Rex Reed: The Film Critic Who Trained a Generation of Writers

I first heard the name Rex Reed when I was about eight years old, and he came to Baton Rouge to write about the making of the film. Rex was considered a hometown success story, having graduated from Louisiana State University and had crosses burned on his lawn after he wrote a scathing article for the college newspaper called “The Price of Prejudice.” The film being made had a limited title Blood Kin and was based on a play by Tennessee Williams The Seven Descents of Myrtle. The director was Sidney Lumet, and the film starred the bright, bright Lynn Redgrave, who was holding court in the lobby of the Bellemont Motor Hotel, where all the film crew were staying right there in town, which, according to Rex, looked like Dorothy Lamour had exploded. (Hotel staff were showing bullet marks in a pool that appeared after locals were upset that Robert Hooks—a black actor—drew in it during his Hurry Sundownand they shot them, saying the players would follow.) I first heard Rex Reed’s voice when he told my friend, Barbara Chaney, “Otto Preminger told them to just shoot everybody right away.

Rex never wrote anything about the production of that film, as it was called The ultimate Mobile Hot Shotsand so ugly that it almost glows with a certain charm. However, I was able to see Rex when he came to town to visit his father and Lucille Cole, the mother of actress Elizabeth Ashley. Mrs. Cole and my mother were craft mavens, stitch bitches, macrame mommas, crochet hounds, and I sat with them and listened to the gossip. When Rex came to town—1972 to 1979—he would sit with us and chat, getting up to prepare the best pot of gumbo any of us had ever tasted.

People who knew Rex told me to remind them of him. I was smart, I loved movies and books, and I didn’t fit in at all. I approached the same people Rex knew in Baton Rouge: older, wiser people, including a professor at LSU who had succeeded Rex in his work. When my high school sports team visited New York during Thanksgiving week of 1977, I called Rex (his number was in the phone book), and we talked for over an hour. I started calling him regularly, and I didn’t understand why he took the time, but now I see that it was kindness, recognizing a kind spirit, someone longing to leave the same city he knew and didn’t like well. Rex started sending me things he had written—newspaper clippings. He asked to read what I wrote. He was strict with his criticism, but the job got better when I did what he suggested.

When I moved to New York in 1989, I would see Rex socially, mostly at parties at the house of Patricia Bosworth, a writer I admired, who told me that Rex had been instrumental in helping her transition from the life of an actor to that of a writer. He says it was Rex, who persuaded the editor to let Patti write the profile of Gloria Vanderbilt, and it was Rex who introduced her to the editors at the meeting. New York Timeswhere his work first appeared. I know the image Rex portrayed, but I also know the man he was.

He was never cruel or cruel to me, but he was always honest, and he never felt that his opinion was the only one or right. He used to shrug his shoulders when people liked what he thought was rubbish. The place where he lived showed his good taste, but he told me that his good taste came from growing up in hot kitchens with oilcloth on the table and the sounds of wild animals in the woods. “I knew there was something better for me,” he said, “and I’ve found it.” The years passed, and I lost track of Rex, but when we saw each other again, it was always comfortable and warm. He contacted me when our mutual friend, Marian Seldes, was ill, wanting more information and asking what he could do and what gifts he could send.

When Patti Bosworth died of complications from COVID, she was devastated, and she remembered our last meeting at her apartment, where she asked us to direct visitors who went out into the yard to smoke: They threw cigarette butts in the yard, and Patti was fined. Rex and I did a great job. Not a single cigarette butt was found the next day. At all the parties we attended together, Rex would introduce me to people. “You won’t know not know Victor Navasky,” he said one night.

Rex gave me this advice in writing: “You can only write as you do, even after imitating others. We all do it, but in the end, it’s your voice that comes out. Speak the truth, and your work will find an audience. You’ll get some naysayers, but that’s the price of exposure, of having an audience. Never waver.” As a writer and friend, Rex never did.