Conversations In The Raw

For over two decades, the art of the interview was very nearly the sole province of Rex Reed, the Master of the Celebrity Profile. In Conversations in the Raw, the second of his four best-selling celebrity profile collections, he turns his focus on cult legends such as Bette Davis and Jean Seberg , international superstars such as Simone Signoret, screen idols such as Ingrid Bergman and Paul Newman. and, as always, Reed's unerring choices of newcomers who just might make it big such as Jon Voight just finishing his work on Midnight Cowboy. 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 Conversations in the Raw are profiles of: Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Myrna Loy, Simone Signoret, Patricia Neal, Oskar Werner, Paul Newman, Joseph Losey, Omar Sharif, Albert Finney, Jean Seberg, Leslie Caron, Burt Bacharach, George Sanders, James Earl Jones, Oliver Reed, Jon Voight, and many more.

For over two decades, the art of the interview was very nearly the sole province of Rex Reed, the Master of the Celebrity Profile. In Conversations in the Raw, the second of his four best-selling celebrity profile collections, he turns his focus on cult legends such as Bette Davis and Jean Seberg , international superstars such as Simone Signoret, screen idols such as Ingrid Bergman and Paul Newman. and, as always, Reed's unerring choices of newcomers who just might make it big such as Jon Voight just finishing his work on Midnight Cowboy. 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 Conversations in the Raw are profiles of: Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Myrna Loy, Simone Signoret, Patricia Neal, Oskar Werner, Paul Newman, Joseph Losey, Omar Sharif, Albert Finney, Jean Seberg, Leslie Caron, Burt Bacharach, George Sanders, James Earl Jones, Oliver Reed, Jon Voight, and many more.

Rex Reed, the master of the celebrity profile, was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, and spent much of his childhood in the South, moving from one town to another because of his father's job as an oil company supervisor. He created his first of many firestorms when he wrote a blistering editorial about racism for the campus newspaper at Louisiana State University. As a senior he won a short story contest judged by Eudora Welty who urged him to become a writer. According to Reed, he has been "a jazz singer, a performer on a weekly Louisiana TV show…a pancake cook…an actor in the summer stock company in the Anaconda Copper Mine in Butte, Montana, and the editor of a college literary magazine started by Robert Penn Warren." While still in his twenties Reed got a coveted position as film critic and columnist for The New York Observer, a job he has held for decades. Until the success of the Ebert & Siskel television programs, Reed was without question the most famous American film critic, familiar to anyone who watched "The Tonight Show" or saw his campy performances as a panelist on "The Gong Show." His featured role in the film version of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckenridge made almost as many headlines as his denunciations of the film after its release. A second career as a master of the celebrity profile began in 1965 after he submitted an interview with Buster Keaton to The New York Times. In an irony not lost on his readers, it was Keaton's final interview and his last words to Reed: "Hell, the way I feel, I just might live forever." Thus became Reed's signature as a literary profilist: finding the indelible, telling detail and letting the subject paint his or her own portrait, whether they were aware of what the end result would be or not. 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…Reed is excellent at recording and using dialogue." Along with Truman Capote, Kenneth Tynan, Tom Wolfe, 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. In his first collection of profiles, Do You Sleep In the Nude?, Reed caught the comet tails of rising stars just tasting the fruits of superstardom, such as Barbra Streisand as she prepared for her pivotal television special Color Me Barbra and an elusive will-o'-the-wisp known as Warren Beatty as he was finishing Bonnie and Clyde. Reed also was brilliant at capturing the stars whose careers had eclipsed—for instance, a classic and much-anthologized piece on Ava Gardner. On occasion when the mood suited him, Reed could stray beyond Hollywood and the entertainment arts as he did with his stunning and revelatory up-close look at Lester Maddox, the Bible-verse-spewing segregationist governor of Georgia. Devault-Graves Digital Editions has reissued Rex Reed's quartet of best-selling profile anthologies in the ebook format: 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.