"I really feel I have his love and respect now, and that he now loves me more than Vern or Dale, but he never told it to me," Dean wrote.
"Getting his father's attention was the most important thing in Dean's life," Wiebke said, echoing what Dean's mother had told me. "He thought his father was very brave to commit suicide.
Dean saw the movie Whose Life Is It Anyway? He said 'a man has a right to end his life.'" And then it ended. Dean and Wiebke split.
It was a startling change of gear. And Dean told Wiebke he was bringing a red-haired stewardess home to Schmockwitz and would Wiebke please beat it. It was 1978, and Natasha was still a baby.
"Was Renate already in the picture?" I asked.
"He knew Renate. He knew her from the time he came to East Germany," Wiebke said. "There were many women. He used to come here and say, 'Can't you teach these girlfriends of mine to cook?' He had a different girl every weekend to cook, but he liked my goulash."
Wiebke was put out that Dean didn't even bother to help her find a place to live. He had powerful friends on the Central Committee, but he did nothing. He didn't bother with Natasha. When he married Renate and adopted her son, Sasha, he bought him videos of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. For Natasha he bought junk.
"Couldn't he buy Natasha a Donald Duck, too?" Wiebke asked, and added, "Renate could never have a child by Dean. After we had Natasha, he had a vasectomy!"
Wiebke looked over at Natasha who was still on the sofa and had not said a word.
"Would you like to play something for us, darling?" Wiebke asked her little girl. Natasha went to the piano and began. Then she got up abruptly and ran out of the room and Wiebke's mood changed.
"Shall I play for you the song Dean and I made together?" Wiebke asked.
They had gone to Prague together to record it. Dean recorded most of his albums in Prague. Wiebke turned on the record player. The song was called "Together," and it had a spoken interlude.
"Tell me you love me," Dean whispered.
"I love you," Wiebke said.
"Tell me you need me."
"I need you," Wiebke said.
"Tell me you respect me," Dean cooed.
"I respect you."
In spite of Wiebke's feisty style in person, the song was very sentimental, all deeply felt; she had gone all the way to Prague to whisper that she respected Dean on the mushiest of all the tracks he ever put down on wax.
"He didn't even make a special effort to get our song special plays on the radio," Wiebke said.
"I'm convinced it was suicide," said Victor Grossman in his flat near the Karl Marx-Allee in East Berlin. The flat was in a postwar apartment building, where, like scabs, the tiny beige tiles had peeled off the facade. Grossman's flat itself was full of books, and there was a yellow plastic shopping bag from Tower Records. Perhaps someone had brought him a present.
The suicide scenario surprised me; it had been mentioned before, but only casually. In East Berlin, Grossman had been close to Dean Reed.
We had had trouble getting to Renate, Dean Reed's widow, and Renate was the key. Leslie Woodhead and I went to see Victor Grossman, who knew her. He agreed to contact Renate. As soon as we arrived, he had called her and now we talked and waited for the telephone to ring.
Good-natured, shrewd, maybe a little vain, Victor had first met Dean at the same documentary film festival in Leipzig where Wiebke met him.
"I was called and asked to help interpret for an American rock and roll singer. It wasn't my sort of thing, but I agreed," said Victor, who was a folk music man himself.
"He was a big surprise for me," said Victor. "I really had never known a rock and roll type, a Colorado cowboy singer, to be an avid leftist. But that's what he was. And we got along very well. It was very unusual for me. And, of course, it was probably interesting for him, too, to meet an American here in East Berlin. We spoke the same language in many ways, and became good friends."
He paused, removed his glasses, and put them back on. "Dean was a star from the moment he arrived. Girls here fall for anything Western. The Golden West, they called it," said Victor. "One girl bragged her Italian lover gave her one hundred lire. She thought that one hundred was a lot of money."
Victor Grossman, in his sixties, wore a plaid shirt and sandals. He was enormously hospitable, but slightly fretful that day we first met. He had not yet booked his summer holiday. If you missed the final booking date, your holiday was kaput, even if there were still vacancies. Victor intended to visit Soviet Georgia with his wife.
In Victor's flat, which he shared with his wife - the kids were grown up with children of their own - back issues of Mother Jones and Rolling Stone were piled knee-high. Galleys of Veil, Bob Woodward's book about the CIA, were sprawled out on a large work table that held a computer. Dictionaries in Russian, German, and English were stacked beside it.
