Rex Reed, who across six decades reviewed films and wrote about movie stars in prose that was graceful and evocative but often also the literary equivalent of a poison-tipped dagger plunged between the shoulder blades, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
A statement from the publicist Sean Katz said that a longtime friend, William Kapfer, confirmed the death, after a short illness.
Mr. Reed made no bones about his fascination with filmdom’s grandes dames of yesteryear — the Dietrichs, Bergmans, Lansburys and Mercouris — and he tended to write about them glowingly. “I am a fan of what was, not what is,” he said. Modern actresses barely raised his thick eyebrows. “The old broads are the ones who interest me the most,” he once told Newsweek. “Nothing bores me more than these miniskirted girls with nothing on their minds.”
Here he was on Bette Davis in 1968, when he was a regular contributor to The New York Times: “Froggy-eyed, lipstick-slashed or glowing like a Tiffany lamp, she is exciting enough, even when photographed through gauze, to make the latest youth idols about as interesting as a withered logarithm.”
Gwen Verdon was one of those performers, “rare as blue butterflies, who carry around their own lightning.” Dame Edith Evans had a “wonderful rococo voice that sounds like Mahler played on a dulcimer.” As for Myrna Loy, “she brings back the quiet aura of a time when kids fell in love to Dinah Shore records and nice women never took their aprons off until 5 p.m.”
But if Mr. Reed disliked someone or — worse — found the person merely uninteresting, it was wise to duck and cover.
His 1967 Times article on Michelangelo Antonioni — “If there is anything more excruciating than sitting through a Michelangelo Antonioni film, it’s sitting through a Michelangelo Antonioni interview” — led the Italian director to write a letter to the editor disputing Mr. Reed’s characterization of him. To Mr. Reed, Bette Midler was “a zaftig waif,” Peter Lawford a low-I.Q. “court jester” and Warren Beatty just plain insufferable.
Mr. Reed had an enduring enemy in Frank Sinatra after he said the singer’s daughter Nancy resembled a “pizza waitress.” He wrote how a tipsy Ava Gardner, who was once married to Mr. Sinatra, said of her ex-husband’s subsequent marriage to Mia Farrow, “Hah! I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy.” Still bruised over that interview 20 years later, Ms. Gardner said of Mr. Reed to The Chicago Tribune, “This son of a bitch is either at your feet or at your throat.”
An oft-quoted Reed takedown was his skewering of Barbra Streisand in 1966 after she kept him waiting longer than a David Lean epic. “Three-and-a-half hours late,” he wrote for The Times, “she plods into the room, falls into a chair with her legs spread out, tears open a basket of fruit, bites into a green banana and says to the reporters, ‘OK, you’ve got 20 minutes.’ ” What Ms. Streisand had to say about him later is best suited for impolite company.
Reviewing “Do You Sleep in the Nude?,” a collection of Mr. Reed’s writings and one of his eight books, Nora Ephron wrote in 1968 that it was impossible to read him “without wondering how on earth Reed gets his subjects to say the things they do.”
His take was simply that he listened aerobically. “I have an empathy for their pain which often leads them to tell me more than they realize,” he wrote.
There was scarcely a major publication that Mr. Reed didn’t write for. Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily, GQ, Esquire, Glamour, Mademoiselle, The Daily News, The New York Post, The New York Observer — they and other outlets ran his work, some for many years. In the 1980s he was a co-host of “At the Movies,” a syndicated television program, and he appeared frequently on the Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson talk shows, where he was wont to offer a “puh-leeze” in his faint Southern drawl to punctuate whatever of the moment displeased him.
He lived in the Dakota, one of New York City’s most prestigious buildings, in a two-bedroom apartment that he had bought in 1969 for $30,000. He even had a brief film career in the 1970s and ’80s, most notably in the gender-bending comedy “Myra Breckinridge,” where Mr. Reed played Myron, who was transitioning to Raquel Welch’s Myra. The movie was universally panned. It was so bad that Mr. Reed put it at the top of his own list of the 10 worst films of 1970.
