Comrade Rockstar

by Реджи Нейделсон

Dean left Dixie no choice about Johnny, so she turned on Will Roberts and told Dean that she figured Will was no friend of Dean's and that Will was reluctant to part with his material. Dean wrote to Will that Dixie was his business partner now.

  There were insinuations and suspicions, and the various factions took differing views of Dean's future in the United States; no one agreed. At one point Dixie took some friends up to Loveland to check Johnny and Mona were not agents of one kind or another.

  "God, Dixie, can't you see we're just poor clods?" Johnny said.

  All of them dissected every letter Dean sent, as semioticians might do; they taped his telephone calls, and sent the cassettes round in carefully made packages. They copied the video cassette of Dean's farewell concert in Johnny's basement. They put his bumper stickers on their cars.

  In the way that Dean's American friends operated, it was a lot like an underground network in the East. There was the hope, the desperate desire for information, the coveting of news, the fear. Cassettes of Dean's songs were copied over and over, like the magnetizdat which Soviet kids had once made of rock music, passing them along, their amateur quality - where you could hear the laughter in the background - making them more potent. Videos were copied, too, until they were too grainy to look at.

  Letters smuggled from one partisan to another were cherished, reread and reread. There were also the aspersions cast on those who seemed to have defected. There were the relationships degraded by desire and need. At one point along the Dean Reed trail, I heard from a musician who had known Dean in Moscow that someone - perhaps it was Mrs. Brown - had heard rumors that I was working for the CIA.

  In Colorado, Dean's friends were not hicks. But they had no East Berlin. They could understand only that their friend had become a big star. By the time Dean came home in 1985, for different reasons - Johnny's bad back, Dixie's longings - they inhabited a world that was as flat as the yellow scrublands on the way up to Loveland from Denver. Dean's presence animated it, and they could not bear to let him go.

  Their delight seduced him; he was homesick; he saw an opportunity to move on one more time and he was determined to take it because it meant going home.

  In trying to solve the mystery of Dean's death, I made a kind of sodden progress and there were times I had the feeling that Dean had existed only in the desires of his friends and archivists. When I heard the stories and read the letters and listened to the taped phone calls, I felt I was hearing versions of what had become a kind of folk tale, passed on from one teller to another.

  Dixie saw Dean's return to America in grandiose terms. It would be the return of a great star, of a prodigal son. Dean wrote that he did not want her to be disappointed, that there were people who would be afraid of him because of his politics, and who would not answer her calls or letters.

  Buried in Dean's own letters though, was a hard, cold, little core of realism, a chilling premonition that none of it was going to happen. I think that all the way along, Dean knew the truth, but he was a patsy for hope.

  The next time I saw Dixie, we had brunch at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. She had promised me more tapes.

  She had tapes of all her telephone conversations with Dean, she said, right up until his death. Interesting tapes. Important tapes. She had them at home at Wheat Ridge, she said, then changed her mind and said they were up at her other house in Grand Junction, up in the mountains. It was her safe house.

  She teased with promises of information, but it was not intended as a tease and her heart wasn't in it. She seemed frayed and worn with sorrow. Her memories of Dean seemed to detonate in her endlessly like tiny land mines.

  In the huge dining room, large people cruised the food, slapping mounds of scrambled eggs on their plates along with dollops of corned beef hash, stacks of pancakes, and bacon and sausage. There was butter and syrup for the pancakes and heavy cream for the coffee.

  Small in her chair, Dixie ate her breakfast, absorbed in some private despair.

  "Dean was going to have trouble making it back here in the music business. It was all run by Jews. Deano didn't care what a person was, of course, he didn't care if a person was pink, white, black, green, purple."

  I wanted the rest of her tapes very badly. I could feel my own desperation grow. I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted those tapes, but Dixie was off on another tangent.

  Dean had money in a bank in West Berlin. Emergency money, she said.

  "Can you check if there have been any withdrawals since Dean's death? If there haven't, I'll give you the tapes," she asked.

  "I'm not sure I understand," I said.

