Comrade Rockstar

by Реджи Нейделсон

  They also fought about his music.

  "Once, when Dean was practicing, I said, 'I've heard that song thirty times, I'm going into the garden.' Dean became hysterical. He said, 'Patty used to love to hear it a hundred times.' I said, 'Good for Patty. I'm not Patty,'" she said. "But I think he knew his limits," Wiebke added. "He would put on Frank Sinatra and he would say, 'I wish I could do that.'"

  Wiebke looked at her box of pictures and documents and in it were bundles of letters tied together with ribbons. She took out a letter that was marked "To be opened in the event of my death."

  The letter, written before a trip to the Middle East, described the necessity of his visit to the Third World. It was what a man had to do, said Dean. You could not ask others to put themselves on the line if you did not do the same thing.

  "As soon as things were going bad in his personal life, he got on a plane and headed for some revolution. He would go somewhere really stupid and dangerous. He played a kind of Russian roulette," said Wiebke.

  In another letter Wiebke showed us, Dean talked of the reconciliation with his father that had occuned when he went home to America in 1978. They had gone fishing together.

  "I really feel I have his love and respect now, and that he now loves me more than Vern or Dale, but he never told it to me," Dean wrote.

  "Getting his father's attention was the most important thing in Dean's life," Wiebke said, echoing what Dean's mother had told me. "He thought his father was very brave to commit suicide.

  Dean saw the movie Whose Life Is It Anyway? He said 'a man has a right to end his life.'" And then it ended. Dean and Wiebke split.

  It was a startling change of gear. And Dean told Wiebke he was bringing a red-haired stewardess home to Schmockwitz and would Wiebke please beat it. It was 1978, and Natasha was still a baby.

  "Was Renate already in the picture?" I asked.

  "He knew Renate. He knew her from the time he came to East Germany," Wiebke said. "There were many women. He used to come here and say, 'Can't you teach these girlfriends of mine to cook?' He had a different girl every weekend to cook, but he liked my goulash."

  Wiebke was put out that Dean didn't even bother to help her find a place to live. He had powerful friends on the Central Committee, but he did nothing. He didn't bother with Natasha. When he married Renate and adopted her son, Sasha, he bought him videos of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. For Natasha he bought junk.

  "Couldn't he buy Natasha a Donald Duck, too?" Wiebke asked, and added, "Renate could never have a child by Dean. After we had Natasha, he had a vasectomy!"

  Wiebke looked over at Natasha who was still on the sofa and had not said a word.

  "Would you like to play something for us, darling?" Wiebke asked her little girl. Natasha went to the piano and began. Then she got up abruptly and ran out of the room and Wiebke's mood changed.

  "Shall I play for you the song Dean and I made together?" Wiebke asked.

  They had gone to Prague together to record it. Dean recorded most of his albums in Prague. Wiebke turned on the record player. The song was called "Together," and it had a spoken interlude.

  "Tell me you love me," Dean whispered.

  "I love you," Wiebke said.

  "Tell me you need me."

  "I need you," Wiebke said.

  "Tell me you respect me," Dean cooed.

  "I respect you."

  In spite of Wiebke's feisty style in person, the song was very sentimental, all deeply felt; she had gone all the way to Prague to whisper that she respected Dean on the mushiest of all the tracks he ever put down on wax.

  "He didn't even make a special effort to get our song special plays on the radio," Wiebke said.

  13

  "I'm convinced it was suicide," said Victor Grossman in his flat near the Karl Marx-Allee in East Berlin. The flat was in a postwar apartment building, where, like scabs, the tiny beige tiles had peeled off the facade. Grossman's flat itself was full of books, and there was a yellow plastic shopping bag from Tower Records. Perhaps someone had brought him a present.

  The suicide scenario surprised me; it had been mentioned before, but only casually. In East Berlin, Grossman had been close to Dean Reed.

  We had had trouble getting to Renate, Dean Reed's widow, and Renate was the key. Leslie Woodhead and I went to see Victor Grossman, who knew her. He agreed to contact Renate. As soon as we arrived, he had called her and now we talked and waited for the telephone to ring.

