Comrade Rockstar

by Реджи Нейделсон

  I got out of the elevator. Oleg got in. I really wanted his videotapes. I held the door open.

  "Hi, Oleg," I said. "How's business?"

  He grunted.

  I said, "What are you doing here?"

  "I am working," he said.

  "Can I have those videotapes of Dean Reed's concerts? Can I have a look?"

  "Maybe."

  Suddenly, I was weary of his games. "Working?" I said. "What at?"

  "I am working on cementing international relations," said Oleg, and the elevator doors shut.

  11

  There was something suspicious about this man supposedly having been killed. And I wondered, "Why would anyone want to kill Dean Reed?" Vladimir Pozner stood in the doorway of his apartment in the center of Moscow. He smiled and invited me in.

  "You'll have to forgive me, but I thought Dean Reed was a terrible phony," he added. "I'm a folk music man myself. The music teacher at my school in New York was Pete Seeger."

  "What school was that?" I asked.

  "City and Country," he said.

  "Really," I said. "Where did you grow up?"

  "24 East 10th Street, in Greenwich Village," he said, "I don't know if you know it."

  I knew.

  We had grown up on the same block. We had gone to the same school. Although we were fifteen years apart in age, the particulars of our childhoods were identical. We reminisced about Bluie, the librarian, and Ottilie, the cook, and Al in Shop; City and Country was a school so progressive you could practically major in Shop.

  Vladimir Pozner remembered Sam, the newspaper man on University Place, and Wannamakers Department Store, where he bought his first bike, and hootenannies with Pete Seeger. I had come 5000 miles to the heart of the formerly Evil Empire to find myself with a man who had... Bluie for library!

  What's more, Pozner had mimeographed copies of the school newspaper from the 1940s. There we suddenly were, on the floor of Pozner's study, reading through the exploits of the "Eights" or "Nines" (no grades at City and Country, only "groups") in the school printing shop or on a trip to the country to try out milking cows or making parchment paper by hand.

  My first week in the Soviet Union and I'd met a man who grew up on my block and went to my school and, more astonishing, spoke not just American, but in my exact accent, though his English was just slightly more New York than mine. He was a Greenwich Village boy. In his study, there was a glass model of the Empire State Building on his desk, and an American quilt on the wall.

  The face was utterly familiar, of course; Pozner had appeared so often on television in America that he was the most famous Communist in the country, with the exception of Mikhail Gorbachev. Our commie, polished, witty, urbane, a man who knew his way around a soundbite.

  When Pozner began turning up on TV in the early 1980s, in the middle of the Cold War, people were perplexed and intrigued by the anomalous Russian who spoke colloquial English, who rarely used the conventional dreary rhetoric of the Soviet hack, and who was very charming, very slick, very enigmatic.

  He looked like one of us, but he was one of them, a member of the Soviet Communist Party, a man who had, for a time, at least, been a true believer. He understood the system and the culture and he could talk about it in a language I understood.

  Like Art Troitsky, Pozner could talk about Dean Reed's dazzling career as a superstar in the USSR in terms of the country's obsession with everything American. It had started around the time JFK was shot, Pozner said, and affably poured out Scotch and settled onto a leather sofa. I took a chair.

  In the early 1960s, Pozner said, people began to see America in a way that was different from that dictated by the Communist Party.

  "The picture furnished by the media, by propaganda about America was false," Pozner said. When people began to understand the truth, really, what happened was that they did a 180 degree turn. Everything about America was great from that point on."

  Pozner had been a young reporter when JFK was shot in November, 1963. That night he went door to door in Moscow to get a feel for what people thought about the American President's death. He found almost everyone in tears; they had adored the handsome young President and now he was dead.

  When Soviet propaganda films about the horrors of the West were shown on TV - race riots, segregation, guns - teenagers simply turned off the sound and read these details: the clothes in shop windows, the shoes worn by people in the street, the names of movies playing at the cinemas, background details that gave them the information they craved about the West.

  Pozner went on, "Dean represented the American man for most Soviet kids. And that was very attractive at a time when anything American was so much desired by most people, especially young people. He was a real living, breathing American."

