Comrade Rockstar Read online

  Comrade Rockstar

  Реджи Нейделсон

  Расследование причин гибели Дина Рида - американского певца и активиста, широко известного в Латинской Америке и странах социализма, но почти неизвестного у себя на родине, в США.

  В июне 1986 г. тело Дина Рида было извлечено из озера под Берлином неподалеку от его дома. Властями ГДР было заявлено, что Дин Рид утонул. Американские родственники заподозрили убийство секретной службой ГДР. Некоторые говорили о самоубийстве.

  Американская писательница - автор нескольких детективных триллеров - пытается найти истинную причину гибели певца, склоняясь прежде всего к версии его убийства агентами штази.

  Интересны зарисовки автора о перестроечном СССР конца 1980-х гг.

  Reggie Nadelson

  Comrade Rockstar

  Acknowledgements

  I'd like to thank Artemy Troitsky for his absolutely unique insights into the business of Soviet rock and roll and pop culture and just about everything else back in the USSR. Vladimir Pozner's special perceptions of the relationship between East and West were irreplaceable.

  Many others helped enormously during the writing of this book, and I'm grateful to all of them: Svetlana Kunetsina, Jo Durden-Smith, Yelena Zagrevskaya, Xenia Golubovitch, Anatoly Schevshenko, Renate Blume-Reed, Russell Miller, and Johnny and Mona Rosenburg.

  I'd also like to thank Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes and Anthony Wall, Alan Yentob, and the late Nigel Finch at the BBC. At William Heinemann: Ravi Mirchandani, Caroline Knight, Susan Sandon, Richard Cable, Cassie Chadderton and Emily Sweet.

  And, of course, Leslie Woodhead.

  Introduction

  More than anything, this is a tale from the Cold War. It began for me on a Sunday night at home in New York in April, 1986. I was only half-watching as 60 Minutes began and the little clock on the logo went tick-tick-tick and the title of the piece came up on the TV screen. "The Defector," it was called, and then there was Mike Wallace in shot, describing the piece, his voice familiar, resonant; no one in America has a more hypnotic voice than Mike Wallace, and he was talking about a rock star named Dean Reed. I'd never heard of Dean Reed.

  The man in the frame now was tall, slim, and improbably handsome, all that thick good hair, the blue eyes, the juicy lips and promiscuous smile, and he was strumming a guitar and singing "Heartbreak Hotel" fit to bust.

  I couldn't take my eyes off him. What made it so intriguing was that Reed appeared to be an all-American boy, yet he was in Red Square, being mobbed by Soviet fans, people plucking at his clothes, throwing flowers, begging for autographs - and this during the Cold War. People gazed at him adoringly and behind this big American, a man whose presence was obviously so addictive, so adhesive that everyone wanted a piece, was the Kremlin, heart of the Evil Empire, as Ronald Reagan who was President at the time called it. By now I was crouched near the TV set, transfixed.

  The scene shifted as Wallace sketched in the life. Born in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, in 1938, Dean Reed was an American kid with an itch for stardom. At twenty, he set out for Hollywood to try his luck. He had a nice singing voice and he looked great. One of his tunes went gold in Latin America and Reed, always restless, headed south. In Chile, he became a superstar. He also saw the misery in which most people he met lived, and he got politics. By then it was the Sixties and, like millions' of other young Americans, Reed was ripe for conversion.

  "Come with me, Dean Reed," said a talent scout from Moscow, who heard him sing at a peace conference in Helsinki. He took Dean back to Moscow and made him a star in the Soviet Union, where tens of thousands of kids thronged to his concerts. Dean, they shouted, Dean Reed!

  He sang "Rock around the Clock," he did the Twist in Minsk, he touched people and made them touch each other, and he radiated good health and good looks. His voice wasn't much, but he could carry a tune and whack a guitar, and all of it electrified the audience.

