"Where is Dean?" she said.
Gerrit told her that Dean had not come to his house the night before and she got very nervous. He was angry at first; Gerrit was sure it was one of Dean's stunts. Dean was always doing stupid things on impulse, Gerrit List thought. On another film, Dean had disappeared for a while because he felt like a break or because he wanted to be in the mountains or for the hell of it.
"This is not good to suddenly make a holiday when everybody at the studio is waiting to work," List said angrily. He was quiet, but he was angry.
Renate did some make-up tests for Bloody Heart and then Gerrit sent her home to Schmockwitz to rest up and wait for Dean. In these things, as he put it, he was Renate's producer, too; it was his job to look after her.
Gerrit List was a mild-tempered man, but he was furious as he phoned around looking for Dean. He was also worried. Dean had called him the night before, and now it was Friday and he didn't know where Dean, his director and star, was.
Renate called Gerrit; he could hear in her voice she was upset. She said, maybe there had been an accident. Gerrit List drove to Schmockwitz.
Dean always drives so fast, Renate said to Gerrit. Maybe an accident. Gerrit picked up the phone.
He called Prague, where he talked to Vaclav Nectar. He made calls around Berlin, to Potsdam, and to a Baltic island hideaway where Dean sometimes escaped. No one knew anything. Gerrit's heart sank. He began to think it was an accident. He thought about a car crash. That evening Renate was so fearful that Gerrit felt he couldn't leave her. He drove home, got some clothes from his house, and then went back to stay with her.
It appeared that the police were not called initially because there was no reason to suspect anything other than an accident or that Dean had maybe taken off on one of his jaunts.
I put together what happened in the next forty-eight hours leading up to Dean's death from what Renate Reed, Gerrit List, and others told me. What happened was that for two days Renate and Gerrit sat in her house by the lake and called all over Eastern Europe, desperate, hunting for Dean. She was terrified as she surveyed the clutter of Dean's life in his study. She was sure he was dead, then uncertain, and then worried he was with another woman, Then she thought, "Please let him be with another woman, but not dead."
The next day Gerrit called a girlfriend of Renate's and asked her to come over because Renate needed help. Then the English journalist telephoned. My God! An English journalist!
"Did the guy from the Sunday Times reach you?" Dixie had written Dean.
The guy was Russell Miller. On his way through Denver earlier that year on a book promotion tour, the Sunday Times journalist appeared on a radio show. He was looking fot good ideas for his next book, he said casually. Dixie said it was she who had phoned in to the radio station to tell Miller about Dean Reed, although Johnny said he had called the station first.
Eventually, Russell Miller arranged to interview Dean for the Sunday Times. The interview was scheduled for Saturday, June 14, 1986.
Miller arrived in West Berlin on Friday afternoon, June 13. He called the Reed house, and Renate said that Dean had been taken to hospital that morning. In the evening they spoke again and she said the doctors thought Dean had an infection and he was not at all well.
Renate was presumably in a state of confusion and fear when she talked to Miller. The last thing she needed was a foreign journalist intruding on a personal crisis, so she tried to fob him off with an explanation about Dean being ill. At the other end, Miller suddenly found himself talking to a man who had apparently taken the phone from Renate. He told Miller he was Mr. Wieczaukowski, the codirector of the movie Dean was due to start in a few days. He confirmed Dean was in the hospital and might have to stay for several days.
It was Gerrit List who had taken the telephone from Renate.
"I was for these things Renate's producer, too," he said again.
The last thing he needed was an English journalist. My God! Dean is not at home, he said. He is lying ill in the hospital. Either in that conversation or a subsequent one later that day or the next, he told Mr. Miller the interview would be rescheduled. His only thoughts were to help Renate and Dean. In his heart there were forebodings and he had to get rid of Mr. Miller. He gave Miller a phony name and telephone number.
"I said the first thing that came into my head. I was Mr. Wieczaukowski," said Gerrit List, who didn't want Renate to have to deal with a journalist.
