Comrade Rockstar Page 4

  "A wet job?"

  The scenarios of his death, as Mrs. Brown called them, came on faster and faster. She could handle something dramatic, brave, important, a death that had meaning. The only unspeakable thing was an accidental death. She whispered to me of the CIA. From her trunk she took a folder and handed it to me. It was the coroner's report on Dean's death.

  Back at the Kahala Hilton in Honolulu, I sat on my balcony - my lanai, as they called it - and watched people on the terrace below feed peanuts to the birds. Dolphins in the man-made lagoon sang for their supper. Holiday-makers, dolphins, we were all tourists locked in a palmy conspiracy of good times. In the souvenir shop were toy rescue dogs with barrels of macadamia nuts around their neck, plastic pineapples with clocks in them, and motorized plastic dolphins to swim in your bath.

  All of Hawaii seemed a comfy lagoon where old people, tourists and children relaxed in the sun. Everyone who tended to the visitors appeared as cheery as could be, putting on muu-muus, cooking pig luaus, driving pedi-cabs, carrying suitcases, selling nuts at the macadamia nut museum, working the army bases, frying McNuggets at McDonald's, dancing the hula, though a waiter at the Kahala Hilton restaurant did tell me that when Imelda Marcos came for lunch - she had her own personalized silver napkin ring - it was an awful lot of trouble. Security men had to be posted everywhere and local reporters came by to see what kind of shoes Imelda was wearing.

  There were a lot of realtors, too, selling real estate to the Japanese, who were buying up the islands even faster than the native culture was disappearing. Every hotel had numerous courteous Japanese on the staff.

  Much of the most desirable real estate the Japanese were buying was around Honolulu, within spitting distance of Pearl Harbor and the Arizona Monument. The sunken battleship, entombed in the waterborne shrine, preserved World War II in a plastic box; visitors, ferried out into the harbor to look at it, looked down fearfully and imagined the dead and dying, December 7, 1942, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Dean Reed was four years old.

  I got out the police file Mrs. Brown had given me, along with the coroner's autopsy report. These were the banal summaries of officialdom - the police and the forensic experts in Berlin - their brutal expressionless accounts of what had happened to a human being. It was labeled "The Final Report Concerning the Death Under Suspicious Circumstances of United States Citizen Dean Cyril Reed."

  Taking into account the autopsy and the criminal investigation, so called, the report stated that there was "no evidence of traumatic violence," "no evidentiary basis for suicide," that "the suspicion of crime has not been confirmed." Officials of the German Democratic Republic concluded: "It can be presumed that Dean Reed died by accidental drowning."

  In the grim medical log that was the autopsy, the only anomaly was a reference to "so-called Canuto's trial cuts... in a typical place as can often be seen in cases of suicide." The cuts were very superficial, the report noted. Nothing conclusive.

  Mrs. Brown was certain Dean's death was not a suicide. He had everything to live for: he was at the height of his career; he loved his wife; he was preparing his biggest movie role ever.

  Before I left Hawaii, Ruth Anna Brown called to say that she wanted Leslie Woodhead to help her produce a television series about the Reed family; she had a sort of American Upstairs, Downstairs in mind. There wasn't much I could do in the way that she wanted me to, so I sent flowers by way of thanks for her time. She wrote to say that she had placed them on the Korean Peace Memorial in Hawaii in memory of her son, Dean Reed, the American singer who died in East Berlin.

  She missed her son whose grave was on the other side of the world. So she made do by putting out flowers for him and communing with his spirit at a Korean shrine. But she failed to find the quarter he had won for racing a mule when he was seventeen.

  4

  "Dean did not kill himself," said Phil Everly when I met him in Burbank a week after I saw Ruth Anna Brown in Hawaii. "He was a good laugher and a guy that laughs does not kill himself," Everly added.

  After Dean got to California in 1958, he not only got himself a recording contract, he got a screen test and a contract with Warner Brothers, where he studied to be a movie star. Among his new friends was Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers and, according to Ruth Anna Brown, they remained friends for life.

