From the box she took a few ballpoint pens with the legend: "Colorado is Dean Reed Country."
"Have some," she said. "I guess you could say they're a rarity now." She gave me the pens then turned to the jumble of audiotapes in the box.
Dixie had taped all of Dean's telephone calls. The answering machine was on a table and Dixie took a tape out and pressed the button. The tape began.
A phone rang. Then Dean's voice came up. They exchanged salutations between Wheat Ridge and East Berlin.
"Is that me calling you, or you calling me?" Dean's voice said. "Are you just waking up? Did you have nice dreams? Are you a member of the Denver Klan?" he joked. Dean seemed to be entombed inside the scratched plastic cassette case and the tapes had the creepy vitality of relics, as discomfiting as a saint's toe-bone in a glass box. Dixie suddenly stopped the tape.
I said to her, "Why did you make tapes of Dean's calls?"
"I just like hearing his voice. Not just then, but all my life."
I wanted the cardboard box. I wanted the letters and the tapes, but Dixie was reticent and said she would think about it. We agreed to meet for dinner the next night and she drove us back to the Brown Palace Hotel. It was snowing harder.
* * *
The Rattlesnake Club was inside the Tivoli Center. The restaurant where we met Dixie had fat copper brewing vats - it had once been a brewery - pushed halfway through the floors like unexploded bombs. The distressed walls looked like the consequence of a tasteful war. The waiters wore Topsiders and pink Ralph Lauren shirts, as if they were Yalies or yachtsmen. Only a few tables were occupied. Dixie, thin in her short white fur jacket, looked bewildered, as if she did not know whom to trust.
We talked about Dean and out of the blue she offered me the cardboard box with the letters and the tapes. The next day, Leslie and I went back to the little house in Wheat Ridge and took the box with a kind of obscene speed, as if she might change her mind about the treasure.
In the tapes and letters Dixie gave me, as in Johnny's tapes and letters and memories, were all the details of Dean's time in Colorado and all that came afterwards. Dean had wanted to come home to America. He wanted it so bad he could taste it, and Dixie conspired with him to make it happen. She had asked Dean if she could set up a fan club for him in America and, before he left Colorado, she was already at work for him.
19
When Dean left Colorado, he went to Los Angeles to look for a manager because, though Dixie would help, he was savvy enough to realize he needed a pro, as well. In fact, he told her, he spent most of his time talking into answering machines. Everyone Dean knew was out of town: the Everly Brothers were in Australia making a video; Jane Fonda was away. No one answered his calls and he hated the smog.
"It gets on my nerves. I've been calling people in Hollywood all day and all I get are recorded messages," Dean told Dixie over the phone.
A fellow named Levinson was interested in working for Dean, but Dean did not trust him; he felt Levinson would sit on his ass and wait for Dean to perform, then come in for his twenty percent. He told Dixie this was the America he hated, said that Hollywood was worse than the killing fields of Cambodia, because you never knew who your friends were. Dean stiffened up his morale with the political rhetoric he could wrap around him like a familiar blanket.
In Los Angeles, Dean stayed with Tillie Price, Paton's widow, who was old and unwell and sometimes referred to herself as "Silly Tillie." He went to visit Paton's grave and missed him terribly. In the house where Paton Price once taught his students the meaning of life, Dean sat on the bed in his room, wondering if anyone would ever call him back.
A second Hollywood career now seemed a pipe-dream. Sure, he'd amassed $300,000 in a West Berlin bank from residuals on his movies, but in LA he discovered $300,000 wouldn't buy a chicken coop. Tillie gave a little party for Dean.
"Don Murray and Kent McCord came," Dean told Dixie. "I asked Kent if he could get me an agent and he said only Jack Fields, who is Ed Asner's agent, is brave enough politically. Haskell Wexler - I know him from Chile and Nicaragua - said the same thing."
Maura McGivney, an old girlfriend of Dean's who sometimes looked in on Tillie Price told me some time later, "When Dean was here, he used to leap out of bed in the morning and run out to the pool for a swim, naked, with a huge erection, singing 'Oh What a Beautiful Morning'. Tillie was embarrassed."
