Comrade Rockstar Read online

  "Be Our Guest" in German flickered in neon on the Stadt Hotel. The doorman there loomed up out of the gloom, wielding his umbrella like a Kalashnikov.

  "Nein! Nein! Nein!"

  He was absolutely furious. We were not hotel guests. Only hotel guests were allowed inside. There were rules. He was the doorman. This was his door.

  "Go," he shrieked and hid under the umbrella.

  Across the square we found a forlorn espresso bar. Its walls were a sort of distempered duck-egg blue and the table tops were covered in scratched linoleum. But the Flying Pickets were on the sound system and the espresso machine, which had clearly been lovingly cared for, gleamed. It shimmered with the suggestive promise of sunny countries and laughter and good coffee.

  "Halifax," Leslie said.

  "What?"

  "This is Halifax, 1951. Where I grew up. The Bon Bon Coffee Bar on Commercial Street. You could listen to Guy Mitchell and Frankie Laine and Ruby Murray on the jukebox ... you don't know what I'm talking about, do you?"

  I ordered something from the menu. It was some kind of chopped beef on toast. Minced, minced beef, I thought. Leslie shuddered.

  "That looks like dog's vomit."

  The Dog's Vomit Cafe was how I came to think of the duck-egg blue espresso bar on the Alexanderplatz.

  "How could Dean Reed have lived here?" Leslie asked, his voice full of disbelief and some despair. "What could he have wanted badly enough to live in this bloody place?"

  East Berlin must have had something, something to entice a man like Dean Reed, I thought to myself. Maybe this was just facade; maybe it was too soon to understand. After all, I had friends in London who preferred East Berlin to West, who talked about the opera and museums, the Berliner Ensemble, and the socialist ideals. Maybe it was too soon for me to get it. People in the west sometimes spoke of the quality of friendship in the GDR, the way you could take the time to sit and talk because no one was rushing to work in a country where everyone was always fully employed. A couple of years later, however, when the Wall came down, everyone saw that what lay behind the facade was much worse that it had seemed that first day. Not only ugly, but polluted, impoverished, run by gray-faced old despots with a vicious secret police so ubiquitous that one in every three or four citizens was involved with it.

  Right now, though, I wanted a record. There were none in the West because Dean Reed had never played in the West or recorded there.

  On the Alexanderplatz was a second record store; in the drizzle, a line had formed outside it. A couple of muscular black American GIs, presumably stationed in West Berlin, passed us and held out their hands, palms up in despair as if to say, "They told us you could get cheap stuff here, but there's nothing to buy."

  I could see the record shop was almost empty. Still, our line of forlorn customers stood in the rain because you were not allowed inside without one of the orange plastic shopping baskets which were in short supply. As one customer left the shop, he handed on his basket to the next person in line.

  The baskets were too small for the records, though, I realized when I got one and went into the shop. The clerks didn't care if you bought anything either and they were irritated if you didn't have the right change; there was nothing much to want anyway.

  Right there in the dreary record shop, I lost whatever was left of my political virginity, of any vestige of the socialist fantasies I was raised on as a "Red Diaper Baby" in Greenwich Village. My mother had been in the Communist Party when she was young, and I came of age in the Sixties when everyone believed in peace and love and universal disarmament. Even in the late 1980s, I probably clung to some kind of sentimental version of it all. I had friends whose parents still stood up when they heard the "Internationale," in one case during a performance of Reds at the movies. ("Down in front," somebody shouted from the balcony. "We want to see them kiss!")

  So my absolute conversion to capitalism came with a small orange plastic shopping basket in a record store on the Alexanderplatz in East Berlin. Simple-minded, maybe, but the practical effects, the everyday results of a system, were always a lot more potent than any theory.

  Rock records were scarce in the East, though before long rock and roll would be the soundtrack for the revolutions of the late eighties. Swaying mobs with lighted candles would appear in Gorky Park in Moscow; the crowd in Prague's Wenceslas Square in 1989 would rattle their key chains like a cheery punk band to celebrate the Velvet Revolution; in East Berlin, as early as 1987, kids climbed into the trees near the Wall to listen to concerts in the West, or to look at the new Soviet premier who was a lot like a rock star.