  On my TV screen now was a sea of young Russian kids, prim in their white blouses and Young Pioneer scarves, and Dean among them, giving off body heat so potent you could almost feel it through the television. And at his feet, the girls swooning, blushing, throwing red carnations and their neckerchiefs, as he swiveled his narrow hips and preached peace and love, offering them sex and politics and rock and roll all tied up together.

  For almost twenty years, he held the East in thrall. He was their American - their first.

  "He was the embodiment of the whole country's dream about America," said a young woman in Moscow. "He came and was a smashing success," a Soviet official said. "He became a celebrity. Here it was like it was with the Beatles for that time in England." A fan I met in a Moscow record shop said, "The girls, young girls, are crying, just crying, 'Dean Reed! Dean Reed!'"

  Reed's albums went gold from Berlin to Bulgaria. He made cowboy movies, Eastern Westerns with stand-in Indians cast in Uzbekistan. He played the radical circuit, too - South America and the Middle East. He sang "Ghost Riders in the Sky" to Yasser Arafat.

  Dean Reed settled in East Berlin, where he married an East German movie star, but he kept his American passport and he filed his tax return annually with the Internal Revenue Service. In fact, he was not technically a defector at all. He called himself an American patriot.

  Hard to remember now that, even in 1986, the USSR was still Communist - Gorbachev had been in power only a year - and the rest of Eastern Europe still practically invisible behind the Iron Curtain. It is hard to remember how amazing this seemed: An American rocker in Red Square. Fans clinging to him, throwing flowers.

  "Dean was as big a star over there as I'd ever seen anywhere," said an American friend who visited him in the East. "We were never anywhere without him being recognized. Every child, every old lady, everybody knew him."

  Artemy Troitsky, Russia's premier rock critic, remembered, "His name was everywhere. Our dear American friend, Dean Reed, was on TV. He was on radio. He was in the papers. His mug was even on paper bags."

  Six weeks after I saw the piece about Dean Reed on 60 Minutes, I saw his obituary in the New Yark Times. It was a short obit down the page that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't seen 60 Minutes. Drowned in the lake behind the house in suburban East Berlin where he lived, the obituary said. I wanted more.

  It was 1986, the Berlin Wall was still up, and information was hard to come by. I started making phone calls. Looking for people who had known Reed. Getting hold of clips from foreign newspapers. Waiting. Obsessing. After a while, a tiny trickle of material about Reed's mysterious death turned into a stream of speculation. Nothing firm. Nothing satisfying.

  "Accidental death by drowning" was the official East Getman report, but the follow-up stories concluded that this was pretty fishy. Dean Reed had been an excellent swimmer. He was in great shape. He was only forty-seven.

  The Cold War. Rock and Roll. Sex and Death! I was pretty sure that Dean Reed, the life, the way he died; had the potential for a great movie. I tried it out on Leslie Woodhead, a director at Granada Television who had worked in Eastern Europe a lot and a rock fan who had made the Stones in the Park with the Rolling Stones. I told him the story and it took him about two minutes to commission a drama-documentary.

  Then came a year and a half of research and, though the drama-documentar
y never happened, I wrote the first version of this book.

  The Berlin Wall was still up and information at a premium. Rumors ran wild. All kinds of people came out of the woodwork: people who had known Reed, or met him once, or slept with him, or said they did. Because Dean Reed was dead before I began, the tales were as often about the tellers, people whose lives were changed, made thrilling or terrible - or both - by their connection with Dean Reed.

  For every event, personal and political, there were at least two versions, sometimes three or four or five. Some people were difficult to reach or didn't want to talk. My own obsession was with the East and the Soviet Union. For that reason some of the people, Reed's first wife Patty, his daughter Ramona, who were extremely important to him, barely appear here.

  This isn't a conventional biography; it isn't really a biography at all. I think of it as a kind of travel book through a now half-lost time and place. My search for Dean Reed took place at the end of the Cold War, as the socialist empire cracked up and the monolith began to topple like those statues of Lenin pulled down by the crowds in Moscow.

