Comrade Rockstar Page 3

  On the wall was a large glossy photograph of Dean; in it he was wearing a beaded Indian neckband and the eyes looked a little mournful. It had been taken not long before his death, and as I stared at it, I found myself dredging up a poem by e. e. cummings. The verse that I'd loved as a moony teenager came back and it reminded me of Dean Reed:

  Buffalo Bill's

  defunct

  who used to

  ride a watersmooth-silver

  stallion

  and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

  Jesus

  he was a handsome man

  and what I want to know is

  how do you like your blueeyed boy

  Mister Death

  Dean Reed was born on September 22, 1938, in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. It was one of a string of small towns on the fringe of Denver when Denver was still a cow town. Wheat Ridge was resolutely rural, not yet eaten by Denver's urban sprawl. Ladies put on their hats for a day out in Denver.

  "All we had was just a very small house and two enormous chicken houses at the back, where we kept the chickens," said Ruth Anna Brown. "We had a cow - I made my own butter and whipping cream - and a pig. I think the kids enjoyed it very very much. I don't think I did. I wasn't meant to be a farm wife," she said, laughing. "I never did care for those chickens."

  In Wheat Ridge, everywhere you looked were the mountains; everything was diminished by their presence. The Rocky Mountains dominated the town where Dean Reed was born; the mountains formed him. Sometimes during the summers when he was a teenager, Dean cruised the mountain passes at night; aboard his Chevrolet. He put down the top, stuck his foot flat on the accelerator, climbed the steep, curving roads, and, turning on the radio, sang at the stars. Sometimes, he turned out the car lights and steered by the light of the moon.

  All around Denver, the Rockies were the horizon, a huge presence, waiting to test you or trick you. The mountains could make you feel tiny, a scrap of nothing on God's turf.

  Dean went to the local schools and joined the Boy Scouts and the Future Farmers of America. At the local military academy he attended, he was good at sports, a keen gymnast, and a fine horseman.

  At Wheat Ridge High, he set the record for the mile-and-a-half cross-country run. In his senior year there was the mule race. Also, as his mother pointed out, he could eat more ice cream than any kid in town - all his life he was crazy about ice cream. In the afternoons after school, he worked at the local dairy. His ears bugged him, though. They were as big as jug handles. He thought they made him ugly, and he worried about getting girls. He got a guitar, figuring it would help get with girls, the ears notwithstanding. He played the high school auditorium; he played Phipps Auditorium in Denver; he played the Harmony Guest Ranch up in the mountains at Estes Park.

  Mrs. Reed stuck a video in the VCR. A documentary titled American Rebel flickered into life.

  "Dean's dad, Cyril," Mrs. Brown explained.

  Cyril was on camera, a big man with glasses. He talked about Dean's first musical performance, how he was a little guy in a big auditorium. He said Dean was called Slim Reed back then. He said he knew that his kid, that Dean, was scared as could be.

  Dean Reed always claimed that he had been a shy boy, an insecure boy who learned to play the guitar at twelve to help him meet girls. A more important theme of his life, though, was wanting his father's love. He had two brothers, Vern and Dale. Dale, the younger, lived in Alaska. Vern, who was a committed libertarian, lived in Seattle where, although he was employed at Boeing, he refused to work on military aircraft. Dean thought this was very brave and often boasted about what a good engineer Vern was. But Dean was not at all close to his brothers; most of all, he wanted his father to love him best.

  "Dean's father did believe in whipping," Ruth Anna Brown said. "And Dean would never cry. Which is very irksome to a person if you're trying to prove your point to them and they just sit there smiling at you."

  On film, wearing thick black glasses, Cyril, who had the politics of Genghis Khan, had cast himself as a lovable rogue; he was very funny. And in his way, Cyril cared for the boy, and the first time Dean got up to play for an audience, the old man worried himself sick. Still, although Dean sent his dad money for a ticket to come see him perform in the East, Cyril never went.

  "I had no use for those countries," he said in his corn-pone accent, laying it on good and thick for the cameras, and it was easy to see how Dean got his star quality from those two old country hams, Cyril and Ruth Anna.

