Comrade Rockstar

by Реджи Нейделсон

  In the Soviet Union and the East, but especially the USSR, people were obsessed with American Indians. Particularly around Leningrad, kids with a taste for exotica joined Indian clubs, wore feather headdresses, practiced Indian love calls, and mourned the death of the great native culture.

  Dean and Renate were to star in the film as a divorced couple, she as a reporter, he as a photographer. On assignment at Wounded Knee they are reunited, but, in the tragic finale, Renate's character is shot dead. Already in 1985 they were thinking about Bloody Heart.

  In the fall of 1985, Dean went to America. Nothing was ever the same again, Renate said.

  "Did Dean want to return to America? Would you have gone with him?"

  "I would have no audience there. I would have no career, no job. I do not speak enough English, and I am not young," she said. "After his trip to Colorado he missed his homeland very much. He was very homesick. He talked of nothing else."

  Dean had come back to her full of hope, wanting to live in America which, to her, was a strange land.

  Renate loved Dean deeply; she loved his courage, his thinking, his personality, she said. He was the man she had been waiting for all her life and whom she thought she would never find. He was her companero. Now he was dead.

  "After Dean died, I put away all the boxes, all the pictures, everything. For a while, I could only look at the pictures and cry," Renate said.

  She got up and wandered over to the window; it was completely dark outside. She shivered and drew the blinds against the night, then turned around and smiled.

  "Are you hungry? I have some steaks I could fry," Renate said eagerly.

  Looking at his watch, Victor shook his head. Perhaps he was thinking about his vacation, perhaps polite.

  Renate would have liked the company, I thought. It was miserable at the end of that road, near the frozen lake in a silent house that was inhabited by ghosts. When she talked of Dean, she was perfectly loyal, but there was an undercurrent; I thought she was angry with him for leaving, and very lonesome.

  We put on our coats. We left the house. Leaving Victor and Leslie near the car, Renate walked me to the little cemetery. In her red coat, she put her hand on my shoulder, as if to steady herself. A bunch of wet flowers lay on Dean's grave, where a rough stone was engraved with the words THE COUPLE REED.

  Renate said softly, "When Dean was leaving for America, I was so unhappy. I thought he was never coming back. He got the stone and he showed me. He said, 'I love you and I am coming back and some day we are being buried together under that stone.'" Renate looked at me and said, "You understand? I think he believed this."

  16

  "My brother called me and said, 'Quick, turn to Channel Four, NBC News, Dean's on,'" Johnny Rosenburg reported when I visited him in Loveland, Colorado, in the winter of 1988.

  It had been the summer of 1984 when Johnny took his brother's call. Now he said, "And I turned it on and, sure enough, there he was. But a big star in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe. I couldn't believe it. I mean I can't even begin to tell you the emotions that went through me at that time."

  With Dean on the TV screen, the reporter's voice was saying, "Who is this man, the one being hounded for autographs in downtown Moscow? You probably don't recognize him. Most Soviets would since he's considered to be the most popular, best known American in the Soviet Union. And most Soviets are quite startled to learn that most Americans have never heard of him." The picture cut to a Soviet woman with a few teeth missing, who said, "He is the best singer in the world."

  Johnny was pretty much bug-eyed.

  "My God," he thought. "It's Dean!"

  Johnny's back had been giving him some pain that day, but he hardly noticed it now. He turned up the volume on the TV. Yes, by God, it was Dean. It was him. On national TV in, where? In Russia. My God. Johnny was stunned.

  "Mona, Mona? Mona!" he had called to his wife. "C'mon in here."

  Then Johnny got his scrapbook off a shelf and looked up that last postcard he had from Dean in 1962: Merry Christmas from South America. All those years since he and Dean had roomed together in their manager's house in Canoga Park in Los Angeles, he had had no idea if Dean was dead or alive. Since the postcard, Johnny never heard from him again. Seeing Dean turned out to be a much more fateful event for both of them than either Johnny or Dean could have imagined.

  Now Johnny looked at me pleasantly. I was sitting on the two-seater couch in his living room in Loveland, near the same TV where he had seen Dean. His memories of the event and the reunion with Dean that followed were absolutely fresh.