Victor disappeared into the tiny kitchen that was behind a curtain strung on a metal rod.
"Have some cheesecake," he said reappearing, a large metal cake tin between his hands. Shoving aside a pile of manuscripts, he put the cake tenderly on the coffee table.
"Go on, please. My wife made it," Victor said generously.
I ate a lot of cake on the Dean Reed story, especially in East Berlin and Prague. Cake eating, as a ritual, seemed to feature as significantly in the German Democratic Republic as smoking Marlboros did in the Soviet Union, or Kents in Romania. As soon as you arrived - at Wiebke's, at Victor's - the coffeepot was filled and a cake was produced. Victor pushed a large knife into the tin and, getting some leverage on it, gently prized out huge slabs of cheesecake.
In the Seventies, when Dean was a superstar making movies in East Berlin, Victor was involved as his translator, and he could thicken up the story with anecdotal titbits: the ragged gypsy girl Dean befriended on location in Romania; his camaraderie with the stunt men (you got paid by the stunt in Eastern Europe, and Dean saw to it that everyone got an equal piece of the action); the horror of the directors when he insisted on doing his own stunts. In one case, even after he broke his wrist, Dean persisted in climbing a castle wall for a sequence in a film. He demanded that his stunts were filmed in a single shot so that it was clear that Dean himself was performing them. He often spoke of himself in the third person.
Idolized by fans, his politics acceptable to the Party, Dean became a minor but potent player in the East. He claimed to know Erich Honecker and Gustav Husak. He made speeches and was honored by the Czechs with the Julius Fucik Medallion. He played concerts in Sofia and the Bulgarians presented him with the Dimitrov Medallion. Every ghoul in Eastern Europe, I thought, the whole bunch of them had honored and celebrated Dean Reed.
We ate cake and drank coffee in Victor Grossman's flat, and Victor told the story of how Dean, on a visit to America in 1978, was arrested and sent to jail; how the East German propaganda machine clanked into action and the legend of Dean Reed grew.
In a Buffalo, Minnesota, jail, Dean began a hunger strike and he wrote a letter about suffering to the people of East Berlin. In it, he crowed about the solidarity among the prisoners, but mentioned wistfully how he dreamed of eating goose, especially now it was almost Christmas. His letters were larded with the international socialist rhetoric he was so good at.
Obsessively, the media reported the details of Dean's detention: on November 6, Neues Deutschland, the official East German newspaper, gave front-page coverage to Dean's telegram of greetings to "the people of the GDR and Erich Honecker."
From his jail cell, Dean wrote to Erich Honecker. Joan Baez sent a telegram to President Jimmy Carter to protest Dean's incarceration. So did Pete Seeger and Dimitri Shostakovich.
An international incident was in the making. On November 11, 1978, the New York Times got into the act, reporting that a number of Soviet composers put through an appeal to President Jimmy Carter to help with the release of Dean Reed who was in jail in Buffalo, Minnesota. He was awaiting trial and had been charged with trespassing during a protest over a power-line construction site.
Trespassing? Trespassing? The infraction was so minor that even a German couldn't get exercised over it. It was more than a little embarrassing when the judge was revealed to have offered Dean his choice: a $500 fine or three days in jail. Dean made a speech and went to jail.
Every morning in jail, apparently, he rose early and, from his cell, he sang for the other prisoners.
"Oh what a beautiful morning, Oh what a beautiful day," Dean sang. It was one of his favorite songs and he often sang it when he was in jail. I could imagine him in the role of Curly; he would have been perfect in Oklahoma. Not everyone saw it that way.
"Give it a break, Dean," the other prisoners shouted. "Give it a break!"
Like Dean Reed, Victor Grossman was an American in Berlin. Unlike Dean, Victor was perfectly cast for his life. He did not admit to missing much by living in the People's Democratic Republic. Except maybe an avocado. And a Jewish salami. It was impossible to get a Jewish salami in East Berlin, he said.
I thought that Victor was maybe a little fed up with talking about Dean Read. Concealed behind his amiable face and the round spectacles, was a not inconsiderable guy. He, too, was an American in the East; he, too, had an amazing story to tell.
"He's an exotic here, isn't he?" asked Mike Wallace when he interviewed Grossman about Dean Reed for 60 Minutes.
"Perhaps, a little bit. Because, of course, there are not so many of us Americans around here, you know. Basically, I'm an exotic here, too."
"That's true. That's true," said Wallace.