Comrade Rockstar

by Реджи Нейделсон

  In the cafe, a grave little all-girl orchestra played skillfully, but without any feeling, for the clientele were more interested in the enormous bowls of ice cream than in the pretty renditions of Brahms.

  A young woman in stone-washed jeans - the uniform of the well-to-do youth of the East - sat at a table opposite her mother, who wore a hat and ate whipped cream off her spoon with her pinky raised in the air. Smiling, she nodded dreamily at her daughter, as if lost in the illusion that this was the Berlin of her gay youth and nothing at all had happened since.

  When the woman in the hat got up to gaze at the cakes in a glass case, her daughter leaned over. She spoke good English.

  "It is nice for her," she said to Leslie and me. "Next time, I will save enough to take her to the swimming baths, too."

  I scrounged a few dollars from the bottom of my bag and gave them to the young waiter for a tip. He seemed worried. Then he smiled. He had it. "Have a nice day," he said. "Have a nice day."

  The Grand Hotel accepted Diners Club, American Express, Visa, Eurocard, Eurocheques, Avis cards, Hertz cards, dollars, pounds sterling, Deutschmarks, Swiss francs, French francs, and yen.

  "Money makes the world go round," went the song in Cabaret. Money, money, money. I could hear the jingling of coins.

  Not much in the East shocked me more than the way these countries degraded their own currency. It eroded the whole structure of society; it made people willing to sell themselves for a few bucks, and I hated it. When in the fall of 1989, East Germans began jamming the trains that would take them west through Hungary, they tossed their banknotes on the station platform with contempt and spat on them.

  At the Grand Hotel was an Intershop, an official hardcurrency store. With their hoses literally pressed against the glass, locals, out for the evening, gazed at displays of leather coats, French perfume, and Italian silks. Without hard currency, they could only look; there was nothing else they could do. Why didn't they smash the windows? Why?

  What did Dean make of it, with his medals from every dictator in the East? Did he have a secret agenda? Was he working for democracy from within, the worm in the apple? Maybe he remained a tourist in Berlin and Moscow, seeing only what officials intended him to see, unaware of the corruption.

  I remembered something that Dean's mother had told me in Hawaii.

  "When he first arrived over there in Germany, he was like something from outer space," she said. "He never got used to Germany, though. He was always a tourist."

  "How could he be?" said Leslie, who had barely said a word all day long. "How the hell could he be unaware?"

  All day, Leslie drove, he took notes, he ate cake, but he kept a thin-lipped silence, which was unlike him, for he was always ready for a laugh. East Berlin got to him, and I knew he was beginning to take against Dean Reed; more than anything, he could not stand the naivete.

  "I don't get his politics, you know," Leslie said.

  Dean Reed's politics were very simple: US democracy was only a choice between Pepsi and Coke; imperialism ruled the West; the East featured benign state socialism and free medical care. Dean had a rationalization for everything, even the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union; the Afghans denied women their rights he said.

  He had the line down pat and was much given to shtick about the arms race and the human race. Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes told him he sounded like an editorial in Pravda.

  I made a half-hearted stab at explaining to Leslie that I thought Dean was, at least, sincere. Leslie didn't care. He was also desperate to get out of East Berlin now. At the border, we discovered we still had East German money. You were forbidden to take it to the West.

  The bank at Checkpoint Charlie had closed. The guard directed us to a bank back in the Alexanderplatz and we turned the car around, and started driving, peering out into the empty city, looking for the bank.

  Suddenly, Leslie stepped hard on the brakes, the car stopped, he got out and I followed. He looked around the dark empty city, the rain falling in gray sheets.

  "It's crap," he said. "Crap. All of it crap. The politics are crap. The money is crap. The furniture, the clothes, the schools. Crap. It's a conspiracy of mediocrity. From the Berlin Wall to Vladivostok, they've cheated everyone and everything is crap."

  A man in a hat walked along the street, staring at us. The man disappeared, and all I could see was the rococo outline of the opera house against a purplish sky. In the distance, beyond the Berlin Wall, lay West Berlin, the neon dream city. It made the sky glow the way Las Vegas does when you come to it, all of a sudden, out of the desert.

  Leslie started walking.

