I was only a few months into my first full-time job in journalism, as a 24-year-old staff writer for The New York Observer in 2013, when my boss informed me I would be taking on a new responsibility — editing the paper’s irascible and provocative movie reviewer, Rex Reed.
It was an unexpected task that provoked dread and excitement. I was a relative greenhorn, still figuring out the basic mechanics of writing and reporting, and Rex, who died last month at the age of 87 — well, his reputation preceded him. He was in his mid-70s and had enjoyed a distinguished career as a legendary critic and magazine writer whose vivid profiles of such eminences as Ava Gardner, Tennessee Williams and Warren Beatty in Esquire had been canonized as classics of New Journalism.
While I considered myself something of an old soul and had aspired to be a jazz critic — a music, I knew, that Rex also loved — in truth, my new title came not simply because we may have been kindred spirits. He had recently faced intense backlash over a scathing review in which he dismissed Melissa McCarthy as a “female hippo,” among other put-downs criticizing her appearance that he defiantly refused to disavow. Our editor in chief, who stood by Rex amid calls for his ouster, was understandably too preoccupied overseeing what was then a weekly print paper and daily website to manage the headaches of dealing regularly with this stubborn but endearing writer whom Nora Ephron once admiringly called a “saucy, snoopy, bitchy man who sees with sharp eyes and writes with a mean pen and succeeds in making voyeurs of us all.”
So, the duty was passed to me not only to manage the ego of the paper’s longest-serving contributor but to operate as a kind of covert sensitivity reader, vetting his copy for offensive words and phrases that could get him into trouble with an online audience he no doubt viewed as irrelevant even in an age of cancel culture.
Though he didn’t know it at the time, I believe I was able to protect him from himself when I later caught problematic language nestled in his copy that would likely have drawn scrutiny. I recall removing the phrase “savage Indians” from a review, for instance. His predilection for “sluttish” was, I felt, a closer call. I usually err on the side of caution.
But as I soon learned, when his reviews began appearing in my inbox every week in bold, 20-point font, one of the greater challenges in working closely with Rex for around three years was experiencing his increasing anger and frustration with what he viewed as the woefully diminished quality of modern cinema.
In my ongoing conversations with him, along with the despairingly pungent emails he regularly sent from his AOL address — many of which I saved in a Google Doc for posterity — Rex seemed to interpret the glut of mediocre films he was forced to endure in an unending series of soporific screenings as a highly personal affront to strict standards of taste, decency and class — cultivated in his peregrinations through an Old Hollywood that had long gone extinct.
“I am facing a lot of forthcoming problems with movies,” he told me in one typically dire email, when I’d asked him to share his reviewing schedule for the weeks ahead. “There is just a real dearth of anything decent to write about.”
“I do not want to waste my time on battling out copy trying to make sense out of incomprehensible movies that are being made by dolts,” he vented in another that had urged the paper to allow him to write more theater criticism — a request our editor in chief was happy to oblige. “So I will continue to push for some theatre reviews to alleviate my torture.”
Rex was not unaware of the cranky image he had constructed. “I fear I am developing a reputation for being such a bastard that I guess I am trying to find something — anything! — to be nice about,” he wrote to me after filing a positive review. “I wanted to give a nod to the actors.”
It felt appropriate that my introduction to Rex, who never worked from the Observer’s offices and rarely, if ever, visited, was mediated primarily by phone and email in the initial period where I found myself as his handler.
Though I was familiar with some of his work, I immediately embarked on a deeper study, digging into People Are Crazy Here, his delightfully candid 1974 collection of celebrity profiles published before the entertainment industry had been corrupted by gate-keeping publicists. I found his old appearances on Dick Cavett’s talk show on YouTube, when Rex was a film critic for Holiday magazine. I was struck as much by his commandingly insouciant presence as I was by his jet-black hair and argyle vest and jacket, which he called his “little Bill Blass number.” I came to regard him as a peculiar titan of journalism, and I wondered if he would tolerate his arranged marriage with a neophyte just two years removed from college.
A few weeks into our budding relationship, we met for the first time at La Rivista, a now-closed Italian restaurant on West 46th Street near Times Square, around the corner from the Observer’s offices and a short subway ride from his two-bedroom apartment in The Dakota, which he had purchased, in 1969, for just $30,000.
The process of arranging dinner amused and intimidated me. “I love La Rivista,” he wrote, “but there’s a noisy, terrible singing piano player they have unwisely hired to wreck the peace and quiet of the place and I think he works on Mondays and Tuesdays, but probably does not go on until 8 p.m. So 7 p.m. is fine.”
When he arrived, he moved us to a separate table from the one I picked, saying it was his regular spot, and asked for a dish that was not listed on the menu, which the server took with no objections, calling him “Mr. Reed” with a ceremonious nod. It was raining heavily outside on that July evening, and we were the only diners in the dimly lit restaurant. I suddenly felt as if I’d been transported to an old New York I’d yearned to experience but knew I had missed. It was enough, I thought then, to see it vicariously through Rex, who seemed to function like it still existed. And maybe it did for him.
I was relieved to find that Rex was a pleasant dinner companion. He never spoke down to me and treated me as if I were his equal as he regaled me with stories about Mel Tormé, Liza Minnelli and the multitude of stars he had known intimately. We bonded over our shared admiration for the somewhat unsung baritone jazz vocalist Johnny Hartman, whom I had recently written about.
