Comrade Rockstar Read online

  In the parking lot, Phil and Joe shook our hands and smiled. We all said, "Keep in touch."

  Shading our eyes from the hot California sun, we stood on the asphalt that shimmered with heat and said goodbye. Phil shook our hands again. He looked just like the boy who, with his brother, once upon a time, helped invent rock and roll.

  Smiling, Phil Everly put on his sunglasses, climbed into the powder-blue Cadillac and drove away, waving bye-bye.

  For a minute I didn't want to go at all, as if staying on in that parking lot with Phil Everly could keep any more time from passing.

  5

  Dean went south to Chile on a hunch, the way he raced the mule, the way he gave the bum on the road to Hollywood his extra pair of pants. Movement was everything and, like a conjurer's trick, it blurred the reality. Life was a stunt, a gamble, a race to get to the big time, to the finish line, to the party, wherever the party was. Fed up with Hollywood - later he would say it was, for him, "a time of exploitation, a time of fear, a prostitution camp" - he simply left. It was 1962.

  He had heard that his record "Our Summer Romance" was a hit in Chile. He was fed up with getting nowhere, as he saw it, and figured he would set out on his own. Or maybe Dean was just plain restless, tired of being cast as a prop at Chasen's.

  In February, 1962, when he was still a contract player at Warner's star school in Los Angeles and had a few hits on the provincial charts, he applied for a passport, stating he intended to depart from the US for South America at New York on March 9, 1962. Did he go from New York? Did he catch a plane? Did he, as might have been the case, hop in his Chevrolet Impala and head south, to Mexico first, or had he already been to Mexico? It didn't really matter. What mattered was that he was on the road now, and though he came home to visit, he never actually lived in the United States again; for the next twenty-four years, Dean kept on moving.

  His passport was issued at the beginning of March, and, like all American passports in those days, it was marked: "Not valid for travel in Albania, Cuba and those portions of China, Korea and Vietnam under Communist control."

  On his application, Dean listed his "hair as brown, although people sometimes referred to him as blond and in some photographs he appeared fair-haired. His eyes were green, it was stated, although they always looked blue; everyone said they were blue. His height, it was stated, was six feet one. This became an important detail in the mystery of his death because there was a discrepancy in his height on various documents, and some people said this meant he was not dead at all. But that came later.

  Almost as soon as he got the passport, he left; he didn't tell his agent or his room-mate; he just packed up his bags and left the house. A few years later, he sent a postcard to Johnny Rose, his room-mate, saying Merry Christmas.

  Dean arrived that spring in Chile, in Santiago, expecting a modest welcome, perhaps from the local DJs who were playing his tunes on the radio.

  Viva Dean Reed! We want Dean!! Viva Dean!!!

  The blue-eyed god had come down from the north, and when he opened the shutters of his hotel room that faced the Presidential Plaza in Santiago, he saw a sea of up-turned faces, or so the story went.

  We want Dean!

  Even when he closed the shutters, he could still hear the roar.

  There was a OJ at a Santiago radio station; his name was Ricardo Garcia and although he dutifully plugged "Our Summer Romance" because the kids liked it, he did not think much of Dean's singing.

  On the other hand... on the other hand, when Garcia saw Dean in the flesh, he knew Dean was hot. The looks were something else, Garcia thought. Dean was very, very sexy, what with the big hair and the big white teeth. His looks were his most important asset. He was as handsome as Robert Redford, and some people thought him a dead ringer for Kurt Russell. He had terrific presence on stage, and warmth, and some ineluctable adhesive compelling quality that drew people to him. You couldn't miss it.

  "He was a naive gringo, who had come to 'do' Latin America," Garcia said. Like a character from a movie musical, Dean was called The Magnificent Gringo.

  I pieced most of the story of Dean in South America together from scraps. I never made it to South America. By the time I went looking for Dean Reed in late 1987 and 1988, the obsession, for me, was with the East. The Soviet monolith was breaking up and this was the hottest story of the second half of the century. Cracking like ice in the spring, I thought, but it was the wrong metaphor.