Ramona was the other reason Dean went to Los Angeles, he told Dixie. Ramona was his daughter by his first wife, Patty, and he wanted her to take his name. Mrs. Brown said it was true that Dean was keen on Ramona, who had visited him in East Berlin. Ramona wanted to make Dean's life story as a Hollywood movie.
I saw a snapshot once of Dean's children, Ramona, Natasha, and Sasha, and they were an oddly assorted bunch. Ramona was a healthy, pretty, self-possessed American teenager; Sasha, the only boy, wore his privilege as uneasily as he wore his skinny black leather pants; Natasha, the pale little girl he'd had by Wiebke, seemed somehow isolated.
Dean had really put his back into getting the hard currency he needed to send some regular support money to Patty and Ramona. According to Dixie, Ramona didn't want anything to do with Dean around the time of the trip to Los Angeles and it nearly broke his heart. In the spring of 1986, he sent Dixie a copy of a letter he wrote to Ramona to commemorate her eighteenth birthday.
He called her his "Dearest Daughter" and told her of his sorrow that he was often not there when she needed him. He told her life was not black and white. He passed on the many homilies Paton Price had preached to him. The letter was full of syrupy political sentiment. I wondered if Dean had sent Dixie a copy because things felt more real to him if he had an audience.
"My daughter wants to become a singer," Dean told Dixie.
Dixie said she was thinking about his career in America. The conversation had the dreamy quality of two people dawdling down different paths, but hoping to meet up.
"Nothing much is happening," said Dean. "It's not as nice as Colorado. The smog is terrible," he said and added that in California he was down in the dumps.
They talked about the movie Dean was planning to make when he went back to East Germany. Bloody Heart was to be the story of the siege of Wounded Knee, the Indian rebellion that took place in 1973 in South Dakota. Already Dixie had been on the road looking for props that he would need and had found a vintage Marlboro sign and some Indian artifacts.
She said, "I went to South Dakota, smart Aleck. But I didn't know what to take. So I went to Wounded Knee and I went to Pine Ridge and I went to Martin and talked to a kid who didn't know his belly button from lint, and then I came home." She laughed happily at his astonished delight over her trip across South Dakota.
"I would love to spend the night with you tonight," Dean said suddenly.
"If I thought that was true I'd trip over my own two feet," Dixie said.
"I'll be leaving on Monday to go to Minneapolis. I'm not having as good a time as I did in Colorado," he said again, flirting with Dixie, obviously wanting her to say she'd come on to meet him, without having to ask. Finally, he said, "Would you fly out and spend some time with me in Ohio?"
She said she would come to Minneapolis.
Dean went on tour across America with American Rebel, the documentary that had played the Denver film festival. In Minnesota, Dixie met him. It was there they agreed that she could be his only manager instead of some Hollywood guy and help pave the way for his triumphal return to America.
Dean wrote to Dixie while he was sitting at John F. Kennedy Airport waiting for his plane back to Europe. He said he wanted to write to her of his thoughts and emotions and how he felt after spending more time in his homeland than he had for a quarter of a century.
"The trip was the happiest I've ever made to America. I've seen my blue skies again and my battery was recharged." He wrote of how he had seen the mountains and the faces of so many people, and of how he had visited Denver, Los Angeles, and New York. He talked of how
all people must have a peaceful future and how he would work towards making it so. He said he felt he would return to his own country and do what he had done in thirty-two other countries.
He vowed to make Bloody Heart an inspirational movie and said he would be back soon. He signed the letter "Dean." Dixie sent him a bumper sticker that read: YOU CAN'T HUG CHILDREN WITH NUCLEAR ARMS.
Dixie tried to call Dean at JFK the afternoon he left. She was afraid of losing track of him. She wanted to beg him to know that not all Americans were Peter Boyle. But she couldn't reach him.
After that, Dixie spent a lot of time with some friends trying to reach a righteous decision about how to help Dean. The afternoon she received his first letter, she was so relieved she cried for six hours.