  Good-natured, shrewd, maybe a little vain, Victor had first met Dean at the same documentary film festival in Leipzig where Wiebke met him.

  "I was called and asked to help interpret for an American rock and roll singer. It wasn't my sort of thing, but I agreed," said Victor, who was a folk music man himself.

  "He was a big surprise for me," said Victor. "I really had never known a rock and roll type, a Colorado cowboy singer, to be an avid leftist. But that's what he was. And we got along very well. It was very unusual for me. And, of course, it was probably interesting for him, too, to meet an American here in East Berlin. We spoke the same language in many ways, and became good friends."

  He paused, removed his glasses, and put them back on. "Dean was a star from the moment he arrived. Girls here fall for anything Western. The Golden West, they called it," said Victor. "One girl bragged her Italian lover gave her one hundred lire. She thought that one hundred was a lot of money."

  Victor Grossman, in his sixties, wore a plaid shirt and sandals. He was enormously hospitable, but slightly fretful that day we first met. He had not yet booked his summer holiday. If you missed the final booking date, your holiday was kaput, even if there were still vacancies. Victor intended to visit Soviet Georgia with his wife.

  In Victor's flat, which he shared with his wife - the kids were grown up with children of their own - back issues of Mother Jones and Rolling Stone were piled knee-high. Galleys of Veil, Bob Woodward's book about the CIA, were sprawled out on a large work table that held a computer. Dictionaries in Russian, German, and English were stacked beside it.

  Victor disappeared into the tiny kitchen that was behind a curtain strung on a metal rod.

  "Have some cheesecake," he said reappearing, a large metal cake tin between his hands. Shoving aside a pile of manuscripts, he put the cake tenderly on the coffee table.

  "Go on, please. My wife made it," Victor said generously.

  I ate a lot of cake on the Dean Reed story, especially in East Berlin and Prague. Cake eating, as a ritual, seemed to feature as significantly in the German Democratic Republic as smoking Marlboros did in the Soviet Union, or Kents in Romania. As soon as you arrived - at Wiebke's, at Victor's - the coffeepot was filled and a cake was produced. Victor pushed a large knife into the tin and, getting some leverage on it, gently prized out huge slabs of cheesecake.

  In the Seventies, when Dean was a superstar making movies in East Berlin, Victor was involved as his translator, and he could thicken up the story with anecdotal titbits: the ragged gypsy girl Dean befriended on location in Romania; his camaraderie with the stunt men (you got paid by the stunt in Eastern Europe, and Dean saw to it that everyone got an equal piece of the action); the horror of the directors when he insisted on doing his own stunts. In one case, even after he broke his wrist, Dean persisted in climbing a castle wall for a sequence in a film. He demanded that his stunts were filmed in a single shot so that it was clear that Dean himself was performing them. He often spoke of himself in the third person.

  Idolized by fans, his politics acceptable to the Party, Dean became a minor but potent player in the East. He claimed to know Erich Honecker and Gustav Husak. He made speeches and was honored by the Czechs with the Julius Fucik Medallion. He played concerts in Sofia and the Bulgarians presented him with the Dimitrov Medallion. Every ghoul in Eastern Europe, I thought, the whole bunch of them had honored and celebrated Dean Reed.

  We ate cake and drank coffee in Victor Grossman's flat, and Victor told the story of how Dean, on a visit to
America in 1978, was arrested and sent to jail; how the East German propaganda machine clanked into action and the legend of Dean Reed grew.

  In a Buffalo, Minnesota, jail, Dean began a hunger strike and he wrote a letter about suffering to the people of East Berlin. In it, he crowed about the solidarity among the prisoners, but mentioned wistfully how he dreamed of eating goose, especially now it was almost Christmas. His letters were larded with the international socialist rhetoric he was so good at.

  Obsessively, the media reported the details of Dean's detention: on November 6, Neues Deutschland, the official East German newspaper, gave front-page coverage to Dean's telegram of greetings to "the people of the GDR and Erich Honecker."

  From his jail cell, Dean wrote to Erich Honecker. Joan Baez sent a telegram to President Jimmy Carter to protest Dean's incarceration. So did Pete Seeger and Dimitri Shostakovich.

