Comrade Rockstar

by Реджи Нейделсон

  Everywhere in the USSR, kids copied Boris' underground album on to cassettes. A million of them. Ten million. Boris' music was unofficial and hard to get hold of and, therefore, in Soviet eyes, more valuable. Maybe Dean's popularity declined because he had become too easy.

  "After Glasnost, from 1985 or 1986, local rock and roll heroes became available to the public," Art said, "and American rock and roll, even if it was Prince and not Dean Reed, became less popular."

  "Only in a very provincial and very isolated country, could a figure like Dean Reed become a big star," Art added thoughtfully. "Gradually, Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, got closer to the world community culturally and in a very humanitarian way. In the light of new information, Dean Reed's figure was getting darker and darker."

  In 1987, Boris went legit. Melodiya issued an album by Aquarium made from underground tapes and it sold 200,000 copies in a couple of hours. Although no Soviet had ever personally signed a contract for himself and all contractual issues, especially with foreigners, were handled by the state agencies, Boris signed his own contract with CBS Records.

  Boris went to America, where he was enthralled and confused; he sat in a closet in an apartment in New York's East Village, listening to music. He sat by a pool in Hollywood and felt disoriented. At home, his fans wondered if Boris had sold out and despaired.

  Art had been friends with Boris for a long time, but even Art was a little cynical. He said that within a decade you would hear Boris's music in the elevator of the Moscow Hilton. Even Art's mother liked Boris.

  Art Troitksy was unhappy in Leningrad. Like many Muscovites, he despised it and called it the "City of Bad Memories." I didn't like it either and I didn't quite understand why at first, maybe the fact that insistently beautiful cities make me uneasy. I felt that in spite of its beauty, or because of it, I was imprisoned in a mad imperial theme park.

  A port city blasted from a swamp by slave labor in the eighteenth century - Peter the Great was obsessed with making a European city - it was gorgeous but crumbling and somehow sinister, like Miss Haversham's wedding cake. Its fartovshiki, the two-bit criminals, hustled you relentlessly.

  Still, it was a Georgian wet dream of a city, with its matched sets of pastel buildings and the gilded griffons on the bridges and the pale green Winter Palace iced with snow. In November, when it got dark early and the snow was dirty, it was a melancholy place.

  What I remembered best about Leningrad was the freaky wax statue of Peter the Great with his own hair in a glass case at the Hermitage and the waiter at the Metropole Restaurant with jars of black-market caviar shoved in the pockets of his pants under his worn tailcoat. At five bucks a pop, it was cheaper than Moscow. I remembered the fact that, under siege by the Nazis during World War Two, Leningrad's people ate wallpaper paste.

  On our one afternoon away from the sports stadium, we went to the Hermitage and when we got back to the hotel and disembarked from the bus, our guide shifted his feet unhappily and refused our gift of Marlboros. It was a kind of protest. All afternoon he had listened to us casually abuse his country, commenting on the bureaucracy and the crappy food and lousy toilets.

  Finally, he said, "Are you with the rock concert?"

  "Yes," I replied.

  He said, "I met Boris once about eight years ago, but he's very famous now. He wouldn't remember me."

  That evening, before the concert began, a group of little girl gymnasts appeared at the back of the sports stadium presumably for a practice session. Twirling, spinning, and tossing Indian clubs, they launched their perfect childish bodies into outer space like tiny sputniks. The band was tuning up. The little gymnasts seemed oblivious to the music and I wondered if rock and roll was already unremarkable to these little kids of seven and eight.

  I wandered into a dressing room where tinted photographs of the heroes of Soviet sport - ice skaters in spangles, footballers in jerseys stiff with sweat - were on the walls. A member of the Russian band was there.

  His hair draped over his ears, he stared into the mirror, reciting his mantra. The room was choking sweet with pot. It smelled like 1968, I thought, and then I left and went backstage, where I had a good view of the band and the audience. The hall was packed.

  "Sing it in Russian!" the crowd yelled, and Boris Grebenshikov, dressed entirely in black and in command of the stage with his band around him, sang in Russian.