  The day was bright and hot. Inside El Torito, a Mexican restaurant, it was dark and wonderfully cool. The maitre d' had a moustache and a red vest. I whispered that we were waiting for Phil Everly and he smiled. "Of course," he said, "we know Senor Everly."

  Leslie Woodhead was there; he was in California on business and, as a serious rock and roll guy, he wasn't going to pass up a chance to meet Phil. We watched through the window as outside Everly disembarked from a long, low powder-blue Cadillac with tail fins, and sauntered across the parking lot to the restaurant.

  A handsome man with a thick shock of brown hair and a baby face, he came through the door, removing his sunglasses as he walked slowly into the restaurant, ducking slightly to avoid the hanging plants. He looked around in a leisurely way, not because he expected anyone to pay particular attention to him, but because he was a man who moved slowly with that easy, hot-weather grace southerners often have. With him was a middle-aged man with a bald spot. They paused for a moment, conferring, squinting, canvassing the room.

  Phil Everly took the center of the floor naturally and, star-struck, like teenagers, Leslie and I fumbled towards him.

  Then Phil saw us. He smiled, walked forward, and stuck out his hand.

  "Hi," he said, "I'm Phil Everly."

  "Hi," said Leslie. "I'm Leslie Woodhead."

  The nice man with the bald spot was Phil's friend, Joe. Once Joe had played bass for Phil. In Phil's company, he'd once met Dean Reed, which was why he was there, I guessed, or maybe he served as Phil's entourage. Joe sold real estate somewhere around Burbank.

  Phil's had not been an easy phone number to come by, which had added to the anticipation. Getting it had required a couple of dozen phone calls back to London, to friends at the BBC, who once had made a documentary for Arena about the Everly Brothers and their reunion concert at the Albert Hall. On the phone, Phil Everly who had a sweet, southern wispy voice, had said he was seeing us just because he liked the guys from the BBC so much. He had had a nice time with them. He liked those English guys. But during the whole, long, boozy lunch that followed, Phil Everly never once mentioned the reunion concert. He never mentioned his brother, Don, either.

  * * *

  We settled, the four of us, in a booth towards the back and drank frozen margaritas out of huge glasses. Phil advised on certain dishes with the assurance and concern of an expert - this burrito or that quesadilla or whatever other fried, cheesy, spicy, tasty Mexican item that was a specialty of the house.

  Phil was an easy talker, and he described how, in 1946, his folks, Ike and Margaret Everly, took their kids and left Tennessee for a better life, first in Chicago, then in California. Their two boys, Don and Phil, were already making records together. In the restaurant in Burbank, a song ran through my head: "Bye-bye, love. Bye-bye, happiness. Hello, loneliness."

  As far back as 1957, the year they recorded "Wake Up Little Susie," Phil and Don were stars. But everyone wanted to be in movies. The studios, awed by the success of Elvis Presley on the big screen and terrified by television, which was a dirty word in Hollywood, grabbed at new talent wherever they could find it.

  "We had signed with Warner Brothers Records," Phil said, blowing out smoke from a Marlboro. "And in the process, we also went to the Warner Brothers Drama School," he added and said it was where he met Dean. "Dean was a real all-rounder. He could sing, he could act. I was a lousy actor." Phil laughed. "The acting class was taught by a man named Paton Price, and to know Dean you had to know about Paton Price. Paton was a real important guy for all of us," Phil said. "He taught us it didn't so much matter what your politics were so long as you used your art to further what you bel
ieved in. He was what you might call a life teacher," Phil added, "He was also a surrogate father for Dean who lived with him and his wife, Tillie, for a while. Tillie still lives here in Burbank.

  Paton Price was a man of impeccable liberal credentials. Although Hollywood had been badly wounded by the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the early fifties, there remained a sturdy left-wing community of which Price was a mainstay. A pacifist, he had gone to jail during World War II. A fierce opponent of segregation and, later, of the Vietnam War, he was a deeply political man.

  Anyway, clearly Paton Price was the first to influence Dean Reed's politics.

  In the booth at EI Torito, Phil Everly finished his drink and lit up another Marlboro.

  "I was about as far away as you can get politically from Dean, I guess," Phil said. "He was a socialist and I'm a Reagan supporter. But it didn't matter. You could talk politics, you know? I respected Dean's political views because Dean had political views that he lived."

