Comrade Rockstar

by Реджи Нейделсон

  It was a Saturday morning when we met, and although he refused even a coffee - I think he wanted to get on with his shopping - he talked freely about Bloody Heart. By June of 1986, there were already ninety people at work on pre-production in Yalta and List was looking forward to the three-month shoot.

  "The Crimea looked a hundred percent like South Dakota!" he said with the tidy pride of a good production manager who has accomplished the impossible and reinvented the world: Bulgaria for Chile, the Crimea for South Dakota. "Riga was a very fine studio and I have developed very hearty friendships in the Soviet Union," he added.

  It was true. Everyone in Russia liked Gerrit List.

  Crossing his plump legs, he exhaled some smoke and I asked him if the trip to America had changed Dean. He nodded. "He was filled with impressions. 'My country is so great. People are so good. Politics are so bad.' He tells me Dixie will organize a concert tour. He says he wants to do it."

  Dean wasn't much of a singer, Gerrit List said and confided that he himself was a Dixieland fan.

  "Dean just played himself," he said. "In the beginning, some people asked, 'Why does he stay here in the GDR?' I think, and this is only my opinion" - Gerrit List put his hand lightly on his breast - "he stayed for love. For Renate." He added, "In the Soviet Union Dean was like God. Here it was no longer so. A lot of people felt he wasn't so big."

  I told Gerrit - he asked me to call him by his first name - that even in the Soviet Union his status had changed, that in the big record store on Kalinin Prospekt in Moscow by 1986 you couldn't find a single Dean Reed album. I mentioned that, at Supraphon in Prague, production of Dean's albums had dwindled almost to nothing. In 1979, 1980, and 1981, ninety thousand copies of his records were issued. With Country Songs, the 1986 album Dean had set so much store by, only a couple of thousand were sold and, after that, nothing. Gerrit List looked sad at all this.

  I remembered that Dean had told Mike Wallace that he had espoused the socialist way because it offered, above all, security. Not even the security of socialism could protect him from the defection of his fans or from his own middle age. More than anyone else, Renate knew it.

  25

  Renate was waiting at the front door of her house, smiling. On the lovely summer's day when I crossed into East Berlin and then driven out to Schmockwitz, the house and the woods looked as they must have looked around the time Dean died.

  The sky was blue. Boats bobbed on the lake. There was the sound of lawn mowers and the smell of new cut grass. A large man in short shorts and Dr. Scholl clogs appeared. His name was Hans and he had produced and directed Dean's television shows. He lived just across the lake.

  Just then a boat sputtered up to the dock behind the house and Sasha and his friends tumbled out and clattered up the walk into the house. Renate smiled and went to get them a meal. In summer, crowded with children and the windows open, the house felt much less lonely, though it had been summer when Dean died.

  Renate cooked for the pack of Sasha's friends and they gorged themselves while I talked to Hans.

  Yes, he said, Dean's popularity as a singer was going and he was sad about it. He knew that tastes were changing.

  But the kids skidded out to their boat, and Hans went away with a basket of strawberries that Renate had given him to his red Peugeot that matched the fruit, his Dr. Scholl clogs going 'clock, clock, clock' down the garden path. Suddenly it was just the two of us.

  Renate told me little things at first. She spoke in English that day and she told me how, when Dean's codirector on Bloody Heart got cancer, the blow was enormous. She showed me Dean's own copy of Bloody Heart; the script was painstakingly annotated in English in his schoolboy handwriting. There were notes about casting, but also notes about the best place to buy plastic cups in West Berlin, and you could feel Dean's immense weariness. He was the star, the director, the writer of Bloody Heart, and, still, he had to get the plastic cups. Real directors didn't buy their own plastic cups.

  On the floor several boxes lay half open and Renate sifted through them as she talked. After Dean died, she had received a telephone bill for 2800 marks or fifteen hundred dollars. She said that most of the calls had been to Johnny in Loveland, but I thought they were to Dixie too, and that Renate knew it because her voice was so bitter.

