What Rex Reed Taught Me About Truth, Kindness and Writing

I first heard the name Rex Reed when I was about eight years old, and he arrived in Baton Rouge to write about the making of a film. Rex was considered a hometown success story, having graduated from Louisiana State University and having had crosses burned on his lawn after he wrote a scathing editorial for the college newspaper called “The Price of Prejudice.” The film being made was tentatively titled Blood Kin and was based on the Tennessee Williams play The Seven Descents of Myrtle. The director was Sidney Lumet, and the film starred the bright, buoyant Lynn Redgrave, who held court in the lobby of the Bellemont Motor Hotel, where all the film crews stayed when in town, which, according to Rex, looked as if Dorothy Lamour had exploded. (The hotel staff would show off bullet marks in the pool that appeared after locals were outraged that Robert Hooks—a Black actor—had dipped into it during the making of Hurry Sundown, and they shot it up, claiming the actors would be next.) I first heard Rex Reed’s voice when he told a friend of mine, Barbara Chaney, “Otto Preminger told them to just shoot everyone quickly. They were ready to leave town. And that was that.”

Rex never did write anything about the production of that film, which was ultimately called The Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, and is so bad that it almost glows with a certain charm. However, I was able to see Rex when he came to town to visit with his father and with Lucille Cole, the mother of actress Elizabeth Ashley. Ms. Cole and my mother were craft mavens, stitch bitches, macrame mommas, crochet hounds, and I would sit around with them and listen to the gossip. When Rex came to town—in the years 1972 to 1979—he would sit with us and talk, getting up to tend to a pot of the best gumbo any of us had ever tasted.

People who had known Rex told me I reminded them of him. I was smart, loved movies and books, and I absolutely did not fit in. I gravitated toward the same people Rex had known in Baton Rouge: older, smarter people, including the professor at LSU who had championed Rex’s work. When my high school drama club 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 began calling him on a regular basis, and I never understood why he took the time, but I now realize it was kindness, a recognition of a kindred spirit, someone desperate to leave the same town he had known and not loved so well. Rex began mailing me things he had written—newspaper clips. He asked to read what I was writing. He was tough with his criticism, but the work improved if I did what he suggested.

When I moved to New York in 1989, I would see Rex socially, particularly at parties at the home of Patricia Bosworth, a writer I adored, who told me that Rex had been instrumental in helping her transition from the life of an actress to that of a writer. It was Rex, she claimed, who had persuaded an editor to let Patti write a profile of Gloria Vanderbilt, and it was Rex who introduced her to editors at the New York Times, where her work began to appear. I know the image Rex projected, but I also know the man he was.

He was never cruel or bitchy with me, but he was always honest, and he never felt his opinion was the only one or the right one. He would just shrug when people liked what he thought was garbage. His apartment displayed his exquisite taste, but he would tell me that his good taste derived 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.” Years would pass, and I would lose track of Rex, but when we would meet again, it was always comfortable and warm. He reached out to me when our mutual friend, Marian Seldes, was ill, demanding updates and asking what he could do and what gifts he could send.

When Patti Bosworth died of complications from COVID, he was devastated, and he remembered our last meeting in her apartment, where she asked us to supervise the guests who went out into the courtyard to smoke: They threw cigarette butts on the grounds, and Patti was fined. Rex and I did a good job. Not one cigarette butt was found the following day. All through the parties we attended together, Rex would introduce me to people. “You cannot not know Victor Navasky,” he said one night.

Rex gave me this advice about writing: “You can only write as you do, even after the imitation of others. We all do that, but finally, it’s your voice that comes out. Tell the truth, and your work will find an audience. It will also find some detractors, but that’s the price of exposure, of having an audience. Never waver.” As both a writer and a friend, Rex never did.