The New Yorker:

The director placed real people, with real senses of humor, into the fantasies of mass culture.

By Alexandra Schwartz

On Sunday, when it was reported that the filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, had been stabbed to death at their home in Los Angeles, the news seemed so senseless and baffling, so at odds with Reiner’s lovable image, that it didn’t properly compute. Who could possibly want to kill Rob Reiner, that big comedic Teddy bear, the closest thing America had to a collective dad? The subsequent revelation that the Reiners’ son Nick was allegedly responsible for their deaths is as terribly sad as it is sordid.

The news was especially jarring because Reiner’s relationship with his own famous father had always seemed so enviably affectionate. Reiner was born in 1947, in the Bronx, the oldest child of the comedian Carl Reiner and the actress and singer Estelle Reiner. (Estelle would later achieve cinematic immortality in Reiner’s classic film “When Harry Met Sally,” as the woman who deadpans, “I’ll have what she’s having,” after Meg Ryan simulates an orgasm at Katz’s Deli.) Publicly, the Reiner men made an adorable couple. A 1979 issue of People had the cover line “Famous Fathers, Loving Sons,” next to a photo of Carl pinching Rob’s cheek. Especially in Carl’s later years, they liked to pose with their arms around each other, their bald heads pressed warmly together like two big speckled eggs. During covid quarantine, in 2020, Carl participated in a star-studded online reënactment of Rob’s movie “The Princess Bride.” In the final scene, Rob, tucked under the covers in bed, plays the role of a young grandson, and Carl plays his grandfather. “As you wish,” Carl says, with a tip of his fedora, when his large adult son, with moving plaintiveness, asks if he can come back to read to him the next day. Carl died soon after, at ninety-eight.

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