  "I sure have had a lot of company since meeting up with Deano again," Johnny said to me.

  The Rosenburg living room had the couch and chair and the TV set and a coffee table. An archway led into a kitchen, where the fridge was dotted with magnets shaped like fruits. On the wall was a collection of fancy commemorative plates.

  On the table next to the chair where Johnny sat was a well-worn bible, with a brass cross for a bookmark sticking out of it. From time to time as we talked, Johnny reached over and touched his bible.

  In his late forties, he wore a plaid shirt and jeans and cowboy boots, and he shifted his weight in his chair like a man in constant pain. All his life he'd had the bad back. Or maybe he was just weary of the constant visitors who'd turned up at his screen door since Dean died.

  Out of the window you could see the neat houses in Janice Court where the Rosenburgs lived. Beyond their yard were more houses, big green pines, and in the background the outline of the Rockies.

  On the way up from Denver to Loveland, the road was dead flat and the countryside looked half-an-hour old. The snow had melted, the sun was warm and it shone on a scatter of wooden buildings set down at random on the raw yellow scrublands.

  Denver wasn't a mountain town at all; it was the last stop at the edge of a huge prairie, flat as a pancake and barely domesticated. This had been the end of the world for the pioneers, the last outpost before they launched themselves with incredible will over the Rocky Mountains and on to God knew what beyond. For the early settlers, so remote was California and the coast, they might as well have been headed for the moon.

  Loveland itself felt like a little covered wagon encampment made suburbia. At the edge of town were the Rockies, purple and huge and intimidating.

  Johnny returned to his story. He took me back, not just to the day in 1984 when he saw Dean on TV, but to the 1950s when they first met. Memories just flooded back to him. Suddenly, it was 1959 and ,he was a kid with an idea, as he put it, about playing some music.

  In 1959, Johnny had had his spinal operation and his folks bought him a cheap guitar to help him pass the time while he was getting better. He always had a desire to get into the music business and he discovered he could pick out a few chords and had the ability to take what was in his mind, as he said, and put it into words and music. The first two songs he wrote were "Lynda Lea" and "Gonna Find a Girl." Eventually, "Lynda Lea" did pretty well in Japan, Johnny said.

  Johnny hooked up with another kid, a guy from his home state of Nebraska named Ted Lummus. Ted was a drummer. They got to jamming together and they got a big old bulky tape recorder and went down in the washroom of Ted's parents' motel and laid two songs down on tape. You got a good echo effect down in the washroom and Ted's parents were OK about them doing it.

  Around that time Johnny read in the Recorder Herald that there was a Capitol recording artist vacationing at Estes Park, at the Harmony Guest Ranch.

  "Let's take these two songs up to him and see what he thinks," he said to Ted.

  "We won't get near him."

  "Well, we never will know 'less we try," Johnny said.

  Johnny and Ted loaded up the old tape recorder and drove up to the Harmony Guest Ranch, where they saw Dean out by the pool with a couple of ladies. So Johnny walked right up to him and told him who he was.

  "I've got a couple of songs here. Would you listen to them?" Johnny asked Dean, bold as b
rass.

  Johnny figured at that point Dean would say get lost. But Dean just told one of the girls to go get an extension cord for the tape recorder.

  After listening, Dean said, "I like those songs. I'd like to maybe record one."

  Jesus, Johnny thought to himself. I don't want to be a song-writer. I want to sing my own songs. I want some of that spotlight. But what could he say?

  "Well, yeah, sure," Johnny said to Dean.

  On Dean's advice, Johnny and Ted cut a demo. Dean said he would take it out to his manager in Hollywood, and a few weeks later, Johnny got a call from Dean; he was back in Estes Park and he had good news. Johnny went up, Dean grabbed him by the hand and smiled.

  "Johnny, I want you to know you're going to be recording for Capitol and you're going to have the same manager I've got."

  Ted got dumped, but, well, that was the way these things went.

