Mudpack-Raking, Sinking Hindenburgs

People Are Crazy Here By Rex Reed

Delacorte, 306 pp., $7.95 How did Rex Reed come to pass? Did Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein concoct him to spread the camp sensibility into the bloodstream of silent America via the Hearst Syndicate? Or did the media fabricate him to add a touch of Bill Blass class to the low couture of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show? Actually, Reed was wafted north by a breeze from the Gulf to make a writing career in New York, and I have heard both Gloria Steinem and Liz Smith take rueful credit for helping him get published in their mass magazines. Soon he was film critic for Igor Cassini’s malodorous and ephemeral Status; when that mule was shot out from under him, he began appearing as an interviewer in the Sunday New York Times and Esquire, and as a columnist in Women’s Wear Daily and Holiday. He acquired a reputation for clever bitchiness and supposedly revelatory interviews with aging prima donnas, an activity best described as mudpack-raking.

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People Are Crazy Here By Rex Reed

Delacorte, 306 pp., $7.95 How did Rex Reed come to pass? Did Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein concoct him to spread the camp sensibility into the bloodstream of silent America via the Hearst Syndicate? Or did the media fabricate him to add a touch of Bill Blass class to the low couture of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show? Actually, Reed was wafted north by a breeze from the Gulf to make a writing career in New York, and I have heard both Gloria Steinem and Liz Smith take rueful credit for helping him get published in their mass magazines. Soon he was film critic for Igor Cassini’s malodorous and ephemeral Status; when that mule was shot out from under him, he began appearing as an interviewer in the Sunday New York Times and Esquire, and as a columnist in Women’s Wear Daily and Holiday. He acquired a reputation for clever bitchiness and supposedly revelatory interviews with aging prima donnas, an activity best described as mudpack-raking.