Kids, old people, toddlers, all Johnny and Mona's neighbors and friends sat on chairs or on the floor. A little apart, crouched against the wall, was Dixie Schnebly.
At the end of the concert, Dean scanned the room.
"Now I want to thank someone here. I want to say thanks to Johnny. I helped Johnny Rose back in Estes Park, then he came to Hollywood and I left."
"Couldn't stand the competition," Johnny called out from the back of the room, ducking his head with delight.
"Right. Anyway, Johnny got in touch after almost twenty-five years. He wrote this song for me," Dean said. "John, do you want to sing this with me? Come on up here."
With a diffident shrug that did not conceal the thrill he felt, Johnny ambled up to the front of the room. Together, he and Dean sang "Nobody Knows Me Back in My Hometown."
Everyone clapped and cheered and Mona took snapshots of the two men together.
It was the last time that Johnny ever performed in public. After Dean died, he gave away his guitar and said it was time to grow up.
After the concert, there was ice cream and cake, and because they knew Dean was leaving the next day, people were reluctant to go. Johnny's neighbors were taken with how nice he was, and a woman called Fran who was a devout Christian, later told Johnny that Dean was the most Christ-like man she had ever encountered. As the party broke up, Dixie remained behind; she was the last to go.
All that night, Johnny was aware of Dixie, the woman Dean had met down in Denver. She was some kind of rival for Dean, although Johnny did not put it that way. She told him, "I want to let you know that I've told Dean, when he comes back, I've got a place for him to stay."
"That's real nice, Dixie. That's really nice," Johnny said, although Dean always had a place with him and Mona. Johnny would always be there for him.
After Dixie left, Dean plunked himself down on the Rosenburgs' sofa and said, "She is in love with me. There is nothing that she wouldn't do for me."
Looking at Dean, Johnny thought: If Renate was here and she looked into Dixie's eyes, and she is as jealous as you said, you'd be in a whole heap of trouble, boy.
The next morning, Dean left Colorado. Mona couldn't bring herself to go to the airport. It was a sad day for all of them. Johnny and Dean had been apart so long and no one knew when Dean would come back.
After I first met them in Loveland in 1988, Mona and Johnny sent me some tapes, tapes of Johnny's phone calls with Dean, tapes where Johnny had put down his thoughts about the reunion with Dean that October in 1985.
"Dean was a confused man," Johnny said on one of the tapes. "After he left Colorado he was even more confused. How can I convey what I felt about Dean, what my family felt? We loved him and he loved us, but we're not the only ones of this planet that he loved, I know that. If anybody ever got to know Dean, a piece of them died when he died. He did what no other American did - Dean became a superstar in a part of the world we call our enemy."
In exquisitely recollected detail, the taped accounts Johnny sent me conveyed his memories of Dean's week in Loveland. If Dean had stolen away a piece of Johnny's life when he left for South America all those years ago, he had given it back.
Letters from Johnny followed me to New York. Mona sent along a jar of her pickled beets, which I had enjoyed in Loveland.
"We're pleased to hear the tapes were acceptable. Gotta tell you it's crazy how we remember even more as the days go by," Johnny wrote.
Johnny also enclosed a note from Dean, which Mona forgot to put in with the beets. It was from Dean to John and it was full of longing. He asked Johnny why they didn't take time for fishing, and for building a fire at night, and using the stars for the roof, while they talked about many things. You could feel how much Dean wanted to be back with his old friend. How much he wanted to go home.
18
"Hi,I'm Dixie."
Her feathery voice was tremulous, almost frightened, when I first met her in the lobby of Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. She was a good-looking woman. In her early forties, Dixie Lloyd Schnebly had on a short fur jacket and polished boots under her slacks and she looked a lot like Ann-Margret.
As Dean Reed's American manager at the time of his death, she had figured as a main character in every news report; she told reporters that he had, without doubt, been murdered. It had taken me a while to reach her; on her answering machine was an announcement that said no one was home but that there was a big dog in the house.