  I'd heard somewhere that when General Jimmy Walker founded the John Birch Society in 1961, Cyril joined up. BETTER DEAD THAN RED. What sweet revenge for his son to finish up a dedicated Communist, if revenge was what Dean was after. Better dead than red. Poor Dean was red and dead. "Well, Cyril was a cantankerous creature," said Mrs Brown, who divorced him as soon as the boys were grown up.

  She searched for her spectacles, found them on top of her head, put them on and peered at the screen where there was a picture of Dean as a boy with some of Mrs. Brown's chickens.

  "Like I said, I kept them back in Wheat Ridge to earn extra money," Mrs. Brown said. "I never did care much for those chickens. Come to think of it, I didn't much care for Cyril, either."

  * * *

  The late 1940s, when Dean was a boy, and especially the 1950s, when he was a teenager, were, on the surface, triumphant and remorselessly upbeat, when any boy, even in provincial America, even in a place like Wheat Ridge, could grow up to be President if he tried hard enough, so long as he was white and obeyed the rules. The War was over, the country was on the move. Dean tried plenty hard. Dean practiced positive thinking. The Power of Positive Thinking by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale was the biggest seller of the euphoric fifties, when the country was in its prime and it was un-American to be a failure and small town values were practically a religion.

  The 1950s were a time when kids competed at hula-hoops; kids stuffed themselves into phone booths and ate goldfish; winning was what counted, but so did charity. Sometimes Dean got a little money for playing his guitar and, when he did, he gave it to the American Cancer Society.

  "He always shared that way," Mrs. Brown said.

  The soundtrack for Dean's teen years would have been peppy and bland, hit parade tunes like "How Much Is that Doggy in the Window" by Patti Paige and "Oh, Mein Papa" by Eddie Fisher. By the mid-1950s though, a whiff of rock and roll and things to come arrived, with Bill Haley and "Rock around the Clock"; and after that: Elvis.

  Anyhow, at first it sounded like a typically all-American childhood, the sunny uplands of life that Hollywood let us believe all good Americans inhabited. This version did not include racial segregation or Senator Joe McCarthy's House of Un-American Activities Committee or the desolating conformity parents preached to their kids.

  In Hawaii that day in her condo, Mrs. Brown suddenly looked up from Dean's photographs and said, "Dean's dad killed himself, did you know that?" She let it pop out of her mouth by the by, as if she did not want it to count for much.

  Injured in a wheat combine accident, Cyril lost a leg, and, in 1984, he killed himself because he could not afford a new one, it was rumored. Dean told reporters that his daddy had died because he couldn't afford medical care and he, Dean, deeply embedded in his socialist beliefs by then, never forgave America for failing his father. Again and again, he told the story.

  "Why didn't you give him the money for a leg?" one reporter finally asked.

  Dean said his dad was too proud.

  By now the rain was battering the roof of Mrs. Brown's condo. She stopped the video and left her boy frozen in time. She peered hard at him as he'd been once; forever crew-cut, forever smiling.

  Fumbling in her trunk of memories, Mrs. Brown was like a woman trying to get unstuck from a chaotic dream. Outside, the tropical storm smashed open the shutters; they banged incessantly against the window frames. As she got up to fix them, she lurched slightly, whether from age or grief was hard to tell, then she sat down
heavily in a chair, her legs falling apart a little. Leslie reached out to take her arm to help her. I wanted to ask her about the death. I wanted it badly. Who killed Dean Reed? I wanted to say. But the intrusion was too great, and, anyhow, she was well defended against it.

  "You about ready for us, Ralph?" she called out towards the kitchen to her husband.

  Ralph, who was wearing a Hawaiian sarong, was making lunch.

  "Give me a few minutes," he called back.

  As we set the table for lunch, I learned, among other things: that, right up to the end of his life, Dean could walk on his hands; that he whistled when he was nervous; that he could juggle brilliantly. He adored spaghetti and Skippy crunchy peanut butter, which Mrs. Brown sent him by mail to East Berlin; and turquoise was his favorite color (not red, he often cracked). He also had medical problems. As a boy - here she grew vague - he'd had some sort of major operation and by twenty he had ulcers and trouble sleeping.