  Twelve thousand people clapped and wept, and some of them pushed up almost to the edge of the stage and linked arms and lit candles. A pale young girl, turning her face up to him, held up a picture of Boris, an icon in a plastic sleeve.

  "Sing it in Russian!"

  Boris finished the number. He introduced Dave Stewart and Ray Cooper. These were his friends from the West, he said, and they were going to sing some songs in English.

  "Sing it in Russian!"

  Film crews in sneakers raced silently around the stage and recorded everything. News crews were there, too. Foreigners loved rock and roll in Russia. It was th e sexiest image of the decade. The revolution had come and it sounded good. It sounded great. It was noisy. It was vivid. It looked like us, and you didn't go to war with your own, so we felt safe for the first time in our lives. We Cold War babies knew for sure now that they weren't going to nuke us. The music seemed to literally tear up the terrors of seventy years and toss them over its shoulder with wonderful abandon.

  Boys punched the air. Tall girls with fabulous cheekbones and pale big lips, the Slav beauties who had suddenly appeared everywhere in the USSR, waved and sang along. In the best seats, officials clapped politely and tried not to wish they were listening to Tchaikovsky. People threw flowers. People unfurled Soviet flags and the hammer and sickle waved to the sound of Ray Cooper's chimes. A boy in a yellow satin jacket turned his back so everyone could see the slogan on it. It read: GLASNOST '88, as if Glasnost were this year's Woodstock.

  In the middle of the swaying sea of bodies, a young Russian soldier in uniform got on to his girlfriend's shoulders and loosened his tie. He made a V-sign. Seeing us standing at the side of the stage, he gestured wildly. He wanted Leslie to take his picture. Then the boy whispered to his friend, who got on his girl's shoulders and the two of them made V-signs and laughed like crazy and yelled and yelled, probably calling out, "Take our picture."

  Boris sang his anthem: "Rock and roll is dead, but I'm not yet."

  Dave Stewart called out, "I'm from Sunderland, Boris is from Leningrad. We meet. It's just a tiny thing. But it's better than killing each other."

  "All you need is love!"

  We all sang along and believed for a while that it was really true. All you need is love. How Dean would have adored it all.

  Or would he? Would he have been thrilled by the noise and good will? Was it what he had wanted? Or would he have felt old, a has-been, a man from a different time, a guy out of step with these tall girls in miniskirts and boys in ponytails? I wasn't sure he would have understood their rock and roll that was such a Russian mix of sex and poetry and religion. Maybe GLASNOST '88 would have left Dean on the sidelines, an old man. But, of course, by November, 1988, Dean had already been dead for almost two and a half years.

  "Sing it in Russian!"

  22

  In the spring of 1986, Dean was working like crazy on Bloody Heart. June 24, the start date for the movie he'd been working on for five years, was coming at him like a train down a track. As he said, there was no stopping it, no changing the date, and if the deals weren't done and the production not ready, it would be over for him.

  From Leningrad I went on to Moscow to try to find out what had happened to the movie, because the deal had been negotiated in Moscow, and I knew that something had gone horribly wrong, something I was now convinced led to his death in the lake near his house in East Germany.

  Bloody Heart was going to change Dean's life. It was the crossover picture that would make him a real contender as a director in the East. Having been to America, he was obsessed
with making a real movie with good production values instead of what he called "a piece of garbage where you could punch your fists through the sets." Sing Cowboy Sing had been an enormous hit, but Dean was fed up with playing an idiotic cowpoke, as he put it. A new career as a director would also release him from life as a fading pop star.

  On May 30, 1986, Artemy Troitsky organized a concert in Moscow to benefit the victims of Chernobyl - the nuclear power plant had blown up on April 25-26 - and it was the first event of its kind. Everyone signed on, all the biggest bands and singers. There was a rumor that Dean Reed showed up and stood backstage at the concert and nobody asked him to play. Nobody cared.

  For the whole of the spring, Dean led an increasingly frenzied life - the film, concerts, albums, television shows. He was always on the road - Potsdam, Prague, Moscow, Berlin. He sat up late in Schmockwitz, reworking the script for Bloody Heart. It was never out of his mind.