  Renate was a realist about what Dean's chances in America might have been. She knew that on the university circuit, with a few songs and the story of his extraordinary life, Dean might have made a small go of it. Dixie and Johnny wanted to turn him into a commercial pop star and take the politics out.

  "He was not good in that way," said Renate simply, lighting a cigarette and tossing back her luxuriant black hair, she said suddenly, "It was 60 Minutes. The letters." She foraged in one of the boxes.

  The night it was shown, Dean had been in Moscow and Renate couldn't get through to him on the phone and she was frantic. America had just bombed Libya. There was a lot of anti-Arab feeling in America and Dean dancing around with Yasser Arafat would not go down well. She knew what was in the program, even though it was broadcast only in America. My God, she thought.

  Dean came home the next day and, when Renate told him that 60 Minutes had been transmitted and what she was feeling, he went crazy. His mood went black. Everything was over, she said. "Kaput," she said now. Renate used the word kaput and put her head in her hands.

  Miraculously, it turned out for the best or so it seemed. In May, 60 Minutes sent a videotape of the show to Schmockwitz and Dean watched it and was happy. It was fair-minded, he thought. Dean was quite chipper. Mike Wallace forwarded a few nice letters that viewers had written. Dean wrote to Wallace to thank him and suggest that they work together for world peace.

  Dean didn't hear much from Dixie or Johnny for a while and it worried him a little, so he wrote to say he hoped the show had not changed their relationship.

  Did he suspect that Dixie was losing heart and Johnny was sitting at home, his butt burned over what he saw as Dean's betrayal? Dean whistled a lot and made plans, Renate said.

  It must have been in the week or two before Dean's death that the rest of the mail to 60 Minutes was forwarded to Schmockwitz by the CBS bureau in London.

  Renate shuddered, as if death had come into the room, and she wrapped herself with her arms. The letters! Oh God, Renate remembered, the letters.

  Every night, glasses slipping down his nose, Dean sat up in bed, reading the letters over and over and over. He read them out loud. He couldn't stop reading the letters that called him a traitor, a terrorist, and a fraud, letters that said keep away from America, no one wants you here, go home to Russia.

  Worse still was that not all the letters were inarticulate or written by crackpots or right-wingers. The cruelest letters criticized Dean, not for his politics, but for his hypocrisy, his ego; they called him an opportunistic man of little talent who could only make it east of the Berlin Wall.

  Dean wouldn't let go of the letters and Renate literally snatched them from him and tore some of them into little pieces. Even Victor Grossman knew.

  "Did Dean plan to defect?" I asked him the day after I saw Renate.

  "He didn't have to defect. He had an American passport," Victor said. "He wanted to go home. 60 Minutes was going to change his life, but it all went horribly wrong."

  "What went wrong?"

  "Dean thought he had done so well on 60 Minutes. Then Dixie - you've met Dixie?"

  I said I knew Dixie.

  "Dixie wrote to him to say, It's over. You can't come home again. You did so badly on 60 Mmutes, you blew your chances. Dean lay on his bed in a darkened room unable to function," Victor said. "His movies were less popular. This is a country of twelve million people and a lot of them began to dislike Dean. How long, in a small country, how long can you go around performing concerts? Once, twice, but the third time? Also people who were becoming more and more disillusioned with or opposed to the system here naturally didn't like somebody who supported it," Victor went on. "What
happened was that fewer and fewer people went to his concerts, and this troubled him greatly, I'm sure. He liked to be the star, and, you know, it's not so nice being a star playing in an empty theater." Victor paused."'By the mid-1980s, Dean heard the doors shutting one at a time," Victor said.

  Like Dixie, Johnny phoned Dean regularly to tell him how bad it was for him in America after the 60 Minutes program, after he went on the show and defended the Berlin Wall.

  Dean wrote: "Dear Johnny, I realize the problems that are now going through your mind, Johnny. You are in a pickle, as the cowboys would say. You and your friends and family met a guy named Dean Reed after twenty-five years of absence. You and your friends liked what you saw and heard. But then this guy named Deano goes and declares himself a Marxist or Socialist. By his enemies he is called a commie!"

