17
"Welcome home, welcome home. My God, man, you kept all your hair. Look at me," Johnny said right off the bat when Dean came off the plane at Stapleton Airport that October day in 1985. He had just burst out of that plane door like the biggest star you ever saw. He looked terrific. He was forty-seven years old.
Dean was in something of a daze, Johnny could tell. There was some press at the airport but not like Johnny would have liked. Dean had written that maybe there could be a horse parade and the mayor could meet him at the capitol. He was used to that level of welcome in Eastern Europe, he said; he loved the fanfare. Johnny had called a few TV stations.
"Guess who's coming to town?" Johnny said.
"Dean WHO?" was what people had usually said back.
Johnny had the date Dean arrived engraved in his head: October 16, 1985. Mona was real excited. Their pictures had hung together on the wall at Johnny's mom's house for as long as she could remember. After staring at Dean's mug on the wall at her in-laws' house for all those years, it was thrilling for Mona to meet him for the first time.
At the airport, Mona got introduced. God, he was a handsome man! she thought when she first laid eyes on Dean. The first thing Johnny noticed was that, to his ear, at least, Dean had developed something of a foreign accent, which the female race, including Mona, found very sexy. But in other ways he hadn't really changed all that much.
But then Dean was swept off down to Denver by the film people who were in town for the documentary film festival.
Mona and Johnny jumped in Johnny's Ford Elite and drove home to Loveland real fast to tape the news coverage. As they ran into the house, they turned the set on. They saw Dean stepping out of his limo at the Westin Hotel downtown.
The day after he arrived in Denver, Dean did a radio show with Peter Boyle. Johnny warned Dean not to go on Boyle's show. Communism was not flavor of the month exactly; no one knew much about this Gorbachev guy; Reagan was talking Evil Empire.
"Don't do it, Dean, you're being set up. Don't do it," said Johnny.
"Johnny," Dean said. "I have played my songs in thirty-two countries and I have risked my life for the things I believe. Why would I worry about one radio talk show guy?"
Dean went ahead with the interview. At their house, Johnny and Mona were listening to the radio.
"It's seven after the hour of nine o'clock on a Friday, the 17th of October, in Denver... you heard it through the grapevine," Boyle's voice came over the radio from the Fairmont Hotel lounge, where he was broadcasting. The music switched over from Martha and the Vandellas to Dean Reed singing, a ballad about Sacco and Vanzetti. Dean called them Nicola and Bart.
Boyle again: "It's twenty minutes after the hour of nine o'clock, 9:20. Remarkable guest in the studio, Peter Boyle on K-BIG AM and FM. That was the voice of Dean Reed. And this is going be a difficult interview. Dean Reed... was born right here in Colorado and now lives in East Berlin. He's back in Denver for the premiere of a documentary film about his life at the festival; he's a big star in Central America; in the Eastern Bloc..."
Johnny and Mona could tell from Boyle's voice that he probably didn't like Dean.
"Do you consider yourself a defector!" Boyle asked Dean on air.
"Not at all, Peter. I consider myself an American patriot," Dean said, his voice firm and cool. "I'm a good American, Peter. I can take a sword 360 degrees around my head and cut no strings. I'm a puppet of no one, Peter."
Boyle egged Dean on, asking him about Communism and if he was some kind of traitor.
Dean started getting mad.
"Peter, I resent that. Dean Reed is not what you say. Dean Reed believes in equality for all mankind. You sound like a fascist. You're talking just like the neo-Nazis that killed Alan Berg."
"Don't you ever accuse me of that," Boyle screamed.
"That's the way you're talking," Dean said.
"Get out of here! Get out of here! Take a walk..."
Johnny thought, Jesus, man, I told you Boyle's best friend was Alan Berg, the talk-radio guy who was murdered by the neo-Nazis. Johnny knew those old Nazi boys were going to be sitting up there in Idaho now, watching for Dean. He thought: Man, if you stick around here, you had better get yourself a bulletproof vest.
"Take a walk. .." Boyle said.
What startled Johnny most, though, was that in the background, along with the noise of scuffling, he could just about make out Dean's voice. He was whistling.