  Rather, it seemed as if, beyond the Berlin Wall, for decades Darth Vadar had ruled, evil, unknown, shuttered. Suddenly, you could look. Lift the visor and see inside. Every other feature story coming out of the USSR was about some underground rock band, or a concert, or a club. In the end, for the most part, the Soviets had not wanted to nuke us; they just wanted to listen to our music.

  Any drama-documentary about Dean would inevitably focus on the Soviet Union and Berlin, the East, and the Cold War. I was in pursuit, after all, of the man who brought rock and roll to Russia. South America felt like a sideshow.

  But there were plenty of people who remembered the South American Dean. By now I was plugged into a weird little network of people who had known Dean and who, energized by news of his death, sprang into life, electric with information or memories.

  I must have talked to a dozen of Dean's rememberers around that time, people hoarding their rich titbits of fact, tiny articles of faith, improbable fantasies blurred by memory. All of it added up to a kind of epic South American Dean: the sheer verve of his leaving home and heading south; his sudden coming into stardom; the gilded looks which people recalled; the political awakening, its naivete, its bravery.

  Chilean expatriates in New York remembered Dean's beauty as they mourned their beautiful country; an Argentine woman I encountered in a Los Angeles restaurant thought of Dean as perfectly raffine'; Marcello, a New York waiter who had once worked in a Buenos Aires television studio had seen Dean perform. Marcello had contacts in Miami who knew Dean and he gave me their addresses, but nothing much came of this.

  Fired up by contact with the star, they all possessed a kind of fatal attraction for one another. Every now and again, as news of our drama-documentary was passed along, the phone would ring and a friend of Dean's, or a relative, or a witness to the life checked in with stories; information, with a covert agenda, a mysterious whisper, a crackle of excitement. The most fabulous witness to the South American years, though, was a Czech countess.

  "I knew Dean Reed." A throaty voice inserted itself into my telephone.

  It belonged to the Countess Nyta De Val. At the time I met her, in early 1988, the Countess was a chanteuse in the nightclub on board the Greek cruise ship Eugenia Costa. In the video she sent me of her act she wore a skin-tight beaded gown. She sang in French. She claimed to have known Dean in South America and she wanted to talk. She lived in Florida, but she was on her way to London - to see her publishers, to set up her cabaret act - it wasn't clear, but I was headed for London, too. I was on my way to Moscow and there were still no direct flights from the US.

  I met the Countess at the Gallery Rendezvous, a Chinese restaurant in Soho, where there was a picture of Mick Jagger in the window.

  The Countess ate spareribs and said she had made Dean Reed a star. She was a cabaret star herself, she said, a well-known chanteuse, and her contacts in Hollywood had brought him south. In another version, she met Dean in a hotel lobby in Buenos Aires where he was having trouble making himself understood and she helped him out. She saw he had a guitar and had him play for her and felt that, though he wasn't very good, his looks would make him a star.

  About a year after "Our Summer Romance" went to the top of the Chilean charts, the Countess also noted, Dean Reed beat Elvis Presley in the South American Hit Parade poll, 29,330 to 20,805. Nyta de Val was very sure about all this; eventually, I found some newspaper clippings that supported the figures.

  An imposing woman of a certain age, the Countess wore a leather skirt as voluminous as a sofa. He
r head was tied up in a silk scarf and a hat sat flat on top of it like a pancake on an egg cozy. She wore several pairs of eyelashes and, as she handed me a photograph, she lowered them with the demure moue of a sixteen-year-old coquette. In the picture, she was on a beach in a bikini. She had a great figure. Dean was with her, and his body was great, too: young, lean, and lithe.

  "We were lovers," she said. "Women wanted him, but the men were not jealous. He played the nightclubs, he played the stadium. All his singles went to number one. He wore a light-blue... how do you call this Italian fabric? I got it made for him, I brought the tailor," she said. "Gabardine! A gabardine suit the color of the sky, very tight pants and he was beautiful," added the Countess, and ate another sparerib.

  In South America, Dean also got politics, which made the Countess unhappy. He saw the writing on the wall and it said: YANKEE GO HOME, sometimes literally. He was shocked. Like most Americans, in finding out he was not universally loved, he was hurt. It was his first exposure to what American imperialism had borne in South America.

  "I saw poor people crawling on their bellies with their last little bit of something for the church," Dean would say.

  He began to read. He wrote to Paton Price and Paton wrote him back, and Dean remembered the things Paton had taught and he set out to dedicate his fame. He wanted to save the world.

  "South America changed my life because, of course, there, one can see the great differences of justice and injustice, or poverty and wealth," Dean said in an interview for American Rebel, a documentary about his life. "They are so clear to see for anybody that you must take a stand. I was not a capitalist, nor was I blind. And there I became a revolutionary."

  In the same film, Cyril Reed said, "He was a normal American boy. And he went to South America. There he saw that ten or fifteen percent of the people were very wealthy, and the great majority of them were at the low end of the totem pole. It was there he began to get, not communistic, but socialistic ideas. There's a difference. Don't ask me what it is. But he can take ten or fifteen minutes and he'll tell you the difference. He did that to me once, but I forgot most of it." Which perhaps told you as much about Cyril's attitude towards his son as what his son felt about the world.

  Heady times in South America, with revolution in the air. Already a sex symbol, when Dean acquired a political agenda he was unstoppable.

  Within weeks of his arrival in Chile, he took out advertisements in the newspapers, urging Chileans who opposed atomic testing to write to President Kennedy. When he set out for a tour of northern Chile and Peru, the American Embassy told him his actions might be contrary to the best interests of the United States.

  Dean also noted that he was an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling, that he was opposed to warfare and military service, and had been a conscientious objector since the age of eighteen. He announced that his friends at home were planning to sue Secretary of State Dean Rusk because of the unconstitutional attempts in Lima to suppress his, Dean's, freedom of speech.

  From Hollywood, Dean's friends duly sent a telegram to the State Department, expressing outrage at Dean's treatment, and it was signed by several of Paton Price's students and by David Dellinger, who later became famous as a member of the "Chicago Eight."

  Dean did not cancel his tour, of course. Every time he was opposed, whenever he realized that the State Department had taken an interest in him, it charged him up: this wasn't just the movies, this had the smack of real adventure. It was always high noon in Dean's South America.

  "He was an idealist," said the Countess. "You could fool Dean easily. But he could get to 5000 workers and tell them how to vote. He was a sincere man. Not like that fat little Allende, who used to wash his hands every time he met the miners." The Countess spat when she mentioned Salvador Allende's name.

  South America, for three or four years in the 1960s, was Dean's coming of age. Professionally, it made him a star. He appeared on television in Lima; with a troupe of "Twisters," he performed at the Astral Theatre. Roaming the continent, he gathered a following. Fans adored him for his music and his politics. The times were ripe in Latin America, what with the young Fidel in Cuba and Che only just dead, his handsome death mask imprinted on everyone's brain.

  In Chile Dean met the poet Pablo Neruda and the folksinger Victor Jara. They accepted Dean, even though he was a gringo. At last, Dean had found a community.

  It was more than a little ironic, because Jara's folk-song movement was intended to fight the tide of American culture that poured down like shit on Chile, as Jara saw it. Chile was a dumping ground for singers who couldn't cut it up north. So long as the pop stars had fair hair and tight pants, the girls went mad for the singing gringos.

  Dean separated himself from the pack; he cast himself as a political man and he had a genius for the rhetoric probably because he was now a true believer. He picketed embassies and sang for the workers; he went up the Amazon with his Indian comrades.

  People went to his concerts even if they didn't agree with his politics. At his concerts he could get away with anything, even the slogans, and people ate it up because he was so handsome, so charming, and because he was an American and a good guy.

  For Dean, life had meaning: he saw himself as an emissary, as an ambassador of peace, and he said so to anyone who would listen. Now he was no longer just a dumb pretty boy out of some Hollywood studio; he was a man to reckon with. The South American experience became a theme he played out the whole of his life.