  "He took a sleeping pill every night of his life," Mrs. Brown said. "But only one. He never took more than one sleeping pill," she said, and then Ralph appeared from the kitchen to say he was ready with the lunch.

  He was apparently known for his fruit salad and was a dab hand with pineapple sherbet, which he produced from a white plastic gadget. We sat down at the table.

  "There's a little something we like to do before meals," Mrs. Brown said.

  I froze. They were going to say grace and I had already attacked the food. I was embarrassed. I wanted to do the culturally correct thing. But Ruth Anna Brown just smiled her smart, wry smile and reached for Leslie's hand.

  "We like to hold hands and wish each other peace and love and friendship," she said.

  After lunch, the rain stopped and the sun twirled some droplets into a rainbow on the window pane. All around the apartment complex, which resembled a two-storey motel made of poured concrete, people were throwing open their windows, getting ready to go out to do the Saturday chores. There was the scraping and banging of front doors and car doors as the place came alive after the storm. Fit-looking old people in Bermuda shorts went outside, sucked in the fresh washed air, hailed each other, arranged dates to eat dinner and play Scrabble, and set off in their cars for the supermarket.

  In the late Hawaiian afternoon, we listened to "Our Summer Romance" on Ruth Anna Brown's record player. It had been Dean's first hit tune.

  Mrs. Brown said, "You have to understand, Dean always did everything he did for a woman. First he married Patty in Hollywood. Then Wiebke and Renate in East Berlin. But I guess you could say I was the original model."

  Mrs. Brown showed me a photograph of the Dean Reed School, which had been dedicated recently in East Berlin. She had also written to Erich Honecker, the East German boss, to tell him to change the name of the cemetery where Dean was buried to the Dean Reed Cemetery.

  "Dean knew Honecker. He knew everyone," she said.

  She put a video of Dean's last concert into the VCR and side-stepped any talk about his death.

  In a single spotlight, Dean sat on a stool on a bare stage in Germany, picked up his guitar and, a cappella, sang a song he said was for his mother. It was called "Mom's Song."

  Mrs. Brown's eyes filled with tears and Mrs. Brown turned away and then looked at us and said, "When I first saw that video, he was already dead and I thought he was trying to tell me goodbye."

  3

  In 1958, Dean Reed went to Hollywood. Somehow, during that long day on the north shore of Oahu, Mrs. Brown summoned up the energy to tell one more story and, as she told it, she was recharged because this was a good story, an exciting story, a family legend about how her boy sought fame and fortune on the road to Hollywood.

  In her hand was a blurred black-and-white snapshot. Dean Reed smiled up out of it. He was twenty and almost unbearably hopeful and handsome. In a white Chevrolet Impala convertible, big as a boat, he had a big stiff crew-cut and he wore a skinny tie. It was taken the year he left home for California.

  His father was not happy about it. Dean had been studying to be a meteorologist and then he just picked up and went West, and his dad, Cyril, was mad because he wasn't at all crazy about this "singing stuff." Dean had planned on becoming a TV weatherman after he finished college. But at the end of summer after his sophomore year and, instead of heading back to school, Dean went West.

  What the heck, he probably said to himself. He was pretty good with the guitar. He had racked up a few successes playing Estes Park, a resort town up in the Colorado Rockies. Dean wanted a look at the big time.

  Driving down the endless desert highway, he was having a ball, maybe singing or listening to the radio or day-dreaming. Anything was possible. Then Dean saw a guy by the roadside thumbing a lift.

  The guy - the bum, as Mrs. Brown called him - at the roadside looked forlorn and miserable. Dean, always up for a good deed, pulled over. According to his mother, the incident might have played like this:

  "Hop in," Dean said. .

  "Where are you going?" the bum asked.

  "Hollywood," replied Dean.

  Clocking the guitar in the front seat, the bum knew a good thing when he saw one.

  He said, "I'll tell you what. You pay for a night at a motel, maybe give me a spare pair of pants, and I'll give you a name of someone in the music business."

  Skeptical, Dean laughed. But he was a good kid with a good heart, and he thought, what the heck.