  According to his own way of thinking, Johnny felt he was Deano's close good friend, and he worried more and more for him. He was convinced if Dean came back to America after the 60 Minutes broadcast, he would get his head blown off. Johnny spent a whole lot of time in his shed out back of his house in Loveland trying to figure a way to tell Dean what was what.

  Mona Rosenburg told me that, just before his disappearance, Dean phoned the house in Loveland very early one morning. She took the call. Dean asked if everything was all right because he hadn't heard a word, he said. Mona said they had all had the flu bad.

  Dean said if they were in any kind of trouble, he would come back there and fix it. During the whole conversation Dean acted as though someone was listening in, looking over his shoulder. Something was wrong, Mona felt, but she didn't know what it was.

  What did the call mean? Mona didn't know. Maybe Dean was looking for a reason to come back. But it was early in the morning and she was feeling lousy and the line was bad.

  Johnny finally knew what to do, though, and he went out to his shed and after a while came back to the house with a new song on a cassette.

  "I wrote a song for Dean and here's a kind of mystery," Johnny told me. "I've been accused of foreseeing Dean's death by writing this song. But after the 60 Minutes episode, after how shook up he was and how shook up I was, I sat down and wrote a song called 'Yankee Man'. It's about Dean. I sent it about two days before he died, and of course he never got to hear it. I've often wondered who over there got to hear it? Did Renate hear it? Did the authorities hear it?"

  Johnny sent me a copy of "Yankee Man." The song was addressed to Dean - to Yankee Man - and it said that even if he said he was proud to be an American, he couldn't tear his country down. That if he couldn't find "nothin' good to say about the USA," he should stay where "You are in the land of the Big Red Star."

  The song was Johnny's way of telling Dean that he would always be his friend, but that he was scared for him, that he wished "you'd turn yourself around." If he didn't, and he came home, someone might "place you six feet under ground."

  It concluded with the poignant line: "Yankee Man, you've walked upon the wrong side of the world for just too long."

  The package with the cassette was postmarked June 11, 1986, the day before Dean disappeared. It arrived in Schmockwitz after he was dead and only Renate heard the terrible song.

  26

  "Shall we eat?"

  Renate and I had driven from her house to a little camping site a few miles away, down a bumpy lane near the lake. It was dinner time and kids in shorts ran and played among the chalets and tents. Their parents sat outside and smoked and called them in to bed.

  It was a fine summer evening, humid, soft - the way it must have been the night Dean died. Renate apologized for the restaurant, but I liked it. It had piney walls and checkered tablecloths. The waitress smiled. I had a beer and Renate had champagne. We both ate dainty little steaks with mushrooms and Renate was still looking for a particular word in English.

  "I am missing this word," she said, grimacing, balling up her fists, opening a package of cigarettes, and then crumpling the cellophane.

  "Damn. A word. What is the word I am thinking of?"

  I asked her if she felt she could talk about Dean's death at all and it was as if something in her snapped like a rubber band that had been holding her together and then she couldn't stop talking. She hinted again that she didn't believe Dean's death was an accident, but she had to believe it because otherwise she couldn't bear the pain, otherwise it would have been... what was the word she wanted?

  There was no acting, it wasn't a performance, only a woman talking about loss in a flat matter-of-fact way. I felt like an intruder, a voyeur, desperate for her to go on and feeling ashamed of it. Renate's hands were steady when she lit her cigarette.

  In the last week of Dean's life, he had had what she called a heart attack. I couldn't know how serious it was because we didn't have an interpreter and the technical terms were hard to translate.

  Renate and Dean were at home in Schmockwitz. Dean was reading his script and making notes when he suddenly clutched his chest and sat back hard. He told her not to call the doctor; he was a week away from the biggest film of his life and it would have been stopped if a doctor got involved. They argued. Finally, he slept. The next morning, Dean wouldn't talk about it and it was that week the tension got worse and things escalated and they had the murderous fight about the lawn.

