REX REED IS ALIVE AND WELL

A premature obit for the prolific critic

Image: Rex Reed, Cannes film festival, 1976, New York Observer ©Getty Images

Rex Reed is alive and well and living at the Dakota, the oldest surviving luxury apartment block in New York, and the spot where John Lennon was shot.

At 87 years old, Reed continues to contribute film reviews to the New York Observer, a regular occurrence since its launch in 1987. He remains at the 8th floor apartment he bought in 1969 for $30,000, refusing to sell to the highest bidder, even when it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber offering a hefty $8 million. The year Reed moved to the building on New York’s West 72nd Street he made his film debut as a leading man in Myra Breckinridge, an adaptation of the Gore Vidal novel, published the previous year. Reed was cast as Myron, a pre-op transexual, with Raquel Welch taking it from there as the post-op Myra (‘whom no man will ever possess’). Farrah Fawcett Majors features at the start of her career, with a bewildered Mae West, way beyond what should have been the end of hers. The author, the director and the cast disowned the film, with Rex Reed joining fellow critics in panning the project on its release. One review dismissed it as ‘an insult to intelligence, an affront to sensibility and an abomination to the eye’. Of his calamitous experience on set, Reed recalled: ‘Mae West spoke to no one but God, Raquel spoke only to the head of the studio, the head of the studio spoke only to God, who then related the message back to Mae West’.

For Reed, the acting credits that followed were few, and include a cameo as himself in Superman (1978), and a part in the Patrick Hamilton stage play Rope. He briefly returned to the stage in 2020, performing songs from the great American songbook in a cabaret show (‘Famous People I Have Known And The Songs They Sang’) that brought him across the lake to, oddly, the stage at The Pheasantry restaurant on London’s King’s Road. Prior to the making of Myra Breckinridge, Rex Reed was rightfully more familiar as a prolific, high profile writer of celebrity interviews. His byline appeared in key New York publications with the city’s name on the masthead - save for the The New Yorker. One of his few regrets.