The Oscars are over, but Rex Reed is still smarting from the telecast. “It was so incredibly boring,” he says. “They have to stop thinking of new ways to improve the Oscars. Just show them and get them off the air.”
At 85, Reed, once known as the hazel-eyed hatchet man for his tough reviews, is still swinging the axe. He’s especially furious at this year’s “In Memoriam” segment: “Those stupid dancers dancing around those tiny pictures of the people who died. You couldn’t tell who died! The whole thing smacks of mediocrity.”
Reed is equally scathing about the state of movie criticism, which he’s practiced for 45 years. If his judgment were a review, it would be a pan. The profession, he thinks, has become irrelevant, its cast of characters largely colorless unknowns. When he attends meetings of the New York Film Critics Circle, he looks around the table and wonders, Who are these people?
“They sit together in little clusters, and they laugh all the way through the meetings at some inside joke,” he says of his junior colleagues. “They vote for Adam Sandler and people like that. I mention certain films and they just draw a blank. I don’t get it. I always thought [critics] were important. I don’t anymore.”
Reed, who has written for The New York Times, the New York Daily News, and, since 1987, The New York Observer, is the last of the celebrity critics, those taste-makers who wielded power over the movie business from the 1960s through the 1990s. A knife in the throat could destroy a career. A pat on the head could lead to an Oscar nomination. Their quotes were splashed on full-page ads in newspapers, the sides of city buses, and movie-theater marquees. Movie critics appeared regularly on Johnny Carson’s, Merv Griffin’s, and Dick Cavett’s chat shows. Columnist Liz Smith covered their feuds. Their writing was stylish, insightful, witty, and bitchy. Of Nancy Sinatra, Reed once wrote, “No matter how much of her father’s money she spends on herself she still looks like a pizza waitress.”
Their names, along with their yellowed clippings, now lie buried in the libraries—“the morgues”—of newspapers and magazines. But Reed, who joined their ranks as an ambitious young journalist in the 1960s, remembers them well.
Judith Crist reached millions of readers every week with columns in the New York Herald Tribune, New York magazine, and TV Guide. Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, championed such fledgling directors as Woody Allen, James Ivory, and Spike Lee. Pauline Kael, an eccentric contrarian, was a must-read in The New Yorker. Of Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, she wrote, “Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.” And John Simon, at New York magazine and the National Review, viciously attacked actresses’ looks: Kathleen Turner is a “braying mantis”; Diana Rigg, appearing naked, “is built like a brick basilica with insufficient flying buttresses;” Liza Minnelli has the face “of a beagle.”
“No matter how much of her father’s money she spends on herself she still looks like a pizza waitress.”
Rough stuff, but, as with all the critics of that era, you couldn’t wait to read them. “These people were important,” Reed says. And what of today’s lot? Reed calls them “freelancers” from online publications he’s never heard of. They have no swagger, no stature, no impact. Worst of all, they aren’t any fun. They don’t have feuds, in print or in person, and their quips (if they have any) don’t sting. Nobody invites them on television, though they sometimes pop up on podcasts that reach two, maybe three, listeners.
Reed, who came to New York in 1960 from Louisiana with $50 in his pocket, became well known through his appearances on Cavett’s show and through his syndicated newspaper column. (At one point his byline appeared in every newspaper owned by the now defunct Tribune Company.) He had roles in a handful of movies that “were so bad that nobody remembered them,” he says cheerfully, although he had a cute cameo in Superman starring Christopher Reeve. “Seen anything good?,” Margot Kidder, as Lois Lane, asks him as he enters the Daily News Building, on West 42nd Street. “Not until you came along,” he ad-libs.
He also appeared on game shows, including the notorious (though now beloved) The Gong Show. “That was crazy and fun. Not exactly classy, but fun. But I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was get paid.” Years later, the actress Mare Winningham, who as a teenager appeared on the show and sang a Beatles song, approached him at a party. “You gonged me!” she said.
