There was an uneasy silence while we ate some spicy squid salad and drank more cold Thai beer.
"You know, we have had in Moscow an American singer named Dean Martin," Art said.
Art had very nice manners and this was his first trip to the West, so I supposed he was trying to make an American connection for my sake.
"Dean Martin," I said. "Really?"
"Dean Reed, I mean," he said. "I mean Dean Reed."
"Dean Reed? You knew him? You saw him? Where? Tell me!" I was so excited I knocked a beer into my lap. "Tell me everything!"
But Troitsky just blew his nose again.
"Come to Moscow," he said. "I can introduce you to his interpreter, Oleg. Oleg Smitnoff. Also there is the best friend of Dean's girlfriend. His girlfriend killed herself when Dean Reed died. Big breasts. Very big." Art tugged unsuccessfully at the front of his black pullover.
My head was spinning. There were people in Moscow who had known Dean, people I could meet, a girlfriend, an interpreter.
"Come to Moscow," he repeated.
I said I was coming.
6
February 1, 1988. It was my first night in Moscow. I had followed Dean Reed to the East, to the place that seduced him. As soon as I saw it, saw Red Square, saw the scale, the otherness, I was surprised, excited, elated just being here. Maybe he was, too. Maybe Dean looked at Red Square and thought, Wow!
Off the plane from London we came, Leslie Woodhead and I and our friend Jo Durden-Smith, another journalist. Even years later, looking at my notes, I could absolutely recapture how thrilling it was. All of it seemed exotic: lousy Sheremetyevo Airport with half the lights out; the sudden appearance of an official tourist rep who seemed to know my name but not those of the others; and the ride along the grim endless road into the city with the stark monument to mark how close the Germans had got; the long straight road from the airport that turned into the shabby grandeur of Gorky Street which then exploded into Red Square. And finally, the arrival at the National Hotel where, from the balcony of room 101, Lenin spoke to the masses below.
There was a tingle, a faint sense of danger, which was crazy, of course. I traveled as a tourist with a tourist visa and I had a return ticket, but for me, this had the enticing whiff of the forbidden. I was an American, after all, as Leslie and Jo never failed to point out, joking about how I must be shaking in my capitalist boots. I had grown up with the Soviet Union as the Other, the Evil Empire, the place from which the missiles that would kill us all would be launched. I remembered the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was a kid when my father, terrified, had said he planned to move some money to a bank in some remote rural part of New York State.
Ambivalent, too. I'd also grown up among people in Greenwich Village who, when they were young, idealized the USSR and had been in the Communist Party; many had seen the USSR only through the rosy tint of those ideological glasses. In every way I was astonished to be here, especially that first night.
That first trip to Moscow changed all our lives, one way and another, mine and Leslie's and especially Jo's. That first night late, after we checked into the National Hotel, we sat in the main restaurant of the hotel. From another room came the sounds of a private party, laughter, balalaika music, ice on glasses.
Through the lace curtains in the window, we watched the snow coming down on Menezh Square. The snow mixed with the patterns of the lace. Red Square was just visible, so were the Kremlin walls and the gold onions on St. Basil's, all magical in the snow. Somehow I had envisioned the Kremlin as a grim fortress, not a place where behind brick walls were exquisite yellow stucco walls and ranks of gold domes.
At midnight, we went out and walked, freezing, over to Red Square. It was enormous, vast, eternal, with enough space for whole armies to parade - it was the most satisfying public square I'd ever seen, bigger than you expected and much more beautiful. In front of Lenin's tomb, in front of the massive red granite box where he lay, the guards were on duty, goose-stepping through the night, and, in the distance, pinkish puffs of frozen smoke rose from a power plant near the river.
"Suddenly, in one of the Helsinki parks I see a young man singing, his cowboy hat on the ground. When he finishes, I go up to him and introduce myself. He says that he is Dean Reed. To me that meant nothing."
In Moscow, the day after I arrived, Nikolai Pastoukhov told me how he first met Dean in Helsinki in 1965.
Although the Countess had said she sent Dean to Moscow because she was afraid of his going "Left Left Left," Pastoukhov said it was because he, Pastoukhov, encountered Dean in a Helsinki park during a World Peace Conference in 1965. Everyone had a version, everyone wanted to somehow own Dean Reed.