Now in March of 1988, around the same time I saw the Rosenburgs up in Loveland, Dixie was here, shaking the snow off her fur chubby. It was starting to snow outside; a blizzard was on the way. In the Brown Palace lobby, waiters bustled around with huge trays loaded with coffee and cake, and the bellhops rustled up large sets of leather luggage.
In the American West, I realized, everyone was big, or seemed big, and the men dressed up in Western costumes; big tall men in boots and cowboy hats, their wives in full-length minks sashaying around the lobby of the Brown Palace, greeting one another as they waited for the annual stock show to open so they could go and buy cows.
We made an odd, huddled grouping in the middle of all these big buoyant people: Dixie, her feral, rather sexy face close to Leslie Woodhead's; Dixie's friend, Greg, a burly man with an amiable manner, who was there, it seemed, as a kind of bodyguard and who also sold real estate.
Like many Western women, Dixie was self-sufficient, but she deferred to men when there were men around.
She leaned closer to Leslie.
"Gee, I'm sorry I was, like, so hard to get hold of, but you have to be careful," she said apologetically. "There are people after Deano. A lot of people are trying to get at me." Dixie often called him Deano.
I assumed she meant that people were after Dean's story, but she also had something more sinister in mind. She was very nervy. She fiddled with a pendant she wore around her neck.
"A gift from Deano," Dixie said shyly.
"It's pretty," I said.
Like a girl with her first corsage, she smiled.
"When it first came I thought it was, like, junk, you know? And then I took it into a jewelry store and they said it was worth something."
I said, "It must be amber. From Russia?"
She nodded. "I thought that was so neat."
Dixie's conversation was peppered with "neats" and "beautifuls," and she blew raspberries for emphasis. With a husky voice and a fluent way with words, she punctuated her thoughts with funny noises and she rambled, but her intuitions and insights had a loony poetic truth. Later on she did admit that she was considered something of a poet and, diffidently, showed me a few of her poems.
Dixie, or DJ as many of her friends called her, was a woman in a man's world, as she put it, and it took a lot to scare her. She grew up in Wheat Ridge, where, as a girl, she first knew Dean. She still lived in her father's house, although her father was dead and she was on her own.
After high school, she had married a Mr. Lloyd, which was how she got into the oil business in the 1970s when Denver boomed.
Things didn't work out with Mr. Lloyd. Then the oil business dried up and Dixie took up driving a long-haul rig. As often as not she was out on the road, the rig eating up hundreds of miles of Interstate, roaring across America.
At truck stops she ate with the truckers; at night, she slept tucked up in the cab of her rig. No one hassled her, because she knew her way around, she said. She said she also had her eye on the possibility of a secretarial business and she had some property up on the North Slope in Grand Junction, Colorado.
When she met up with Dean Reed in October of 1985, though, when he asked her to be his manager in the US, she set aside all her other ambitions. Dean told her that she would be his Colonel Parker.
Now Dixie rose from the sofa in the hotel lobby, then she sat down again. She seemed to be looking for someone, but she settled down and told the story of how she had met Dean Reed at the documentary film festival in Denver where American Rebel was shown.
The second screening of American Rebel was on Saturday night, the night after Johnny and Mona had been to see it. Dixie had not been able to get a ticket, but she figured, what the heck, she'd go along and if she couldn't get in, maybe she'd run into Dean anyway. She had known him when she was a young girl and he was a teenager back in Wheat Ridge.
Outside the Tivoli Center in Denver on that warm October evening, police cars cruised the area, their windows down, and their radios on. Because of Dean's bust-up with Peter Boyle on the radio and the press it got, there were plenty of cops. Dixie passed the time waiting for Dean by eavesdropping on a couple of police car radios.
Dixie could read police code. She had been to the Miami Convention in 1972 with her husband, who was some kind of player on the Nixon side and had FBI protection. For the hell of it an FBI guy taught Dixie to read the codes.
