It snowed the day that we, Leslie Woodhead and I, finally went back to Schmockwitz, to the house on the wrong side of the Wall, at the end of a country road next to a frozen lake. Victor Grossman was with us; he had agreed to translate. It was March, 1988, four months since we had first come.
The wind howled around the Alexanderplatz as we drove out of Berlin towards Schmockwitz. The earflaps of his Russian hat pulled down over his ears, Victor Grossman sat in the front seat next to Leslie and recited the directions for Schmockwitz. In his lap, Victor held a bag with a couple of avocados that I had brought him. Leslie pretended not to have been down the road the previous November.
As we left the city behind, the snow fell harder. A thick mist came up and the low-lying suburban buildings turned into an endless gray blur. The dismal little East German cars slid and skidded on the highway: none had chains or snow tires. Hairdryers on wheels, Leslie called them The Trabants. I said they were like mobile sardine cans. We passed the time making up names for the Trabis, laughing nervously, not paying attention to the fact that Victor Grossman might have been offended by our jokes. This was his country, his country's cars.
The village of Schmockwitz was shut tight for winter. The pub was boarded up. At the end of the long, bleak road was the Reed house, with the carved R on a post.
We parked and, as we walked down the path to the front door, I could see the lake, gray and forbidding. Every time she looked out the window, I thought, Renate must have seen the lake where Dean died. On the doorstep were two pairs of rubber boots caked with mud. I wondered if they had been used the day Dean's body was dragged from the lake.
The house seemed silent. It had been the object of so much effort for so long that I sometimes dreamed about it. Suddenly, a light flashed on inside, the door opened, and Renate stepped out, smiled, and kissed Victor's cheek.
In black leather pants and a white silk shirt, Renate stood in the doorway and greeted us, smiling. She had an anxious, beautiful face and dark eyes. Renate gazed directly at you, kept you in her gaze, made you the center of her attention. She had that peculiar talent that people said Jackie Onassis had.
"Please," said Renate and opened the door wide and tilted her head in welcome.
"Thank you," I said, and gave her some chocolates.
"Thank you," she replied.
In the hall, Renate took my wet boots away and gave me furry slippers. A good hausfrau, I thought. Renate smiled; she knew what I was thinking. Still standing in the vestibule, she lit a cigarette. Her hand shook as she forced a lighter into life. But she grinned with unexpected good humor; she had a wry grasp of the situation, and I liked her instantly.
Victor, who had removed his own boots, was already in the sitting room. On a table in front of a tan corduroy sectional were blue and white cups, a coffeepot, the inevitable cake, and a plate of little chocolates.
"De'cor is Biedermeier Cowboy," Renate announced winningly.
The house was full of stuff: a carved dining-room suite, a cuckoo clock, a sofa, chairs, a big fireplace with a television set, video cassettes, plants, copper jugs filled with flowers, a miniature set of fire tongs, and a shovel. Over the fireplace hung Dean's guitar, and there were horse things - bridles, bits - props from a movie. In a picture in a fancy frame on the mantel, Dean and Renate kissed for the cameras. Beside it was a brass carriage clock, with an inscription from Dean to Renate that read, "I love you more every hour."
On the floor lay a dark brown animal skin, probably a bear, I thought; it seemed to have a bear's head. I had seen a video clip of Dean near that fireplace, holding his guitar, speaking to the camera:
"This guitar, this Martin guitar, which I took with me when I left, has been in the jungles with me in Brazil and Bangladesh, and this buckle [points to his belt buckle] are the only two things that I've kept for the twenty years since I left America. They have traveled throughout the world with me day by day, they know my life."
"Please, sit down." Renate gestured towards the sofa.
I sat down and fell out of the slippers, then I ate some cake. Leslie sat near Renate and listened intently.
Renate spoke German and Victor translated, although sometimes she slipped into English. She seemed fragile and sad and vulnerable. The big dark eyes locked mine into a tremulous gaze. My God, it must have been lonely down the end of that road with only her boy, Sasha, for comfort.
