Renate loved Dean deeply; she loved his courage, his thinking, his personality, she said. He was the man she had been waiting for all her life and whom she thought she would never find. He was her companero. Now he was dead.
"After Dean died, I put away all the boxes, all the pictures, everything. For a while, I could only look at the pictures and cry," Renate said.
She got up and wandered over to the window; it was completely dark outside. She shivered and drew the blinds against the night, then turned around and smiled.
"Are you hungry? I have some steaks I could fry," Renate said eagerly.
Looking at his watch, Victor shook his head. Perhaps he was thinking about his vacation, perhaps polite.
Renate would have liked the company, I thought. It was miserable at the end of that road, near the frozen lake in a silent house that was inhabited by ghosts. When she talked of Dean, she was perfectly loyal, but there was an undercurrent; I thought she was angry with him for leaving, and very lonesome.
We put on our coats. We left the house. Leaving Victor and Leslie near the car, Renate walked me to the little cemetery. In her red coat, she put her hand on my shoulder, as if to steady herself. A bunch of wet flowers lay on Dean's grave, where a rough stone was engraved with the words THE COUPLE REED.
Renate said softly, "When Dean was leaving for America, I was so unhappy. I thought he was never coming back. He got the stone and he showed me. He said, 'I love you and I am coming back and some day we are being buried together under that stone.'" Renate looked at me and said, "You understand? I think he believed this."
"My brother called me and said, 'Quick, turn to Channel Four, NBC News, Dean's on,'" Johnny Rosenburg reported when I visited him in Loveland, Colorado, in the winter of 1988.
It had been the summer of 1984 when Johnny took his brother's call. Now he said, "And I turned it on and, sure enough, there he was. But a big star in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe. I couldn't believe it. I mean I can't even begin to tell you the emotions that went through me at that time."
With Dean on the TV screen, the reporter's voice was saying, "Who is this man, the one being hounded for autographs in downtown Moscow? You probably don't recognize him. Most Soviets would since he's considered to be the most popular, best known American in the Soviet Union. And most Soviets are quite startled to learn that most Americans have never heard of him." The picture cut to a Soviet woman with a few teeth missing, who said, "He is the best singer in the world."
Johnny was pretty much bug-eyed.
"My God," he thought. "It's Dean!"
Johnny's back had been giving him some pain that day, but he hardly noticed it now. He turned up the volume on the TV. Yes, by God, it was Dean. It was him. On national TV in, where? In Russia. My God. Johnny was stunned.
"Mona, Mona? Mona!" he had called to his wife. "C'mon in here."
Then Johnny got his scrapbook off a shelf and looked up that last postcard he had from Dean in 1962: Merry Christmas from South America. All those years since he and Dean had roomed together in their manager's house in Canoga Park in Los Angeles, he had had no idea if Dean was dead or alive. Since the postcard, Johnny never heard from him again. Seeing Dean turned out to be a much more fateful event for both of them than either Johnny or Dean could have imagined.
Now Johnny looked at me pleasantly. I was sitting on the two-seater couch in his living room in Loveland, near the same TV where he had seen Dean. His memories of the event and the reunion with Dean that followed were absolutely fresh.
"I sure have had a lot of company since meeting up with Deano again," Johnny said to me.
The Rosenburg living room had the couch and chair and the TV set and a coffee table. An archway led into a kitchen, where the fridge was dotted with magnets shaped like fruits. On the wall was a collection of fancy commemorative plates.
On the table next to the chair where Johnny sat was a well-worn bible, with a brass cross for a bookmark sticking out of it. From time to time as we talked, Johnny reached over and touched his bible.
In his late forties, he wore a plaid shirt and jeans and cowboy boots, and he shifted his weight in his chair like a man in constant pain. All his life he'd had the bad back. Or maybe he was just weary of the constant visitors who'd turned up at his screen door since Dean died.
Out of the window you could see the neat houses in Janice Court where the Rosenburgs lived. Beyond their yard were more houses, big green pines, and in the background the outline of the Rockies.
On the way up from Denver to Loveland, the road was dead flat and the countryside looked half-an-hour old. The snow had melted, the sun was warm and it shone on a scatter of wooden buildings set down at random on the raw yellow scrublands.
