Comrade Rockstar

by Реджи Нейделсон

  Anyway, after the illegal entry into Uruguay, a policeman who had previously arranged Dean's deportation recognized him.

  "Hello, Dean," the file recorded him saying, "I always suspected we would meet again."

  In 1966, Dean went to Madrid; the following year he moved on to Rome, where he made some Spaghetti Westerns. (This wasn't a life, I began to think; it was a mini-series!) He made eight movies altogether: in 1967, Buckaroo; in 1968, 20 Steps to Death, The Three Flowers, and Adios Sabata; in 1969, Death Knocks Twice, Pirates of Green Island, and - my favorite title - Machine Gun Baby Face. Sometimes, late at night, you could still catch Adios Sabata on TV. In it, Dean worked with Yul Brynner. Dean was taller than Yul, but Yul was the star, so Dean played their scenes standing in a hole on the beach that had been specially dug for him. Dean told the story for laughs, but it clearly got up his nose that he was less important than Yul.

  Around that time Dean got divorced from Patty and said Jane Fonda had told him Santo Domingo was a good place to get a divorce. When he arrived there, he laughingly told the press about how he was taller than Yul. Next thing he knew, he saw a story in the paper that Yul Brynner had arrived in Santo Domingo. He hinted at scary reprisals from Brynner.

  In 1970, when Dean applied for a new passport - his old one had expired - his height was listed not as six feet one, as it had been in his original document, but as six feet four, and this became a tiny fact in the confusion over his death. Or maybe by 1970 Dean just felt he had grown taller.

  In 1972 [1] he washed an American flag out in public. It was the year of the Miami Convention, when Richard Nixon was already deep in his own paranoia and lies, and in Vietnam and Cambodia more and more people were dying. Washing the flag became Dean's emblem. He proclaimed that he was cleansing it of the blood of North Vietnam, making it clean of American guilt. Making it clean, clean for Dean.

  He loved stirring things up and getting arrested; in a way he loved going to jail. Except maybe for the time the gay guys got after him. There were plenty of gay guys in South American jails because homosexuality was a crime. "Give us Dean! Give us Dean!" they cried merrily, and banged their tin mugs on the bars of their cells. As Dean told it, these men had faces so painted up, you would not believe it.

  "I was never so frightened in all my life," Dean admitted.

  "You be good, Dean, or we will give you to them," a guard and prisoners said on one occasion.

  Instead, the guards gave them Dean's washing - the gays did laundry for a price - and it never came back.

  "They tore it up into little strips for souvenirs," Dean said, whenever he told the story.

  The South American stories, which reminded him of some of his most heroic days, were threaded through his life. He loved telling them. Dean courted trouble in foreign places and he said it was for honor's sake, for the cause, for the righteous position he took on things, for the revolution. Part true believer, part bad boy, he played politics because it was subversive and sexy and it got him in the news and it was loads of fun. He was a star. And he was everywhere.

  During his time in Rome he became, briefly, a Maoist. I learned this from Georgy Arbatov, his Soviet minder; Arbatov told me he wrote to Dean about the Maoist business, but you couldn't really persuade him.

  He also joined antiwar speakers in Rome, at the Piazza Navona. Wearing a suit, flashing his American passport, he talked his way into the US Embassy. From the steps, he turned to the crowd of protestors who stood outside the gates and he raised his fist.

  "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!" Dean shouted.

  * * *

  Many of Dean's adventures during the late Sixties and early Seventies were recounted to me by his second wife, the East German Wiebke Reed. They met in 1971 in Leipzig, at the international film festival. Over lunch in East Berlin seventeen years later, in 1988, Wiebke told me she could remember her first words to him.

  "You are the best-looking man in the wotld." It was a line she got off a Little Richard record.

  Earlier that day, I'd met Leslie Woodhead in West Berlin, and we took the subway to the Friedrichstrasse station to meet Wiebke. Friedrichstrasse station in East Berlin was three stops from the Zoo station in the West, and it was a much more surreal way to come across the Wall than through Checkpoint Charlie. It was banal and had no melodrama. You got into a subway car; the train juddered across no-man's-land; the passengers read their paperbacks, didn't talk to each other, and got out.