What raised perhaps the most hackles across the years were his reviews. It’s not that he disliked whatever he saw; it just seemed that way. And he could be brutal. “A loopy, lunkheaded load of drivel” was his dismissal of “The Shape of Water” in 2017, and “just because he stopped shaving doesn’t mean he can suddenly act” was his 2018 verdict on Keanu Reeves in “Siberia.”
In self-defense, Mr. Reed insisted to The Times in 2018 that “I like just as many films as I dislike.”
“But I think we’re drowning in mediocrity,” he continued. “I just try as hard as I can to raise the level of consciousness. It’s so hard to get people to see good films.”
On more than a few occasions, he landed in trouble of his own making. He was known to trash films he had barely watched, and some critics of his said he occasionally had assistants conduct his interviews.
When Marlee Matlin, who is deaf, won best actress at the 1987 Academy Awards for “Children of a Lesser God,” Mr. Reed wrote that she had benefited from a “pity vote.” Bizarrely, and wrongly, he insisted that Marisa Tomei did not really win the 1993 Oscar for best supporting actress for her role in “My Cousin Vinny” and that the presenter, Jack Palance, had read the wrong name. Mr. Reed once mixed up Benicio del Toro, a Puerto Rican actor, and Guillermo del Toro, a Mexican filmmaker, misspelling Benicio to boot.
Eyes really widened in 2013 after Mr. Reed cruelly described Melissa McCarthy in “Identity Thief” as “tractor-sized,” likening her to a “female hippo.” In response, Ms. McCarthy said she “felt really bad for someone who is swimming in so much hate.” His own reaction was that she owed him an apology, for she went on to lose weight after his review.
A couple of times he ran into trouble with the law. In 1988 he pleaded guilty to and received a $2,000 fine for trying to evade New York State taxes. Twelve years later, he was accused of shoplifting at a Tower Records store on the Upper West Side after being found with Mel Tormé, Carmen McRae and Peggy Lee CDs in his coat pocket. It was all a mistake, he said, and the charges were dropped. When she learned of the incident, Ms. Lee sent him a complete set of her recordings.
Rex Taylor Reed was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on Oct. 2, 1938, the only child of James M. Reed, an oil company supervisor, and Jewell (Smith) Reed, who claimed a distant relationship to members of the Dalton Gang and whose father, she said, was rocked as a boy on Jesse James’s knee.
James Reed’s work in oil fields meant the family moved around the South a lot. Rex, by his own count, attended 13 schools, graduating in 1956 from Natchitoches High School in Louisiana. Four years later he earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Louisiana State University, where he wrote movie and theater reviews for the student newspaper.
Long before then, film had captivated him. “My whole realm of experience was shaped by movies,” he told an interviewer with the Louisiana Educational Television Authority in 1983, saying that he went to theaters every day and “withdrew into a world that was more pleasant than the world of my immediate experience.”
His goal was to make it in New York, but his first attempts at landing a newspaper job there went nowhere. After a succession of odd jobs, including a $57.50-a-week stint in the publicity department of 20th Century Fox, he made it to the 1965 Venice International Film Festival. Nearly broke, he bluffed his way into interviews with Buster Keaton and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Mr. Belmondo spoke no English and Mr. Reed no French, so the authenticity of the quotes attributed to the actor were, as the French might say, discutable.
Mr. Reed typed out his articles on hotel stationery and sold the one on Mr. Keaton to The New York Times for $125 and the one on Mr. Belmondo to The New York Herald Tribune for $150. They were published on the same day. With that, Mr. Reed’s writing career took off, as did his celebrity.
No immediate family members survive. “I don’t have ‘relationships,’ except friends,” he told The Times in 2018. “I don’t know, love is not something that I’ve been really good at. I think people are intimidated by people with opinions.”
Nonetheless, “most people I interview have respect for me even if they don’t like what I write about them,” he said to The Washington Post in 1970. “I guess they feel they would rather be hatcheted by me than anyone else.”
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