Jo shuttled in and out of Russia. It became more and more exhilarating. Westerners flooded in: movie producers did deals; Western comics did stand-ups in Red Square; businessmen grabbed what they could - I met at least one business guy who felt salvation for the Soviet Union lay in potato chip factories. In Moscow, at least, Glasnost had also begun to liberate the Russians, not just from fear, but from nothingness, from the dead stagnant years.
The drama was all there, and the melodrama and the excitement and the theater, and people bellowed with rage and sometimes with laughter. Even the women who guarded the floor at the Rossiya Hotel were moved by it all and they smiled shyly and hoped you would offer them a lipstick or some pantyhose.
Jo was crazy about it. He was endlessly tolerant of the poets and musicians - I called them the Wispies for their chin beards - who could talk you to death, and for the hoods who could get you diamond earrings cheap, and the famous pianist with a marvelous dacha outside Moscow, who was a connoisseur of seven-star brandies. There was never enough talk, never enough late nights.
With Yelena to translate, Jo now knew his way around Moscow: he could get you into the Bolshoi Ballet through the back door, where a man waited to ply you with cakes and sweet champagne; he knew where to buy a good steak; he knew everyone in Moscow and everyone knew Jo.
Like any number of Westerners before him, George Bernard Shaw and Paul Robeson and folk singers and hippies and artists and spies, Jo was seduced by Russia.
"The Sixties are alive and well and living in Moscow," Jo said and I repeated it portentously to anyone who would listen.
I gave Yelena's mother a box of scented soap and she went into the other room with it and through a half-open door I saw her perusing the label carefully, decoding the legend of this box from New York City.
Like everyone, the family hoarded stuff, and the kitchen where we ate lunch was strewn in profligate disarray with shortbread, Scotch, and Chanel nail polish.
We ate lunch. We ate stroganoff, kasha, pickles, eggplant, cabbage, cookies, chocolate cake, and bread and butter, and drank beer, wine, and whisky and soda.
Xenia ate and then she talked about the last time she had seen Dean Reed. It was in 1986 at the Olympic Velodrome at Krylatoskoye, which was Stas Namin's old discotheque. Suddenly, Stas himself had appeared. He clapped for attention.
"We have a friend here. We have the famous Dean Reed," Stas said.
Xenia went on. "There was an uncomfortable silence and, half a beat too late, the crowd obediently rushed towards Dean, who strode into the spotlight. From his pocket, Dean took pictures of himself and began signing them, handing them out to the dancers in the club, who took them politely."
Sitting on a box that held the equipment that made smoke for the disco, Xenia had watched, a little aloof.
Now she said, "Once he was handsome, and he was trying to keep his romantic American image," she said. "But he realized the game was over. It reminded me of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, The Last Beauty of the Self."
An intense feeling of sadness had come over Xenia. That night in the discotheque Dean reminded her of her grandfather who could not face the truth.
"Grandpa grew up under Stalin. Grandpa was a spy during the War. When he worked for the KGB, he felt it was real and virtuous. If you take their work away, men like this have nothing. In the end, he had nothing to live for. He was just like Dean Reed. Grandpa was a true believer."
That same night in the discotheque Dean asked Xenia, "What do young people really feel?"
"My attitudes had changed, of course," Xenia said. "We are the small brothers and sisters of Boris Grebenshikov. We had all our principles changed. We have none left."
"Why did you keep Dean's poster on your bedroom wall?"
"He was a hero created by publicity and I understood all the power in this country is shit, but I believed that he believed. When I heard he had died, I was not surprised. I thought: everyone has to pay. But the poster was a bright impression of my childhood. Dean was our first American."
Xenia remembered thinking as she looked at Dean that night in the disco that time had passed quickly and he had not noticed and now it was too late.