"I am very happy to be part of your Colorado world and eager to make Colorado another home for you, again!" Dixie wrote to Dean, adding if she ever spoke out of turn or if she stepped on his toes, so to speak, or Renate's or Sasha's, he was to tell her plain.
By the second half of November Dean was back in Germany, and, in the weeks and months that followed, Dixie called and wrote frequently and he responded eagerly.
Often, Dixie's letters ran to six or eight pages, single-spaced. In January of 1986 Dixie wrote to Dean seventeen times. He was astonished and delighted. All the letters were about him.
Almost as soon as Dean left Colorado, Dixie went to work as his Colonel Parker, paving the way for his return. She setup a fan club and had nifty membership certificates printed; Mrs. Brown was made an honorary member and so was Renate; Dixie got bumper stickers printed that read: SO WHO'S DEAN REED?
She wrote to classmates at Wheat Ridge High; she called record companies and checked out which early songs of Dean's had been hits; she commissioned record finders to locate copies of Dean's old records, including one titled "Cannibal Twist"; she drove across the Southwest, looking for props for Dean's movie; she had a lengthy correspondence with the South Dakota police department on the pretext that she was a schoolteacher whose class was interested in such things, and so obtained pictures of South Dakota police uniforms, badges, and cars.
Along with her letters, Dixie sent Dean packages. One contained postcards showing the Denver Mint and panoramic views of Denver. She shipped the movie props via Czechoslovakia, to the DEFA Film Studios in Potsdam. She sent him turquoise jewelry she had purchased in Santa Fe and a denim jacket from Johnny.
Dixie wrote out shipping lists very carefully; in one case at least she painstakingly translated it into German. This list included three music videotapes, one red bandanna, three copper medallions, twelve boy scout pins, one pack Skoal (chewing tobacco), one plastic ring, one 1986 calendar, one empty milk carton from the Wheat Ridge dairy (where Dixie and Dean had worked after school as kids) for a joke, one box of liquorice for Renate (just for fun). For St. Valentine's Day, she sent a cubic-zirconium heart-shaped pendant for Renate.
Dixie wrote to Dean of her progress and how she had picked up material on music videos, their production costs, and even directors in the Denver area; she boned up on music copyright laws and ordered both the Songwriters Market book and a Nashville yellow-page telephone directory.
Her letters were full of good advice and jokes; she was coy, cute, smart, flirtatious, and sassy. She chided and chastised Dean and instructed him to be good to himself. When he was feeling down, he was to look in the mirror and say "I love me." She was bossy, sweet, provocative, spirited, determined, and greedy, but only for love. The letters included sly asides and little drawings - moon faces of herself, smiling or pensive. There was such longing in all of them, and poetry, and the sense that she was blossoming, that her world was enlarged, embellished, and lit up by Dean Reed.
Dixie wrote to Dean of her feelings for Colorado: "the inky blue darkness of the star bedecked night" and "the light blue cloudless sky of morning"; of a delicious Mexican meal she had eaten; of her snowmobile, which was a delight. She tempted him with the pleasures of an American life and wished him "beautiful blue-sky days." She said she hoped Renate would "like our weather, our little towns and big towns, our massive shopping centers filled with people who are rude, kind, happy, sad, little, big, young, and old! In her own way, Dixie was a poet of the banal.
"In case you haven't figured it out, getting a letter from you, or a card, is better than home-made chocolate cake," she wrote to Dean. She wrote that she had even begun German classes and she signed one of her letters "Chow" because it was a word Dean often used. She asked him what it meant.
He wrote back, "It's an international word in Italian for hello and goodbye" and she wrote that that was "neat" and she was relieved to know what it meant because she couldn't find it in her German dictionary.
Dean said her letters were "jewels" and exclaimed on how many she had written. He complimented her on her humor. "I tried to translate some of your jokes for Renate, but it is difficult to translate jokes - that is my problem living in Germany... Humor must be in the native tongue. Ja?'
His letters were typed on a portable typewriter, and he noted his spelling was terrible, but blamed it on the fact that he spoke four languages. He enclosed the address of Mr. Oleg Harjardin, the President of the Soviet Peace Committee, because a friend of Dixie's had requested it.