Half in the shadow, Dixie watched people going in to the show. She let her mind wander on the subject of Dean, recalling there had only been a few guys like him when she was little, real cowboy types. She remembered how Doug Dana once gave her a 1955 Wheat Ridge Annual. It had a picture of Dean in the play Pistol Pete, serenading the girls. The last time she had seen Dean was in 1963, when he attended a Wheat Ridge High reunion. He had been to Hollywood by then and all the kids were really excited.
In between, for more than twenty years, she had kept a scrapbook on him, waiting for him. She thought it was something anyone would do if one of their classmates got to be so famous.
And then, suddenly, right there in Denver at the Tivoli Center she saw him. Bounding out of a car, Dean strode up the steps of the Tivoli Center. Without thinking, Dixie darted out from the shadow into the light.
"Hi, I'm Dixie," she said.
Dean seemed a little nonplussed.
And then he smiled and exclaimed, "Little Dixie! Of course, I remember. Ja," Dean said effusively.
It was weird how he had that little German accent, Dixie thought. It was kind of nice. Dean introduced Dixie to his mother, Mrs. Brown, who had come into town for the film festival. Mrs. Brown didn't seem to remember Dixie, but Dean had had lots of friends as a kid. She greeted Dixie with a smile.
Now, in the lobby of the Brown Palace, Dixie whispered to me, "A lot of people want to harm Dean, you know. But I think I can trust you. Would you like to see where Deano grew up?"
I said yes I wanted to see where Dean had grown up. His mother, Ruth Anna Brown, had told me a lot about his childhood when I'd met her in Hawaii, and I'd seen pictures, but I had not actually seen his boyhood home.
Dixie's friend Greg peeled away to go and sell some real estate; Dixie led Leslie and me out to her pick-up truck, where she told us that she kept a gun in the glove compartment. I made Leslie sit in the middle, next to her.
Dixie drove us to Wheat Ridge, which was now pretty much a suburb of Denver; just off the exit from the freeway, a sign read: WELCOME TO WHEAT RIDGE, COLORADO, CARNATION CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. POP. 28,270.
When Dixie and Dean had been kids, Wheat Ridge, like the other small towns at the foot of the mountains, was a rural village where a lot of people still kept horses. Dean sometimes even went courting girls on horseback. Sometimes, Dean galloped over the empty fields to where Dixie waited for him behind her house. She was just a kid, still in pigtails, but she was kind of in love with Dean, the handsome older boy, and he was nice to her in a brotherly way. "Little Dixie," he called her when they rode horseback together.
"Everyone had a horse around here, even me," Dixie said. "And I was raised poor as dirt. Deano thought he was poor. But I was the poor one," she said, as if they had engaged in a "poor" competition.
The anger rose and died away in her. I tried not to look at the glove compartment where the gun was. Leslie listened to Dixie attentively.
What really rankled with Dixie was how, when Dean went to Hollywood, she could not buy his records because her mother was very strict and didn't want her to have any spending money. Her best friend, Karen, could buy Dean's records and that hurt worst of all. Dixie's mother did not approve of Dixie, never did, but her dad was always proud of her and they had had some neat times together when she was growing up. He loved goofy gifts and she always bought him a toy at Christmas, but her father was dead now and all Dixie had was the little house in Wheat Ridge.
"What about Dean's dad?"
"He was something else," she said. "He never got over Dean being a Communist. Cyril taught at the local high school and was a big womanizer. Ruth Anna Brown was one of his students. When Ruth Anna divorced Cyril, Deano was shattered. In those days, people didn't get divorced, you know?"
We drove around Wheat Ridge. Most of the shops had moved out to the big malls and it was only a shabby suburb now. Vacancy signs hung outside the Blue Swan and the Humpty Dumpty Motels. On the roof of Verne's Cocktails, a pink neon martini with an olive in it flickered, or maybe it was a Manhattan with a cherry. Across the street was a plain white church.
"I don't think there was much church-going in Wheat Ridge," Dixie said. Dean's people were not church-goers," she added, although she herself was raised a Catholic. She took a small breath now, and slowed the truck down. She pointed at a two-story bungalo with a front porch and a tidy front yard with a low long shed behind it made of chicken-colored cinder blocks.