"I thought he was the saddest man I ever saw," she said. "I saw how all these fake rock and roll teenagers started smiling, as if to say: We don't have anything in common with this silly, pro-Soviet bullshit. But then it betrayed the slavery of the whole thing. They, they started massing around him. They rushed to him, not because they were sympathetic, but because there was this impact. What impressed me was he had this great big pack of photos of himself that he was distributing. And these photos that he was carrying told me a lot about him because it was the Dean Reed who is of no use to anybody. He is just lost."
"Dean bloody Reed," Art Troitsky said that night at the Blue Bird cafe in Moscow.
At the Blue Bird cafe, the musicians, in their wide-boy pinstripes, like visitors from the past, produced the poignant ripple of "Autumn in New York." It had been a famous rock venue and was now a jazz club and the smoke was thick. Crowded around the little tables in the cellar, the jazz fans, like jazz fans everywhere, bobbled their heads knowingly over their black turtleneck sweaters.
The introductions were in English. "English is the language of jazz," said the manager.
"Jazz is the language of democracy," said the tenor sax player who called himself Alexander Mouscou and whose hero was Charlie Parker. Mournfully, he returned to the stage, where he played "Moonlight in Vermont" for us.
From the next table, a man with a hard face hailed us and said that he had been to jail once for listening to Willis Connover's Jazz Hour on the Voice of America; not for the first time, I thought ruefully about my own naive leftie adolescent contempt for the Voice of America. The arm of imperialist 'Amerika', we called it. In Moscow, I discovered that jazz and rock and roll on the Voice of America had been so important, people felt it was the only thing that had made them feel alive. Like Dean Reed, I had been a sucker for an ideology.
"Dean bloody Reed." Art was mumbling into his glass of Advocaat.
From the moment Art Troitsky had said, "Come to Moscow, I will introduce you to those who knew Dean Reed," he was the perfect guide. He stage-managed everything, producing girl, friends, rock stars, and information. He translated brilliantly. He was intelligent, cynical, and smart, and he was always surprising, his views complex and unexpected. He was tough, cosmopolitan, and urbane. He hated nationalism. Art didn't need some crummy clod of earth to claim as a home and he rarely went on about his Russian roots: his home was wherever his friends were. I had recognized all this in him almost from the beginning, because he seemed to me a kind of metaphorical New Yorker, though maybe that was just fantasy on my part. Art had also been an impeccable reporter: objective, candid, and precise. Now in the Blue Bird he raised his glass, drank it dry, and a stream of venom poured out of him.
"Dean Reed was a bastard," Art said quietly. "At first everyone welcomed him. He looked like an American and he sang like one. In the early Seventies drastic changes happened. The generation of young Soviets split into the Stupids or Rednecks and the Non-Stupids or Underground. For another decade Dean was cheered by the Rednecks for whom he remained the only real star."
"Rednecks?"
"The working class and peasant young people who took what culture they were given by the state. Dean Reed was like a token American on Soviet TV. Dean Reed was all there was.
"The Rednecks believed what they were told by the Soviet media - that Dean Reed was very big in America but that he sacrificed his popularity in the US after discovering Communist ideals. We understood he was nothing in America... I personally realized that quite well. I read books, I followed the music charts. A fucking American Soviet traitor." Art said and sat up very straight and spoke softly, but he was furious.
"I shared the one hundred percent ironic and despising view of him which existed in the Soviet underground. He was a traitor to our rock and roll idea because we sim
ply could not understand how a person who represented Western culture, which for us meant freedom, how a person who came from that culture, could be such a bastard."
Suddenly, I remembered a story about Dean traveling across the Soviet Union to give his moral support to Brezhnev's campaign to open new regions for development. Dean was an enthusiastic propagandist for the enterprise, but it was always a sham, a facade, a hollow endeavor, a Potemkin railway. A decade after the new railway lines were begun, nothing had changed; workers along the railway lines still lived in shacks with open sewers beside them.
Art said, "I think that after a while some people began to consider Dean a traitor, a traitor of the rock and roll idea, because, for us, a person who would kiss, really kiss, Brezhnev, you know, on the mouth like this, smack, really passionately, would never be a person who had anything to do with rock and roll. Brezhnev was anti-rock and roll. And so was Dean Reed. Any guy who put our rock and roll ideas into the big shit called Communism. A totally stupid person who couldn't understand good from bad, black from white, Brezhnev from Mick Jagger, and so on.