  When you traveled by train, you barely saw the Wall. But at the turnstile in the station there were border guards with guns, the requisite exchange of hard currency for visas and the worthless East German money.

  It was raining. Outside the subway, alone and in small groups, people scanned the crowd anxiously, waiting for relatives from the West. The hard-currency hustlers turned up the collars of their leather jackets against the weather and scanned the crowd for the suckers.

  Wiebke was in her late forties, but looked a decade younger. Small-boned, pretty, and tough, she had a blonde ponytail and wore good leather boots and a cheerful expression. She was chatty by any standards; for an East German, she was gregarious. Her English was very fine - fluent, full of nuance and detail. She had learned it as a result of her marriage to Dean, and she worked as an interpreter.

  We got into the tinny orange car of which she was dutifully proud and she pointed out the opera house that had been restored to its prewar grandeur.

  I asked about the Wall and she produced a pro forma, but quite spirited, defense. I had heard it all before: the calm conviction that the system, if not perfect, was better than most. As we drove, she talked of the hemorrhage of talent, which had made life impossible in the East before the Wall was built; she described how the East had suffered during World War II; she recounted how the GDR was steadfast in its anti-Nazi stance. She wasn't at all aggressive about it; she simply believed.

  At the Stadt Hotel, where, a few months earlier, a sullen doorman had turned us away, Wiebke had things in hand. A table had been booked. The waiter smiled at Wiebke as we sat down and she began her story of her first meeting with Dean.

  At the film festival in Liepzig [2], when she saw Dean across the room, she was determined to meet him.

  The room was full of filmmakers, but all she could see was the gorgeous man with the blue eyes in a white turtleneck sweater. Every other woman in the room was staring at him, too.

  A clever, curious girl, she was thirty, worked part-time as a model, and had trained as a teacher. She adored music and art: she was especially into Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles, the Mamas and the Papas, and Leonard Cohen. Their records were not always easy to come by in East Berlin, but there were ways, and Wiebke was hip. She was standing with a friend who followed her gaze.

  "What an astonishing-looking man," said Wiebke's friend.

  Wiebke had an idea and she ran out of the room. She found a friend who was a photographer and she whispered in his ear.

  "OK," he said.

  He let Wiebke carry his light meter back into the reception, where she saw Dean again. She knew he was Dean Reed. Everyone knew.

  Already Dean had a reputation in the East, he was big in the Soviet Union and word had filtered through. He was the center of attention. He was dazzling. From the second he set foot in East Germany, he was a star. He had no idea, of course, but Berlin would become his home for the rest of his life.

  At the film festival, Dean had serious things on his mind. He was talking earnestly about his plans for a gesture of solidarity with the North Vietnamese. A group of Americans had gathered and was trying to decide what to do about Vietnam. Give blood? What were the alternatives?

  Everyone from the Left was there at the festival. It was an annual event on the Leftie circuit. The room bulged and throbbed with people drinking, talking, making deals. There were a couple of elderly Americans, two members of the Hollywood Ten, who, persecuted by Joe McCarthy, had lived in exile in Europe ever since. Old men now, they talked a lot and cracked cynical
jokes, and who could blame them?

  The two blacklisted writers cracked up because Dean wanted to send white doves to Vietnam.

  "Why don't you send the blood of the doves, Dean?" said one of them.

  "How about we drink the blood of a couple of white doves, Dean?" said the other.

  Dean didn't mind. He went on talking; he had seen news footage where some pretty North Vietnamese girls pushed bicycles loaded with provisions and ammunition up the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He wanted the delegates to load up bikes and push them into the market square at Leipzig as a gesture of solidarity. The Americans he was talking to at the festival thought this was a hoot.

  "That's a good one, Dean," said one of them. "That's wonderful."

  On the other side of the room, Wiebke tossed down a few vodkas; she hardly ever drank, but she was nervous. She made her way over to Dean.

  "You are the best-looking man in the world," she said. She blushed horribly. Dean laughed and said something back to her in English, but she didn't understand. She had used up all her English with the one sentence "You are the best-looking man in the world."