  Renate would star with him in Bloody Heart. They would be together all summer long. They would have a chance to patch things up and get past the quarrels they'd been having which were nagging at Dean like his ulcer.

  He was also desperately involved in the complications of pre-production; making a realistic movie about America in East Germany and the USSR meant he had to attend to a million details and he did it obsessively. Dean cast his "Indians" in Alma Alta in Uzbekistan, and from a collective farm that was populated entirely by North Koreans. American police cars and jeeps, as well as period sedans, were hired from vintage car clubs that flourished in the Baltic cities of Riga and Tallinn. Already that spring, a credible version of an American church was under construction in Yalta in the Crimea, which was to be the principal location for Bloody Heart, but the wood had to be shipped in from Riga because wood was scarce in the Crimea.

  He was determined. When Bloody Heart was finished, Dean would show his movie in America and he was convinced that it would be his ticket home.

  "It was really a dream world in some ways," Victor Grossman said. "But Dean had high hopes and met someone in America who was willing to manage him, a woman who talked about fan clubs and making pencils and all kinds of things with 'Dean Reed' on it." He meant Dixie, of course.

  In Potsdam, Dean struggled with the changes at the DEFA Film Studios, which was his professional base. The great Berlin movie studios, where films like the Blue Angel had been made before World War Two, had been taken over by the Communists in the 1950s as part of the socialist network of movie facilities.

  By the 1980s the studios were a mess. On DEFA's vast back lot, broken Roman columns lay on the ground. Inside the studio, the sound stages were shabby and so were the sets, except for one improbably imperial bedroom and bathroom constructed of fake marble.

  DEFA was in trouble. Erich Honecker still ruled East Germany, but hard currency was increasingly what mattered, and the producers at DEFA dreamed of deals with the West. Maybe Dean thought that Bloody Heart was the perfect vehicle for his return to America, but the smart money at DEFA knew the West wasn't interested in a movie where the FBI were the bad guys.

  Bloody Heart was cut back. In the Soviet system, everything on a movie was painstakingly planned because everything was so expensive, even the lousy film stock. You had to calculate the number of shots - there were two and a half meters of film per shot - and submit your plan. At almost seven hundred shots, Bloody Heart was two hundred more than the norm. Dean was planning a movie that would run over two hours.

  "I must show the American life with all the details. There must be lots of short scenes," said Dean who, like all movie directors, dreamed of movies with thousands of extras. He was forced to scale back from a cast of six hundred to a cast of sixty.

  Dean needed Soviet coproduction money to make his film. In fact, half of the money was to be Soviet, but, even more than in Germany, in the Soviet Union money for old-style socialist movies was drying up. In spite of his impossible schedule in the winter and spring of 1986, until the week before he died in June, Dean shuttled to and from the USSR as if his life depended on it. He was worried, frantic, his face lined, Lilia Liepine told me when I met her in Moscow. She had been Dean's production manager on Bloody Heart.

  In her pink angora sweater, Lilia looked like Mrs. Brown and she said she had mourned for Dean like a mother. She was from Riga. In the Soviet Union, the production of every movie was assigned by Moscow to a regional studio. Bloody Heart, a German coproduction, was given to the Riga studio, in part, at least, because in the Latvian capital most people spoke German.

  "Dean felt we were like Germans, that we were too polite, too reserved for his taste," said the good-natured Lilia.

  She told me sadly that, in the Riga studio, the boxes of props for Bloody Heart were still stored, including a cracked Coca Cola sign and the footage, which Dean had shot on Denver's skid row when he was in Colorado.

  He had been convinced that it would give the movie a real feel of America, and the tale of the filming was already added to what he called "The Annals of Deano." He loved telling how he found himself in the middle of a burglary that day on Larimer Street where the bums lived, how a real American cop stopped him with a big riot gun, how he, Dean, bravely kept the cameras turning and got the real goods, how frightening America sometimes was, with its hundred million handguns. Dean was frightened by the guns, but exhilarated at the same time.