I had followed Dean to Moscow and now to the offices of the agricultural newspaper Pravda Selskaya Shizn which translates roughly as Pravda Country Life, where Nikolai Pastoukhov was the editor. Pastoukhov - he sometimes thought of himself in the third person - had been bored out of his skull at the conference. The conference was dull. The women looked like dogs. The Chinese were contentious and intractable. The speeches were incessant. Which was why Pastoukhov escaped for a smoke.
Strolling in the park, smoking, he ogled the pretty girls in their miniskirts. Right up to their asses, he thought, and tried not to get too excited about this vision of Western pulchritude. Still, it was part of his job, observing life around him; he was a journalist.
Suddenly, Pastoukhov's attention was diverted by the sound of music. A little group had gathered and at its center was a handsome young man with a fine head of thick hair, playing the guitar, his hat on the ground. He was working for money to get a ticket back to Argentina, he said. But he was not an Argentine. He was an American. His name, he said, was Dean Reed.
Stamping out his smoke, Pastoukhov looked the American over. God, he thought, the American had the little group in the park eating out of his hand.
In those days in the mid-1960s, Soviet officials were on the lookout for acceptable entertainers to pacify the Soviet kids and prevent their wholesale defection to the decadent music of the West. (Damn Bittles! Pastoukhov thought, as he often did, for Beatlemania had swept the Soviet Union.) Here was this handsome American with a real cowboy hat, plucking his guitar, singing peace songs. Pastoukhov had a little talk with the young man who, to his wonderment, espoused peace and love and the socialist cause. This was the jackpot! Bingo, he thought, or the Soviet equivalent.
"Come with me, Dean Reed," he said.
That evening at the hall where the peace conference was in progress, Pastoukhov pushed Dean on to the platform and introduced him to the delegates in the packed room.
"Here is new blood come to us with the peace movement from America," Pastoukhov said.
Dean Reed began to play. Pastoukhov stood in the wings and watched, holding his breath. When Dean played the World Peace Congress in Helsinki, things were a mess: the Master of Ceremonies, a doddering old Finn, was hysterical; Bertrand Russell had failed to show; Bertrand Russell's secretary, who was there, took up the Chinese line, which was that you could not talk World Peace until there was World Revolution.
"Bullshit," the Soviets cried.
"Bullshit," thought Pastoukhov, bored to death with this idiotic babble and desiring only a cigarette.
"Stop him! Stop him!" some people yelled at Bertrand Russell's man.
"Let him speak," others shouted.
Pastoukhov said, "There was almost a fistfight starting. And he jumps on to the podium with his guitar and starts singing for us. OK. And I am thinking it would be so good for him to come to us in Moscow.
Maybe Dean looked out into the sea of angry faces, maybe he listened to the contentious voices and escalating fury, and thought: I can make a difference; I can make the difference between war and peace; I can make people touch each other. He was twenty-seven.
He picked up his guitar and sang "Marianna." He sang cowboy songs and he sang something that to Pastoukhov, at least, sounded a lot like rock and roll.
From the
podium Dean greeted the delegates - the Westerners in jeans, the chubby Chinese in Mao jackets, the dewlapped Soviets, their chests webbed with war medals, the East Germans in gray leather shoes, and he made them sing. He told them to hold hands. He told them they had to hold hands, even if the girl sitting next to them was lousy looking - this was how Pastoukhov reported it - they had to hold hands and sing.
When that wasn't enough to liven things up, Dean leapt off the stage, climbing over the delegates' legs, striding down the aisles. He made them hold hands! The delegates started smiling. They laughed and sang along with the crazy American. Dean roamed the hall some more, then he bounded back on to the stage, picked up his guitar, and, with everyone holding hands, Soviets, Chinese, Africans in their fancy robes and little caps, they all sang "We Shall Overcome."
In the wings, Nikolai Pastoukhov grinned his delirious grin; he knew a good thing when he saw it.
"Come with me, Dean Reed," he said. And by nightfall, Dean Reed was on the train from Helsinki to Leningrad.