Reed enjoyed—and sometimes sparred with—his prominent colleagues. Kael “was colorful because she was so noisy about everything,” Reed says. “In the screening room, you knew the movie wasn’t going well because she’d go, ‘Oh … oh … oh!’ She would just sigh, very loudly, her disapproval.” She couldn’t stand John Simon. “He makes spider sperm,” she said. Once, at a New York Film Critics Circle meeting, a colleague wanted to give a special award to Bea Arthur.
“Oh, my God, I don’t believe what I’m hearing!,” Kael shouted.
“Well, she reminded me of my mother,” the other critic said.
“Then your mother must have been a drag queen,” Kael said.
Everything Kael blurted out was “always to the horror and the consternation of Judith Crist,” Reed recalls, laughing. “They had a silent rivalry.”
Reed himself had a public, though friendly, feud with Crist. Of Reed’s performance in the spectacularly campy movie Myra Breckinridge, Crist, with a tinge of the homophobia prevalent at the time, told Cavett, “I’ll never be able to look at Rex again without wondering, ‘Is he or isn’t he?’” Cavett invited Reed on his show the next day to respond. As it happened, Crist had become the spokeswoman for a vaginal spray. “I’ll never be able to look at her again without wondering, ‘Did she or didn’t she?,’” Reed retorted.
Reed has lived alone in a roomy two-bedroom apartment in the Dakota since 1970. He bought it for $30,000, his payday from Myra Breckinridge. A few years ago, Andrew Lloyd Webber offered him $8 million for it. The shelves in his study groan with books and record albums. (No Spotify for him; he’s strictly a turntable guy.) Scattered throughout the apartment are inscribed photos of renowned friends—Liza Minnelli, Angela Lansbury, Melina Mercouri, Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood.
When Reed moved in, the Dakota was full of showbiz people. (“It’s now investment bankers,” he says.) Ruth Ford, the Broadway actress, found him the apartment. Robert Ryan, the character actor, was president of the co-op board. Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, threw glamorous parties. When Gilda Radner ripped up the living room in her ground-floor apartment, she discovered an old swimming pool. And John Lennon and Yoko Ono holed up in their bedroom watching TV and smoking pot.
Reed vividly recalls the night of December 8, 1980. He got a call from Ford, who lived next to the entrance. She’d heard a bang and thought the boiler had exploded again, and she asked Reed to check it out. When he came downstairs, he saw Lennon sprawled on the ground, a river of blood running down the pavement. Reed says he helped put him into the police car in which he died.
The next day Reed gave an interview to the Today show. Asked if Lauren Bacall, who also lived in the building, was hiring bodyguards, he declined to answer. “I can’t speak for her at all,” he said.
Back in his apartment, the phone rang.
“This is Betty,” Bacall barked. “I just saw you on television, and you named me! Nobody knows where I live. And I’m more famous than you. More vulnerable, too!”
“Everybody knows where you live, Betty,” Reed replied. “In your book there’s a picture of you in front of the Dakota, and when the [tourist] bus gets to 72nd Street, they say, ‘This is where Lauren Bacall lives.’”
“Frank Sinatra was right,” Bacall snapped. “You’re all sons of bitches.”
They eventually patched things up and became friends.
“I don’t get it. I always thought critics were important. I don’t anymore.”
In his heyday, Reed churned out thousands of words a month while making time for dozens of television and radio appearances. Time magazine reported he fielded 20 invitations to star-studded parties in one week alone. He shuttled between New York and Los Angeles and was a fixture at international film festivals.
Today the pace has slowed considerably. “I’m 85 fucking years old,” he says. “I’m tired of deadlines. I look forward to days when I don’t have to be anywhere.”
Not long ago, he almost left the Observer, which is now an online publication only, but the publisher doubled his fee.
“They still want the Rex Reed byline,” he says with a shrug.
Michael Riedel is the co-host of Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning, on 710 WOR, and the author of Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway and Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway