Comrade Rockstar

by Реджи Нейделсон

  The lobby at Mosfilm had the silvery, stylized feel of an RKO set with Art Moderne corridors, the kind where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers might have danced; black-and-white photographs of great Russian movie stars lined the walls. I couldn't find Dean anywhere on the wall of stars.

  The man in charge of foreign coproduction wore a very good suit and had an office as big as a conference room with a map of the world on the wall. He looked like a producer. He did not introduce himself or respond to a request for his name, or maybe he didn't understand. Anyway, I never knew his name and I thought of him as Mr. Big. He addressed himself entirely to Leslie Woodhead because Leslie was also a producer in a good suit and a Western coproduction of any kind was a juicy prospect.

  Mr. Big wanted to talk deals. He wanted to talk to Leslie about the prospect of his shooting Dean's life story at Mosfilm and how much stuff - lights, sets, costumes, crew - he could sell. Production at Mosfilm was way down. Times were tough.

  Mr. Big ordered his secretary to bring coffee. I wanted to talk about Dean Reed, but he yawned, interested only in the deal, and so I drank my coffee to cover my boredom.

  "You'll want to see a script, of course," Leslie said.

  No, Mr. Big said and offered him a Havana cigar.

  Nothing was more astonishing than that no one in Moscow asked to see a script anymore; they asked how much money you had to spend. Leslie had been sneaking around Eastern Europe for years in order to make his ground-breaking drama-documentaries and he had met secretly with Soviet dissident generals in back alleys and taken illegal photographs of the Communist Party headquarters in Prague and the shipyards in Gdansk. Suddenly, in the heart of Moscow, all anyone talked to him about were below-the-line costs and exchange rates.

  Hopeful, Mr. Big pushed his box of Havanas at Leslie.

  "Cigar?" he said in English.

  "Can we film in Red Square?" Leslie said for the second time.

  Sure, you could film in Red Square, although the Kremlin is heavily booked years in advance.

  "What did you think of Dean Reed?" I finally said.

  Mr. Big shrugged his beefy shoulders. It had been Dean's ambition to play John Reed, the American who took part in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Around 1980, the director, Sergei Bondachuk had planned to make a Russian version of John Reed's life and Dean promoted himself for the part. Bondachuk went to California and, language notwithstanding, offered the part to Warren Beatty. Beatty subsequently made his own version instead and called it Reds.

  According to Mr. Big, directors were interested in Dean as an actor, but only up to a point. Dean would only work for hard currency. "We'd love to use you," directors would say, "but currency is what we lack."

  As I pushed the conversation in the direction of Bloody Heart and as Mr. Big watched Leslie, trying to decipher his intentions, the door opened and a man, maybe sixty-five, ambled in. He wore a shiny blue suit, a greasy yellow shirt and a tie that might have come from a Soviet production of Guys and Dolls. He looked like Harry the Horse. Like Mr. Big he didn't offer his name.

  Harry slumped into a chair. His back permanently curved, as if he'd spent too much time shooting craps, he held his cigarette between this thumb and his forefinger. In preparing Bloody Heart, Dean had come to Mosfilm to look for costumes and Harry the Horse was his minder.

  Harry accepted a Marlboro from me.

  Mr Big said, "Dean wasn't such a big star, but the young girls were crazy about his looks. He became in the end a little bit yesterday's man. Many actors are gifted, but stupid. Dean saw what was going on. Dean was not stupid."

  Realizing that no money would change hands that day, Mr. Big lost interest in us and looked at his watch. Harry the Horse took charge.

  "You would like to see studio?"

  It smelled of make-up and cigarette smoke. We traipsed across a sound stage at Mosfilm with a set for a fairy tale that was in production. Mismatched green plastic leaves dangled from Styrofoam trees and a few actresses in pink tulle smoked cigarettes. The cameras were as big as dinosaurs, the lights as big as tanks.

  In the make-up department, a group of women in cotton smocks and hairnets worked silently with pots of paint and powder. Like everywhere else in the country, there were shortages in the movie business. Good blood, stage blood, was hard to come by. The youngest girl in the room had a Walkman on and she jiggled to the music while she worked. Across the room in a glass case were a pair of false limbs, the exquisite work of the prosthetics team; in another case was Rasputin's wig.

  The costumes were stored in a separate warehouse. In one section alone there were hundreds of military uniforms and, at the end of every rack, a detailed diagram of the uniforms it held, including the period, the size, and the rank and order of the soldier or officer in question. The Nazi uniforms were crowded together. They looked old and smelled stale, and for a minute I had the feeling they weren't costumes but captured uniforms. German caps were piled on a shelf; black and brown leather gloves lay in tidy pairs in a carton on the floor; in another, larger box, jackboots, tied together by their laces, were neatly stacked.

  I had to get some air. We went out into the snow where, clutching his pack of Marlboros, Harry the Horse escorted us to the back lot and left us there underneath a gallows with a rope dangling from a post. Next door was the London Street with quaint shop fronts and nineteenth-century signs; it was falling down; Baker Street had begun to rot.

  Out in front of the studio, our car and driver were waiting at the front gate. The driver looked like Karl Malden. Every day, he expected and we gave him Marlboros. Cigarettes, especially Marlboros, were like currency in Moscow. You could even hail a passing car - a regular car, not a taxi - by holding out a pack of cigarettes and the driver would stop and, after negotiating the number of packs, give you a lift. There was always a lot of debate about how many packs you had to hand over.

  I said to our driver, "You know what? You look just like a famous American actor."

  "So what are you giving me tomorrow?" the driver asked.

  I talked to more nameless film people in Moscow and a few were convinced that the final contracts on Bloody Heart had never been signed. There was apparently only one person who could really help, a lawyer who was unavailable until the end of the week. We passed the time hanging out with Art and Svetlana, and then the lawyer called and invited us to meet him at Sovinfilm, the state production bureau. The lawyer's name was Boris - he didn't mention a last name, just said to call him Boris - and we sat in the same conference room where Boris and Dean had negotiated the deal on Bloody Heart. Lilia Liepine was with us.

  Boris was the legal advisor to Sovinflim, he wrote the contracts and witnessed them. A nice man with a good smile, he had a head like a skull. He had been fond of Dean, he said. He had been really emotional after he died because he liked him.

  "Was the contract for Bloody Heart canceled?" Leslie asked. "Was Bloody Heart shelved?"

  Boris wanted to reminisce.

  "I have a friend who is very similar in appearance to Dean Reed - my friend and I were buddies in the army - so I felt friendly towards Dean," he said. "Dean was always enthusiastically welcomed, a permanent friend of the Soviet Union. Yes, he always had nice photos of himself in a bag, ready to deliver when anyone asked. He behaved himself. He was a good guy."

  "Completely?"

  Boris was a lawyer and he shifted into a moderate gear.

  "Dean was temperamental - he scolded, he shouted - but he was a good guy all the same," he said again.

  Boris reiterated what we already knew: how important Bloody Heart was to Dean; how he was obliged to take a codirector; how the codirector got cancer a few months before filming began, leaving everyone in the lurch and the film companies in East Berlin and Moscow nervous.

  But what about the contracts?

  The first Bloody Heart script had been approved as far back as November, 15, 1984. Boris dove into a large leather bag, looking for the contracts. Leslie and I waited, not looking at eac
h other. If the contracts had not been signed, if Bloody Heart had been shelved, it would have been the end of the road. It would make you believe Dean's death might have been suicide.

  We had been on the road for a year, looking for answers. I was impatient. I sat on my hands while Boris put aside his bag and knelt down to open the bottom drawer of his desk.

  "I've found it!"

  Triumphant, Boris emerged with a sheaf of papers. On June 10, 1986, the final contract for the Soviet-German coproduction of Bloody Heart had been signed by a Mr. Gerrit List, a representative of the German film studios at Potsdam. Boris passed the contract down the table to us.

  I stared at the bits of paper written in languages I did not understand, signed a few days before Dean died. Suicide seemed much less likely now. He had been working for years towards the movie and it had been given the go-ahead. Green-lighted. It was OK.

  Had Dean been murdered then? And why? It didn't make sense. None of it made any sense. Maybe it had been an accident after all..

  Boris shuffled more paper. Shooting was definitely to have begun on June 24 in East Germany and on August 11 in the Soviet Union.

  "Everything was set," he said. "Even the music director, who was from Prague. He was called Svoboda. Everybody in Prague is called Svoboda. Unless they are called prisoner," he added with a straight face.

  I didn't get it.

  "Svoboda means freedom," Leslie whispered.

  "When Dean died, everything was canceled," Boris said. "Without Dean there was no movie. He was the movie."

  Boris produced another piece of paper. It was a termination contract for Bloody Heart. It was dated July 15, 1986. The contract for the picture was declared null and void. Dean's body was discovered on June 17, so they hadn't wasted much time.

  The room was quiet. Lilia Liepine wiped her eyes. Vera stopped translating. Boris looked sad and for a minute he sat perfectly still, lost in some impenetrable Russian reverie. Then he smiled cheerily and packed up his lawyer's briefcase.

  "Things change," he said.

  23

  By 1988 there was a cooperative toilet with real toilet paper and piped-in muzak in downtown Moscow and for fifty kopeks you could sit peacefully for as long as you liked. People said this was perestroika at work, a sign of financial restructuring, the coming of a brand new form of private enterprise. You couldn't see it in Moscow's hotels, though. I knew someone who was thinking of making a documentary about them and calling it Hotel Fawlty.

  We were in the Hotel Budapest. My room had a drain in the middle of the floor and indolent cockroaches lazed in a puddle in the bathroom. Something unspeakable discolored the sheets and the only amenity was a green plastic radio beside the bed, which bore the mysterious sticker: "Inspected by Mildred."

  Leslie Woodhead's room wasn't much better. It had a large refrigerator that did not work. The orange paper curtains on the window didn't meet and, when he opened the window, they fell on his head. Vera Reich, the translator who had become a friend was determined to do better for us, so now we stood in the lobby of the Rossiya Hotel. It had 3000 rooms and a concert hall.

  When John Denver came to Moscow in 1985, he had played the Rossiya. People in the Soviet Union liked Denver for his music and his politics, though some of them made fun of his pimples. When he heard Denver was scheduled to play the Rossiya, Dean flew in from East Berlin on an impulse. He didn't have a visa, but he was Dean Reed after all and he felt he was a kind of soul mate of John Denver's. The officials at Sheremetyevo Airport kept him waiting and, by the time he got to the Rossiya, he had missed the show.

  "Why can't I be John Denver? I'm from Denver, too," he often said.

  In the cavernous lobby of the Rossiya I fantasized that Dean was alive and would come striding in. Laughing, he would make the crowds at the check-in desk laugh. But Dean was dead, and it was all just idle speculation to help kill the time, and all there was in the lobby of the Rossiya was a sign for Diners Club that read: RUNNING OUT OF RUBLES?

  As she negotiated with the reservations clerk at the Rossiya, outrage crossed Vera Reich's face. Then she turned to us.

  "Everything is fixed, you have rooms here," Vera said, wiping away her make-believe tears.

  "How do you do it?" I said.

  "I just keep talking until they can't stand me anymore, and I cry," she said, and then we all went upstairs.

  The Rossiya was so big that you literally needed a map to get around, but having navigated the corridors, we found my room and sat down there and drank a lot of Scotch out of the one glass from the bathroom. Vera talked about her memories of Dean Reed.

  At Vera's language school in the early 1970s, rumors began to go around that Dean Reed was coming. All through the school you could hear the whispers. Along the corridors, before class began, in the recess, at lunch, they whispered it: Dean Reed. Dean Reed.

  "Dean Reed is coming."

  "Like the Pied Piper," said Vera.

  "Was he good? Was he a good singer?"

  Vera grinned. Who could tell? Who cared! He was so handsome and he was wearing very tight pants. He sang rock and roll. He brought us this gift. He was American.

  "I guess Dean was also popular because he espoused socialist values," Leslie Woodhead said.

  Vera chortled politely.

  "What you must understand is that we believed the exact opposite of the propaganda," she said. "If the television said, America is slums, poverty, crime, we believed the opposite." It was what Vladimir Pozner had said. "May I ask you something?' Vera inquired delicately.

  "Sure."

  "How it is that some people in United States have joined the Communist Party?"

  I told her that everything was not quite perfect in America. I said that there were many people who were illiterate, hungry, and homeless.

  "But, surely, they are just bums," said Vera.

  For the time being, I left Vera to her dreams about the streets that were paved with gold.

  "I guess Dean's problem going home to America was that people in America weren't too keen on socialism," Leslie said.

  Vera said, "They're not too keen on it in the Soviet Union either."

  She pulled on her knitted hat. Vera was going home to some remote corner of Moscow and would pick us up the next morning. I thanked her for fixing the rooms and tried to give her a box of fancy soap, but she shook her head and refused.

  "This is my job," she said politely.

  Vera visited the West for the first time that year and she wrote to me to say she didn't care for the supermarkets in England because the variety of goods made her hyperventilate. What she loved most about the West was that relationships were not degraded by need. Vera loved the West for its friendliness. Eventually, she went to live in Arizona.

  The next day I met Xenia Golubovitch, a sixteen-year-old Moscow student who had met Dean Reed first when she was a little girl. Xenia, dark and intense, showed me the poster of Dean on the wall of her bedroom.

  She said in perfect English, "He was the embodiment of the whole country's dream about America. In their secret hearts, people have the American dream. The point was that they were trying to project the way they wanted America on to Dean." She pointed at the poster and read out the hand-written dedication on it: "'To Xenia, I thank you for your love and friendship and for your tears. Be brave, plus happy, plus truthful, love Dean Reed.' That's what he wrote to me when I was five."

  The poster had been on her wall all of Xenia's life. As a five year old, Xenia had seen El Cantor on television. (It was the story of the Chilean folksinger Victor Jara who had been a friend of Dean's and was murdered in the soccer stadium in Santiago by Pinochet's goons.)

  Xenia said, "I saw Dean Reed in a film about Victor Jara on Soviet TV and they killed Jara and I cried. They were such humble people and I have such an image of them and their ponchos."

  Her mother asked Xenia what she wanted for her birthday that year and she said, "I want to meet Dean Reed."

  Now she added, "My
mom dressed me up like a little doll and took me with her to the Rossiya Hotel where Dean was performing."

  "Do you want me to dance with you?" Dean had said to Xenia when they met. "What do you think of me?"

  "In my kindergarten, some people think of tables, some of chairs. I think of you," Xenia told Dean.

  Showing off, she had begun counting in English for Dean and he laughed and she nearly died of embarrassment.

  Xenia's mother Yelena Zagrevskaya was Jo Durden-Smith's girlfriend. After I had seen Xenia's Dean Reed poster we all sat down in the kitchen of the apartment and Yelena's mother made us lunch.

  Yelena was a brilliant translator and interpreter. Since our first trip in February of 1988, Jo had been back to Moscow a lot and he had fallen in love with it and with Yelena. In his cowboy boots, his big leather bag flapping on his shoulder, and a cigarette in his hand, Jo had become a familiar figure around Moscow.

  Jo was a writer, witty, charming, talented, and skeptical, though when he had left London for America in the 1960s he told a friend, "I have to commit myself to the Revolution." (He subsequently wrote a wonderful book called Who Killed George Jackson? It was about the reality and, most importantly, the illusions of the 1960s in America.)

  "The Sixties are alive and well and living in Moscow," Jo often said.

  Russia was his new love, his new discovery, the place where the culture was up for grabs and rock and roll was playing in every bar. It wasn't just that Jo liked to be where the action was - which he did - there was something about the Russians that touched him in the way that America had once done. It was nothing at all like the cozy, comfortable, middle-class England that Jo came from and that he loathed.

  In Russia Jo could lose himself. He loved it and he loved the people. He loved sitting around all night drinking and smoking and talking philosophy with poets. Most of all he loved the fact that he could claim the place as his own at exactly the moment when you could actually feel history happening. Here it was all over again, the 1960s: the politics; the rock and roll; the shifting values; the wild nights; the fabulous characters; the conflict between old and young; and the booze and parties.