  "Where are you going?" I was nervous.

  Looking around once more at the empty, dark, wet Berlin street, he took all of the shitty, crumpled, greasy money out of his pockets and shoved it in a garbage can on top of all the other garbage. Then we got back in the car and fled to the West. I could hear Leslie heave a sigh of relief.

  I said, "What's the matter?"

  "I had a minute of panic," he said. "I thought I might be trapped on the other side of the Wall."

  14

  In Prague, Vaclav Nectar [3] had been Dean Reed's best friend. He was himself an improbable rock star. A tiny, cherubic man who had trained as an opera singer, he had the direct, dimpled gaze of a five-year-old, the face of an elderly baby. Un vieux garcon, the French would have called him. His friends called him Vashek.

  In the driveway of Vashek's little villa in the exquisitely bourgeois suburbs of Prague lay a mirrored ball from a dance hall that had closed. It seemed such a perfect metaphor for Prague: heartbreakingly lovely, sad, the gaiety and music shut down by an oppressive regime.

  "I can't think of anywhere to throw it away," said Vashek.

  On the other side of the drive was an ancient tree. "My wife's father planted it when she was born," he added, gazing up at the sky on a day so exquisite it seemed ironic all by itself, but almost everything was in Prague.

  Inside the house Mrs. Nectar fussed with coffee cups and cakes. She had been a ballerina and she was thin and looked fragile and safety pins dangled from her apron. She also had a cold and she smiled wearily and left us in the living room with its carefully matched furniture to watch a video of Vashek's band, the Bacilli. All of the Bacilli wore masks and their biggest hit was called "The Clown."

  There followed a little tour of Dean Reed memorabilia, carefully hoarded, placed in positions of honor around the house: wind-chimes from Colorado, a big tin samovar from the Soviet Union, a chromium clock from somewhere socialist, and a little brass lamp from India.

  "Dean had a tremendous capacity for warming up the public," Vashek said. "He could win their trust immediately, then state his political convictions. People would take it from him. He spoke in English. He was a master at communicating. I learned from him: the public must be yours the moment you've sung your third song.

  "He did the international hits. He did the Everly Brothers, 'Ode to Joy', and even 'My Yiddishe Momma', which was tremendously popular here."

  In the basement of Vashek's house was a secret rock and roll museum. On a row of shelves, back jssues of the New Musical Express were stacked tidily alongside newspaper cuttings and record albums. There was an old stereo. The walls were completely papered with posters of rock stars such as Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, and Dean Reed. Cliff Richard, however, had, in a sense, made Vaclav Nectar a star.

  In 1968, Vashek tuned into a radio broadcast from the Albert Hall in London and he heard Cliff Richard sing "Congratulations."

  "I was much taken with it," Vashek said in his formal way. Three days later, adding his own Czech lyrics, Vashek recorded a cover version of "Congratulations." It became the anthem for the euphoric Prague Spring when the country seemed to have been liberated from its oppressive regime. In Czech its lyrics concerned spring, green trees, a girl in a nylon blouse, and young love over a Martini Dry. Vaclav Nectar longed to meet Cliff Richard, but when he finally saw him back
stage at a concert, he was too shy to say hello.

  Prague was a city addicted to music: Paul Anka had played Prague once, so had Manfred Mann. So pervasive was rock and roll in the Sixties, that when the writing team of Sucy and Slitr - their hits included "Mr. Rock and Mr. Roll" and "Vain Cousin" - opened the Semafor Theater in Prague, over five years a million people came, which was equal to the entire population of the city.

  In the 1960s there was a surge of Western culture; the Beatles flourished. In his book about rock and roll in the East, Timothy Ryback describes a delicious moment when, in 1965, Allen Ginsberg was made student king in Prague. Ginsberg announced that rock and roll "had shaken loose the oppressive shackles of Stalinism."

  What a howl it must have been when they made Ginsberg king and carried him like a hero-god around town. He was thrown out of the country for subversion, perversion, and wearing flowers in his hair.

