(5 of 5)
After the Luau. The interview has ended, and as I gather up my notes, Reed is standing at the kitchen sink blowing water out of his Aquafilter like a kid trying to blow bubbles. We shake hands goodbye and he says, "I just know you're going to make me sound like a pompous ass."
We'll see, I say. And driving back to my hotel, I wonder. Hours later I am leafing through his book, checking facts and idly perusing when, near the end of his Warren Beatty piece, I come across this paragraph: "Maybe I wasn't being fair. So what if Warren Beatty acts like a jerk? When he's far from the maddening Hollywood hysteria, shut off from the beach-blonde starlets busily buying baby sharks for their swimming pools, out of touch with phonies filling his head with how they're spending $3,900 on totem poles for their front yards featuring hand-carved faces of all the members of their families-away from all the silliness, Warren seems like a nice guy."
I thought about that. And you know, when the invitations to all-day luaus at the David Susskinds' in Pound Ridge, New York, are locked away in the cupboard, when Melina Mercouri isn't tousling his hair and looking at him like he's a lamb sandwich and she hasn't eaten all day, when Jacqueline Susann isn't sitting there stroking his ego and feeding him Nikoban lozenges, Rex really isn't all that bad either.