WEEKEND RUBRICS: 5/16/26

R.I.P. REX

BEFORE GOOGLE

“I took the lowest form of journalism—the celebrity interview—and did something with it. For a boy with no money who didn’t know a famous soul to come to New York and make a name in journalism, that was no small achievement.” - Rex Reed

Andrew Goldman, who has his own remarkable interviewing skills which have been displayed in The New York Times, among many other premiere journalistic outlets, including WSJ Magazine where he is a contributing writer, recently posted about having interviewed Rex Reed, who died this week at the age of 87, for The Originals podcast. He hosted the podcast for several years for Los Angeles magazine. Andrew conducted the interview at Reed’s apartment in the Dakota where, against the co-op rules, he took photos of some of the photos of Reed and his famous friends that were framed all about the walls. I am reposting four of them here. Above: Reed with Angela Lansbury. Below. Sue Mengers. Carol Channing. And Liza Minnelli and Peter Allen, to whom Minelli was married from 1967 to 1974.

Andrew wrote on his Facebook page:

“I interviewed Rex Reed in his apartment in the Dakota on February 12, 2022, for The Originals. My mom had given me a collection of his profiles when I first got to New York, right around the time he famously got pinched for stealing a bunch of CDs from Tower Records, which honestly kind of made me admire his outlaw ways. He was known as a merciless film reviewer, but he was a much more skilled stylist than he was given credit for. In fact, Tom Wolfe included his Ava Gardner profile in his 1973 The New Journalism anthology alongside Capote and Didion. I suspect he stopped doing profiles because the subjects stopped consenting; he was always funny, but could be brutal. Legend has it that his profiles of Barbra Streisand and Warren Beatty seeded their lifelong distrust of journalists. He gave me a great, great interview, and was extremely patient when the SD card on my recorder ran out of space and waited while I sprinted ten blocks to grab a new one at Staples. I took a bunch of snaps of his amazing apartment and the objects within, and of his incredible bathroom fame wall. It remains one of my favorite episodes.”

The New York Times, clinging to its premiere classification as a publication, failed to mention that Rex Reed was gay in his obituary written by Clyde Haberman as if the obit were written by the 81-year-old Haberman during one of those years when Liza was married to Allen who was, you know - cover your ears, Clyde - gay.

If you want to read a great remembrance of Reed, check out this lovely, beautifully written one, “The Rex Reed I Knew,” at Observer.com, by Merin Curotto, the site’s Head of Editorial and Audience.

After I read it, I sent her an email thanking her for it.

“One of my great regrets is not knowing Rex better,” I wrote. “I always thought of myself as having the ‘Rex Reed slot’ at Vanity Fair and maybe the reason he never got his byline in there more often. So I was not only a bit shy and intimidated to cultivate a friendship but was also sort of gilded with a bit of guilt that there seemed to be room for only one southern gay guy who knew his way around fame and fought for his sentences.

“My Aunt Jo down in Mississippi once turned to me when I was about 12 or 13 and said, ‘You know who you remind me of .... Rex Reed.’ She thought she was being a bit unkind but as I looked back on it in later years, I realised it was one of the kindest and most perceptive things anyone had ever said to me.

“Rex and I were once sitting in a van down in Louisiana being hauled to a fancy-enough lunch at a renovated plantation upriver from New Orleans. We were both participating on panels at the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival that year. On the way home after an awful afternoon of putting up with the rising humidity and the kind of the-south-shall-rise-again queen who owned the place and could sashay while sitting at the head of a luncheon table, we kept each other in southern stitches by saying what we’d really thought about the outing we’d had to endure. During a lull in our laughter, I told him about my Aunt Jo saying that about me and how much it had meant to me. I think he was touched by that. I hope he was. Filling the silence with a fumbled sigh that sometimes our tears can form when we’re trying not to let them form themselves, he turned his head to look out the van’s window at the Louisiana landscape where he had lived the life that led to his longing to live a much bigger one so much farther upriver.

“He lived it.

“We are all lucky that he did.”

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Above: Talk about everything connecting. I unearthed this photo of Rex and Henry Geldzahler and Fran Lebowitz at, it seems, a screening for something. Does anyone know the poster behind Henry and Fran? I didn’t really know Rex that well, but Fran and Henry were certainly big parts of my “growing up” in small-town New York after moving up the road a-piece from small-town Mississippi.

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And check this one out: Kay Thompson and Rex at a party in 1974 in Donald Brooks’s apartment. I moved to NYC the next year trying to find my way to just such a sofa to sit next to just such people.

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