  Pozner held up the bottle, but I refused the Scotch; I was too busy scribbling down what he said.

  "Also," Pozner added, "let's keep in mind that it wasn't just the Soviet authorities that gave Dean a big hello, but the so-called Socialist camp."

  True enough, not only the Soviets and the Eastern Bloc embraced Dean. He went on playing in Latin America. He went to Chile and played for Salvador Allende and in Nicaragua he played for Daniel Ortega. He even played for Yasser Arafat.

  There's a piece of film I found later, after I met Pozner, that showed Dean Reed, a checkered headscarf on his head, jogging with what I assumed were Palestinian troops, all carrying small missiles or AK-47s. And then it cut to Dean Reed, guitar on his knee, singing "Ghost Riders in the Sky" and when the camera pulled back, you saw he was singing it to Yasser Arafat, with Arafat tapping his fingers merrily on a table, and smiling and clapping for Dean Reed.

  Pozner said, "So you see, Here's an American who's saying everything that we want him to say. And he's doing it in an American way. And that's very effective."

  I asked, "Do you still have an American passport?"

  "I never did," he said.

  Vladimir Pozner's cultural coding was quintessentially cosmopolitan. Survival was bred in the bone. His father's family were originally Spanish Jews who migrated to Poznan' in Poland, and then to St. Petersburg. In order to enter a university, which was forbidden to Jews, they converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1922, Pozner's grandfather left St. Petersburg in the wake of the Revolution; in 1940, his father fled Paris as the Nazis marched in.

  The family settled in Greenwich Village. Vladimir was six, and sometimes kids at school called him Bill because William was the nearest equivalent of Vladimir in English. He grew up during World War II, when America and Russia were allies, and his two heroes, he said, were Joseph Stalin and Joe Di Maggio. All his life, Pozner's father nurtured dreams about the romantic Revolution of his youth and the importance of the socialist enterprise, and he instilled them in his sons, Vladimir and his brother, Paul, too. Pozner's father worked in the movie business. With the onset of the anti-Communist frenzy that began in the late 1940s, his boss offered to obtain US citizenship for him. Otherwise, he was told, he would be fired. The father refused. He took the family East, first to East Berlin, where his job was to restore the film industry.

  Vladimir, aged fifteen, hated Germany. It was gray and oppressive. In 1952 the family moved on to Moscow. Under Stalin, the Pozner family, part Jewish, part foreign, would almost certainly have been labeled Enemies of the State and sent to a gulag. But, in 1953, Stalin died.

  Vladimir settled down with his family, but after a while he grew homesick for New York. A group of young Americans came to Moscow in 1959, when under Khrushchev things opened up a little, Pozner remembered.

  He remembered how it had been in New York, how free and friendly and easy, and he said to his father: I'm going to leave. I'm going back. His father said to him: If you try to defect, I'll report you to the KGB.

  Pozner adapted to life in Moscow. He passed his exams. He became a journalist. He joined the Communist Party.

  "It is easier to believe if you are ideologically motivated. I've always
been very political," he said now in his apartment in Moscow.

  In 1979, Pozner first appeared on American television, and he was cool. Cool for a cool medium. In a perverse way, ordinary Americans admired him because he was loyal. He was also very good-looking.

  The mistake, I realized after I got to know Pozner better and he became a friend, was to think of him out of context. Just because he looked like a Western journalist didn't make him one. It didn't make him a Soviet dissident, either. He was a man doing his job. He was a survivor. And what I also realized was he was the kind of true believer I'd known all my life, a New Yorker, a man of the left but for whom the true tune, more than that of Marx or Lenin, was that of Pete Seeger, who had been the music teacher at his school - and mine - in Greenwich Village.

  Vladimir Pozner was fifty-four and he had the perfect face for a messenger between cultures: the good cheekbones, which the cameras loved, gave the face a Slavic cast; the fast-breaking all-American smile warmed it up; the receding hairline made it accessible. Like all of the great TV performers, Pozner was both aloof - as befitted a media royal - yet so knowable that people in the street thought he was their cousin.