  It was how such things happened, Renate said and asked if I understood; I said I did. It had been a very hot day. The lake was filled with boats. The sound of the lawn mowers all across Schmockwitz gave off an insistent buzz. Renate asked Dean to cut the lawn and he refused.

  You know how these things are, Renate said again. Again I said that I knew.

  Dean had a bad temper and he was enraged. Renate said she, too, had a temperamental side, though usually she could balance things. On the day she asked him to cut the grass she couldn't - how shall I translate, she asked - stand it, hack it, bear it, how did you say? So there was the terrible fight about the grass cutting.

  Dean stormed upstairs to his study. A few minutes later, she followed and to her horror his door was locked. Dean never locked the door. Never! Renate knocked.

  "Please Dean, please let's talk," she said. "Talk to me!"

  There was no answer.

  "Please!"

  As if in slow motion, he opened the door and she saw him reach for the machete - a prop from one of his films, but a real machete - from the wall where it hung and then he held it and began to slice at his arm. He cut himself over and over.

  "My father was brave enough to kill himself, but I can do nothing," he said to Renate.

  Dean stood in his study and then slowly sank to the bed. Sasha ran up the stairs to see what was wrong, but Renate barred the door.

  "Go back downstairs," she told Sasha. "Go downstairs! Go!"

  Now at the little restaurant, Renate smoked and told me that Dean had only nicked himself. He made a lot of cuts on his arm, as many as fifty perhaps, but they were no more than scratches and there was no real blood. I wondered if these were the "Canuto's trial cuts" referred to in the autopsy report that Dean's mother had given me in Hawaii.

  Renate sipped her champagne and offered me a cigarette.

  What should she have done, she asked? Should she have called for medical attention when Dean wounded himself? Should she have halted work on Bloody Heart? But Dean... he, what was the word she was looking for?

  * * *

  On Thursday, June 12, 1986, Dean and Renate had dinner. Dean took a sleeping pill, as he had done every night of his life since he was twenty. They argued again, bitterly this time but not as violently as on the day when Dean had slashed himself.

  At about ten in the evening Dean called Gerrit List, who had just returned from Moscow. Gerrit said he had news about the contracts for Bloody Heart. It was the news Dean had been waiting for and he couldn't wait until the next morning when he would meet Gerrit at the studio. He said he would come over to his place right away. He was excited. He told Renate he would spend the night at Gerrit List's house a
nd then in the morning the two of them would go right to the studio. List's house was only a few minutes from the studio and the Reeds were forty minutes away. Dean would meet Renate at the studio, he told her. He had to talk to Gerrit. He couldn't sit still.

  At about half past ten or just after - Renate couldn't remember exactly - Dean left the house in Schmockwitz. He got in his car and drove away.

  On Tuesday, June 10, 1986, Gerrit List had signed the contracts for Bloody Heart in Moscow and then he flew back to East Berlin. He went to the studio from the airport; there was a lot to do on the movie. Special effects were in the works. Among the first sequences filmed would be a night scene shot during the day. The

  "American Night," Gerrit List called it.

  According to Gerrit, he definitely called Dean at home in Schmockwitz on Thursday, June 12, although the police reports recorded that Dean had called Gerrit. It didn't matter. They talked. They exchanged greetings and Dean said he was coming to spend the night with Gerrit.

  "We can speak and I can sleep, and tomorrow I am already at work," said Dean.

  "My wife was away, so I made up the bed in the sitting room," Gerrit List said. "It was not good manners of Dean to ask to stay over. He didn't ever sleep at my home before. It was not usual. But my family was on holiday and he wanted to hear the news." Then Gerrit added, "But Dean never arrived."

  When Dean didn't show up after Gerrit had gone to the trouble to make up the bed in the sitting room, he was mad. But he just figured that Dean had changed his mind again and went to bed. Or maybe he didn't want to phone the Reed house in case Dean had gone somewhere else. He was always going off on escapades. Gerrit wasn't worried. He went to bed. The next morning, Renate drove herself to the studio and Gerrit was waiting for her.