  From the moment in June 1986 when I saw Dean Reed's obituary, I followed his ghost, trailing the evidence, mired in the big rich fruitcake of a life. Dean moved through it singing "Bye-Bye Love" with Phil Everly in East Berlin and Woody Guthrie songs on the Siberian Express, and making spaghetti westerns with Yul Brynner. He was part Forrest Gump, part political hustler, part American hero.

  Comic, triumphal, tragic, incredible, here were all the things about the East that I'd never read in any newspaper, these tales about music and style and sex and teenage life, about what rock and roll meant to them, about what the Beatles meant in the USSR. Above all, here was the story of the yearning for the West. Here was a Cold War sideshow invested in one handsome American boy from Colorado who, guitar on his back, struck out in search of fame and fortune and found it on the other side of the world. And even after I had finished this book and it was published in England and Leslie Woodhead made a BBC documentary based on it, the story stuck to my life. In 1999, I got a call from Hollywood.

  "I've sold your book to Tom Hanks," my agent said.

  And it was true, as it turned out, and eventually I met Tom Hanks, but that came later.

  Sixteen years have passed now since the Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989, and Dean Reed will soon have been dead for twenty years. So it seems like a good time to take another look at his life. After the Berlin Wall fell, I was able to track down information about Reed that I couldn't access before. Based on this, I reworked the original book, incorporating things as I saw them on the road in those astonishing years. It is now finally published in the United States for the first time.

  Looking back, what I feel most now is how exciting it was as late as the late 1980s: the still thrilling, still terrifying crossing over the Berlin Wall, the look behind the Iron Curtain, the sudden contact with the so-called enemy and the realization that, for many, all they wanted was our music. Give us rock and roll! Dean Reed gave it to them.

  Here was a guy who lived at the intersection of East and West, them and us. The crossing over gave Dean Reed glamour, and made him Comrade Rockstar.

  Reggie Nadelson

  New York

  February 2006

  1

  DEATH IN BERLIN FOR DEFECTOR WHO CHANGED HIS TUNE

  MYSTERY OF POP STAR IN LAKE: IT WAS MURDER SAYS MANAGER

  DEAN REED, THE SINGER WHO WENT EAST AND THEN WANTED TO COME IN FROM THE COLD

  The crumpled newspaper cuttings dated June, 1986 were in my bag as I climbed up the viewing platform near Checkpoint Charlie and looked down at the Berlin Wall on the first day of my search for Dean Reed. How he died, and who he was; most of it lay on the other side of the Wall that split the world for as long as I could remember. It was November, 1988.

  Down a jumble of gray streets fifteen minutes from the center of West Berlin, the Berlin Wall wasn't marked on a lot of Berlin maps, but it felt like the border of the world. Whenever I heard the phrase "Iron Curtain," in my mind's eye I always saw the Berlin Wall.

  I saw it for real now, in front of me, this curtain of fortified concrete, eight feet high, twenty-nine miles long, topped with balls of barbed wire, covered on the Western side with graffiti, splattered in the East with blood. I was on my way to the other side, to East Berlin, where Dean Reed lived and died, to see his house, to find his albums, to try to get a sense of who he was, this man who had haunted my dreams since I had first seen him on 60 Minutes.

  Dean Reed's death had been the subject of plenty of speculation. People variously believed that he had been murdered by the East German Stasi, the KGB, the CIA, and neo-Nazis.

  From the top of the viewing platform at Checkpoint Charlie, I could see not just the Berlin Wall but the other side. I looked at the unsmiling border guards in a watchtower peering through binoculars at the tourists, who looked back through their cameras. Between us was the dead zone of no-man's-land. A few months later, a twenty-two-year-old waiter jumped over the Wall because he could no longer wait, and he was shot dead. He was the last person to die there.

  On the platform near me, a West German woman was showing the Wall to an English friend. Turning to me, she said, "Do you think they shall take this down? They are sometimes talking so."

  "I hope so. Wouldn't it be great?!" I exclaimed.