  In interviews Dean Reed said he considered that the best part of his time in Hollywood was finding Paton Price, that because of Paton he acquired a life-long friend, and because of Paton he kept his integrity.

  Price was dead by the time I started looking for people who knew Dean Reed. The only pictures I saw of him were in a filmed interview. He had a tense, intense, intelligent face, a high forehead and a goatee, but he was dying by then and you could see the skull beneath the skin.

  He told his classes at Warner Brothers that you could not be a good artist unless you were a good human being. He told them that they had to dedicate their fame, if they were lucky enough to have fame, to make this world a better place to live in. Among his students, along with Dean and Phil Everly, were Jean Seberg, Don Murray, the Smothers Brothers, and Dick Clark. Dick Clark, who had gone on to invent American Bandstand, one of the first rock and roll shows on TV, became a very rich man. I wondered what he thought about Dean now, if he thought of him at all, but I couldn't get hold of him.

  In spite of Phil Everly's fond words about Paton Price, there were also those people I met over the months when I went looking for Dean who thought Price was a manipulative man, a mentor and teacher, but also a godfather who pulled Dean's strings.

  At Warner Brothers, in his acting class, at his house, which was a kind of salon for his students, Price always undertook to preach his beliefs. Because of Paton's teachings, Dean turned down the chance to star in a TV show that was coming up then; it was called Wanted Dead or Alive. (There was some confusion over whether it was a show called Killer Diller, about a cowboy who would rather sing than fight, but most people thought it was Wanted Dead or Alive.) Dean did not want to carry a gun on screen; instead of Dean, a young unknown named Steve McQueen was cast.

  On one occasion, when Dean was having trouble with his lines, Paton apparently told him he was having problems because he was sitting next to an attractive woman and both of them wondering what was under their clothes. Price made both of them strip naked and told them they could now both concentrate on putting some emotion into their acting. It embarrassed the hell out of Dean.

  I remembered Dean's mother's bitter words: "Most often, in later years when Dean came on a visit to America, he stayed with Paton and Tillie in Burbank," she had said in Hawaii. "Paton had a lot of influence with Dean. Paton blamed me for the fact Dean was a virgin when he got to Hollywood. Well, just what in the world did he think I could do about that? I think what Paton taught him, was he taught him about sex."

  I heard other versions - with Dean's life there were always other versions - about how Price asked Dean to do a love scene with Jean Seberg in class. About how Price felt Dean didn't know what to do and said to him, "You're a virgin, aren't you?" He took him to a brothel and got him the best prostitute, who was black. And afterwards the girl apparently said to Dean, "You're a natural." Or maybe that was only rumor.

  Along with Paton Price and his lessons, there were other requirements for the students who were contract players at Warner Brothers. Dean learned to fence and act and wear nice clothes. He and the other kids worked as bit players and walk-ons. When big shots toured the studio, they posed with them. Movie magazines pictured them dressed to the nines, the girls in evening gowns with big skirts, the boys in white dinner jackets, all of them smiling and dancing at restaurants and nightclubs like Chasen's or the Brown Derby. Hollywood wallpaper.

  In Hollywood, things were changing. A handsome young truck driver changed his name to Rock Hudson and became a big star, so it could happen to anyone. Universal produced movies made by Ross Hunter where the titles always seemed to appear on padded satin cushions and seemed always to feature Agnes Moorhead and Deborah Rush. On the screen, married couples slept in separate beds and starlets had their dresses glued to their breasts because a starlet was not permitted to show her cleavage, although she could show the mounds on either side. It was the 1950s. The Eisenhower Years.

  Did you hear the one about the Eisenhower doll? people would say. You wind it up and it does nothing for eight years. But the country was prosperous, secure and confident, and scared. The McCarthy period had only just ended. Fear of Communism remained; people were actually literally scared of it, especially if they were Catholic. The Church actually instructed them to pray for the souls of the poor commie children. They probably would have worried less if they knew how Nikita Khrushchev felt when he visited California in 1959.