  Dixie said softly, "I've been getting strange phone calls. I think someone is speaking Spanish. I think the calls are coming from South America." She tried to drink some coffee, but her hand shook and she put the cup down. "I want to know if there have been any withdrawals recently because if there have it might prove something."

  I said, "Prove what?"

  Dixie looked expectantly at the door to the restaurant and said, "It will prove that Dean is still alive."

  "Dick Cheese, Mr. Cheese."

  The public address system at Stapleton Airport in Denver ran through a never-ending loop of names, "Dick Cheese. Mr. Cheese. Brett Falcon. Mr. Falcon. Margaret Bird. Ms. Bird. Wayne Sick. Mr. Sick," and so on, until it looped back and began all over again with Dick Cheese.

  It was snowing again in Denver the morning after I saw Dixie, and the planes were delayed. Travelers wandered around the airport looking for something to do, or to buy, or to eat. The airport was huge and so were the people and a lot of them were stuffed into down coats and vests because it was the spring ski season. On their feet they wore huge plastic ski boots in pink and baby blue and they marched around stiff-legged, unable to bend their ankles. As they bought souvenirs and ate soft ice cream, they resembled vacationing families of Yeti with pastel feet.

  Among the passengers were young couples, barely out of their teens, their own babies slung casually into backpacks. Returning home, setting off on a journey, they coped with ease. Their ancestors would have come West in covered wagons. Every one at the airport was big, handsome, and healthy, and they were all traveling, because moving on was the American thing to do.

  "Dick Cheese."

  I was glad to get on the plane back to New York.

  20

  It took me a long time to get a fix on 60 Minutes and how their story came about and the confusion about the origin of the story made people suspicious; some even suggested that somehow it had something to do with Dean's death.

  When I met Bill McClure - a producer for 60 Minutes based in London - in his Knightsbridge office, he told me he hadn't much liked Dean Reed. McClure had lived in Berlin and he knew Europe well.

  "A very big fish in a very small pond," McClure said. "Renate was a bona fide star, though." McClure's neck bulged over his collar; he loosened his tie and told me that the original idea had been to do a piece for 60 Minutes on a number of American defectors in Europe, including Dean and Victor Grossman.

  McClure thought Dean was a hustler, an opportunist without political conviction, a self-aggrandizing old crooner, with an ego the size of the Berlin Wall.

  "Dean Reed was a fake," he said. "And he was approaching fifty and he was frightened." McClure's dislike emanated from every pore.

  His animosity, however, I discovered, was at least partly to do with Dean's last-minute decision to defect from the show. McClure had set everything up. He flew Mike Wallace into East Berlin. Then Dean backed off. McClure sat in East Berlin with a crew and with Mike Wallace ready to go and this putz, this cowboy, this fake said he didn't want to do it. McClure's job was on the line.

  "Whose version would you believe? Mike Wallace, who gets maybe a million a year, or Bill McClure, who gets maybe fifty grand?" said Erik Durschmied. "Anyway, the show was my idea."

  I was feeling trapped again in the adhesive confusions of Dean Reed land, and this went on. for months to come
while I tried to follow the way the 60 Minutes story and everything that surrounded it developed.

  I met Erik Durschmied at the Intercontinental Hotel where he was staying in New York, and we went out to Murphy's Irish Pub on Second Avenue because he liked the cheeseburgers there.

  Durschmied's wife, Annalise, was a long-time friend of Dean's in Europe. Durschmied was a tough little Viennese of about sixty who worked for CBS out of Paris as a cameraman. He was a legendary figure, who had made his reputation working for the BBC as a brilliant reporter-cameraman in places like Indochina. He had thinning hair and a good tweed jacket.

  Erik Durschmied ordered a beer and a cheeseburger. At Murphy's, there were checkered cloths on the table and a crowd of men at the bar. Their ties at half-mast, they craned their necks to watch a football game on the TV set that was suspended over the bartender's head.

  "Dean hated East Berlin." Durschmied chewed his hamburger methodically and drank some beer.

  "Did you like Dean?" I asked.

  "Yes, and I'm a black and cynical bastard," he said. "Dean was a feather in the wind. He was naive. But he had enormous charm. Whatever his talent as a musician, his talent for charm was never in any doubt at all."