"To me," Johnny said, "it seemed that World War Three almost erupted behind that microphone."
Eventually, I met Peter Boyle, and he said he was a little sorry he'd lost it with Dean Reed.
"I wish I had to do it again," Boyle said. "I probably would have done it differently. I don't know if I did my job correctly. It was a very raw nerve time for me. I had been, up until actually that day, I had been testifying in a murder trial of a colleague named Alan Berg, who had been murdered by neo-Nazis." Boyle was sorry he'd thrown him off the air and he recalled how intimidating Dean seemed.
"And he got up," Boyle said. "He really got up. And he was big."
Maybe it wasn't World War Three, but the story escalated around Denver, said Peter Boyle.
"Well, less than an hour later, the whole story about what had happened had changed. And it was all over the press. And Dean Reed was saying that he would be murdered in Denver that night. And if he was, it would be on my conscience. It was my fault. And I had just gone through a murder. And I thought, you know, 'My God!'"
That night, because of the Boyle affair, when American Rebel premiered at the documentary film festival, a squad of police cars cruised the Tivoli Center in downtown Denver.
Jesus, Johnny thought when he got there. Johnny had bought about twenty something tickets for the show and inside the Tivoli Center's movie theater, he and Mona and their friends settled in their seats.
The lights in the theater went down, the film opened on a rain-streaked Moscow street, and then changed to Dean in Red Square mobbed by fans. The filmmaker Will Roberts' voice described how he'd been visiting Moscow when he came across the scene and asked someone what was going on.
"That's Dean Reed," the guy said.
"Who's Dean Reed?"
"Why, Dean Reed is the most famous American in the world."
In the audience, Johnny figured it was going to be OK now so he just laid back and enjoyed himself, although he wondered how Dean could expect anyone in America to reach out with open arms to him when, in one of the film's sequences, Dean was singing "Ghost Riders in the Sky" to Arafat.
"You must be kidding me," Johnny said to himself, as he was prone to do.
But considering the adverse reaction to the Boyle business in the Denver press, not to mention the Arafat thing, there wasn't much trouble that night. After the show, folks gathered to welcome Dean, and pretty soon he was absorbed into the Denver life, as if he had never been away. That was Friday night, there was another screening on Saturday, and on Monday Johnny went down to Denver to rescue his old friend and bring him up to the house in Loveland.
In downtown Denver, Dean was troubled at first because he couldn't recognize a thing. He couldn't find where he had grown up and it upset him a lot, he told Johnny.
Although he had been back to the USA a few times, he had not been home to Colorado for a real visit since his high school reunion in 1963. The only buildings Dean recognized were those he had seen on television.
Dynasty had made Denver famous. It was the perfect primetime soap, the quintessential fairy tale for the Reagan years: rich people in big shoulder pads doing evil things to one another, while having a marvelous time spending loads of money. It was the most popular show in the world and its logo, which consisted of shots of Denver's glittering skyline, gave the city a real global presence. In Germany, Dynasty was called Der Denver-Klan. Even with the Berlin Wall still up, people in East Berlin could watch Western television because you couldn't jam TV signals.
What's more, because the West
German television signals were too weak to reach beyond East Berlin, the rest of the population of East Germany made a terrible fuss. They wanted Dynasty, too, and in the end the East Germans were forced to run the program themselves.
On the evenings when Dynasty was broadcast, no one went out. In East Berlin, people pulled down the blinds, not altogether, in fact, because of politics, but because the soaps were non-kulturny; and Germans liked to think of themselves as cultured, if nothing else. At the house at 6A Schmockwitzer Damm, the Reeds, more than most, were glued to the television the night Der Klan was on. Like everyone in East Berlin, Dean watched both Dynasty and Dallas obsessively.
A friend of Dean's told me that once when he and his wife visited the Reeds in Schmockwitz they were watching Dynasty. "There are only two good days in East Berlin," Dean said. "The day we get meat. And the day we get Dynasty."