Like all teenagers, Sasha, who was fifteen, seemed to be perpetually in motion. Ill at ease, but handsome and polite, he shook our hands, kissed his mother, and hurried away to meet his friends, his long, skinny legs encased in black leather pants that gave him the look of a big bird.
"He is a good man. He is my little man," said Renate. "You would like to see the house?
It was a shrine. On a table were Dean's spurs from Chile. A saddle was tossed over the stair railing. On a wall, an American flag hung upside down; it was the flag Dean had washed in public in Santiago to protest the Vietnam War, the flag he said he had washed of the blood of the Vietnamese. It was hung upside down as an ironic comment on America.
We followed Renate up a flight of stairs, where she opened the door to Dean's study. I walked in and thought: the inner sanctum. You could almost smell him in here.
Through the window was a view of the lake and the woods beyond. On the wall were pictures and quotations from Fidel Castro and Jimmy Breslin. On the desk was his portable Olivetti typewriter and, under the glass top, snapshots. One was familiar.
"Oleg Smirnoff," I said.
"You know Oleg?" Renate smiled.
She was pleased because Oleg had been such a good translator for Dean. Dean said Oleg could do it almost better than he could. (I thought of Oleg's hatred of Germany, where, he said, the people say hello to the dogs but not to you.) Renate was happy that we knew Oleg.
Back downstairs in the living room, we exchanged pleasantries about Mrs. Brown and Phil Everly. I told her about Nikolai Pastoukhov and his tale of Dean's first trip to Moscow, when he sang all night in the private train that belonged to Deputy Premier Tikhonov.
Lost in reverie, Renate clasped her hands and perhaps imagined her handsome husband singing in the train that sped through the Tolstoyan night as if it were a scene from a Russian novel she'd read as a schoolgirl.
"So what is it exactly that we are here to talk about?" Renate asked.
The small talk was over, the cake eaten. Renate wanted to know what we wanted. Leslie talked about the drama-documentary that he wanted to make. He said that he liked to think of Costa Gavras's Missing as a model. Renate said it was among her favorite films. This was a good sign. She poured more coffee.
Leslie took charge and he was convincing.
"We want to work with you," he said. "To be absolutely candid, you are Dean's widow. You own the rights to his music. We need you."
Renate inquired politely about editorial control over the script. Could she see a script when one was ready? she asked.
"I really would like to," he said, "but I am forbidden to do so by Parliamentary law."
I had no idea if this was true, but it sounded convincing and I was impressed.
Renate nodded and she poured out white Hungarian wine into dainty Hock glasses with thin green stems.
Renate Blume was born in Dresden. She must have been a child during the firebombing that reduced the city to rubble, but she did not talk of such things. She was reserved and well bred. Her father had been an aviation engineer. Her brother was a mathematician. It had been expected of Renate that she would be a doctor. She wanted to dance, but her parents forbade it. "We are scientists in this family who do not fool around with such stuff," they said.
Still, she had her way and, having trained as a dancer, she got a place in Berlin's best acting school. Before she had even finished the course, she was cast in a film, The Divided Heavens.
Renate played the tragic heroines on stage in Dresden. She married a director, Frank Bayer; she worked in films and on television. For her po
rtrayal of Jenny Marx in a Soviet series, she received a Lenin Prize.
Renate rose from the sofa now and took a mother-of-pearl box from a drawer in a table. In it was her Lenin Prize, a small, elegantly embossed medal.
"Dean also got one," she said. "He got his first, which was right, because he was the bigger star."
Shyly, she reached for the scrapbook beside her on the sofa and opened it for us. In it were fanzine snaps of Renate.
"A fan sent me this," she said self-consciously, giggling over a picture of herself in a miniskirt, her cheeks sucked in, her hair long, her lips white. "Terrible," she added. "Terrible pictures. But I have been so lucky in my work. Then I have had no luck at all when Dean died. The man I was looking for all my life and thought I would never find," she said piteously.