  In the 1980s, Pozner set up a television "Spacebridge" with Phil Donahue in the US. This allowed citizens in both countries to talk to one another on camera. Pozner and Donahue became friends and Donahue invited Pozner to New York City.

  In 1986, Pozner went back to New York for the first time after thirty-eight years. Although he had been a good Soviet citizen, a faithful and loyal Party man, he had never quite been trusted. He had not been allowed to travel to the West, and it had eaten at him for decades. It was the worm in the whole of his life. Doors had opened and shut, permission given and withdrawn, and for a while he drank too much because of it. But now he was back. He was home. New York City.

  On the 59th Street Bridge in the taxi coming in from the airport, he suddenly saw the city.

  He said, "In the distance, I saw New York. And my heart stopped." In the streets, he stared at people and he knew them all, knew how they felt, who they were; he was one of them.

  "I wanted to cry out, Hey, you, all of you, look, it's me, I'm back ... I love you."

  I could never shake the feeling that Pozner was an American.

  "Of course I am," he said. "I got my idealism there. Tom Paine was my hero."

  And like Art Troitsky, Pozner identified with Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye.

  "When I read Catcher in the Rye," he said, "I thought: Holden Caulfield is about me."

  As he headed down Fifth Avenue on his first day in New York, he looked around him with the possessive ease of a man who had come home. "This is my town!" he thought. Eventually, he got a US passport, though subsequently he went back to Moscow and became a TV star in the post-Communist era.

  On that winter's day in Moscow, though, putting away the school newspapers, purple with the ink from the ancient mimeograph machine that I knew too well, Pozner drank his Scotch thoughtfully.

  "To be honest," he said, "I thought Dean Reed's music was junk. I thought he was plastic Hollywood beefcake. The first time I saw him, to tell you the truth, my hair rose up at the sight of that hustler. He wasn't stupid. But he wasn't politically sophisticated either. Who else have you seen in Moscow?"

  I said that I had seen Nikolai Pastoukhov.

  "No shit. How is the old hack?" Pozner asked.

  "He's editing Pravda Country Life."

  "How the mighty have fallen."

  I said, "He says he discovered Dean Reed when he was walking in a park in Helsinki.'"

  "Pastoukhov, never took a walk in his life," Pozner laughed. "I'll tell you something. Dean Reed lived here for a short while. He couldn't be a star anywhere else. Nothing really worked for him. He went from Hollywood to South America, to Italy, where I think he even made Spaghetti Westerns with Yul Brynner, and finally to the Soviet Union. He came here to milk a very naive cow. Drink?"

  I nodded. Pozner poured.

  "I couldn't stand him," he said again. "You think of Paul Robeson, or Vysotsky, or Pete Seeger, for that matter, who stood up for their beliefs... Dean Reed just took it where he got it. He was very good-looking, that's true, so he was a big star with women, and he also fulfilled the image of people who knew America from films we grew up on. Dean was certainly used by the Soviet regime."

  "Who do you think killed him?"

  "Frankly, as I said, I don't think he was important enough for anyone to bump off," said Pozner. "Unless he knew something important by chance. But the US Embassy wasn't interested. A lot of people said there was a woman involved. Well, cherchez la femme," Pozner said.

  "Didn't he sort of bring rock and roll to the Soviet Union?" I said.

  "He had no talent: that's why no one has heard of him in America. And he didn't bring rock and roll to the Soviet Union. The Beatles brought rock and roll. When Pastoukhov and his sort discovered Dean Reed, they thought they were giving the kids something." Pozner shrugged contemptuously. "They thought they bought the Beatles and they didn't even buy Pat Boone."

  It was Friday evening and, as I walked away from Pozner's house and into the Arbat district, I felt I could hear a million voices chattering, gossiping. Moscow felt like a huge cafe where everyone knew everyone and everyone chattered all the time. Everyone had a story to tell. Information was like cash in Moscow; it was often the only commodity worth having. Information was still so carefully controlled by the state even in 1988 that, although the telephones were free, there were no telephone books at all.

