REX REED'S 2007 GOODBYES

Rex Reed offered some interesting—and enticing—remarks in his New York Observer salute to the permanent departees of 2007.

On his friend June Allyson:

Sailing her way across the Tait campus in Good News and nailing the role of tomboyish Jo in the lavish Technicolor remake of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women made such an impression on me that I couldn't believe my luck when, years later, I found myself interviewing her on a Hawaiian cruise. After putting her husband, David, to bed, we watched her old movies in the ship's theater, munching popcorn while she whispered naughty, unprintable secrets in my ear about what was going on before and behind the camera as each scene rolled.

Oh, please tell!

And who can forget the bombastic energy of showstopping Betty Hutton, who earned millions in a spectacular career and lost millions more in a tragic personal life that plummeted from stardom in films, Broadway musicals, concert stages, nightclubs and her own television series, down to scrubbing floors in a Catholic rectory in Rhode Island. This is a show-business soap opera just waiting to be filmed—a life almost as tumultuous as Edith Piaf’s, except that the melodrama lasted longer.

And then there's Reed's memory of

Brett Somers, the popular raspy-voiced panelist on Match Game and the wife of Jack Klugman (I’ll never forget the time I walked into a restaurant and she stopped her dinner companions cold, yelling, "Kiss ass—he writes!")

Reed also shares this one:

I won’t laugh as much after the death of Tom Poston, a bug-eyed regular on the old Steve Allen Show who went on to become a weekly fixture on Newhart, where he met his wife, smoky-voiced actress Suzanne Pleshette, who survives him. Both in failing health for the last few years but never losing their edgy sense of humor, they sent out one of the best Christmas cards of 2007. Following a page crammed with a Webster’s dictionary of fatal diseases, a drawing of both of them in bed with thermometers in their mouths and the words: "DON’T SEND US ANY PRESENTS THIS YEAR—WE HAVE EVERYTHING ALREADY!" Without laughter, we are doomed.

Actually, we're doomed anyway, but the laughter lessens the pain.

Reed misses another person I hope to cover soon.