"That's where Dean's mom kept her chickens," Dixie said and I stopped the truck.
For a while we sat in the truck outside Dean's house.
Leslie said to Dixie, "What was Dean like in high school?"
"He was very naive in some ways. He was terribly shy with girls. When he went to Hollywood, he was still a virgin. I mean, everybody did it back then," she said. "My homecoming queen in high school was pregnant. Everybody was pregnant."
"Was Dean very political?" Leslie asked.
"Dean was not particularly political in high school, but he was a gung-ho kid. He did track, hence the race against the mule. He was a gymnast and a swimmer. He did it like he did everything. He was a track alcoholic, a music alcoholic, whatever he did, he did with maximum commitment. When I met him later, there were two Deans, the public man and the private one, and he was definitely a political alcoholic."
Then Dixie found a pack of cigarettes in her bag and lit one and took another little breath. She told us how after the showing of American Rebel at the Tivoli Center the night she met him, Dean had invited Dixie back to visit with him at the Westin Hotel. She thought it was so unique that Dean would be her friend, she said. He was the same slim cowboy she had known as a child. He spent the evening with her and sang her three songs so gently. In public he told the same three stories over and over, as if he'd memorized them, but, alone with her, he opened up. When he told her he wanted to think about coming home, he cried.
Cautiously, Leslie shifted the conversation towards Dean's death. Dixie grew wary. It was getting dark. I thought about the gun again. Leslie edged towards me and away from Dixie, pretending to reach over for a pair of gloves he had left on the dashboard. From somewhere police sirens wailed. Alongside the entrance to the freeway was a tangled mess of steel that had once been a car.
The pick-up skidded and Dixie drove badly, as if talking about Dean had drained her and she could no longer concentrate. She announced that she was taking us back to her place, and then she missed the exit that she must have taken every day. Her face glowed in the reflection from the headlights of oncoming cars. My stomach turned over.
"There are so many things I could tell you," she whispered, veering out of lane. "I know I can trust you. I think I can trust you. Can I?"
I nodded in what I hoped was a trustworthy fashion and Dixie smoked a second cigarette and told us she had given money to the Sandinistas because Dean told her it was a righteous thing to do. She let slip that she felt Fidel Castro was the devil incarnate. Her politics seemed to me a kind of American libertarianism that existed where liberalism flipped backwards to meet the right. Colorado had its own peculiar mix of la
issez-faire libertarian and far-right zealots.
This was the heartlands: there were a hundred million handguns in America and a lot of them were in Colorado and at least one was in Dixie's glove compartment. I had never seen a gun in real life.
Dixie tried to believe what Dean had believed, a sentimental socialism that was part peace and love, part free medicine. But she had been raised on the anti-Communist Catholicism of the middle 1950s in the middle of America. As a result of this stew of ideas, she was now scared of everything, including the CIA, the KGB, and CBS.
Eventually, she found the exit that she was looking for, drove off the freeway, and pulled up in front of a small gray house. She jumped out of the truck and ran towards the door. In the window sat a big sad dog with a huge pink tongue, staring out into the night.
We followed her inside and stood around in the nearly empty house.
"Say hello to Bear," Dixie said patting the dog now licking the window pane.
Leslie said hello to Bear and I realized this was the dog mentioned on her answering machine.
Dixie went into the kitchen.
"There's orange. There's cola," she called out.
"Orange, thanks," I said.
It had been Dixie's father's house. She generally rented it out, though it was currently unoccupied, and kept only a room for herself. Most of the time she lived in the mountains near Grand Junction.
On a chair was a box and Dixie picked it up and held it close to her. In it she said were Dean's letters and some tapes. It was pretty much all she had of Dean, who had told her that he loved Renate, but that he did not want to die in East Germany. It would be hard for Renate to work in America. Dixie had said she would help find Renate a job. He talked to her about his need for America, about the movie he was making, about peace and love.
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