  Possessed by the vision of the professional American film, but doomed to make it in two countries where every piece of equipment was forty years out of date, Dean himself oversaw the casting and the sets and even the make-up tests and the animals.

  He chose a horse for himself at a collective farm in the USSR where wild horses were broken. Month after month, he traveled the whole of the Soviet Union with Lilia Liepine, restless, anxious. In Yalta, mobbed by fans, Dean gave an impromptu concert at the end of a long hard day and Lilia said to him, "How can you stand it?"

  "I like it," he said. "I need it."

  Then the tank was late arriving from North Vietnam.

  Hanoi was the only place you could put your hands on an American tank. People filming in the Soviet Union who needed a US tank had to buy one from Hanoi. I remembered that I had seen a photograph of Dean with some North Vietnamese generals. He appeared to be joking around with them and maybe it was how he had finagled his tank. I asked Lilia Liepine if people would be frightened by the sight of an American tank being driven down a road in the Crimea.

  "USA, USSR, there isn't a lot of difference between tanks," she said.

  "Of course, in the end, the Soviets canceled the money for Bloody Heart," said an American diplomat who had known Dean and was retired and bored and happy to talk. "The Soviets killed the movie," he said with absolute certainty. "Everyone knew," he said, "the movie was kaput."

  Kaput. Finished. If it were true, the emotional fallout for Dean would have been like Chernobyl.

  In Moscow at the end of 1988, I discovered just how much the new freedoms in the USSR were changing things. Perestroika - the restructuring of the economic and political institutions - meant that, where movies had once been completely subsidized by the state, every studio now had to turn a profit. Movies had always been big in the Soviet Union. The Soviets went to the pictures all the time - as much as nineteen times a year, some people said - largely because there wasn't much else to do. Their flats were crowded and the restaurants were disgusting; at least the movie theaters were warm and you could make out in the back rows.

  Even before Gorbachev took office in 1985, people were fed up with the crap that came out of the Soviet studios. State censorship, the yes-men of the Brezhnev era, and the decades of stagnation meant that movies ran largely to provincial romance and costume drama. The Russians were crazy for costume drama and heroic space pictures, including Cosmonaut #2 in the USA. The Russian version of Mary Poppins had been the biggest cinematic event since Battleship Potemkin; the Sherlock Holmes movies, too, were very popular.

  A sign of change, and there were peopl
e in Moscow who read these signs meticulously, obsessively, was the election of Elem Klimov as head of the cinematographers' union. It took place a few months after Gorbachev came to power. Klimov's films had been banned for years; then, suddenly, he was official.

  Censorship crumbled. Movies once considered irreverent were screened. Sexy movies. Political movies. Soviet film stars began appearing in Playboy. In 1987, Juris Podnieks made Is It Easy to Be Young? and it was another watershed because in his dark, tough picture, he portrayed hostile punk kids and their passionate desire above all else for money and good times.

  One night I met a writer at Dom Kino. Moscow's film house was jammed and the stylish crowd of movie people drank and kissed the air a lot and Nikita Khrushchev's grandson, a balding, plump young man in jeans, ate ice cream. Over vodka, the writer looked at the crowd and said, "Just remember, these people who now dance to the Gorby Gavotte, used to do it to the Brezhnev Boogie and before that, in some cases, to the Khrushchev Carioca."

  Mosfilm, the city's main studio, was in the Lenin Hills on the outskirts of Moscow. Leslie and I went with our guide, Vera Reich. As we drove up to the studio gates, Vera said that she worked mostly for film people and that her last client had been the director Roland Joffe. Leslie Woodhead said we knew Roland and we'd seen him recently in Beverly Hills. At this Vera's face lit up: this connection with Roland somehow made us all friends.

  Even in her tiny high-heeled leather boots, Vera Reich was very short. She was curious about everything. She had a genuine smile and she was completely incorruptible.

  "Film is our most important art," Lenin said, and it was inscribed over the front door of the studio. The studio was vast; it had offices, sound stages, prop shops, costume stores and a huge back lot where vintage trams lay rusting in the dirty snow.