The TV shows were better propaganda for the West than any tract on democracy, better than long-range missiles; you could not buy this stuff for a billion bucks. Naturally, the citizens of the German Democratic Republic infinitely preferred low doings in American cities to socialist documentaries about the manufacture of neon, or German variety shows featuring dancing girls in animal suits singing "Winter Wonderland." Everyone could see the good life on American TV: big cars; big blondes; fabulous homes. I always thought it was Dynasty that brought down the Berlin Wall.
As they drove around Denver, Dean's mood lightened. He looked at Johnny's car.
"Is that all motor?" Dean said, admiring Johnny's Ford Elite.
"It sure is," said Johnny.
"It's a typical American car, lots of power," Dean added.
"I wouldn't have a small car, they scare me to death," Johnny said.
"Renate is the same way," said Dean.
As Johnny drove through downtown Denver, Dean went on just ranting and raving about how wonderful it was.
"Well, Dean, you call yourself a country boy but you like this sort of thing. A town that has more than one stoplight is too big for me," Johnny said.
"Johnny, you just don't know how to live."
"So how come you left Hollywood?" Johnny wanted to know.
"They sold out my contract to some weird guys," Dean said.
"Are you sure about that, man?" Johnny asked, because he considered Dean's response pretty paranoid. "I don't remember it like that. I thought they were just a couple of guys from Abilene, Kansas, with a Cadillac dealership who bought you out."
Dean didn't answer. For a while, on the fifty-mile drive up to Loveland, they were silent.
When Johnny pulled into the driveway in Janice Court, everyone in the neighborhood was hanging around. Johnny had explained in no uncertain terms just how big Dean was in the entertainment business but Dean just leaped out of the car and said hi and shook their hands, they nearly dropped dead of shock.
Mona came out to greet Dean. He put his belongings in the house and, grabbing his camera, climbed the ladder at the shed in the back yard and began taking pictures. The mountains were exceptionally beautiful that fall. Every time Mona Rosenburg looked out of the kitchen window, she felt glad to be alive.
She said, "You just know that when Dean looked out of our west window and saw those mountains, his heart must have had a flutter."
"During that week, we got to know each other real well," Johnny said. "That friendship that we once had was all of a sudden there again, and it grew. I would like to think that it solidified and was even more important to both of us than what it was when we were young, back in 1960.
It was sunshine and blue skies every day that week in Colorado. Mona made pecan pie. Dean and Johnny chewed the fat. It was as if Dean had come in from the cold; he had come home. During the week in Loveland, Dean rode a neighbor-boy's motorcycle, threw a football - he forgot how hard it was to throw a spiral and how much fun - ate Mona's pecan pie, gave her little love pecks on her neck, left his room a mess, and spoke German with Pamela, the Rosenburgs' daughter, who was studying the language.
Dean sang for the local kids and juggled and walked on his hands for fifteen minutes at a go. He admired the way Mona and Johnny kidded each other - they had lost a child once and joking kept them going through the hard times.
Dean and Johnny drove over to Collins to buy cowboy stuff that was on sale and Dean thought the "fifty percent off' sign was a capitalist trick. He bought a belt buckle, but he didn't have Dean Reed put on it because it was considered improper to make a big thing of personalities over there in the East. Instead he got LOVE put on it.
Dean gave interviews to the local press. He took Mona and Johnny to a party given by Denver Magazine, which pleased them since they didn't ordinarily brush shoulders with the type of people who went to those parties such as the DJ Gary Tessler.
Mona saw how Dean held all those people spellbound with his baby blues.
At night, after supper, Johnny and Dean sat up late and talked. They talked religion and Johnny thought Dean was more an agnostic than an atheist, although he did some research and found out Marxism was a religion and Marxism was atheism. Dean told Johnny that Mikhail Gorbachev was going to make big changes; Johnny had the idea Dean had had a talk with Big Mike. Dean always called him Michael. John and Dean batted ideas around.
"Over here we have a tough freedom. A lot of people might run back to Russia, " Johnny would say. "Anyhow, how come you only talk politics. You're an actor, aren't you?"
"Why can't I be both? It worked for Reagan," Dean said.
Dean laughed and so did Johnny, but Johnny had the feeling Dean meant it.