With Pastoukhov, he traveled in a private compartment that belonged to the Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union. Deputy Tikhonov was a celebrated poet and he greeted Dean as a fellow artist. Through the June night, Tikhonov read his poems aloud and Dean played his guitar - you could just hear him singing the "Midnight Special." Pete Seeger had toured the Soviet Union to great acclaim a few years earlier and his American folk music was held in high esteem.
I liked to imagine that they sat in an opulent old-fashioned railway carriage with red plush seats and antimacassars, and a gleaming samovar. Toasts were made. Outside the cornfields sped by forests of white birches. Pastoukhov remembered it like a scene from a Russian novel, from Tolstoy perhaps.
At Leningrad the train pulled into the Finland Station. Pastoukhov took Dean to the Astoria Hotel for lunch. There was a jazz band in the restaurant and he asked Dean to sing. It was a kind of audition and Dean sang his heart out, and the audience fell in love with the young American. Bingo! thought Pastoukhov for the second time.
Dean's final conversion to the East began on that stage at Helsinki. Perhaps he was an official delegate from Argentina. Maybe the Countess's version - that she had sent him - was partly true; maybe not. Maybe Pastoukhov's tale of the pick-up in the park was a bit of embroidery. Who could tell?
Finishing his tale, in his Moscow office, Nikolai Pastoukhov leaned back in his chair and puffed on his cigarette. He was past seventy now, but vigorous and canny. Cigarette ash tumbled down the florid, flowered tie that covered half of his dark-purple shirt that was the color of grape juice.
In Pastoukhov's office, there was neither a typewriter nor a note pad, only a bank of plastic telephones with blank faces and a row of Christmas cards on a shelf bereft of books.
Pastoukhov dropped the butt from his cigarette into an ashtray and lit up again, his mouth pulling in smoke between the huge jowls, like a friendly hound enjoying a smoke. Like every Russian I met, he had real narrative talent. Still wrapped up in the tales of his discovery of Dean Reed in a Helsinki park in 1965, he gave those old jowls a good shake.
"Deanrid!" He said it as a single word, the way Russians often did, as though it might have been a slogan or a product, the way you might say Kleenex! or Communism!
"Deanrid!"
Nikolai Pastoukhov was restless. I asked about the rest of Dean's career, but because he had played no part in it, he was not interested and he waved the question away with an impatient gesture.
"Yes, yes, he traveled a lot," Pastoukhov said. "He left South America and went to live in Italy, then to Berlin. He settled in Berlin because he met a woman."
I asked about the death.
"Officially, he drowned. But he was a very good swimmer. How did it happen? I don't know. Maybe provocation. The American press calls him the "Kremlin agent" or the "notorious Communist." He annoys the Americans."
Glee engulfed Pastoukhov's features. He winked. Then he fixed his face in a somber expression more appropriate to official grief.
"I was shocked when I received the sad news of his death. He was very young, very handsome. He was the first friend from the West. He talked about peace and friendship; we were very much impressed. He visited Siberia; he said his visit recollected his native Colorado in the United States. He liked to make out autographs, to be mixed with girls. But I think he had no time for this sexual business. He is good boy. Look."
Rummaging in his perhaps bag - you never knew when there might be a sudden special on bananas or socks in Moscow, so you always needed a bag ready - he pulled out a photograph album. Pastoukhov pushed an old magazine cover with a picture of Dean under my nose. He said, "Dean has written here: 'To my lovely papa from his son, Deanrid.' Always he calls me papa, because I gave him birth here in Soviet Union," added Pastoukhov, who leaned back in his chair again and this time rubbed his eyes.
The old eyes filled up, though whether this was from affection, self-pity, or cigarette smoke was hard to tell.
Chasing Dean Reed was like scrambling through tangled webs spun by those who adored him and wanted to protect him, and there were plenty of them: lover, mother, daughter, father, son.
"He called me his second mama," older women said. "I was his second papa," said some of the men, and when I met an American journalist who once interviewed Dean Reed, she said, "I never slept with him, of course. We were just friends." But I hadn't even asked.