  "Gorby, Gorby," the kids hanging in trees near the Berlin Wall would shout, as if the Soviet premier were that year's rock star. And, in a way, he was.

  Over that year, during my first encounters with the world where Dean Reed lived, I finally saw why. He had been a star. He was an American guy singing the music that everyone yearned for, the music that made you feel alive if you were young. It was the best, most joyful expression of the sedition which was the only way to keep from shriveling up in an oppressive society. In West Berlin, I met a man who smuggled synthesizers and cassettes past Checkpoint Charlie, not for profit, but as a gesture of solidarity with the rock and roll underground.

  In the record store on the Alexanderplatz, flipping albums methodically, front to back, in bin after bin, long after I had given up, Leslie scanned each cover and found nothing. Not for the first time that day I had the eerie sense that Dean Reed had never existed in this strange country, where the rules were made to fence people in, to make them conform, to keep them quiet. How could the exuberant cowboy I'd seen on TV have been part of it?

  Suddenly, Leslie whispered at me, "Over here."

  The album was titled Country Songs and Dean Reed's picture was on the cover. He wore a cowboy hat and he was smiling and he looked wonderful, full of life. I held the album. I touched his hat. I carried it gently in the orange plastic basket to the cashier, who glared at me because I didn't have the right change. I didn't care. Dean was real now; I could touch him.

  Outside, we located the rental car and climbed in and decided to risk the trip to Schmockwitz, where Dean Reed had lived. It was not on the map of places you were permitted to visit, according to the day visa printed on the stiff oily paper. All day we had discussed if we should risk it. But it seemed innocent enough, the half-hour drive into the suburbs, and Leslie turned the key in the ignition.

  I propped the Dean Reed album on the dashboard. My feet were soaked and I took off my shoes and hung my socks on the radiator to dry. Outside a thick mist, a kind of soaking drifting fog clung to the windshield. In an endless tangle of suburban streets, we got lost.

  Then, all at once, we bumped over the cobblestones into the village of Schmockwitz itself. I had assumed that Schmockwitz must be the Graceland of the East. There would, I hoped, be souvenirs, mugs and keyrings, albums and posters, all with Dean's face on them, maybe even a replica of his guitar or a talking Dean doll.

  We pulled up in front of a tavern, one of those Berlin pubs with lace curtains in the window. As I opened the door, the buzz of voices went silent. Everyone looked up from their food. I felt like an interloper as, in unison, a half-dozen hefty burghers stopped their Sunday lunch and stared at my bare feet. No one smiled. There were no Dean Reed beer mugs.

  Backing off, I got in the car and Leslie drove down a narrow road between bare birch trees. Slush spattered the window. The rain, heavy now, fell from a greasy leaden sky. We took a wrong turn. We ended up in front of a large building that was shuttered for the winter. A sign I could just decode announced that it was a Communist Party Rest House. The car wheels squealed and we backed out in a hurry. We were lost in the dark. The woods seemed to close in from both sides of the road. It was completely deserted.

  Paranoia turned on the projector in my head and the movie flickered into life: it was in black and white with a creepy grain and the pulsing soundtrack of an irregular heartbeat. Whoe
ver had it in for Dean Reed, whoever killed him, was somewhere down this road. Someone who was looking for us.

  We would miss closing time at Checkpoint Charlie; we were way out of bounds, beyond the limits of our visa. We would spend the night in an East Berlin jail among officials who were not only Communists but also Germans, and perhaps there was a small concentration camp still open somewhere ... that would be it, a small camp. Rigid with fear, I sat, watching my socks flutter on the radiator. I thought I heard the wail of a German police car siren rise and fall. It was coming closer.

  6A Schmockwitzer Damm was a low-lying, white stucco house with an orange tiled roof, a garage, a lawn. A large carved wooden R was perched on a post in the yard as if it were a ranch: the Double-R ranch; the Dean Reed Dude Ranch of Schmockwitz.

  On the other side of the house from the road was a stretch of lake the color of tin, where Dean Reed's body lay for four days before it had been dragged to shore in June of 1986. The place felt deserted, lonely, desolate.