She first met Dean on location in a movie called Kit und Co, taken from a Jack London novel.
"We were lovers," she said. "But only for the film, of course."
Renate was still married and Sasha was a little boy. Dean was married to Wiebke. But something stirred between them right away, perhaps friendship, Renate said. In 1975, she divorced Mr. Bayer, but she did not ever want to marry again.
"I lived without my husband and without Dean for almost seven years," she said. She did not want a star like Dean for a husband - she knew there would be problems. But it was somehow inevitable.
They were married on September 22, 1981, Dean's birthday; he wrote a song for her called "On the 22nd of September."
Now Renate pulled a large box of photographs towards her. Bending over it, the ritual began: the showing of photographs. Ruth Anna Brown had produced pictures from a trunk in Hawaii and Wiebke from her own archive and now Renate.
Leslie and I sat on the edge of his seat, looking at the box that had not been opened since Dean's death, according to Renate. She sat on the floor near the box and started pulling out pictures. Images of Dean spilled out on to the carpet as if he were a jack-in-the-box and only Renate could let him out. I sat beside her.
Pictures of Dean in performance. Pictures of Renate and Dean. Pictures of their wedding. For the wedding, Renate had worn a white dress and she carried white roses. Dean wore a suit. The wedding party was on a boat on the lake.
In the pictures, groups of people celebrated, toasting the radiant couple; he was fair and handsome, she was dark and beautiful. In one photograph, Dean wore a sailor hat cocked dashingly over one eye. He sat at the wheel of the boat. Renate gazed lovingly into his eyes, and her arms were clasped passionately around his neck. In another, Dean hugged a pig. "A wedding gift," Renate said, giggling. Then she grew serious.
"Three weeks after we were married Dean went to Beirut," Renate said now, no longer laughing. "Dean was an idealist."
Before they were married, she had accepted his need to put himself on the line for his beliefs. She understood Dean because she, too, believed. Like all educated East Germans, she spoke Russian. In working with the Soviets on The Life of Karl Marx, she came to understand them. With her whole heart she felt they were a friendly, peaceful race. In the Soviet Union, many people had lost their families in the War. The Soviet Union had lived through war in a way that Americans had never known upon their own soil, and the USSR would never want war again, she said.
"So many women are living alone because of wars; and have never found another husband," Renate said sadly.
Truly, Renate believed; she had also been passionate for Alexander Dubcek's Prague Spring, for socialism with a human face. So she understood his need to travel for the cause. When he went to Chile in 1983, though, she was scared and she begged him not to go. The death squads were rattling around like loose cannon and no one was safe. Renate begged Dean.
"Please, Dean. Don't go. Please!"
Before he left, he got into his car and drove all night to the Czech border to meet his friend Vaclav Nectar. There, Vashek handed him the master of a record Dean was to present to the brothers in Chile. In no-man's-land at midnight, the two rock stars embraced.
"Promise me you won't sing 'Venceremos'," Renate said when he got back from meeting Vashek and before he left for Chile.
"No, Renate, I cannot promise you. I am not going all the way to Chile to sing 'White Christmas'," Dean said.
* * *
The secret police grabbed Dean as soon as he arrived in Chile and he was informed that he could not work because he had no permit; he said he was not working for pay, only bread, so he didn't need a permit. He strode into the union hall that was filled with his comrades who had paid a loaf, if they could, to see him sing.
Fist raised, Dean jumped on to the stage and the striking workers from the copper mines began to clap for him. Their wives and their kids clapped. Striking his guitar with one hand, the other held in a clenched fist, Dean sang "Venceremos," the anthem of the revolution. No one had dared sing this patriotic song since Allende's death; everyone in the hall stood. Everyone began singing, raising their fists for Dean and for liberty. Outside the hall, the security men prowled, their weapons ready, waiting for him.
Dean spoke to the crowd in Spanish. A woman put a pendant that had belonged to her dead husband around his neck. In Santiago the next day, Dean sang "Venceremos" again, this time to a group of university students who had never heard it before, because they were too young.
