I was saddened to learn that film critic, journalist, actor, and flamboyant media maven Rex Reed, 87, died recently in his sleep at his New York home. Not surprisingly, upon hearing of his passing, a tsunami of remembrances erupted from around the world—both congenial and callous, with many a blend of the two.

Many of his obituarists described him as a “contrarian film critic who perfected the skewering celebrity interview,” a “caustic film critic,” and “a critic known for acerbic reviews.” Few could argue with Jordan Ruimy’s assessment, published on his blog, World of Reel, that Reed was “the last great newspaper film critic.”

Adored or abhorred, Reed was a brilliant bolide whose trenchant pen lit up the pages of The New York Observer for four decades. He was also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, and Vogue.
Shortly after bidding farewell to Louisiana State University in 1960, having earned a journalism degree, he headed—to borrow the line of fellow gifted Southern writer and editor of Harper’s magazine, Willie Morris—“north toward home,” in Reed’s case, a two-bedroom apartment at The Dakota in Manhattan, where he lived for decades.

I was one of the fortunate ones to enter Reed’s orbit for a brief time in the mid-2010s, a result of his reading my book, Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts, without igniting his ire.

To the contrary, Reed told me that one of the seminal influences on his decision to pursue a career in journalism was his time as a student at Louisiana State University, where he visited the set of The Long Hot Summer, filmed in Louisiana in the fall of 1957, wrote articles about the production for the school’s newspaper, The Daily Reveille, and was mesmerized by Welles’s performance and personality, as well as by fellow actors Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Lee Remick, and Angela Lansbury.

Though holding Welles in high regard, Reed found the director’s 1973 documentary, F for Fake, which explores the essence of forgery, truth, fiction, and illusion, deeply unsatisfying. On September 26, 1975, in the New York Daily News, he wrote, “F for Fake is a talentless concoction of unparalleled ineptitude… It would have been a more generous gesture to show a retrospective of old Welles films rather than remind everyone of how low his ability as a filmmaker has plummeted.”

Reed’s review of my book, which focuses on the lifelong relationship between Welles and his mentor, my grandfather, Roger “Skipper” Hill, was far more sanguine:

“I have always been intimidated by Orson Welles, and having been raised with a totally different kind of education, I know nothing about schools like Todd (all that discipline, organization, and segregation from growing up like American high-school musicals in the movies) sort of terrifies me. That is why I approached the book with trepidation.
“But it is so imaginative and personal and revealing that I have devoured it like gulps of Merlot. Of course, my passion for a good juicy story makes me long for more–in so many decades, didn’t Orson share just one opinion about Joan Fontaine, Dietrich, or staging “Hamlet” in the actual Elsinore Castle with Ruth Ford as Ophelia? I guess one needs to return to the glut of biographical books about him to see what he thought of Loretta Young and Claudette Colbert, or of playing an immigrant father to a moppet named Natalie Wood.
“No matter. The book proves how two divergent personalities can converge, through a relationship that spans time and geography, to mirror the best and brightest values of another era. I found it both scholarly and immensely hypnotic.”
His last sentence may be debated, but there is no quibbling over Rex Reed’s pyrotechnic prose, at its best, being “scholarly and immensely hypnotic.” The silence he leaves in his wake is deafening.