  I took the newspaper clippings out of my bag and read the article by Russell Miller, a British journalist. Miller, by chance, had arranged to interview Dean Reed for a magazine the weekend he died. From West Berlin, where Miller was staying, he had called the house at Schmockwitz. The interview was scheduled for the next day, but Mrs. Reed told him that Dean was ill and could not see him. In the middle of the conversation, a man came on the line - it seemed to Miller that he had snatched the phone away from Mrs. Reed. He told Miller that Dean was in the hospital and that he should go home and would be contacted. Then he gave Miller his name and a telephone number in Potsdam. He was Mr. Weiczaukowski, he said.

  Puzzled, Russell Miller went back to London and, on the following Tuesday, when he heard the news that Dean Reed was dead, he called Potsdam. There was no Mr. Weiczaukowski at the number he had been given. He wrote a story for the Sunday Times, and so the mystery was cranked up. It grew and leaked and multiplied.

  "I have over 2000 scenarios," Dean Reed's mother would tell me. "And it's about up to 3000 now, I think ... each scenario brings up a new way I think he was killed."

  "I read something about maybe there being drugs, or that there were some political implications," a friend of Reed's told me. "I've heard the CIA whack," said someone else. "I've heard killed by a jealous lover. Or the KGB."

  And so it went. Eventually, the rumors spread so that nobody could unpick the truth about his death from the rumors. KGB, CIA, eventually I became hooked on the creepy network of conspiracy buffs. Already, for months, I'd been trying to get a fix on it, had talked to Russell Miller, who was as perplexed as I was. Now, finally, on this dank December day in 1987, I was here in this silent, cold place. The house was shut up. No answers.

  I said, "Let's go."

  It was wet and dark and I was frightened; we had seen the house. I wanted to go. I felt we were out on a limb with no backup, no way back if we got lost. But Leslie insisted on getting out of the car to take pictures of the house because, if he made a drama-documentary, his production designer would need them. He took his time while I sat in the car. It wasn't just for the production designer, I could see that. It was an obsession for him, this part of the world, this other place across the Wall. In a way he was addicted to Eastern Europe. It tested you and then you could go home, a no-exit with a revolving door, an adventure with a return ticket, he always said.

  "Cheer up," he said now, turning to take yet one more picture, then getting back in the car and revving up the motor of the car loud enough to wake the dead. "Listen, honestly, this is nothing at all compared to when I was filming a documentary about torture in Brazil."

  Down that country road, in the encroaching gloom on the other side of the Berlin Wall was where I seriously began looking for Dean Reed. The Berlin Wall had gone up in August, 1961, which was just about the time Dean Reed had left America. He never lived there again, and he died in this lake in East Berlin. Who killed him? Who was he? A true believer? A spy? Just a guy, an American with a guitar and great looks and a lot of ambition?

  Leslie drove a few hundred yards and stopped and got out of the car. I followed him to the little cemetery by the side of the road. A few wet flowers lay on a headstone. It seemed incredibly sad somehow that the dazzling American I'd seen on TV should end up in this lonely place. I bent down. On the headstone, in German, was inscribed simply: Dean Reed. Born Colorado, 1938. Died Berlin, 1986.

  2

  When Dean Reed was seventeen, he raced a mule 110 miles for a quarter. He did it on a dare, his mother told me, and he nearly dropped dead and so did the mule. Some people said it showed his tenacity and grit, but she figured it was just a funny thing a kid would do. Anyway, Reed won and someone caught him in a photograph. At the end of the race Dean's face glowed with triumph. Racing that mule was ambitious, brave, and hokey, and it had the feel of one of those old folk songs where heroic men in bare feet race locomotives.

  "I still have that quarter somewhere," said Dean's mother, Ruth Anna Brown.

  Mrs. Brown lived in a condo on the north shore of Oahu in Hawaii. I went to see her because I wanted her to tell me how her son had died. Instead, for a while, we talked about his childhood: how, born in 1938, he grew up in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. We talked about the mule race and she looked for the quarter.

  Hawaii seemed as far away as you could get from East Berlin and the Dog's Vomit Cafe. The islands were like a trail of denatured but delectable crumbs, nibbled off the coast of California and flung far away across the South Pacific. The sun shone, holiday-makers tanned their plump flesh, girls in bars wiggled their hips and their straw hula skirts, and everyone drank things from huge pineapples with pink plastic parasols in them.