  Needless to say, a young kid like Johnny from nowhere, he was out-of-his-mind excited. Soon after, Roy Eberharder, Dean's manager, flew in to meet with John and his folks and he signed John up. That was October. In November, Johnny went on out to California and signed with Capitol.

  Dean was living out in Canoga Park with Roy Eberharder and Mrs. Eberharder and their son, Dale. It was one of Shirley Temple's older houses that she rented out and it was on a hillside overlooking Canoga. Johnny shared Dean's room with him.

  Sometimes Johnny found himself alone in the evenings. Other times he'd be gone on the road and Dean'd be there by himself. Most of the time, though, they were both there together.

  They never went around as a pair. The only time they were together was at the house, in the evenings mostly. They'd just lounge around, go out to play badminton, go down to Canoga Park, kick some dust. There wasn't much to do.

  Out in California, as Johnny recalled, things were going pretty well for both of them, though they never really discussed each other's careers. One evening, Dean and Johnny were at the house. Johnny was thinking about his work, figuring he was getting on OK. He didn't think it was a bad life. Dean was crazy upset, though.

  "I'm never going to get any work if I keep this guy as manager. I don't know about you, but I'm getting out on my own." he said.

  Johnny told Dean he was nuts. Almost the next day, Dean disappeared. Johnny, who sometimes didn't see him for days anyway, didn't give it much thought for a while. Then he began to wonder. He went and found Roy Eberharder.

  "Where's Dean?" Johnny asked.

  "The SOB thinks he can do better for himself," said Roy.

  Johnny let it drop. He was busy trying to keep his own head above water, tryiug to do his own thing.

  It was the latter part of 1960 when Dean just disappeared. He wasn't a hundred percent sure of the date. Most records showed that Dean actually left around 1962.

  In the house in Loveland, Johnny broke off his story. He was a self-possessed man, damaged by disappointment and lost chances, maybe, but with a humorous, long-suffering look and a great talent for storytelling. From the time I met Johnny Rosenburg and heard his stories about how he met up with Dean Reed after a quarter of a century and how Dean came home again to Colorado, I could never get the rhythms of Johnny's speech out of my head.

  "This is Mona," Johnny said, as a handsome woman in jeans came through the screen door carrying a brown paper bag full of groceries.

  She had a steady blue gaze and a face out of a Dorothea Lange photograph. Mona was one of twelve children. She had worked three jobs since Johnny's illness and now their eldest girl, Pamela, was in college. You knew that at the Rosenburg house Mona ran things even if she always deferred to her husband. We shook hands and Mona went to put up some coffee in what she and Johnny referred to as the 'world's loudest coffee pot'. Mona usually called him John, which was his true Christian name. When the coffee was ready, John took a cup from Mona and returned to the story of his time in Hollywood.

  He crossed his foot over his leg and rested a scrapbook on it. He opened the brittle pages. There were some publicity stills of Johnny Rose, which had been his professional name. He had been as handsome as Dean in his way; Johnny had looked like a young Steve McQueen. But after Dean left Hollywood for Chile, things didn't go right for Johnny. He had just signed the seven-year contract with Capitol and was back in Loveland on a visit to his folks, when Roy Eberharder called him on the phone.

  "Johnny, I got bad news for you. Capitol dropped you," Roy said.

  "What?!" Johnny couldn't believe his ears.

  "Well, they've got a new policy. If you don't make it big in the first record, that's it."

  Johnny stopped his story to take some coffee from Mona. Then he shrugged some and said there was nothing to explain why he was dropped so suddenly from the music business in the early 1960s. He'd been doing OK; he'd won a big talent contest in New Orleans; he had even played Ocean City Park in California, where he did a show with Dirty Stevens.

  "She had a big hit out at that time called 'Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces'. Do you remember her?" Johnny asked.

  I tried very hard to remember because it seemed so important to him.

  "I can't understand why things turned out for Dean and me the way they did," he said.

  I asked what he thought the reason was.

  "You know, it's really hard to say. I don't know. I don't understand that anymore than I understand why I was treated the way I was," Johnny said. "You know, the people that were judges on that panel for that contest, people who are supposed to be able to identify talent when they see it, they picked me and then they didn't want to work with me. There I was on Capitol along with Dean, I had songs that were doing quite well. I don't know why, all of a sudden, I was no longer around."