They were enchanted because he was so alive, because, if he was always on the make, it was usually in pursuit of love - theirs, the fans', the world's - it didn't matter. As a result, all these papas and mamas and lovers wanted nothing to do with the dark side of Dean Reed, but only to keep his memory intact. For them he was like a figure in a plastic snow globe from a long ago holiday; you could take it out and shake it whenever you wanted to remember how wonderful it all once was.
Pastoukhov's assistant arrived to show me out. A man in a suit and sneakers, he spoke exquisite French and looked exactly like Klaus Maria Brandauer. I said so, meaning it as a compliment, but he looked crestfallen.
"What about Charles Bronson? Everyone says I look just like Charles Bronson," he said.
As I was pulling on my coat, my mother's ancient mink I'd brought to Moscow for warmth, Pastoukhov eyed it appreciatively.
He said, "I remember America very fondly. Americans come here. We go to America. We traveled up and down Mississippi River."
"What year was that?"
"1978? 1979?" he said. "So, you like this glasnost?"
"Oh, yes. Isn't it wonderful?" I said. "Isn't it amazing. Wouldn't Dean Reed have loved it... it's great!"
He shrugged doggily. "1978, that was real detente," he said.
For a moment Pastoukhov looked thoughtful. He opened his mouth as if to reveal something, some fact about Dean Reed, some hard nugget of evidence, but he shut it; his journalist's heart no longer stirred and, anyway, the next morning he was starting a skiing holiday with his girlfriend. We shook hands. We exchanged addresses.
"So maybe I will visit the United States. I will stay in your house, OK?" Pastoukhov said and bellowed with laughter so that his hound-dog jowls shook again and ash from his cigarette toppled on to his tie one more time.
In the lobby of the newspaper building, on a wooden bench, people sat waiting for appointments, their boots dripping snow that turned into puddles on the floor. Over the sound system, Dave Brubeck played "Take Five." On a tiny television propped on a wobbly table, the security guard on duty wearing rough wool mittens watched blurry images of Mikhail Gorbachev talking to people in the street.
7
Dean Reed was twenty-eight when he stepped into the center of the stage at Moscow's Variety Theater in 1966. He sang like crazy for the audience: folk songs, ballads, Latin American songs he learned in Chile, show tunes - "Maria" was a big favorite in Russia - some of his own antiwar songs. He could sing "The Twist," he moved like a rock and roller; he crooned Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" like a pop tune.
> Some in the audience had perhaps seen other Americans perform, Pete Seeger, perhaps, or, if they were old enough, Paul Robeson. But no one in Moscow had ever seen anything quite like Dean Reed. It was electric. He was so vital, so handsome, so rock and roll. For an encore, Dean sang "Ghost Riders in the Sky" and it became his signature tune in Russia.
At the end of the concert, the audience cheered, clapped, whistled, and stamped their feet for twenty-five minutes.
In reporting performances, Pravda noted that Dean Reed "left his country as a sign of protest against the unjust war in Vietnam." Posters all over Moscow announcing the performances showed that he was gorgeous and played the guitar and hinted at an "exotic" biography. He had a recording contract with Melodiya, the state recording company, which had never before issued a rock and roll record; he got a tour. It was such big news that even the New York Times got wind of it, which was pretty rare in those days for a Western newspaper. On page forty-seven of the New York Times on November 28, 1966, it was reported that an American singer was loudly cheered at a Moscow theater.
In the Soviet Union, Dean's official minder was Georgy Arbatov, the director of the Institute for Canada and the United States, and an influential player in Soviet-American policy. I went to see Arbatov, who was a pleasant man in a good suit with a benign face and an avuncular manner. His office was elegant, with a long conference table that shone with polish. A picture of Gorbachev hung on the wall. Through a translator, Arbatov spoke about Dean Reed, and how he was for the Soviets like the Beatles, and how important it had been, his coming.
Until Dean came along, though Arbatov did not spell this out, Russian kids mostly had to settle for folksongs celebrating tractor production or maybe for mustachioed pop stars with plastic smiles. Once in a while a foreign folkie like Pete Seeger might show up. There had been a time when Soviet bureaucrats had tried to offer a bit of modern culture to the kids; somewhere along the line, apparatchiks tried to replace the Twist with new dances for socialist youth. The Moskvich, the Terrikon, and the Herringbon were not a success.
Comrade Rockstar Page 6