"My wife and I, we left Berlin," Russell Miller said. "And that was that, we left without thinking anything was wrong. It was only actually here in England on the Tuesday morning that I picked up the Guardian, I think it was, and there in the obituary column was Dean Reed, just a little paragraph, and I said, 'This is unbelievable.'"
Miller called the number Mr. Wieczaukowski had given him in Potsdam. A woman answered and said it was a private number and no one called Wieczaukowski lived there.
On Saturday Renate and Gerrit continued to look for Dean, still hopeful. Sunday was much worse, Gerrit said. On Sunday, June 15, the employees of the lifeguard station for the Zeuthener See and Schmockwitzer Damm informed the German People's police that an automobile had been standing about twenty meters behind the lifeguard station since at least Friday morning. The license plate number was ILT 8-05. It might have been there earlier, but they would not have seen it until the morning of the 13th when they came on duty. It was Dean's car.
After the car was found, Renate's mood changed constantly. Dean was alive, she thought; he was dead. She knew he was dead. She said it over and over: he's dead, he's alive. Gerrit List didn't know how to help her.
Increasingly distraught, Renate trembled a lot, smoked cigarettes, and was white as death, Gerrit said. On Monday a neighbor phoned. She had seen a lot of police cars near the lake. She had seen the Red Cross. Maybe Dean had drowned, she said. No, no, said Renate, Dean was a good swimmer. It was a shallow lake. It was high summer. He was a good swimmer. Please let him come back. Please. Oh God!
"I am missing this word," Renate now said again to me as we sat in the restaurant near her house in East Berlin in the summer of 1989. We sat late into the evening but it was still light out. "What is this word?"
We left the restaurant and walked for a while and you could smell the pine from the woods. Renate lit a cigarette and told me a story she said she had not told before.
Some years earlier, Renate and Dean had taken Sasha on a skiing holiday. It was a lovely holiday, Renate said. One afternoon she and Sasha were fooling around in the snow, playing and laughing with Dean.
He went inside the chalet to take a telephone call. It was the news of Paton Price's death, but Renate didn't know and she and Sasha kept playing and throwing snowballs and giggling together. After an hour she wondered what was going on and said they ought to go back to the chalet.
When they got inside, she found Dean fast asleep. An open bottle of sleeping pills was beside the bed; it was empty.
Renate ran to another chalet where she knew there was a doctor. He came back with her and looked at Dean and at the pills. He said Dean hadn't taken enough to kill himself. Just let him sleep it off, the doctor said.
Be watchful, the doctor added. Dean may wake in the night, he said. Dean did wake up. Naked, he stumbled toward the door; it was twenty degrees below zero. He was full of sleeping pills and he would have frozen to death if he had gone outside, said Renate.
"If you go out there, you will not only kill yourself, you'll kill Sasha and me," Renate shouted, pulling him back into the chalet with all her force.
It would have been a betrayal.
That was the word she had been looking for all day. Betray. Yes. Betray. That was it.
I waited. Clearly, Renate had never had anything to do with Dean's death, nothing at all. She had felt he was her partner, her lover, her man, as she had once said on a videotape. She had loved him; she still did. She had to believe his death was an accident, not a suicide. If it was a suicide, he had betrayed
her love.
Just before he died, in spite of all their fights, silly fights about mowing the lawn, he told her how much he loved her. If he then went and killed himself, it was betraying her trust. She was very fierce about it. It was something that had been preying on her mind for a long time.
We walked together for a few yards, along the rural lane near the lake. It was two years since Dean had died on a summer night like this. I looked at the lake. I said I hoped that Renate would meet someone else nice some day.
"No," she said. "I hate men."
It would have been a betrayal.
On the morning of June 17,1986, Renate's neighbor came across the lawn to Renate's house. Renate could see her from the kitchen window and went outside to meet her. The neighbor smoothed her apron awkwardly.
"I think they've found Dean," she said.
Earlier, at 8:20 a.m. his body had been discovered in the Zeuthener See. "It was approximately 300 feet from the lakeside," noted the police report. Accidental death by drowning was the official verdict. No one believed it.
27
In Wheat Ridge, Colorado, the telephone rang in house. A machine with Dixie's voice on it answered.
"Dixie, this is Ruth Anna Brown, Dean's mother. Damn this machine! You never call me back, but I guess you've heard the terrible news about Dean? Call me this time, Dixie," she said.
"Hi, Dixie. This is Johnny. Call me! For God's sake, Dixie, call me!"
A reporter in Leipzig telephoned Vaclav Nectar in Prague. His life in fear, as he put it, began with that call; the news made him crazy; he felt Dean's death was a terrible omen for him.
Oleg Smirnoff heard the news in Moscow on TV.
"Dean first, me next," Oleg thought.
In Paris, Erik and Annalise Durschmied were in the Metro and he was reading the Herald Tribune when he turned so white he looked like a man in the middle of a heart attack. When the train stopped, he pulled Annalise onto the platform.
"What is it?" she asked urgently.
"Dean is dead," he said.
In the little house where they lived, Wiebke told Natasha as best she could that her father was dead. Natasha had seen Bobby die on Dallas and she knew that Bobby wasn't really dead.
She said to Wiebke, "Maybe Daddy is not really dead at all. Like Bobby on Dallas."
Gerrit List was put in charge of the funeral: Renate was drugged like a stone. He sent her to a sanitorium, where she slept and slept. He organized everything. He notified the relatives. He received Mrs. Brown when she arrived. He collected Ramona and Patty from West Berlin. At Checkpoint Charlie, the daughter from Dean, as Gerrit called her, was weeping.
"My father is dead," she kept saying.
Patty told a Denver journalist that the authorities in East Berlin refused to let her or anyone else view Dean's body. It had been in the water for four days and had been partly devoured by fish. It was shocking and was not fit to be seen, the officials said. They were perfectly proper, but not forthcoming, and Mrs. Brown couldn't get much out of them. She said that the policeman she met with was mightily pompous.
"In the GDR we do not have crime," he said.
Eventually, the officials relented and days and days after Dean died - no one was sure exactly how many days - Patty went to the morgue. Renate couldn't bear to go.
In the morgue, in order to get a good look at Dean's body, Patty knelt down beside it as if she were praying. It was Dean's body, she said. She was sure. She told the Denver Post, "They were Dean's toes. My daughter has his toes."
Then the body was cremated.
Mrs. Brown had a lot of questions: If Dean meant to defect why did he take his important papers with him on the night he disappeared, but not his passport? Why was he wearing two coats on a warm June night? Why was he cremated so quickly? But it had been Gerrit List who gave the order for the cremation because it was the proper thing to do once the autopsy report was complete. Will Roberts, who had made American Rebel, the documentary about Dean, arrived in town and went a little nuts from grief. He said that Dean was murdered.
The night before the memorial service, there was some wrangling over the disposal of the remains: Will Roberts wanted to have parts of Dean sent to places he loved like Chile and Nicaragua. The women were horrified. Things were so tense in the house in Schmockwitz that Mrs. Brown couldn't stand it and went to stay in a hotel.
The memorial service was finally held on Tuesday, June 24, in East Berlin, the day that had been scheduled for the start of Bloody Heart.
All of the Reed women were there: Ruth Anna Brown, Patty, Wiebke, and Renate. They declared themselves sisters. They were all Reed women, they said, and held hands.
All of the children came, too: Ramona, Natasha, and Alexander, whom everyone called Sasha. Friends came from abroad, including Vaclav Nectar.
It was like a big Hollywood funeral with the bereft beautiful women, and famous faces, and powerful dignitaries who packed the hall and included the Deputy Minister of Culture, the Director General of the DEFA Film Studios, a member of the East German Communist Party Central Committee, the First Deputy Chairman and General Secretary of the German Democratic Peace Council, and the President of the Committee for Entertainment.
The service was organized by Gerrit List and his colleagues at DEFA and everything was correct, Gerrit said. It was a hero's send-off; Dean had been a hero in the DDR, honored, officially approved, supported, and loved.