  I said, "Maybe the business was too mean for you."

  "Maybe," he said. "Maybe you had to be mean. Or very sold on yourself, because that's what Dean was. He wasn't doing that great back then. He had to pay his own way to South America, where he heard he had a hit with 'Our Summer Romance'. But nobody was sold on Dean more than Dean himself. You know that was it. I mean Dean knew some day, some way, he was going to be a hit. He knew he was going to be a hit one way or the other. I hoped I would be a hit," Johnny said, "but hope wasn't enough."

  After he had seen Dean on TV in 1984, Johnny had one hell of a time running down Dean's number over there in East Berlin. He called the TV station in Denver. He called NBC in New York. London said they'd get back to him, but he couldn't wait. Up half the night in a growing frenzy, he called in succession: the State Department; the Russian Embassy, who were not very nice; and the East Germans, who were quite nice. Eventually, he got a telephone number in East Berlin. When he heard the operator's voice, he just went bananas. He taped the phone call and now Johnny put a tape into a tape recorder box that sat on the floor near him. He switched it on.

  "United States calling for Mr. Dean Reed."

  "Yes, this is Dean Reed."

  "Dean, this is an old friend of yours back here in the United States. Does the name Johnny Rose ring a bell?"

  Dean didn't remember.

  Johnny reminded him they recorded on Capitol together, that his birth name had been Rosenburg, but he recorded under Johnny Rose and how they met at Estes Park, where Dean helped him.

  Dean remembered. Of course, he remembered. You could almost hear Johnny let out his breath with relief that his old friend remembered him.

  Johnny told Dean he had made the TV news back in Colorado. Dean asked if Johnny was still in the singing business. Johnny told him how he underwent surgery in 1981 and couldn't work. They exchanged news about their families and promised to write each other. It was almost crying time for Johnny, as he put it.

  "My God, man, keep in touch, write to me," Johnny said.

  That's how it got started. The renewed friendship got cranked up as they wrote each other. A while later, Dean told Johnny he was coming back to Colorado for the Denver Film Festival in the fall of 1985. Some fellow called Will Roberts had made a documentary f
ilm about Dean: American Rebel was its title. It was more than twenty years since Deano had been back to Colorado, but he was finally coming.

  From things Dean was saying in his letters, Johnny could see he was a big star over there in the East. Big like Michael Jackson. That kind of big. Johnny realized that Dean thought a lot of people would know of him in Denver. It worried Johnny considerably.

  Johnny said, "In his letters he would say, 'Well, when I get back to Denver, Johnny, maybe we can have a horse parade from the airport to the state capitol, and the governor can be there to greet me.' And I thought, Wait a minute. Nobody knows him. I thought to myself, You're a songwriter, John. You've got to do something here. You've got to tell Dean nobody knows him back in his hometown. Then I thought, Well now, wait a minute. That's a pretty good title for a song. So I sat down and I wrote this song. I called it 'Nobody Knows Me Back in My Hometown'."

  "You think he'll laugh at it?" Johnny had asked Mona when he had finished the song.

  Mona said, "So what? You've had people laugh at your songs before."

  Johnny sent the song on over to Dean in East Berlin, and Dean flipped for it. Dean sang it at the Youth Festival in Moscow, the summer of 1985. A couple of months later, he called Johnny to say he would arrive on October 16.

  Johnny played "Nobody Knows Me Back in My Hometown" for us on the tape recorder. It was really good, a classic country tune.

  Johnny remembered everything about that period, and he recorded his and Dean's phone conversations and put his own thoughts down on tape. It was uncanny. It was as if Johnny knew that one day somebody would make the movie.

  Johnny picked up the bible with the bronze cross from the table near his chair in his living room in Loveland. I asked him about Dean's death.

  "Maybe he was the best mole this country ever came up with," said Johnny Rosenburg. "But me, maybe I'm thinking more with my heart than with my mind when I say, I think he was murdered."