A couple of times he ran into trouble with the law. In 1988, he pleaded guilty to and received a $2,000 fine for trying to evade New York State taxes. Twelve years later, he was accused of shoplifting at a Tower Records store on the Upper West Side after being found with Mel Tormé, Carmen McRae and Peggy Lee CDs in his coat pocket. It was all a mistake, he said, and the charges were dropped. When she learned of the incident, Ms. Lee sent him a complete set of her recordings.
Rex Taylor Reed was born in Fort Worth on Oct. 2, 1938, the only child of James M. Reed, an oil company supervisor, and Jewell (Smith) Reed, who claimed a distant relationship to members of the Dalton Gang and whose father, she said, was rocked as a boy on Jesse James’s knee.
James Reed’s work in oil fields meant the family moved around the South a lot. Rex, by his own count, attended 13 schools, graduating in 1956 from Natchitoches High School in Louisiana. Four years later, he received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Louisiana State University, where he wrote movie and theater reviews for the student newspaper.
Long before then, film had captivated him. “My whole realm of experience was shaped by movies,” he told an interviewer with the Louisiana Educational Television Authority in 1983, saying that he went to theaters every day and “withdrew into a world that was more pleasant than the world of my immediate experience.”
His goal was to make it in New York, but his first attempts at landing a newspaper job there went nowhere. After a succession of odd jobs, including a $57.50-a-week stint in the publicity department of 20th Century Fox, he made it to the 1965 Venice International Film Festival. Nearly broke, he bluffed his way into interviews with Buster Keaton and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Mr. Belmondo spoke no English and Mr. Reed no French, so the authenticity of the quotes attributed to the actor were, as the French might say, discutable.
Mr. Reed typed out his articles on hotel stationery and sold the one on Mr. Keaton to The New York Times for $125 and the one on Mr. Belmondo to The New York Herald Tribune for $150. They were published on the same day. With that, Mr. Reed’s writing career took off, as did his celebrity.