  According to Durschmied, Dean also had a sense of humor, at least about his own films.

  "He knew his films were garbage," said Durschmied, "but Dean himself had no taste. He gave us some of those vulgar porcelain statues from Germany. We were touched, of course, so we kept them, but they were junk."

  We talked about Dean's womanizing and he agreed that there was plenty of it, but he felt that Dean was also capable of real friendship with a woman, his own wife Annalise, for example. I had met Annalise once in Paris and it occurred to me, that, like Dixie and Wiebke, she was slender, small-boned, blonde, and sexy.

  "Would you have gone to bed with Dean?" Durschmied asked suddenly.

  His accent grew more Viennese with every beer and a friendly leer spread across his face. There followed an exchange about whether or not I would have slept with Dean Reed, or, indeed, with Elvis Presley. The crowd had grown noisier at the bar. I edged my chair away from Durschmied.

  "Would you have gone to bed with Marilyn Monroe?" I said.

  "You bet! Just think of being able to tell people." Durschmied wiped some mustard from his chin.

  Leaning over the table, Durschmied whispered to me about Dean Reed, who he was, why he had died.

  "Remember, it was the American Embassy that got Dean free in Chile when he was arrested there in 1983," Durschmied said. "Why would the embassy bother with some commie type who'd gone over to the other side? Ask yourself why."

  "Why?" I said.

  Durschmied was silent for a moment and I asked myself what he meant. Was Dean a spy for us? Was that what Durschmied was saying? Was he CIA, the ultimate mole?"

  It was a tantalizing idea, the corn-fed blue-eyed boy with his crew-cut and Chevrolet Impala, his mule races and silly songs. Did Paton Price run him? Was the sudden move to Latin America exquisitely planned? Was the socialist rhetoric a perfect cover for an agent? In his tight pants, with the guitar slung over his shoulder, with his merry antics and goodwill, he had certainly converted plenty of Russians to America.

  Was Dean Reed, then, the Tab Hunter of the secret world? Was he, as Johnny Rosenburg had once suggested, the best mole our country ever had? But even Johnny didn't believe that and neither did I.

  For the hell of it, Durschmied also tried out the notion that Dean Reed was still alive and living in the Soviet Union. I said it seemed unlikely that a six-foot American rock star had gone to ground so easily in Gorbachev's Soviet Union, where Western news crews were now to be seen everywhere. Durschmied giggled. It was provocative stuff, but it was small talk.

  "The whole thing is a jigsaw puzzle, and you're looking for a bit of sky when the sailboat is right in front of you," Durschmied added mysteriously.

  He clamped his mouth around some French fries and wouldn't say anything about the sailboat, what it was, or where it was. It was clear he didn't know much, but his urgent whispers had a kind of adhesive quality and the spy stories were tempting.

  Then he said something really interesting.

  "Dean Reed was a man without a language. Without a language. Ja. Like me," Durschmied said.

  In the tapes I had with Dean Reed's voice on them, his English was stilted, as if something essential was sometimes missing, and people in Colorado had talked of how he had a little accent when he came to visit.

  Durschmied went on. "Look, I was only fifteen or so when I left Austria. All my vocabulary for subjects before fifteen is German. Everything else, which means my entire professional life, my political life, is in English. The same with Dean. His American vocabulary was pre-1961. Everything else was in a foreign language. Spanish. German. His musical life, his political life, his married life, his whole adult construct was foreign."

  It was true. Dean spoke English, German, Spanish, and a little Russian. The gaps in his languages matched the gaps in his experience. The old-fashioned slightly stiff English went with the smiling countenance and the belief in peace and freedom. It was always 1962 in Dean's world. The clock in his head had stopped when he left America.

  In a letter to Wiebke, Dean had once written that being in America had made him happy because he could speak his own language. This was so astute it turned my head. Dean was not a subtle man, but he had poignantly diagnosed what ailed him: he was a man without a language.

  Durschmied got up now and so did I, and we headed out of Murphy's.