  An international incident was in the making. On November 11, 1978, the New York Times got into the act, reporting that a number of Soviet composers put through an appeal to President Jimmy Carter to help with the release of Dean Reed who was in jail in Buffalo, Minnesota. He was awaiting trial and had been charged with trespassing during a protest over a power-line construction site.

  Trespassing? Trespassing? The infraction was so minor that even a German couldn't get exercised over it. It was more than a little embarrassing when the judge was revealed to have offered Dean his choice: a $500 fine or three days in jail. Dean made a speech and went to jail.

  Every morning in jail, apparently, he rose early and, from his cell, he sang for the other prisoners.

  "Oh what a beautiful morning, Oh what a beautiful day," Dean sang. It was one of his favorite songs and he often sang it when he was in jail. I could imagine him in the role of Curly; he would have been perfect in Oklahoma. Not everyone saw it that way.

  "Give it a break, Dean," the other prisoners shouted. "Give it a break!"

  Like Dean Reed, Victor Grossman was an American in Berlin. Unlike Dean, Victor was perfectly cast for his life. He did not admit to missing much by living in the People's Democratic Republic. Except maybe an avocado. And a Jewish salami. It was impossible to get a Jewish salami in East Berlin, he said.

  I thought that Victor was maybe a little fed up with talking about Dean Read. Concealed behind his amiable face and the round spectacles, was a not inconsiderable guy. He, too, was an American in the East; he, too, had an amazing story to tell.

  "He's an exotic here, isn't he?" asked Mike Wallace when he interviewed Grossman about Dean Reed for 60 Minutes.

  "Perhaps, a little bit. Because, of course, there are not so many of us Americans around here, you know. Basically, I'm an exotic here, too."

  "That's true. That's true," said Wallace.

  "I'm more exotic than he is, in that sense," said Victor Grossman.

  While we waited for the telephone to ring - for Renate Reed to call Victor back - Victor pulled one leg over the other, polished his spectacles, and told his story which, like Dean's, was pretty incredible, another tale from the Cold War, another story of an American who had crossed over.

  Victor, who had grown up in New York, went on to Harvard. In 1951, during the Korean War, he was drafted. The army asked if he belonged to certain left-wing organizations.

  "Did you?" I asked.

  "As many as I possibly could," Victor said.

  "The Communist Party?"

  "Yes, of course."

  Refusing the draft was illegal. Being a Communist was illegal, too, if you were in the military. It was Catch-22 and Victor kept his mouth shut, joined up, went to West Germany, and served nearly his whole year without incident, although as a Jew he felt uneasy: there were still plenty of fascists around.

  Then the letter came. The Judge Advocate, noting that Victor Grossman had concealed his illegal affiliations, ordered him to report to the nearest Military Court. Victor panicked.

  In his head perhaps, he played out scenes of his Court Martial. Senator Joe McCarthy's voice plagued his sleepless nights: "Are you now, or have you ever been...?" Maybe agents in raincoats chased him through his nightmares. Images of prison haunted him, of hardened criminals and Victor among them, a kid who grew up in New York, whose parents sold books, a commie, a pinko traitor.

  Victor ran. Making his way to the Danube, the river that was still divided between East and West, he jumped in. Just stuffed his papers in his pocket and jumped, just like that, swam across, and came up on the Russian side, clutching those papers, looking to defect.

  He couldn't find a Russian.

  For twenty-four nightmare hours Victor wandered around the Eastern sector, holding tight to his papers, looking for a Russian. By the time he found one it was pretty hard to explain where he had been all that time.

  Still, they took him in, debriefed him, and resettled him. He went to university and moved on to East Berlin, where he married Mrs. Grossman, had a couple of sons, and got down to the business of being a journalist and translator. He had an East German passport with the word" American" stamped across it.

  As a Jew, he said, he found West Germany scarier than the East. In East Berlin he never made a secret of his Jewishness. He believed the German Democratic Republic made a conscious effort to reject fascist ideology. He believed the GDR made an effort to evolve a just socialist society. Victor didn't have to buy into these views, to accept the socialist package. He had grown up on it. He believed.

