair—a Queen Anne chair. The doorbell rang, and I was in my underwear and a sleeping bag on the floor. I went to the door with a towel wrapped around me. Standing there is Robert Ryan, one of the most famous movie stars—one of the most successful actors of all time, who starred on Broadway in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. And there he was. He was very, very famous. Robert Ryan was standing there, and he said, “I’m the president of the board of Dakota, and I just came to welcome you to the building.” Now, how does that happen to the ordinary Joe?
It doesn’t.
He came in. I made him a cup of instant coffee. He sat in the wide rib, yellow corduroy winged back chair, and I put some clothes on and sat on the sleeping bag. And I’m still in that apartment. I’ve been in that apartment since 1970. So what is that? That’s over 50 years?
“The people with real ambition to write seriously have moved to television.“
Do you feel you were one of the first to cover the show business so thoroughly?
Well, I was one of the early successes and certainly one of the youngest successes in journalism, but I had some mentors. I wanted to do something different with the celebrity interview, for example. There weren’t any critics that I admired, and I wanted to write about films and theater. I didn’t really have much respect for anybody except Walter Kerr. I thought he was a great critic. And for movies, I love James Agee. I thought he was the best movie critic there was. And I admired the two of them. And then also, as far as writing about celebrities, that’s probably the lowest form of journalism, celebrity interviews. But I really admired Gay Talese. He was a great influence on my writing. When I was in college, the only ‘C’ I made in journalism was in feature writing because I wouldn’t follow the rules. The first thing they taught everybody in feature writing class was the five W’s of the Associated Press: Who, what, why, when and where. That has to go into the opening paragraph. Well, I just hated that. I started stories about the color of the wallpaper.
My editors loved it, and they were willing to pay me. Honestly, I’ve never written anything on spec.
You’re not a big TV fan, right?
My first job as a critic was as a television critic for Women’s Wear Daily. And I really hated it because I couldn’t stand to be home every night watching television. Also, I felt like by the time it got into print, it was yesterday’s mashed potatoes, and everybody had already forgotten what I was writing about and didn’t care. It was a very temporary form of show business. And yet there I was, stuck every night in front of the television set. I just hated that. I still have not watched much television until recently. Now I feel that the movies are so mediocre and so bad that the people with real ambition to write seriously have moved to television. That’s where the good writers are.
What are you watching? What have you watched that you’ve liked?
I like a lot of stuff on Netflix. Ripley—the remake—oh, I loved it. I thought that was absolutely terrific. I’ve binge-watched all nine episodes of Monsters, the Menendez brothers series. I watched the whole thing in one day.
Did you like it because you thought the writing was good, or was it just because the story was fascinating?
Well, I thought the story had so many loose ends and missing parts that I was very anxious to see them all come together. I wanted all the gaps to be filled. They weren’t. There still are gaps. We still don’t know what really happened. We don’t know if those boys were abused by their parents or whether they just wanted money. There are too many things missing in that story—but that makes it a great mystery. And then I really love that series about the Mormons. Oh, gosh, what was the name of that? My friend Bill Paxton was one of the stars. Big Love. Oh, I thought that was marvelous. Just marvelous. I watched that, and then Bill sent me every episode that I missed. So I have the complete Big Love.
You have a lot of friends.
I don’t feel like I have them now. They’re all gone, really. It was a huge blow to me to lose Angela Lansbury. We were really close. It was not a fan and a star relationship. We were like family. When I came to New York and I started writing for the New York Times and she was opening in Mame—and this was one of the biggest deals in the history of musicals. And, of course, they assigned me the story. But my mother was dying of leukemia, and I had to go to Baton Rouge and be with her, and I couldn’t do the story for the opening day, and they were talking about assigning somebody else, and Angela Lansbury wouldn’t hear of it. She said this much: “What he’s going through is more important, and this story can wait.”
She showed me great friendship. She had a house and in Ireland, and I went to the Cannes Film Festival and wrote about it for the Daily News and the Chicago Tribune syndicate, she said, “Well, you’re so close. Come over to Ireland and stay with me for a week after the film festival is over.” And so I did. I went and stayed in her villa in Ireland many times when she wasn’t even there, she just left a key for me. And I got to know her husband, Peter, and I got to know her two kids. I’ve been through a lot with her. I was staying with her when my father had his coronary, and you could not get an airplane in and out of Ireland for some reason. There were no flights to be had. She pulled every string in the world that she knew with the president of Aer Lingus and got me on a flight to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from Ireland. We were very close.
She’s gone now.
What sort of things did you do together?
I taught her card games, we watched old movies, and we went to restaurants. We enjoyed the quiet part of life, away from it all, and we became very good friends.
What kind of friend do you try to be?
Well, the one thing that I am not is judgmental, but I think I’ve been severely misjudged. People think I’m a monster, and they accuse me of all the things that, well, they actually do.
What do you mean?
Well, people really attack me because they don’t like me. Not because of my work. They just attack me on general principles. I’ve never done that. Mainly, what I’m negative about is the lack of quality. And I think we’re drowning in mediocrity. I grew up at a time when it was not mediocre, and now it is. And so that’s why I constantly find fault with all of this stuff because it’s bad.
You think the great writers are moving to television.
The kind of writing I admire is real people doing real things and saying real things to other real people. I like that. I respond to that. And most of what I’m seeing now is just silly fantasy films and Sci-Fi and horror and brutality and carnage. These are not the subjects that I want to die thinking about.
How do you want to be remembered?
I’d like to be remembered as somebody who really, really tried to make things better. Or at least respected the things that were good when they happened and not, you know, as a curmudgeon. That’s not really what I am in real life. And the movies that I really love? They never say anything. The end is coming soon, and I don’t want the last impression to be “Film Critic Found Dead at Computer,” reviewing a bad movie. That’s why I’m determined, in the time that I have left, to work less. There are things I haven’t done in my life that I want to do, and they’re more important than writing movie reviews. I want to go on a safari—things like that—before I die. I’m just so tired of writing.