Denver wasn't a mountain town at all; it was the last stop at the edge of a huge prairie, flat as a pancake and barely domesticated. This had been the end of the world for the pioneers, the last outpost before they launched themselves with incredible will over the Rocky Mountains and on to God knew what beyond. For the early settlers, so remote was California and the coast, they might as well have been headed for the moon.
Loveland itself felt like a little covered wagon encampment made suburbia. At the edge of town were the Rockies, purple and huge and intimidating.
Johnny returned to his story. He took me back, not just to the day in 1984 when he saw Dean on TV, but to the 1950s when they first met. Memories just flooded back to him. Suddenly, it was 1959 and ,he was a kid with an idea, as he put it, about playing some music.
In 1959, Johnny had had his spinal operation and his folks bought him a cheap guitar to help him pass the time while he was getting better. He always had a desire to get into the music business and he discovered he could pick out a few chords and had the ability to take what was in his mind, as he said, and put it into words and music. The first two songs he wrote were "Lynda Lea" and "Gonna Find a Girl." Eventually, "Lynda Lea" did pretty well in Japan, Johnny said.
Johnny hooked up with another kid, a guy from his home state of Nebraska named Ted Lummus. Ted was a drummer. They got to jamming together and they got a big old bulky tape recorder and went down in the washroom of Ted's parents' motel and laid two songs down on tape. You got a good echo effect down in the washroom and Ted's parents were OK about them doing it.
Around that time Johnny read in the Recorder Herald that there was a Capitol recording artist vacationing at Estes Park, at the Harmony Guest Ranch.
"Let's take these two songs up to him and see what he thinks," he said to Ted.
"We won't get near him."
"Well, we never will know 'less we try," Johnny said.
Johnny and Ted loaded up the old tape recorder and drove up to the Harmony Guest Ranch, where they saw Dean out by the pool with a couple of ladies. So Johnny walked right up to him and told him who he was.
"I've got a couple of songs here. Would you listen to them?" Johnny asked Dean, bold as brass.
Johnny figured at that point Dean would say get lost. But Dean just told one of the girls to go get an extension cord for the tape recorder.
After listening, Dean said, "I like those songs. I'd like to maybe record one."
Jesus, Johnny thought to himself. I don't want to be a song-writer. I want to sing my own songs. I want some of that spotlight. But what could he say?
"Well, yeah, sure," Johnny said to Dean.
On Dean's advice, Johnny and Ted cut a demo. Dean said he would take it out to his manager in Hollywood, and a few weeks later, Johnny got a call from Dean; he was back in Estes Park and he had good news. Johnny went up, Dean grabbed him by the hand and smiled.
"Johnny, I want you to know you're going to be recording for Capitol and you're going to have the same manager I've got."
Ted got dumped, but, well, that was the way these things went.
Needless to say, a young kid like Johnny from nowhere, he was out-of-his-mind excited. Soon after, Roy Eberharder, Dean's manager, flew in to meet with John and his folks and he signed John up. That was October. In November, Johnny went on out to California and signed with Capitol.
Dean was living out in Canoga Park with Roy Eberharder and Mrs. Eberharder and their son, Dale. It was one of Shirley Temple's older houses that she rented out and it was on a hillside overlooking Canoga. Johnny shared Dean's room with him.
Sometimes Johnny found himself alone in the evenings. Other times he'd be gone on the road and Dean'd be there by himself. Most of the time, though, they were both there together.
They never went around as a pair. The only time they were together was at the house, in the evenings mostly. They'd just lounge around, go out to play badminton, go down to Canoga Park, kick some dust. There wasn't much to do.
Out in California, as Johnny recalled, things were going pretty well for both of them, though they never really discussed each other's careers. One evening, Dean and Johnny were at the house. Johnny was thinking about his work, figuring he was getting on OK. He didn't think it was a bad life. Dean was crazy upset, though.
"I'm never going to get any work if I keep this guy as manager. I don't know about you, but I'm getting out on my own." he said.
Johnny told Dean he was nuts. Almost the next day, Dean disappeared. Johnny, who sometimes didn't see him for days anyway, didn't give it much thought for a while. Then he began to wonder. He went and found Roy Eberharder.
"Where's Dean?" Johnny asked.