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.