“Thanks so much for picking up the check on the Observer’s dime,” he wrote in an email the following day. “I enjoyed having dinner with you. One of these days, we should have a music appreciation session. I cannot believe there is anyone out there 22 years old who knows who Johnny Hartman is.”
He got my age wrong by a couple of years, but I was comforted I had won his approval, and I continued to meet with him to strengthen our rapport. I was lucky, I understood then, to have gotten the chance to know him — even on the waning end of his illustrious life.
In his heyday, Rex had been close with a number of celebrities and enjoyed a brief acting career — most notably in the widely criticized “Myra Breckenridge” with Raquel Welch. His year-end in memoriam piece commemorating forgotten stars who had died was a reminder of his exhaustive knowledge of the industry, not to mention his uniquely personal connection to a bygone glamour he was increasingly eulogizing.
By the time we crossed paths more than a decade ago, I got the sense that he was grumpily reckoning with a world that had changed without his consent. I appreciated his curmudgeonly perspective, especially at a time when criticism appeared to be softening and with contrarians in ever shorter supply. But I wished he could find it in himself to be less negative. Rex was inclined, to cite one of his critical tics, to label movies he hated “the worst of all time,” often for minor films undeserving even of a negative superlative.
The week I asked him to review “Blue is the Warmest Colour,” meanwhile, he ignored my request and filed, instead, a pan of a forgettable horror film called “Big Ass Spider!” Rex later told me that he had no interest in watching nearly “three hours of lesbian sex.” There was no arguing with him.
His frustration extended equally to theater. At one point, he sent me a review of a play, “Hand to God,” that I found so unmercifully mean, I decided to cut the last paragraph and didn’t inform him prior to its publication. Rex was furious, accusing me of sending his writing “through a Cuisinart.”
“This surprises me because you are usually so careful,” he said in a lengthy email. “It is the very worst kind of editing in journalism and it cannot continue.”
Despite occasional tensions, I enjoyed his charmingly anachronistic writing, recognizing a debt owed to him by reviewers like Siskel and Ebert, who helped formalize a highly subjective and personality-driven style of film criticism he had pioneered. Rex’s evocative metaphor describing “The Grand Budapest Hotel“ as “one of those scrumptious lavender Louis Sherry candy boxes from the turn of the century,” for instance, is one line still resonating in my ears.
Less forgivable, in my estimation, was his rather cavalier admission, over dinner one evening at the now-closed Café Un Deux Trois in Times Square, that he had fabricated the quotes in one of his first published interviews, with the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Rex, who sold the piece for $150 to The New York Herald Tribune, spoke no French when Bel-Mondo, who knew no English, sat down to speak with him in 1965 at the Venice Film Festival. “I just made it up,” he said blithely as he ate his dessert. “I didn’t think he would see it.”
Though he came to rely on tape recorders, Rex increasingly struggled with technology. “Matt,” he wrote in one email, “everything I send you for the next three days is going to indicate that it is coming from” what he confusedly called one of his friend’s computers. “If there is any problem with anything, please contact me on my own computer’s email address.”
For Rex, the web was an abstraction, and it was a sign of continued relevance if publicists pulled quotes from his reviews to use in print movie ads. It seemed even more important to him that Gloria Vanderbilt and Al Hirschfeld read his reviews, as he boasted to me.
The last time I saw Rex, it was a week or so before Christmas in 2023 and he had just had serious dental surgery that, he warned in advance, made it difficult to chew on the right side of his mouth. I had reached out to him after a period in which we had fallen out of touch, and I was amused to find he hadn’t changed at all when he accepted my invitation and said he would be happy to “share a meal” with “an old friend.”
“It was a nice surprise hearing from you,” he said in his reply. “My Thanksgiving was pleasant, but I did dine at the home of two girls who cannot cook. My turkey drumstick was as hard as a baseball bat, the rest of the turkey was tasteless, the brussels sprouts were burned, and they forgot to put sugar in the pumpkin pie. All quite indigestible, I’m afraid.”
We met at Chez Napoleon, a classic French restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen that, like many of his favorite haunts, recently closed. He had the rabbit stew. His lip was slightly limp as he told me of his efforts to travel more, including a cruise on the Nile River in Egypt. With his slightly Southern drawl, he recalled his past encounters with luminaries he had profiled, including the aging subject of what he said was his favorite piece, Tennessee Williams. “Baby, I’ve been sick,” the playwright mewls in its famous first sentence.
For his part, Rex looked to be in relatively good health — with his round, ruddy face, full head of white, well-coiffed hair and sharp-edged opinions. He seemed grateful to have a steady writing gig into his 80s, even if his reviews were now published only online, a fate he once dismissed as an abomination.
When I told him my wife and I were expecting our first child, a boy, his response was characteristically pessimistic. Rather than the usual mazel tov I was accustomed to, Rex questioned if I was comfortable bringing a child into a world as chaotic as the one he experienced every day, with rampant crime, war in the Middle East and partisan divisions infecting our politics. It didn’t feel like a provocation. He seemed genuinely curious.
While I found it somewhat depressing to see him again, I was comforted that he had not appeared to change at all.
“Don’t mess with history. Don’t change things. You’ll lose your customers,” he once told me, while voicing his disappointment with a storied restaurant in New Orleans that had made its way onto an ever-growing list of institutions he insisted had lost their touch.
I now realize he could very well have been talking about himself.
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