  Dusk fell over the desert. The neon came on outside the motels. Dean agreed to pay for the bum's room. He gave him a pair of pants, too, although it was his only spare pair, according to his mother.

  Mrs. Brown went on. "And this fellow said to stop by and see Capitol Records, and he gave Dean the name of a person to see. And Dean did. And what do you know? He was for real. Dean got a recording contract." Ruth Anna Brown beamed.

  In Hollywood, the Capitol Records building was pretty easy to find because it was built in the shape of a stack of records.

  Inside, sweet-talking the receptionist, Dean evetually got in to see Mr. Voyle Gilmore, who turned out to be the genuine article. The bum on the road was, in fact, a musician and a pal of Gilmore's from the old days. Gilmore was also a top producer for, among others, Frank Sinatra.

  Dean got a try-out. Next thing you knew, he was on the phone back to his mom telling her to come on out and sign him to a seven-year contract with Capitol. He wasn't twenty-one yet and his mother had to sign....

  "Come on out to California, Mom," he said, shouting because he was on long distance, which was still a novelty, used only for death and celebration.

  It was 1958. He was twenty. He had a great smile. He could shake his hips and girls thought he was very sexy.

  Dean's dad was mad as hell that Dean had quit his education and gone to Hollywood. Dean didn't care. He was on the move now, recording songs, appearing on TV. Now, on Ruth Anna Brown's television set, I watched a clip from an old program. In it, a girl bobbed on to the stage, her pony-tail bouncing.

  "How about everyone coming over to my house. I've got the new Dean Reed album and it's areal gasser," she said.

  The girl on the screen had the knowing look of a TV pro, even at fifteen. She wore a party dress with a big skirt and she had the calculated innocence of the 1950s.

  "But here he is himself in person. It's Dean Reed!"

  Bright as a button, he bounced up to the mike in that loose-jointed way that was considered slick, snapping his fingers, dancing, jumping. He wore a white sports coat and he had all the moves. He was quite polished; he knew his stuff. He was accompanied by a group of similarly hip boys, snapping their fingers.

  "I went to a football game and I never will forget that pretty little, pretty little, pretty little majorette," he sang as he smiled his million watt smile. The boys joined in the refrain: "Twirly Twirly," they sang. "Twirly Twirly."

  Then a couple of plump majorettes in little white booties came on and pranced around, tossing their batons, eyeing Dean Reed.

  "Twirl
y Twirly," Dean sang again.

  Leslie and I looked at each other; I could see that, like me, he could barely sit still he was so excited, that he wanted to say, as he did after we left, "This is it! This is the key. This is the root of the story, the beginning of the Dean Reed we've been looking for. He was on his way to being an early American idol and, if he'd stuck it out, he could have been, well, Fabian."

  "Dean's life, it was just like a movie," Mrs. Brown said, as she reached over to shut off the TV.

  For a minute I was silent. Mrs. Brown was clearly ready for us to go. I wasn't going.

  Finally, I said, "So who do you really think killed him? How did your son die?"

  "Well, I went to see one of their policemen over in East Germany, you can just imagine." Mrs. Brown was not as reticent as I had expected. "My goodness, he was a pompous man. I asked who he thought did it and he looked at me as if I were just plain crazy. I'll never forget it. He said to me, 'There are three things to consider. First, crime. Second, suicide. Third, accident.'" She hesitated. "Then he said, 'One. We do not have crime in the GDR. Two. We know Dean well and he would never have committed suicide. Three, therefore, it was an accident.'

  "So tell me this," Mrs. Brown continued. "If it was an accident, why was Dean pinned under the pilings of the pier in the lake? Why were his arms stretched out so that he was pinned in a Christ-like position? Why was he wearing two jackets in the middle of summer? Why?"

  Notions poured from her like hope: that Dean got into trouble because he knew something about Chernobyl - he had been due to start filming that summer in Yalta, which was not far away; that he was dissatisfied with the system - she had a letter from him as far back as 1985 saying so; that he knew things about Oliver North and the Contras. He was intending to call a press conference for the Saturday he died, he said.

  "There was always an agent assigned to Dean to do a 'wet job', in case he got out of line, " she said.