  "Let's get away from all this," Dean said to Wiebke. "Come up to my hotel room." He talked through a translator named Victor Grossman.

  "I'm not going to do something as sleazy as that. I don't want to compromise my husband, who's quite well known here," Wiebke said. Victor translated this, too.

  Not long after the festival, Dean left for Moscow. One day Wiebke was curled up in a chair and the phone rang. A girlfriend picked it up.

  "It's your Dean. From Moscow, I think," she said.

  "Hello? Who are you?" said Wiebke, trying to locate some English. She wanted to say "Where are you?" but it came out wrong.

  "Who are you?" she said again.

  "Dean Reed," the voice answered.

  "I know it's Dean Reed. Who are you?"

  "Dean Reed! This is Dean Reed."

  It was a terrible mess.

  Wiebke hired a Fraeulein Schultz to teach her some English. She worked hard at it. The fraulein was seventy-five and proud that she was still a fraeulein. They worked on English with "Cecilia," a Simon and Garfunkel track.

  Wiebke persevered, and when Dean returned to East Berlin a few months later to begin work on a film, her English had improved. The relationship blossomed. Dean was some catch. He had his own minder, who was a member of the Politburo. He experienced the privilege that artists enjoyed - nice housing, good medical care. He always wore that white turtleneck. Rock and roll in East Berlin had had its ups and downs, as often as not, the state took its cues from the USSR.

  In 1972, Dean made his first German film. In The Good for Nothing, an adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel, Dean was deliciously miscast. His German was lousy, but it didn't matter. In a long pageboy and a ruffled shirt with puffy sleeves, he looked gorgeous.

  Wiebke and Dean began seeing each other and he took her to Moscow with him. In those days he could draw 60,000 people for a concert. Women followed him openly in the street.

  Wiebke was astonished. After a performance one night, a girl tried to rip his cowboy shirt from his back when he came offstage. A bit of cloth came off in the girl's hand and she stood there, looking at it and weeping. Another slipped him a note that read, "I'll meet you at midnight."

  Before a performance, he whistled from anxiety. When Dean began whistling, Wiebke knew he was worried. He had enormous energy. He lived off big rushes of adrenalin, and then, at the end of a day's work or after a concert, as it drained away, he was exhausted. He fell into a chair one night at the Ukraina Hotel, staring at the green chenille bedspread with little cotton balls on it. He couldn't stand or speak. He shut down, like a light switch. And then, in Moscow, out of the blue, Dean asked Wiebke to marry him.

  "Would you like to be my wife?" Dean said.

  "I would like two days to think the situation over," she said.

  He was not pleased at all by her reticence, although it was a phrase she learned from him. "I would like two days to think it over," Dean would say whenever he had a difficult political issue to deal with.

  "Unless you're my wife, I can never take you places," Dean told her.

  So she said OK. They got married and Dean did take her traveling. He took her to Venice. He took her to America where, like Leonard Cohen, they stayed at the Hotel Chelsea. On a plane to LA, she saw Kojak in the flesh. With Dean, Wiebke went to Colorado and Hawaii, and to New York, where she was sick as a dog in a restaurant in Greenwich Village. She told him she thought it might be fun to stay in America for a few months, maybe longer, but Dean said no.

  "'I cannot," he said, "I have no career here. I am a political man."

  Wiebke: adored Cuba, although Dean was disappointed because Fidel Castro was out of town when they got to Havana. Nonetheless, he was impressed by Cuba; it was the only country in Latin America where, as he saw it, there weren't great disparities between rich and poor. Wiebke was surprised that white people ran everything.

  "The music in Cuba was wonderful," said Wiebke. "Dean made his best record with some Cubans. They have natural rhythm, you know.

  Now, in the restaurant of the Stadt Hotel in East Berlin, Wiebke finished her story, staring at the remains of the kebab on her plate.

  "Have some wine?" I said.

  I wanted to get Wiebke to tell me what Dean was like in bed.

  "No thanks," she said, "I'm driving."

  We stayed on for a while, talking and drinking coffee. There were more stories, more anecdotes, more tales. Across the table I could see Leslie thinking: how in the hell are we ever going to make a film of this huge promiscuous life, about all this STUFF?

