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 a widely-syndicated film critic for The New York Daily News and from that vantage point began to interview everyone in the film and theater worlds who mattered. In Do You Sleep in the Nude?, the first of his four best-selling celebrity profile collections, he captures the ego and zany personality of soon-to-be-superstar Barbra Streisand, the elusive Warren Beatty just finishing Bonnie and Clyde, the last ever interview with legend Buster Keaton, and a classic and much reprinted portrait of Ava Gardner in her waning years. 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 Books has reissued Rex Reed's quartet of best-selling profile anthologies in ebook form: Do You Sleep In the Nude?, Conversations in the Raw, Valentines & Vitriol, and People Are Crazy Here. Devault Graves Books has also released Do You Sleep in the Nude? in trade paperback. 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 Do You Sleep in the Nude? are profiles of: Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, Carson McCullers, Lucille Ball, Ava Gardner, Lotte Lenya, Michaelangelo Antonioni, James Mason, Bill Cosby, Marlene Dietrich, and many more.