  The political limelight did for him what cameras did for other stars: it lit him up; it turned him on; it made him shine. It was the making of Dean, and the more he fought the good fight, the more famous it made him and the fame fed the ambition and there was no stopping him.

  And there was Patty, the girl he had met at his agent's office in Hollywood. In 1963, they were married in Mexico City. I saw a picture of her, a very pretty girl in a dress with a big skirt. They had a daughter they named Ramona. Many years later, Dean apparently told a friend that not making the marriage with Patty work was the biggest regret of his life. He always sent money for Ramona when he could. By 1964, Dean and Patty were living in a handsome suburban villa in Buenos Aires, where Dean had his own TV show.

  It was a charmed life for a while, but then right-wing gangs shot up the house and someone smeared a hammer and sickle in red paint on his garage door. Dean and Patty got guns. He became increasingly radical.

  "Brainwashed," said the Countess, finishing her lunch in the Chinese restaurant in London. She straightened her hat.

  "Who brainwashed him?" I was exasperated by now, trying to follow her anecdotes of the years in South America, trying to fit it all together.

  "I sent him to Russia," she said. "I was a little bit afraid of how he was going left, left, left, and this scared the wits out of me because being Czechoslovakian, having spent some time in the Soviet paradise, I was not exactly very leftist... I admired this beautiful child with all these gorgeous ideas about the world. But I did not like that going left. So I said the only way to prove to him how absolutely wrong he was was to send him to Russia."

  The Countess's story rambled. She reported rumors about bank accounts and Porsches that Dean received in exchange for errands he did for the East German Politburo. Chasing Dean Reed, I thought, was like chasing smoke. The Countess was convinced the Communists killed him.

  "He knew too much. Over there in the East it is like the Mafia. Once you were in, you could never get out," she said.

  As she saw it, Dean was a Manchurian Candidate, run, turned, used, a traitor but a victim, too. Having eaten all the spareribs, and turning to the fortune cookies, the Countess started on a tale about an out-of-body experience in which she met her dead father, who told her where the Czech government treasure was buried.

  In London, around the same time that I met the Countess, I also met Artemy Troitsky. A friend called and asked if I wanted to meet a rock critic from Moscow. We agreed to meet at Tui,
a Thai restaurant in South Kensington.

  Troitsky was a Soviet rock critic with half an inch of stubble on his handsome jaw. He was traveling in Britain to help promote Back in the USSR, his book about Soviet rock.

  Troitsky had a cold. He ate his lemongrass soup and blew his nose. It was his first trip to the West. He was my first real Russian. He said his Western name was Art. Wearing black jeans and sweater, an olive green T-shirt and jacket, and a new pair of sneakers, Troitsky had walked that morning from Bloomsbury to Chelsea. His feet hurt.

  In the beginning the two of us made the sort of chitchat that seemed appropriate in those first heady days of glasnost. Art's favorite writers were Gogol and Cervantes, although when he was younger he read Kurt Vonnegut and J. D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye was Art's favorite book. In Prague, where he grew up - his father worked there as a journalist - he wore a yellow hat with a peaked brim because he could not get a red hunter's cap like Holden Caulfield's.

  In 1963, around the time Dean Reed was already crooning his heart out in Santiago in the pale-blue gabardine suit, Troitsky heard "Surfin' USA." It was the first rock and roll record he ever heard, and because he could not find "surfin" in his English dictionary, he figured it was some kind of dirty word. "Like fucking," he said. "I thought this meant fucking." He was eight years old.

  "I only believe in rock and roll and John Lennon," he said now in a way that managed to be both solemn and ironic.

  In London, Art spent most of his time going to gigs, sometimes three in one night. Johnny Rotten was fantastic, he said. At the Limelight he heard Pop Will Eat Itself. "They were very good." Art's green eyes shone. "I had a great time. I almost ate myself."

  I asked if he had been shopping, but he said that he didn't like shopping much.

  "I do have a long list from my wife, Svetlana. She wants a sunlamp and a riding costume from..." He consulted a piece of paper. "Moss Bros. Svetlana is not allowed out of the Soviet Union at the same time as me. She is a hostage," Art said.