  Forbidden to visit Disneyland, the Khrushchevs went to 20th Century Fox. There, they watched a rehearsal of Can Can, disapproved of it, and met the stars and starlets. Among them was Marilyn Monroe. Having learned a few words of Russian from Natalie Wood, Monroe shook Mr. Khrushchev's hand and whispered in his ear:

  "We, the workers of 20th Century Fox, rejoice that you have come to visit our Studio and our Country."

  As he flew out of Los Angeles, so the apocryphal story went, Khrushchev looked down and saw all the swimming pools.

  "Now I know that Communism has failed," he said.

  A year later, John F. Kennedy was elected President because, in a way, he looked like a movie star.

  Phil Everly ordered another margarita. The smell of Phil's cigarette was drifting my way and I was dying for a smoke. Shaking out the pack, he offered me one. I confessed I had just given it up. Putting the cigarettes away in his pocket, Phil said, "You're crazy if you go back to it."

  I played the scene in my head: "Want a cigarette?" someone would say to me. "No thanks," I'd reply. "Wow. You quit. How did you manage?" In reply, I would cast my eyes down and raise my voice.

  "You see," I would say, "it was Phil Everly who got me to quit. Of the Everly Brothers."

  Phil was a great flirt. I was having a very good time. The margaritas kept coming. Phil was charming. He was smart. He was articulate. He was witty. He had been in the Marines and was a Republican and listened to right-wing talk radio; it was, in fact, the first time I had ever heard of Rush Limbaugh. I was trying to reconcile just how much I liked him with the way I felt about his politics, which only proved how narrow, snotty, and provincial New York liberals could be.

  Leslie Woodhead had always loved Phil's music, too. He loved it in the way that Europeans have always loved America for its seeming glory days, for the open road, the neon and the motels and the diners, for Marilyn Monroe and cars with chrome and tail fins, and, most of all, for the music, the early sounds of rock and roll, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, Elvis, and the Everly Brothers. In a way it was the era that produced Dean Reed.

  I knew that Phil had visited Dean in East Berlin and I asked what it was like.

  "Dean couldn't go out of the house without being mobbed," Phil said. "Man, he was bigger than Elvis."

  "Was he any good?"

  Phil said, "You can't fool crowds that size, not anywhere."

  "Big crowds?"

  Phil smiled. "Everywhere he went and he looked great, he was in great shape and he could still walk on his hands. He was the same age as me and still doing that."

/>   "So he made out OK over there?" I asked.

  "If Dean was doing the same business over here, he'd have been a millionaire many times over," Phil said seriously. "I don't hold with socialism, but, hey, Dean put his money where his mouth was."

  Lighting up, Phil exhaled more delicious smoke and sipped his drink. Across the table, Joe, the bass player who sold real estate, was listening hard.

  "So who do you guys think killed Dean Reed?" Phil asked, and I realized it was the reason he had agreed to see us, to find out if we knew anything.

  Leslie recited the usual litany: the KGB killed Dean because he was wanting to come home to America; the CIA killed Dean Reed because he wanted to come home and they didn't need another commie agitator; it was an accident as the official report said.

  Leslie leaned forward. He was always brilliant at what I think John Mortimer once called the "fatal question," the zinger, the one that comes right at the end of an interview.

  "Or suicide?" Leslie asked very casually.

  Still, Phil wasn't buying it. "There's not a chance in hell that Dean would have committed suicide. A man that can't laugh, that's a man that kills himself," he said for the second time that day as if saying it again would make us believe it. He had the feeling that, towards the end of his life, Dean did want to come home.

  I said, "But he had his passport. He was a US citizen. It was easy. Why didn't Dean just pack up and come back?"

  "What about 60 Minutes? They are pretty much on the left," Phil said.

  "I don't understand. Do you mean 60 Minutes had something to do with his death?" Leslie asked, but Phil just shook his head and his reticence grew.

  "Let's have another drink," I said.

  Phil said no thanks, but he added, "Dean was real big over there, though. A big star. You couldn't go into the street without the girls coming up to Dean for an autograph. It was the real thing."

  Outside, the sunlight was blinding. Phil had to go back to work. He was making a new album. It was his best album yet, he thought.