Rex Reed and me

An unrecognized kinship

As a showbiz-addled kid in the 1960s of course I read a lot of Rex Reed, and indeed I read enough of his early stuff that I could say I knew of him when he was a “serious” writer. You know (or perhaps not), when he was deconstructing Lester Maddox alongside his showbiz work. One detects a certain almost mocking self-awareness in the title of his first book of collected pieces, Do You Sleep In The Nude? A little over 10 years later he issued Travolta to Keaton, whose very title indicated a certain diminishment of vitality.

Reed was also, at the time, a notable staple of late-night talk, and while one couldn’t say he invented the concept of the newspaper columnist as media megastar, he certainly took it to new heights. Or lows, depending. Whereas all of Walter Winchell’s movie appearances were as himself, Reed’s early adventures in movie acting entailed real acting, or something like it. As a stunt bit, for a piece no doubt, he cameoed as a farmer in Preminger’s 1967 Hurry Sundown (Winchell appeared, as himself of course, in Otto’s stupendous Daisy Kenyon 20 years prior), and then really made the grade by playing Myron in the 1970 adaptation of Gore Vidal’s gender-smashing satire Myra Breckenridge. Directed by Michael Sarne, a failed pop singer who had dated Brigitte Bardot, Breckenridge is truly one of the most special motion pictures ever made, in that is is packed with incredibly scintillating components — Racquel Welch! John Huston! Mae West! George Furth! Farrah Fawcett! Andy Devine! John Carradine! A John Phillips score! Cinematography by the guy who co-founded Panavision! — but nevertheless is almost completely unwatchable. The picture famously bombed in almost every respect and if I recall correctly Reed was a pretty good sport about the whole thing. It’s worth noting, however, that Reed did not phone in his performance, not in the least; his line reading of “Where are my tits?” is one I can still recall down to the last syllable. (In the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Michael Weldon opined “Any film that opens with John Carradine as a doctor surgically removing Rex Reed’s cock has got the right idea even if it did go wrong.”)

The reason I felt a kinship with him was because in 2009 I joined him in the small fraternity of film reviewers/critics turned temporary film actors, when I played the “Erotic Connoisseur” in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. Other notables in the field include Eugene Archer, who in 1950s Paris wrote the “Who the hell is Howard Hawks” letter to Andrew Sarris that kicked off the American branch of auteurism; Archer, credited as Seymour Hertzberg, plays a rich dyspeptic idler who sneers at the erotic aspirations of the film’s male protagonists in Rohmer’s La Collectioneuse, a few years before Breckenridge. There’s Leonard Harris in Taxi Driver, Chuck Stephens in Citizen Dog, Mark Peranson in Serra’s Bird Song, Joseph McBride in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and earlier/later in The Other Side of The Wind, and so on.

While one wouldn’t go so far as to call Reed a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy, he was more than reasonably collegial. Once greetings were exchanged after encountering him at some screening or party or other, his default mode was that of eyeball-rolling; something was always testing his patience with the world. I never brought up our ostensible affinity because I knew he wasn’t at all keen on Soderbergh’s films; check out his review of Logan Lucky, which really reads like he’s doing a bit rather than engaging the actual picture. I reckon a fair amount of his later work has that quality. So let’s remember the good times, like when he met up with David Bowie in the mid-70s expecting to be appalled — rock hater Rex didn’t like the tunes — and was instead charmed, of course he was, and tickled when Ziggy told him that he gave up serious saxophone studies when he realized he just wasn’t gonna be the next Eric Dolphy. Or the occasion when Rex got busted at the Tower Records near Lincoln Center — man, I still miss that joint — hiding a few CDs under his overcoat (discovered while he was paying for several others — I think Tower security was being a little draconian here) and said the whole this was a “senior moment.” He was only 67 at the time! It is somewhat comforting that Reed died at the Dakota, where he bought a pad back when one actually could — there was a period when one didn’t have to pledge one’s first-born to Satan to reside there — and was apparently a very good neighbor to John Lennon and a help to Yoko Ono on the evening Lennon was murdered. For a variety of reasons, we will not see the likes of Rex again.