They wrote about everything. Dean wrote about how his dog bit him, about the Sandinistas, and about his trips to Prague for recording sessions and to Moscow to negotiate money for Bloody Heart, his movie. He wrote Dixie when the Challenger space shuttle blew up in the winter of 1986 that he thought it was a bad omen.
Dean's letters to Dixie covered a lot of territory and revealed not only a man with an enormous appetite for work and for movement, but also a man who, in between the lines, was growing weary of it all. The letters careened between revelations of his philosophy of life, the determination to better the lot of all mankind, and the steely practicalities of the performing life: copyrights, arrangers, engineers, producers, contracts, deadlines.
As they wrote and called each other, in the letters and tapes, you could feel the intimacy build, as if they were locking into some fatal two-step to the exclusion of everyone else.
In the house by the lake in East Germany, Renate began to resent Dixie's barrage of phone calls, but she was always polite when she picked up the phone.
The calls and the letters continued on well into the winter of 1986. The manic reporting of every detail in their lives continued. Dean had begun to focus seriously on his return to America. There was also an ecstatic mention of the possibility of 60 Minutes. The biggest show on American television was interested in Dean! In his mind, Dean fixed his return to America for October, 1987, which was only a year and a half away and 60 Minutes would be terrific publicity.
His return, he said, would be based on the distribution of American Rebel, the documentary, and the release of his new LP in America, which he also intended to call American Rebel. In a letter to Dixie, he discoursed on the meaning of the word "rebel." Dixie looked it up in her Funk and Wagnall's Dictionary and also in her Reader's Digest Family Word Finder.
How to present himself to America, he wondered. There would be a personal tour; his film must be shown in the universities. He, Deano, would appear on television and radio talk shows; there would have to be an advance man to handle Deano's publicity .
He also discussed with Dixie the autobiography he intended to write; the old one was incomplete. Maybe Dixie would write it for him. Yes, why not, and perhaps they could get an advance from a publisher, although maybe that was too optimistic.
She pooh-poohed all that, and told him he should be nicer to himself. He would soon be rich, she kidded, which was just as well, because she might want a new Rolls-Royce in 1987.
He confided in Dixie his dream of founding a social democratic party in America. If there were 260,000,000 Americans and only two percent voted for him that would be considerable.
"My dedication in my life has been to use my fame and talent to fight against
injustice wherever and whenever I found it," Dean wrote, then added, "I believe that there is a great commercial hole to be filled in the USA. There is a need for a new singer to fill the void which Pete Seeger used to fill."
Now Dixie had a real purpose. She called Mrs. Brown; she called Tillie Price; she talked to Phil Everly on the phone and Phil did not have the heart to tell her that she had no idea how to be a manager. As she toiled to put Dean back on the American map, she saw the pitfalls everywhere. But she had found a community.
Then relations in the community soured. There was bickering about who owned what bits of film archive in American Rebel. Mrs. Brown said she had given Will Roberts money to accompany Dean to Chile; Will Roberts said he had mortgaged his house to make the film. For Dean's biography, Dixie thought maybe she would write to Yasser Arafat for his thoughts on Dean because, "Wouldn't that fritz Johnny?" She was not happy working with Johnny.
To protect Dean (in case he hit it big), Johnny had had Dean sign a deal with him for residual rights. It would stop people making spin-offs, such as Dean Reed dolls, without Dean's approval. The contract ran until the end of 1988. Dixie didn't like it one bit. Dean said he made the deal because Johnny was "sick and didn't have much of a future," explaining how much it meant to John and Mona when he, Dean, came to visit and gave them his love and trust. Anyhow, Johnny had promised when the day came that Dean signed on with the William Morris Agency in Hollywood, he would tear up that contract right in front of Dean's eyes.
Dixie finally asked Dean to release her from her promise to work with Johnny. His views were on the hard right, she said.
Dean responded that "Johnny was a religious and conservative guy, who, if he did not love Dean, would never be a fan of his life." But Johnny did love Dean, Dean said, and Dean would not release Dixie from her promise. To cheer her up, he sent her Yasser Arafat's headscarf for a present.
Comrade Rockstar Page 18