  Up near Wahiawa, where Mrs. Brown lived with her fond husband, Ralph, the air smelled of pineapples. The fruit, whose smell made you giddy, grew on plantations that were as plush and tidy as wall-to-wall carpeting, but the mountains just beyond the fields were raw and imposing. The settlements had a breezy ramshackle charm, and on my way to Mrs Brown's, I'd seen plenty of surfers with heavy tans and hard bodies and pale vacant blue eyes lounging outside the bars and burger joints.

  Mrs. Brown got up suddenly from her chair and went to the windows, one at a time, fastening the wooden shutters, then closing the windows: There was a storm coming and you could hear the wind and somewhere a flag flapping in it like wet laundry.

  I liked Mrs. Brown. She was a handsome woman with fine, powdery white skin and hair, but she wasn't a fragile old lady. She was tough and funny, and some of the time she (Well, my goodness!) camped it up, her hands on her hips, full of self-mockery and good humor. Her back was straight and she wore a sweatshirt from the University of Hawaii, where she had just finished her doctorate in women's peace studies. At seventy-four, she was immensely hospitable and naturally wary, and she had an unbending determination to see right done by her boy who was dead in East Berlin. At first we made small talk.

  Mrs. Brown was no fool, Courteously, she asked who I was. Leslie Woodhead, who was there too, talked about the drama-documentary he hoped to make, and I mumbled something about writing for the Guardian and tried, shamelessly, to refer to my right-on past on various picket lines and peace marches. Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, I almost said. It was OK; Mrs. Brown got the point.

  "I had that child for a special reason. I always thought that Dean was born under a magic star," she said.

  Mrs. Brown sat on the carpet between the television set and a brassbound trunk. I sat beside her. The trunk was full of memorabilia. Every so often, she reached into it and brought out pieces of Dean; there were record albums and tapes, videos and scrapbooks, and copies of Dean's autobiography, a small book with dark blue covers, written in German. Everyone I met had a copy of Dean's little blue book and in each, on the flyleaf inside the blue covers, was an inscription in his big childish hand, invariably wishing the recipient peace and love and all good things for a socialist future. And then there were the photographs of Dean: Dean in his high sch
ool letter sweater, Dean and the mule, Dean with his guitar, Dean with his white Chevrolet Impala convertible. His mother next to me, his images spilled on the carpet, I began to feel I knew him a little; already I was thinking of him as Dean.

  She was rueful. In spite of the trunk, she felt she had so little of Dean left. She said that she possessed not so much as his belt buckle - Dean's widow would not give it to her, she said. So, - when a year or two later, the Colorado Historical Society organized the Dean Reed Collection, she was happy. Eventually I met Stan Olliner, the curator of the collection, a bespectacled man who carefully put on white cotton gloves before showing me the Reed archive, which included film scripts and pictures and diaries, as well as a plaster casting of Dean's teeth. Dean had always carried the cast with him in case he should break a tooth on the road, Olliner explained. "Dean was a pack rat, thank goodness," he added. "He literally saved everything.

  All of it had been donated by Dean's widow, Renate. She even apparently offered Olliner Dean's dog, Emu, for when the dog died and could be stuffed. Olliner said, no thanks.

  "In no way could I justify a stuffed Emu to the Colorado Historical Society," its director told the Denver Post. Mrs. Brown thought it was all perfectly wonderful anyway.

  "I think Dean's looking down and saying, 'Wow! I just knew I'd come back to Colorado, no matter what.'"

  All day long, as we sat with Mrs. Brown on her living-room floor, the television was on, and images of Dean - some from contraband videos of television specials he'd made, others from documentary films about his life - flickered across it. Pictures of Dean lay on the carpet in black and white and color. 1938-1986. I knew I should get to the point and ask Mrs. Brown about Dean's death, but it made me feel like an intruder. Anyway I didn't want to stop her from telling the stories that poured out of her in random order as she turned over the photos and glanced up at the videos and talked about her kid. I couldn't turn away from the images, either.