  When the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, everything went dead. People said it was as if you could hear the noise in the streets, the excitement, news, chatter, music, the buzz that during Alexander Dubcek's short reign had risen to a delirious hum, simply stopped. Banners and flags that crowded the city's sight lines, extolling socialism and Lenin and Brezhnev, flapped to a tuneless breeze. In Wenceslas Square, for twenty years afterwards, it was as if the soundtrack was shut off. That's what everyone noticed as the city crept back into silent submission.

  The Soviet invasion destroyed the hope and the gaiety; the country was gradually strangled by dread. But it took time before all the music died. In 1969, the Beach Boys came to Prague. (In Czech, the Beach Boys were known as the Boys from the Seashore, a name in this landlocked country that seemed sweet and loony and reminded me of Shakespeare's "Seacoast of Bohemia.")

  "Help me Rhonda, help help me, Rhonda ...," the Lucerna Hall rocked all night, and Mike Love of the Boys from the Seashore said how happy he was to be in Prague. He wanted to dedicate a song to Alexander Dubcek, who was in the audience. It was called "Breaking Away."

  Prague was the most beautiful city in Europe, but in those years melancholy floated like dust through the stucco-colored air and there was a slow, drifting accretion of inertia. In every window in the shabby arcades around the square, in every car, taxi, and shop, were pictures of Lenin. Slogans pasted on ravishing baroque buildings testified to the joys of socialism. Groups of children with sullen faces were herded, silently, through the Klement Gottwald Museum of Socialism.

  As the hard-liners had tightened their grip after 1968 all of the rock clubs shut up and Prague's top band, the Plastic People of the Universe, went to jail. Into this lovely town stunned into weary acquiescence, Dean Reed arrived and it was like Christmas.

  That day at his house, Vaclav Nectar confessed suddenly that he was not altogether sure how great Dean's singing talent was. But his fans loved him and that was his true talent, and so when you walked with Dean in Wenceslas Square, it took an hour to go half a mile.

  Everything east of the Berlin Wall was relative. For many in Prague the 1970s were dead years musically, but compared to East Berlin, for Dean it was bliss at least professionally. There was a tradition for pop and rock which barely existed in East Germany, and even when East German officialdom recognized its inevitability, it did so by establishing an organization with the chilling title Sektion Rockmusik. As often as not, in East Betlin, a backing band meant a hundred singing strings because, under German socialism, no musician could be unemployed.

  With its recent democratic history and its bohemian passions, its love for jazz and pop and rock, Prague's musicians remembered how to do it. Dean got himself a deal with Supraphon, the state recording label, which lasted the rest of his life. In a good year, what with exports throughout the Soviet Bloc, Supraphon sold a couple of hundred thousand Dean Reed albums.

  Dean's first Czech tour was a "Solidarity with Chile Tour" in 1975. Ironically, as Czechs fled to the West if they could, thousands of Chileans, in flight from the horrors of Pinochet's rule, escaped to Eastern Europe. All over Europe and particularly in Czechoslovakia, Chileans, a few of them Dean's companeros from the old days, lived in exile.

  Someone said to me, "Poor bastards, they exchanged Pinochet for Husak." It probably didn't seem that way, though, if you had just avoided having your brains bashed out or worse in a Chilean football stadium. Among this free-floating group of peripatetic exiles, emigres, musicians, and poets, Dean was a drop-in star.

  "Am I popular because I fight for peace?" Dean had asked Vaclav Nectar. Vashek did not want to hurt Dean; he would say, "Half like you for that." And Dean would say, "What about the other half?" "Because you're American."

  On that tour in 1975, Dean sang "Bye-Bye Love" to rock-starved Czechs. He was sweet with the girls and brazen with the bureaucrats. He stood up for his friends. He spoke his mind. In his white turtleneck, Dean went on television and said: In life you must have love and fun. Fun! It had been a long time since anyone thought about fun, maybe not since 1968; the idea of fun itself was a revolution.

  Out of the blue, when we were settled in Vashek's basement, drinking coffee, he said suddenly, "But meeting Dean didn't help me much. But I don't mind, although it aggravated my problems for the next ten years."

  With the obsessive recall of the torture victim, Vashek began the long, sad, intricate tale of his relationship with a Mr. Hrabal whom he called the Master of Power. The road to Vashek's particular hell had been paved with good intentions. His life went terribly wrong, and it was full of dark corners and dead ends, like a Czech novel.