  "Of course, he was a Virgo," said Wiebke thoughtfully.

  I said, "I see." "Like me," she said. "Both Virgos. Stubborn, obsessive, perfectionists. He didn't have hobbies. He didn't read much, except politics. He didn't go to the theater or the opera, or have an interest in sports. He was interested in propelling his career. He "craved attention," she added. Once we were in a boat with Victor Grossman. Dean disappeared. We got into a panic. We looked over the side of the boat, and, suddenly, he bobbed to the surface. 'Look, I've drowned,' he said and, rising from the water like Jesus Christ, he burst out laughing."

  Wiebke shuddered, finished her story and signaled the waiter for a bill.

  I opened my bag to get some money to pay it. Wiebke stopped me.

  "Please," she said.

  "It's OK," Leslie said.

  "No, I will pay and, if you like, you can pay me back later," she whispered, glancing over her shoulder at the waiter. Then I understood: she wanted the dollars.

  Wiebke stuck her elbows on the table and put her chin in her hands. "Sex and politics. That's all Dean was interested in. Sex and politics."

  I thought of Paton Price.

  Paton who had been angry with Mrs. Brown because she sent Dean to Hollywood a virgin; Paton who wrote letters to Dean in South America about the women he screwed; Paton who made him strip naked in class, and sent him to a prostitute who said Dean was a natural in bed. Dean always said: "I am no puppet." But wasn't Paton his godfather? His puppet-master? The best friend of Dean's life as he called him: Paton Price.

  "Was he?" I asked.

  "Sorry?"

  "A natural?"

  Wiebke changed the subject. The next afternoon, at her house in East Berlin, Wiebke showed us her nudie shots of Dean doing push-ups on the carpet.

  Wiebke's place was in the Berlin suburbs. It was five minutes' drive from Dean's place at Schmockwitz.

  We ate coq au vin in the kitchen. Over the table, a shelf held a dozen brightly colored packets of tea that were obviously precious. I asked if food was hard to come by. Only the mushrooms, she said. And oranges. You could only get oranges at Christmas.

  Natasha, Wiebke's daughter by Dean, ate with us. She was twelve years old. A slight, fair, pretty girl, she had her mother's face imprinted on her like a pale photograph. She smiled shyly and hardly spoke. She
refused to speak English, Wiebke said, because she was angry with Dean for leaving her. And for dying. She was mad at him for dying.

  A cuckoo clock chirped from the living-room wall. Wiebke got out a box of pictures, as Mrs. Brown had done in Hawaii. There were photographs of Dean turning somersaults in the air, of Dean rolling around with the dog, of Dean doing push-ups on the rug without any pants on. There were pictures of Wiebke barebreasted, which she showed us without any embarrassment.

  Natasha crept quietly into the room and curled up in the corner of the sofa.

  I tried to get another look at the picture of Dean doing pushups bare-assed, but Wiebke had moved on and was staring at her own wedding pictures. Dean wore a cowboy shirt with an eagle on the front. Wiebke wore a muu-muu from Hawaii and platform shoes. Everyone had had such a good time that they forgot to speak English, which made Dean feel left out. He grew petulant and remote. Wiebke wondered what she was doing there.

  "It was the first time since we met we didn't make love, our wedding night," Wiebke said.

  After Dean and Wiebke were married, they built the house in Schmockwitz. She gave up her career. He chose women who were self-possessed and competent, but as soon as they were his, he wanted them to stay at home.

  Dean could be erratic, even volatile, Wiebke said. His moods could change on a dime.

  "Once he became so furious he punched the furniture with his fists. On another occasion we turned up at some cinema where tickets should have been left for him, but weren't. He could not handle it. He wanted to go home and give himself up to despair," she said. "I said, 'Dean, let's go out and have a good evening,' but he said, 'You don't know what it's like when I'm checked in this way. It makes me feel dreadful. I can't cope with it.'"

  They tangled about clothes.

  Wiebke said, "He wore those cowboy clothes. He had a red jacket. 'He looks just like a trained monkey,' my first husband would say."