Pink carnations decorated the hall and the overwhelming smell of the flowers made Wiebke feel sick; she had never been so queasy in her life and she thought she might faint. Renate was drugged like a stone. She used the expression over and over. She was up to six Valium a day.
Suddenly, Will Roberts got up, faced the crowd, and delivered a funeral oration. He said that Dean's ashes ought to be tossed across the oceans of the countries he loved. He said everyone should stand up and give a big hand for Dean and started clapping, but no one joined in. Gerrit List was mortified. It was not the way things were done in Germany. It ought to have been a somber occasion. There was a form to these things. But he rose, too, and began clapping and everyone else clapped now. It was surreal and a little macabre, the sober Germans in their dark suits, the Party officials, the Americans, all of them clapping for a dead man at his funeral.
As the service ended, Dean's peppy singing voice came over the loudspeaker. He was singing "Gimme me a guitar...' Many of the family stood and applauded. Mrs. Brown rose and said that Dean must be buried in East Berlin; here were his friends, she said.
To himself, Gerrit said, Please God, no more applause.
A hundred people went to the Reed house in Schmockwitz for coffee and cake. Patty was nice to Renate. Renate felt Patty had really helped her understand Dean's moodiness and was truly a sister. All the wives embraced.
"We are all Reed women," they said again to one another.
Mrs. Brown wondered why there was no candlelight parade through the streets of East Berlin for Dean. She couldn't understand why no one held a big parade or a vigil for Dean.
"Like they did in New York for John Lennon, she said.
When there were just a few people left in the Reed house, Gerrit finally went home and got into his own bed.
"It is all over," he said to himself and slept.
28
It wasn't over.
There were a dozen theories that grew into a hundred conspiracies. On June 18, 1986, an Associated Press item appeared on the obituary page of the New York Times. I read it at home in New York; it caught my eye because I'd seen the 60 Minutes piece on April 20. I couldn't believe it. That's the guy from 60 Minutes, I said to myself, the man who brought rock and roll to the Soviet Union.
The obit was short and uninformative, noting only that the East German press agency had reported that Mr. Dean Reed died from a "tragic accident." Then someone sent me a piece from the London Sunday Times by Russell Miller, dated June 22, five days after Dean's body was pulled from the lake. Miller described his e
fforts to interview Dean and his mysterious conversations with a Mr. Wieczaukowski.
So little news came out of East Germany that the mystery Miller reported became the basis for other articles, the centerpiece really of a web of theories. Mike Wallace had a stab at a follow-up piece but he abandoned it after a couple of phone calls. For 60 Minutes it was only another story.
Until I met Gerrit List in Berlin two years after Dean died, no one identified him as the disappearing Mr. Wieczaukowski.
"Accidental death by drowning," the official report read. No one accepted it, because it was intolerable: it meant Dean's death had no meaning. Only Gerrit List clung to it. He insisted that Dean had gone out on the pier on the lake because from the end of it you could see a bungalow on the other shore that looked American. Dean thought it might work as a set for Bloody Heart. You couldn't get to the end of the pier, though, without going through a corrugated metal gate, but the gate was locked.' According to Gerrit List, Dean had tried to climb it, flipped over, fell into the water, and drowned. No, said Renate firmly. That gate was always open.
Questions were raised about the autopsy. There was a Valium-like substance in Dean's blood. Enough to kill him? It depended. His liver was as enlarged as an alcoholic's, said the report, but Dean never drank.
Then I met Clive who was a British stringer for Time in West Berlin and he said, "You knew about the reports?"
"What reports?"
"They were pretty convincing, the reports I read about Dean having treatment for cancer in the last months of his life," said Clive.
There was nothing about cancer in the autopsy report, and the rumors spread and the mystery grew and any firm ground turned into a swamp. All dead ends, I thought. I couldn't get any real fix on Dean's death. And, why was Dean wearing two coats on a warm June night, if he was? When his body was found, Dean was wearing a jeans jacket Johnny Rosenburg had given him, as well as an overcoat. Or maybe just the coat. It wasn't clear.
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