  He settled down in East Berlin, where he wrote books about folk music and he took his holidays in the Soviet Union, and, after thirty years, Victor Grossman still believed. He knew that it was not paradise on earth, but his basic convictions were intact: in the East there were great gains in education and in medical care and the arts. Neo-Nazis and big business ran West Germany, Victor believed; I. G. Farben was a name that often popped out of Victor Grossman's mouth.

  What about the Stasi? What about the prison camps? Perhaps, Victor said, perhaps they existed, a few of them, and they were not unlike the prison farms of Arkansas.

  Leslie asked if Victor felt oppressed at all by the system, by the lack of freedom to express his opinions, for instance. Victor said that he often heard a wide range of opinion expressed in East Berlin. Maybe you didn't hear the non-leftist view in political meetings, but you heard it at the supermarket. You heard discussions of West German TV, for instance, and people watched the American soaps obsessively. There were shortages, yes, but there was music, theater, art, opera. There were world-class sports.

  "I don't actually care much for sports," Victor added with a self-deprecating smile.

  In some ways, I thought that Victor was a man in a time warp. In spirit he was true to his origins. You could put him in a museum with a label: Young American Communist Man, circa 1952. He had grown up when the Soviets were America's brave wartime allies.

  His role models must have been those urban coastal Jews in America, the union organizers in San Francisco, and the New York booksellers, like his parents, the believers who hoped for a better way of life for their kids and for the dispossessed, who thought, whatever its drawbacks, and all systems had drawbacks, that the socialist ideal, realized, would feed body and soul.

  "All them cornfields and ballet in the evenings," Peter Sellers had said as the union man in I'm All Right, Jack. That was what the American dreamers imagined when they thought of the Soviet Union and even of its satellites: All them cornfields and ballet in the evenings.

  In East Berlin, Victor Grossman was one of a tiny group of Western expatriates. He did not think he would ever see America again. He still owed the US army some time, so he was afraid to go back, but, as the years went by, if Victor missed America, it became more and more remote.

  "Will you ever go back, do you think?" I asked.

  He said, "I think this year we shall have our holiday in Soviet Georgia," he said.

  Then in Victor's apartment, the telephone rang. Speaking briefly into it, he covered the mouthpiece.

 
"It's Renate. She says she will see you, but not before Sunday, if that is convenient for you."

  One more delay. We had a thousand questions. Victor had to get to the travel agency.

  In the elevator, he was silent, concentrating on his holiday, I thought. We shook hands and agreed to meet on Sunday - he would translate for Renate. Leslie and I were going back to West Berlin for the night, and then on to Prague.

  "Is there anything you'd like from West Berlin?" I asked.

  Victor hesitated.

  "Please let me," I said.

  "Well, I would like an avocado. It is thirty years since I last saw one," he said.

  The metallic sound of the goose-stepping guard at the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism rang out with chilling irony as Leslie Woodhead and I drove away from Victor's, looking for something to do. Leslie had hardly said anything while we were at Victor's, and I knew something was bothering him.

  At the Kino, Die Mission was playing. I wished it were Tootsie, which had been a big hit in East Berlin, and I could have used a laugh. Robert De Niro speaking German did not seem an appetizing way to spend the evening. I had watched him schlep his weapons in the string shopping bag up that mountain in English already, and once was enough. As he manfully shouldered his own good-hearted message around the globe, Dean would have identified with De Niro, Die Mission, and the penitent's net bag.

  I suggested a visit to the opera, for which East Berlin was famous. Leslie looked horrified. Opera was something fat ladies did if they couldn't get a job with a rock and roll band.

  "Let's have a drink instead," he said.

  A few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie was the Grand Hotel, an island of comforting new Western decadence in the gray heart of the righteous socialist state, but a state that needed hard currency desperately in the late 1980s.

  Inside the lobby, the illusion began to fall apart. It was as if hoteliers from another planet had reconstructed a hotel from a blueprint made after a single visit to Earth. The elaborately carved period furniture was imitation veneer on top of chipboard; the courteous young managers in striped pants had the beady eyes of security guards; there was a swimming pool in the hotel, but it was too small for real swimming, and the tropical solarium looked out on a sodden, chilly city.