  Before I got to Moscow, I thought I'd begun to know Dean Reed. Now I realized I'd barely cracked the surface. I thought of Pastoukhov, who said Dean Reed was a fine young man who didn't have time for sexual stuff, and of Alla who said he had two or three women a day. Oleg Smirnoff said he taught the Russian kids democracy but criticized Solzhenitsyn. Millions of kids had believed in Dean Reed. And Vladimir Pozner thought he was just a fake, a two-bit hustler who could whack a guitar and swivel his hips.

  The rest of the day I thought about Pozner. I thought about his love for American folk music and jazz and the blues, and his life as a kid in Greenwich Village, where I had grow up too. I thought about the rhetoric, too, of the American Left. I knew it by heart. My mother, the Commie, I thought.

  My mother who, during the Depression, had attended Workers College, who went on bread marches wearing the Persian lamb coat her father gave her. My mother, who had gone to Moscow with a friend on a package tour in the 1960s and danced in her nightgown with a Soviet naval officer at the hotel nightclub. "I didn't have any evening clothes and anyhow it looked better than anything they had," she said. In Moscow, I missed my mother.

  In the Kalinin Prospekt, after I left Pozner's apartment, a little crowd had formed. At its heart was an old crone with a crate beside her. The crowd pushed forward.

  "Pineapples," she said. "Pineapples."

  The crowd looked skeptical.

  The old woman tore open the crate and extracted from it tiny white boxes. The crowd moved in. Showing her toothless gums in a triumphant smile, the woman tore the cardboard away and held up her proof: a slice of frozen yellow fruit. It was not unlike a slice from the pineapples that grew on the plantations near Mrs. Brown's condo in Hawaii, except the Moscow pineapple had no smell at all.

  Inside the record store nearby, I looked for Dean Reed's records. I ran into Tolya, the rock fan who had once bought Records on Ribs. He said that he remembered Dean Reed. "I remember him very well," Tolya said. "He was a young, tall, lean guy, with a mane of hair. He was completely different by comparison with Soviet singers."

  But I looked now for the records in vain. I wondered if they were out of print or out of stock. I found a Pat Boone album, though, and on it was a picture of Pat in white buck shoes. I bought it for Art Troitsky. He was in heaven.

  Walking through Moscow, thinking of how Dean Reed had loved it when he arrived, I remembered what the Countess in the Chinese restaurant in London
had said.

  "Dean went to Russia. Now if you have a person that is kind and lovable, the entire world should not be punished; it should be loved. But he comes back after a couple of months of Russia, telling you he's got to murder half of the real world. The only way I to teach people how to live is to kill them."

  She said, "And then he told me that he had been in a car accident and had to spend many weeks in a Russian hospital. Now, as I have lived under the two worst regimes in the world, Communism and Nazism, both with the capacity even in those days to brainwash people, the more I heard him speak, the more I became totally convinced that in the hospital they had brainwashed him."

  In a sense, Dean had been brainwashed, but not in the way the Countess meant. It was the romance of revolution that seduced him and the way the fans made him an idol.

  At the Lenin Museum later that day, I looked at the Soviet Realist paintings, many of Lenin himself, the most famous with him pointing to the future. Lenin's Rolls-Royce was also on display. And there was something touching and funny about the wig Lenin wore - it was there in a glass case - when he smuggled himself into Russia to start the Revolution he starred in. I thought that, somehow, for Dean, too, this country offered him a future and provided a perfect starring role. Within a few years, the museum would be shut.

  12

  After his first trip to Moscow in 1965, Dean Reed returned to South America. Back in Buenos Aires, where he was then living, Dean was questioned by the police about his visit to the USSR, and as the military began to crack down on the country, he was expelled.

  For the next half dozen years, Dean commuted between South America, Europe, and the Soviet Union. Deported from Argentina, threatened by the Right, he tried to get in again by traveling to Uruguay. He was arrested. To the world that knew him, he had the glamour of a political cowboy, moving faster and faster. By now the FBI and the US State Department were on his case.

  When I returned from the Soviet Union, I applied for Dean's file courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act, but it didn't arrive on my desk until about 1990. Much of it was blacked out, as was usually the case with FBI files. What I could read, as far as his exploits in South America went, seemed pretty accurate.