"He shakes hands with Soviet officials, appears in concerts with the most hideous Soviet pop stars, singing patriotic songs, awful patriotic Young Communist singers... For some, he was young, he played the guitar, he occasionally did something like "Blue Suede Shoes." For us, it is a betrayal. How can he be on the same base with all these small Communist Soviet bastards? He was on the one hand for rock and roll, and on the other for everything that we were opposing."
Art looked at me, ordered another drink, and said, "We couldn't understand because he was a person who digs rock and roll, wears cowboy boots, who was born in the USA, the land of the free, the home of the brave and Chuck Berry. He was perceived as the ultimate bastard. It was weird. It was just weird."
24
Towards the end Dean told Dixie that Bloody Heart was coming unglued. The money for the movie was late coming from Moscow. He said someone was following him. He said that he had plans to flee to the West. Once a week he crossed through Checkpoint Charlie to call Dixie from a telephone in West Berlin.
"I don't know my status anymore," he said. "I'm frightened," he told Dixie from a public telephone in West Berlin. "I am frightened."
He called Dixie every Tuesday from Schmockwitz and every Friday from the West. He was scared to death.
On one occasion at least, according to Dixie, Dean went into West Berlin wearing a false wig and moustache. He also used a phony name. But why? Why would Dean use a disguise? Why did he really cross the Wall to call Dixie from a public phone that stank of urine? It was the stuff of melodrama and Dean loved a good piece of theater, but this time he was driven by real panic.
Maybe he crossed to get to the Berliner Bank, a branch within spitting distance of the Wall, where he kept his hard currency account. A few weeks before shooting began on Bloody Heart, Moscow had still not committed the money. Johnny was angry. Renate was more and more anxious, worried, frayed.
Did Dean's love affair with America make him careless? Did he provoke the Stasi? Was somebody listening in on his phone at home? After a bitter fight with Renate, Dean slashed his arm. He told her, that unlike his father who killed himself, he didn't have the guts.
I found the phone booth where Dean had called Dixie and from it you could see the barbed wire and the Berlin Wall.
Leslie Woodhead had gone to make a film with some Pacific Islanders and I had been side-tracked from Dean Reed for a while by other work. I had come back to the story now, still desperate to know how he died.
The phone in the phone booth was broken. It was a hundred yards from the Berlin Wall. At Checkpoint Charlie the sour, pale guards were in shirt-sleeves, but nothing else had changed. Nothing would ever change here, I thought, not in my lifetime. It was the summer of 1989.
Even on a beautiful warm afternoon, the crumbling stretch of West Berlin had a doomed, uninhabited appearance. I had come back here because I knew that whatever killed Dean Reed lay across the Wall and through East Berlin and down at the end of the road in Schmockwitz.
In the weeks before he died, things got worse and worse for Dean. Anxious and exhausted over the contracts for Bloody Heart, he and Renate fought more and more often and his letters to America were punctuated with expressions of fatigue. He felt old. Incessantly, he looked for gray hairs in the mirror. All through the winter and spring, Renate had been unhappy about the calls and letters from Dixie.
"She's so insecure," Dean said to Dixie.
"She's a little girl, Dean. Don't blow it."
"How's your love life?" Dean asked.
"I don't have one. I haven't been looking."
"Paton Price used to tell us you can't look for that."
Over time the tension grew. When Dixie called, it was often Renate who picked up the telephone. She was always polite.
"He is home, but wait a moment, please," said Renate and went to get Dean.
"I had some problems with Renate today," Dean said to Dixie.
Sensing his bleak mood, Dixie said, "Pick yourself up."
"It's a little bit more difficult. It was your telephone call. She said we talked for one and a half hours. I said it couldn't be. She's jealous sometimes. She's crying now."
"I want to be her friend," said Dixie.