  "Of course, you know Dean and Renate were planning to go to live in Rome," said Durschmied.

  Rome? Rome! No, I didn't know about Rome; there had been no mention at all of Rome. Another alley to follow looking for Dean Reed. Another dead end, I thought.

  "Rome?" I said, but Eric Durschmied was half a block ahead of me, singing a Tom Lehrer song in counterpoint to the noises of the New York night.

  "They're rioting in Africa, they're starving in Spain," he sang and disappeared around the corner. He never said another word about how the 60 Minutes piece on Dean Reed came about.

  In the corridor at the 60 Minutes offices at CBS News on West 57th Street in New York, before I saw Mike Wallace, I heard his voice. It was the same voice that came out of my TV every Sunday night, the voice that had introduced me to Dean Reed in April of 1986.

  When I got to his office, Wallace was talking on the phone and he looked up and smiled and raised a hand in greeting. He looked, exactly like Mike Wallace and I was pretty awestruck and more than a little nervous. I was here to interview the most famous and toughest reporter in the country.

  He hung up the phone and shook my hand. He said that when they had first met, he thought Dean was a bit of a fraud, but after a while felt that was probably an unjust assessment and that Dean probably did believe the things he talked about. He was naive maybe, but he had conviction and he was charming.

  "Was Dean intelligent?" I asked.

  "Intelligent enough. He was certainly no dummy, though he had a learned rhetoric and could do the Communist number; but he adjusted his view as we went along. It wasn't merely a kind of parrot repetition; there was some real involvement. Of course, he had done this interview plenty of times and he knew the words and knew how to express himself in those terms," Wallace said.

  "Did you like him?"

  "Yes, I did. He was politically naive, but he was honest," Wallace said.

  On February 9, 1986, Mike Wallace flew into East Berlin. Bill McClure was already there, wringing his hands, wondering if Dean Reed intended to do the interview.

  Dean had tentatively agreed to the interview, but he did not like Bill McClure much, so he changed his mind. Dean felt that 60 Minutes, along with his movie Bloody Heart, was his ticket back to America. He had spent some time on a recent trip to Moscow with Oleg Smirnoff rehearsing for the interview, with Oleg playing Mike Wallace.

  "Why are you a Communist, Mr. Reed? Why d
o you believe in the Berlin Wall? Call yourself an American? What about Afghanistan?"

  Oleg and Dean trudged around Red Square.

  "Hit me harder. Ask me another question." Dean said, "Pretend you're Mike Wallace."

  Oleg had no idea what he was doing.

  "Hit me again," said Dean, obsessed with 60 Minutes.

  Dean called Dixie: "In four days in Moscow I spoke only English," he said. "I was getting ready for Mike Wallace. Johnny has begged me not to do the 60 Minutes interview. Johnny says 60 Minutes goes deep into the past."

  Johnny was more worried about 60 Minutes than Dixie. He knew that Dean just did not understand the type of people at 60 Minutes. He did not get that America had no love for communistic people like himself and that the interview would not do him any good.

  "These people dig deep into your background," Johnny said on a tape he sent to Dean in East Berlin. "Stay away from 60 Minutes. They're gonna cut you to pieces."

  Renate was outraged. "What kind of a friend is this that comes down on you so hard and tells you not to get this publicity!" she said.

  Dean and Renate arrived at the Palast Hotel, where VIPs stayed in East Berlin, to meet Mike Wallace, Bill McClure, and Anne de Boismilion, the associate producer who worked for CBS in Paris. A woman from East German television was with them. Dean was fretful but Mike Wallace did not object to Dean's playing hard to get. Unlike Bill McClure, he found it neither objectionable nor manipulative.

  "The guy was scared. Many people on the verge of an interview try to back out and then come back again. I harbored no hard feelings about that," Mike Wallace said to me.

  Dean said to Renate, "Please help me to say no," and then the three women went to the restaurant. Half an hour later, Dean came back in, grinning sheepishly. "I've agreed to do the interview," he said.

  In the end, Renate was impressed with the undertaking and Wallace was deeply impressed by Renate. He felt in her a profound solidity. She was a considerable woman.