Dean was arrested and deported, although there were some who said he bought his ticket out with the American Express card Paton Price had given him for emergencies. While Dean was in Chile, a filmmaker he knew recorded everything. Now, in Schmockwitz, Renate put the video on and the scene played in front of us.
Renate was scared when Dean went to Chile, of course, but by and large, they were happy. Dean made her happy. He even whistled at her when she was especially pretty; in Germany it was an insult when a man whistled at a woman, but she understood that for an American it was a compliment. They had holidays in the mountains together and she helped him prepare his television shows. She coached him in German. They went skiing. Dean adopted Sasha. He offered, but he never pushed.
"I would like Dean to be my father," said Sasha and, after a while, he took Dean's name.
Looking up at the video, Renate smiled at another image of Dean. He was on a dirt bike, which he rode standing up, playing his guitar.
"He really was crazy," she said fondly.
After they were married, Renate gave up a good deal of her own work; she had a more important role: it was her role to be there for Dean when he came back from his many trips, to entertain his friends and comrades.
Life was full: Dean performed at concerts and he made movies. His friends from America came to visit, among them Paton Price, who stayed for six months in order to act as Dean's advisor on Sing Cowboy Sing, a cowboy spoof.
It was shot in Romania because Romania was a terrific double for the Old West, the landscape was rugged and there were barely any television aerials in the Romanian countryside. Paton hated the food. A million East Germans saw Sing Cowboy Sing.
Like a fond mother hen, Renate indulged Dean when his Americans came, for she knew that he missed his own language and its jokes. When Phil Everly was at the house, they carried on like little boys, horsing around together. At a concert at Karl Marx-Stadt, Dean and Phil played "Bye-Bye Love" together, just as Phil and Don had once done.
"How did you come to play with Dean in East Berlin?" I had asked Phil Everly in the Mexican restaurant in California.
"He just got in touch and invited me," Phil said.
"What was it like with Dean in East Berlin?" I asked.
"We played some concerts. We had a lot of laughs. Dean was a real joker. He got me an interpreter, a lady who was one of only twelve Mormons in East Germany. There was nothing to buy, I mean how much caviar can a fellow eat? So I bought some diamonds, but they weren't much good. But Dean loved it."
I remembered that Phil had found East Berlin depressing.
"In fact, it had me scared when I got off the plane," Phil had said. "Of
course, Dean was on the other side. Dean was so popular then, so well known that the treatment once you got in there was phenomenal. The fact that you were coming there to see them. But I was scared until I saw him. I told him that, too."
Dean took him to the Stadt Hotel, the best in town. Phil remembered, "The first room I had was so narrow, maybe as spoiled American that I am. You had to see it to believe it. And I told Dean. I said, 'I can't stay here two weeks.' Dean got me to a corner room, which was twice as big, and got me one of the two televisions in that hotel. You could see West Berlin television, so I watched Bonanza. In German, you know? But it was so American, I loved it. One thing is sure," Phil added. "Renate sure did love Dean. Some mornings, when he got up to go to the movie studio around six, she got up even earlier, drove her car down the road and waited, so she'd be there to wave him off to work."
By and large, life with Dean was idyllic, Renate said, conjuring up scenes of domestic bliss. They had busy lives, but, from time to time, they stole an evening together. Dean would sit near the fire and play the guitar, with Renate stretched out beside him on the bear-skin rug. They talked about Bloody Heart and how they would spend the summer of 1986 filming it together in Yalta, and they looked into each other's eyes.
Bloody Heart was to be their movie - Renate's and Dean's. Dean was to star, write, and direct the film about Wounded Knee. A German-Soviet coproduction, it was a love story, set against the Indian uprising at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, which ended with a violent shoot-out between the Indians and the FBI. It was a perennial favorite of socialist propaganda and it had everything movie-goers in the East loved: war, horses, big set pieces. Most of all, it had Indians.
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