  After 1968, and already a marked man, Vashek had been called by the state to testify against Marta Kubishova, the heroine of the Prague Spring, the girl who sang at the tanks in the streets and was awarded a Golden Nightingale by Mr. Dubcek. Frantishek Hrabal, as the chief of Pragokoncert, had complete authority over pop music. A former head of disinformation, he was a full KGB Colonel; he was the Master of Power.

  "We have people to destroy you," the Master of Power screamed at Vaclav Nectar when he refused to identify Marta Kubishova as the woman in a set of pornographic pictures. Marta and Vashek had worked together in a group called the Golden Kids and they were friends.

  Kubishova sued Hrabal for slander. Vashek spoke in her defense again, and his career was finished. So fragile was Vashek afterwards that, on one occasion, after he shouted at the Master of Power, his chief torturer, he committed himself voluntarily to a lunatic asylum.

  "I could claim I was briefly deranged and had meant no harm," Vashek said.

  There followed an incredibly complicated story about how Dean seemed both to cause trouble for Vaclav Nectar and to bail him out, but I couldn't follow the terrible events that involved apparatchiks and ministers and bad Communist karma. Part of it was to do with Dean's insistence on being paid for his performances in dollars, as I understood it, part to do with Nectar's rebellion against the bureaucracy.

  In any case, there were periods when Dean was not allowed to perform in Prague. And it was Vashek who, because he was friends with Dean, suffered most. There were interrogations. Trips were canceled. Vashek was victimized, terrorized, worked over by the secret police. But Vashek never blamed Dean, not even because Dean's righteous outrage seemed to be only about money.

  "To Vashek, my brother, friend, and comrade. I love and respect you very much. You are a very special person in my life. Until death us do part. An embrace," Dean wrote in the flyleaf of his autobiography.

  Vashek showed me the book. He insisted that the last line was significant. Before he spoke, he put a record on the stereo to muffle our conversation.

  He whispered, "With Dean's death my life in fear began," he said and then suddenly stopped.

  In the background, the music played dully. Vashek's voice dropped as he spoke of the Czech secret police and an alliance with the East German Stasi and their desire to eliminate Dean Reed because Dean Reed was trouble.

  "Dean said too much. He called the officials 'Mafia'. He had man
y friends among the prostitutes here. Many were informants," Vashek said. Glancing over his shoulder, he added with a meaningful stare, "One of the girls was called Ophelia," he added, and looked at me to make sure I understood he was referring to Dean's death - a murder in his view - by drowning.

  Still, well before his death, Dean was finally allowed to perform in Prague again; he sang "Give Peace a Chance" and 4000 people rose to their feet.

  "The popularity, doesn't it bother you?" Dean's Czech engineer had asked.

  "I need it," Dean would say. "I can't live without it. It is a drug."

  15

  There seemed to be no way forward. The more informants I talked to, the more the mystery jammed up against itself: Wiebke described a massively moody man whose adrenalin rushes left him too drained to turn on a light switch; Victor thought Dean was a man of profound political naivete and great glamour; and Vaclav Nectar saw him as a brilliant performer and loved him, even though he had somehow ruined Nectar's life. Dictators gave him medals; stunt men, kudos; women adored him; no one could or would really talk about his death.

  I had been following his ghost for months by now. Who killed Dean Reed? Who was he? A true believer? An American rock star supplying opium for the socialist masses? Our spy, the best mole America ever had? Theirs?

  The Berlin Wall was still up and even when you got to the other side, it was a police state, ruled by the Stasi, a fortress of paranoia. Information about Dean Reed was very hard to come by. I was at a dead end.

  East Berlin was a city of dead ends: the Wall that kept people in; the badly drawn map on the greasy visa issued at Checkpoint Charlie, which marked forbidden territory; the midnight curfew for tourists; the worthless money which you could not export; the East Germans, noses pressed against the glass at the hard currency Intershop in the Grand Hotel, gazing at leather coats they could not buy from countries they could not visit; doormen who barred the way to hotels; the official reports of Dean's death which yielded nothing much at all except the German obsession with bureaucratic detail; the lonely house where Dean Reed had lived next to the lake where he died.