Sometimes, Dean would be laughing, kidding, and feeling he could be the first one hundred percent genuine international superstar, then his mood would drop way down. Johnny found Dean one night, reading an article that was pretty tough on him. Dean's mood turned really bad.
"It's just one article, Dean," Johnny said.
"You just don't understand, Johnny," said Dean.
But the next morning, Dean straddled his chair backwards like always and ate his Wheaties.
"Breakfast of Champions," he said and hugged Mona.
Dean was a big hugger and it made Johnny uneasy, but Mona loved it. So did Pamela and her brother, Eric, who went by the nickname of Bull.
Now Mona offered me a piece of her peach pie and we all moved into the kitchen and sat at the table. She reminisced about Dean's visit while she served up the delectable pie.
"Dean couldn't believe the way John and I dealt with each other. I'd say, 'Oh, quit' or something. And he'd say, 'You know I can't do that with Renate. I can't say, I love you, to Alexander, because there's a different set of love for the German people,'," Mona said. "I said to Dean,'You're kidding. Well, I love you, Dean. Would that just blow Renate out of her mind?' And he says, 'Yeah, it would.'"
That same day, Johnny said to Dean, "Let's just shut down the telephone, Dean, and go up in the mountains." Most mornings that phone just rang off the hook at the Rosenburgs with people wanting to talk to Dean.
"Johnny, I'm not vacationing here. I got to lay the groundwork for when I come back," Dean said and Johnny realized coming back to America was already in Dean's mind.
When Dean took Renate's call early one morning at Johnny's house, she was scared. The Boyle radio show bust-up made the news in East Berlin and it was reported that Dean's life was threatened. Dean reassured her over the phone.
Then Dean said to Johnny, 'You know, I had a devil of a time with her. When I got ready to come over here she thought that I would never go back. What I had to do was get some friends together to bring down this great, big, huge bolder, and say to her, 'Renate, I will be back and you and I will both be buried under that bolder.' 'But Johnny, I am not going to be buried under that bolder.'"
"Well," Johnny said now, "as things worked out that's where he wound up."
That was also the night that Dean confided in Johnny he was not proud of having been married three times and that he loved Renate a whole lot. He was very
firm in that, although she was awfully jealous, he said.
Renate would have been even more jealous, according to Johnny, if she had known about Dixie Schnebly, the woman who came into Dean's life in Colorado that week.
Mona put the dishes in the sink and said, thoughtfully, "Dixie knew the ropes. She was a business woman and very intelligent. She was a go-getter." Mona added, "Dixie, in my opinion, was a woman that was fascinated by Dean Reed. There wasn't anything she wouldn't do to help him, and she was maybe even in love with him. But I think her number one goal was to have him."
"Dixie Lloyd Schnebly. Yeah," Johnny said with a snort. "I don't know how many other names. She came into the picture on the Friday night at the end of the week when Dean was here."
The Rosenburgs were planning a concert in the basement of their house, and Dean asked if he could have a friend come up from Denver.
"Would you like to come up here?" he asked Dixie over the phone. "We're having a bye-bye Dean party."
* * *
For the party in Loveland, Dixie wore slacks, high-heeled boots, and a white silk blouse. She told everyone that meeting them - Johnny and Mona and their friends - made her feel so special, that she was thrilled Dean let her be one of their group.
In the Rosenburgs' yard, Dixie danced with Dean to a Phil Collins tune on a boom box. Johnny's brother shot some video. Then Dean did the Twist and everyone laughed at him because he was so old-fashioned. Dixie showed him how to dance 1985 style. "Pornographic dancing," Dean called it.
At one point Dean quit dancing, and walked on his hands for a while, then he grabbed Johnny and arm-wrestled him.
"That's the first thing I always had to do with my dad every time I came to see him. We could never really talk, so we did this stuff," Dean said to Johnny.
Afterwards, in Johnny's basement with the gold-flocked wallpaper, the oil painring on the wall, and the upright piano, Dean gave a concert. He had on his white turtleneck and a pendant around his neck, and he looked his most handsome. As it turned out, it was his only concert in America. He was wonderful. He sang practically his entire repertoire. He told jokes. He did political shtick. He kidded the little kids.
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