"I know she's scared," said Dean. She's not accustomed to someone sending so many letters back and forth. I tell her very often, but it doesn't help."
"You go on down and put your arm around her, go tell her that we want her," said Dixie but she stayed on the phone.
Dean had asked Dixie to write to Renate and months earlier she had written a letter. She wrote about American customs and how everyone would hug Renate; how Renate would like the climate; how she must not cut her hair because American men liked women with long hair; how she must not be sad.
In March, Renate replied.
She explained how certain conflicts between herself and Dean had come about. She talked, as she often did in those days, about how Dean had gone to America and fallen in love with his homeland, and how much she had missed him, but that she had had no picture of what he was experiencing. She said he had come back to her wanting them to live in America. It felt foreign to Renate. He said he had met a woman - Dixie - who would help him make a career in America.
She spoke frankly to Dixie about how much Dean talked of the United States, and how he spoke to her, Renate, unfairly about East Germany, her homeland.
Renate understood how he longed for his native country. But conflicts arose, and nerves were frayed. Even on a rare evening when Renate and Dean could be alone, he might be thinking of America. She added that she had known Dean since 1973 and that she loved him most deeply.
It was a desperately affecting communication and I felt for Renate who seemed stranded now. But she asked Dixie for a photograph of herself and said she wished for her friendship.
A week later Renate wrote again, a cheery note, thanking Dixie for her friendship and noting that she had a cold and could not kiss Dean.
Dean did talk to Renate about America a lot, about the special smell of Colorado, its blue skies and smiling people, and his longing seemed insatiable.
He seemed like a man sorting through his life, clearing things up, cleaning out the past. He visited Wiebke at her house, where on a hot day in spring she sat in her bikini in the garden, typing translations. Smiling, Dean pushed open the gate.
"I've been thinking things over and I want to leave a present for Natasha," Dean said.
He gave Wiebke 3000 Czech crowns.
"That's very generous, Dean," Wiebke said.
He said he wanted to see Natasha more often now because he was going to the United States in the not-too-distant future.
Dean said, "I want to come back and talk. Maybe I shall come back soon," he said...
"He never came back," said Wiebke. "I wish I had just wrapped away my typewriter and said, 'This is a good time, why don't we talk now?' But the moment p
assed and we didn't. That's the last time I ever saw him."
Doggedly, Dean continued his work on Bloody Heart, but he also wrote to his high school classmates, who were gathering for a reunion. He told them he missed them and felt it was not fair that he could not be with them at the high school Ole Gym, where they could play basketball. He missed the picnic. He loved hamburgers and potato chips. You could feel how homesick he was. I felt it more than I had ever felt his passion for politics. There was something terribly naked about this peppy communication with his high school classmates.
He wrote of his destiny and how it had taken him to thirty-two countries, that he spoke four languages (English the worst!), sat in prison, fought injustice, made his mistakes, and favored the human race over the arms race. He wished his friends much peace, love, courage, and happiness, and signed it, with an embrace, "Dean 'Slim' Reed."
Bloody Heart was scheduled to begin on Tuesday, June 24 - Tuesday because, as Gerrit List told me, it was bad luck to start a picture on a Monday.
In East Berlin I met Gerrit List, who was a producer and production manager at DEFA and had worked with Dean in East Berlin almost from the time he arrived. I got the impression that he had considerable power inside the film business.
I met him in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, which had become my refuge in East Berlin. List was a middle-aged man in an anorak and the gray leather shoes East German men seemed to wear a lot. He smoked Camels. With Dean, he had made El Cantor in Bulgaria and Sing Cowboy Sing in Romania. List could effectively manage the complicated life of a location; he could work in Soviet Karelia in winter and in Cuba in the tropical summer heat.
Once he had waited patiently in a Cuban port for a ship that was three weeks late because he did not have the hard currency to expedite the baggage by air - that was sometimes the price of working in movies. He had a nice time in that sunny Cuban port, though; "The Bay of Pork," he called it.
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