Valentines & Vitriol

by Rex Reed

For over two decades, the art of the interview was very nearly the sole province of Rex Reed, the Master of the Celebrity Profile. While still in his twenties Rex Reed became the widely-syndicated film critic for a succession of high-profile magazines and newspapers and from that vantage point began to interview everyone in the film and theater worlds who mattered. In Valentines & Vitriol Rex Reed reports on Elizabeth Taylor on the set of the disastrous Russian-American collaboration The Bluebird, captures Roy Scheider and Louise Fletcher just as the public is becoming aware of their talents, a late-in-life meeting with legend Bette Davis, William Holden coming to grips with aging and wanderlust, and a surprisingly revealing look at David Bowie who is a much more sensible person than his image suggested. Writer Tom Wolfe has said about Reed: “Rex Reed…raised the celebrity interview to a new level through his frankness and his eye for social detail. He has also been a master at capturing a story line in the interview situation itself.”
Along with Wolfe, Truman Capote, Kenneth Tynan, and Harry Crews, Rex Reed achieved a literary reputation for a genre, the celebrity profile, once relegated to gossip journalists who as often as not wrote studio-approved fantasies of the lives of the stars.
Devault-Graves Digital Editions has reissued Rex Reed’s quartet of best-selling profile anthologies: Do You Sleep In the Nude?, Conversations in the Raw, Valentines & Vitriol, and People Are Crazy Here. Virtually anyone who was anyone during the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s in the movie and theater world are captured for the ages in these books. When asked why he no longer writes celebrity profiles, Mr. Reed answered simply: “The movie stars of today are no longer interesting.”
But when they were, Rex Reed was there to file them away for history. It is to the reader’s pleasure to rediscover them.
Included in Valentines & Vitriol are profiles of: Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Lillian Hellman, Bette Davis, William Holden, David Bowie, Robert Redford, and over twenty more.

Paperback

First published April 18, 2013

About the author

Rex Taylor Reed is an American film critic and former co-host of the syndicated television show At the Movies. He currently writes the column "On the Town with Rex Reed" for The New York Observer.

Reviews

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't expect much from this. I didn't even know who Rex Reed was. However, I enjoyed it immensely. The intelligent interviewer was witty and pithy, even incisive in exploring the interview subjects, films, etc. Covered here (generally late 70s) are:

* David Bowie while filming the cult film The Man Who Fell to Earth. (Bowie want out of rock and permanently into cinema.)
* Elizabeth Taylor on the fraught filming of The Blue Bird (1976)
* Sophia Loren
* Pearl Bailey
* Jacqueline Susanne
* Bette Davis
* Carol Channing
* Two thirds of The Andrews Sister trying to chart a post-fame career
* Ginger Rogers
* Carroll Baker on the Andy Warhol-produced dark comedy Bad (1977)
* Geraldine Fitzgerald on the joys of belting out tunes roughly to small crowds
* Walter Matthau evincing an addiction to gambling on the horses
* Jeff Bridges embarking on his famous career
* Marvin Hamlisch as king of film scores
* Roy Schneider on the difficulties of filming Jaws

and many more!

[TrumanCoyote · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely could've done without that whole silly introductory thingie...all apparently intended to convey the notion that he really does Work For A Living ("Yeah Rexie, you're a regular coal miner"). Also the bit on Mabel Mercer grew pretty snobby and old-fartish ("Damn kids with all their newfangled dances--and sweating"); and indeed the "valentines" did tend to get a trifle unctuous at times. Enough interesting/compelling stuff though to keep the pages (even if they were electronic!) turning. And it's also funny how so many of these folks with such illustrious pasts say that they only live for the future. :)

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again, I spent a lot of time googling further information on practically every person he interviewed. I really wish he had written more books. It would be really interesting to see what he would have to say about some of the contemporary 'stars'.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Life is too short to waste time being bored," Jacqueline Susann once told Rex Reed (which he recounts in his outstanding essay about her decade-long battle with cancer that ended Oct. 21, 1974 when she was 56). There not a boring profile in this book--Reed's fifth collection (following DO YOU SLEEP IN THE NUDE, CONVERSATIONS IN THE RAW, BIG SCREEN LITTLE SCREEN, PEOPLE ARE CRAZY HERE. This outstanding 1977 tome collects articles previously published in Ladies Home Journal and the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

This book is divided into four sections:

THE GODDESSES: Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, & Audrey Hepburn.

THE HEROES: Jacqueline Susann, Sylvia Syms, Hildegard Knef, Louise Fletcher, Pearl Bailey, George Burns, Melina Mercouri, Martin Ritt, and Lillian Hellman.

THE SURVIVORS: Bette Davis, Mabel Mercer, Carol Channing, The Andrew Sisters, Ginger Rogers, Dody Goodman, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Walter Matthau, Alexis Smith, & William Holden.

THE NEW BREED: Ellen Burstyn, James Coco, Robert Evans, Valerie Perrine, Glenda Jackson, JEff Bridges, Diane LAdd, Marvin Hamlish, Roy Scheider, Katharine Ross, Genevieve BujoldGiancarlo Giannini, Robert Redford, David Bowie and Madeline Kahn.

What a cast!

There's two 12-page sections of photos.

Another great selection of Hollywood profiles and interviews.