  She smiled knowingly, tucked her beautifully cut blonde hair behind her pink shell of an ear, and shouldered her Gucci bag.

  "If they take it down, there will be trouble," she said. "First Turks shall come over, and then German nationals. These East Germans shall take our jobs. They will invade our department stores."

  That's what really got to her: if they dismantled the Wall, the East Germans might charge into the KaDeWe, denuding it of most of its 400 varieties of sausage and all of the handbags. She didn't have to worry. Two years later, on the Sunday in November when the Wall was sliced open and East Germans raced into the West, the New York Times reported: "The big department stores such as KaDeWe were closed, despite recently passed legislation that would have allowed them to stay open."

  "You know what I am thinking?" she asked.

  "What?"

  "If the East Germans take the Wall down, we in the West will have to build another."

  I climbed down from the platform and got back in the car.

  The line of cars moved slowly into the border crossing. Leslie Woodhead, who was hoping to make a drama-documentary out of the Dean Reed story, was with me on this first trip East and I was glad. He had worked in Eastern Europe a lot and I figured he was knowledgeable when it came to doing business in Communist countries. As we pulled into the crossing proper, passing from West to East, then stopped, a man pushed a little mirror on wheels underneath the car in front of us.

  "The spy's carpet sweeper," Leslie said.

  My stomach turned over as we edged forward. A pale border guard put his head out of his cubicle like a jack-in-the-box and stared into the car. I had never been to the East before, but I'd seen all the movies.

  The building where you showed your passport reminded me of a drive-through confessional; the young soldier, like an angry priest, snatched my passport, then snapped his window shut, leaving us to wait without any identity under a sickly white light in no-man's-land.

  Eventually, the guard returned our passports and we bought day visas inscribed on what felt like cheap toilet paper, stiff, slick, brown, foreign.

  Creep, I thought silently. "Have a nice day," I said, and the guard looked startled.

  Whenever Dean Reed went through Checkpoint Charlie, though, he apparently always said "hi" to the guards, and Hans, or Heinz, or Hermann, whoever was on guard duty, would go home and say, "Dean Reed passed by today." He was so famous that for years you could just write DEAN REED, EAST BERLIN on a postcard and it would get to him.

  The empty streets that led away from the border were full of potholes. The walls of the dank gray buildings that lin
ed the roads were still pocked with shell marks from a war that had been over for more than forty years. I was expecting posters with socialist slogans or banners or stylized graphics of Lenin's head, but here were none, only the crappy streets with half the streetlights broken, crumbling buildings stained by the insistent rain, and shop windows that featured maybe a sparkly nylon blouse or a can of Spreewald pickles or some fancy china no one wanted. Still there was something thrilling about being here; I had crossed the Berlin Wall. How could I have known then that, in two years' time, the Wall would be a pair of earrings in Bloomingdale's?

  "I want a Dean Reed record, please," I said to the clerk at the Melodia record shop on the Leipzigerstrasse, where "Winter Wonderland" was playing. The saleswoman, who had thick ankles and thick glasses, ignored me. I shouted at her the way you do when you don't speak a language and feel that if you say it loud enough in English someone will understand.

  "Dean Reed, please. Bitte?" I added and pointed vaguely at the albums.

  "Winter Wonderland" was more her sort of thing. It was the most popular song in East Germany that year except for "Baa Baa Black Sheep." "Oh Tannenbaum" was also high on the charts, but it was almost Christmas.

  "Dean Reed, Dean Reed," I insisted, my voice rising. A man with a little green fedora shot me a disapproving look.

  "Shhh," he hissed.

  The woman with thick glasses turned away impatiently, nodding brusquely towards the door, and so I began to speculate that, even dead, Dean Reed was a non-person, a subject not for discussion in this country where you could not discuss much, not out loud anyway.

  Outside, in the streets, the shoppers plodded by, their expressions dour and disengaged. On the Alexanderplatz, a brutal piazza big enough for an army to maneuver in, a wind came up and drove the freezing rain in slanted sheets against us.