Johnny let it drop. He was busy trying to keep his own head above water, tryiug to do his own thing.
It was the latter part of 1960 when Dean just disappeared. He wasn't a hundred percent sure of the date. Most records showed that Dean actually left around 1962.
In the house in Loveland, Johnny broke off his story. He was a self-possessed man, damaged by disappointment and lost chances, maybe, but with a humorous, long-suffering look and a great talent for storytelling. From the time I met Johnny Rosenburg and heard his stories about how he met up with Dean Reed after a quarter of a century and how Dean came home again to Colorado, I could never get the rhythms of Johnny's speech out of my head.
"This is Mona," Johnny said, as a handsome woman in jeans came through the screen door carrying a brown paper bag full of groceries.
She had a steady blue gaze and a face out of a Dorothea Lange photograph. Mona was one of twelve children. She had worked three jobs since Johnny's illness and now their eldest girl, Pamela, was in college. You knew that at the Rosenburg house Mona ran things even if she always deferred to her husband. We shook hands and Mona went to put up some coffee in what she and Johnny referred to as the 'world's loudest coffee pot'. Mona usually called him John, which was his true Christian name. When the coffee was ready, John took a cup from Mona and returned to the story of his time in Hollywood.
He crossed his foot over his leg and rested a scrapbook on it. He opened the brittle pages. There were some publicity stills of Johnny Rose, which had been his professional name. He had been as handsome as Dean in his way; Johnny had looked like a young Steve McQueen. But after Dean left Hollywood for Chile, things didn't go right for Johnny. He had just signed the seven-year contract with Capitol and was back in Loveland on a visit to his folks, when Roy Eberharder called him on the phone.
"Johnny, I got bad news for you. Capitol dropped you," Roy said.
"What?!" Johnny couldn't believe his ears.
"Well, they've got a new policy. If you don't make it big in the first record, that's it."
Johnny stopped his story to take some coffee from Mona. Then he shrugged some and said there was nothing to explain why he was dropped so suddenly from the music business in the early 1960s. He'd been doing OK; he'd won a big talent contest in New Orleans; he had even played Ocean City Park in California, where he did a show with Dirty Stevens.
"She had a big hit out at that time called 'Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces'. Do you remember her?" Johnny asked.
I tried very hard to remember because it seemed so important to him.
"I can't understand why things turned out for Dean and me the way they did," he said.
I asked what he thought the reason was.
"You know, it's really hard to say. I don't know. I don't understand that anymore than I understand why I was treated the way I was," Johnny said. "You know, the people that were judges on that panel for that contest, people who are supposed to be able to identify talent when they see it, they picked me and then they didn't want to work with me. There I was on Capitol along with Dean, I had songs that were doing quite well. I don't know why, all of a sudden, I was no longer around."
I said, "Maybe the business was too mean for you."
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe you had to be mean. Or very sold on yourself, because that's what Dean was. He wasn't doing that great back then. He had to pay his own way to South America, where he heard he had a hit with 'Our Summer Romance'. But nobody was sold on Dean more than Dean himself. You know that was it. I mean Dean knew some day, some way, he was going to be a hit. He knew he was going to be a hit one way or the other. I hoped I would be a hit," Johnny said, "but hope wasn't enough."
After he had seen Dean on TV in 1984, Johnny had one hell of a time running down Dean's number over there in East Berlin. He called the TV station in Denver. He called NBC in New York. London said they'd get back to him, but he couldn't wait. Up half the night in a growing frenzy, he called in succession: the State Department; the Russian Embassy, who were not very nice; and the East Germans, who were quite nice. Eventually, he got a telephone number in East Berlin. When he heard the operator's voice, he just went bananas. He taped the phone call and now Johnny put a tape into a tape recorder box that sat on the floor near him. He switched it on.
"United States calling for Mr. Dean Reed."
"Yes, this is Dean Reed."
"Dean, this is an old friend of yours back here in the United States. Does the name Johnny Rose ring a bell?"
Dean didn't remember.
Johnny reminded him they recorded on Capitol together, that his birth name had been Rosenburg, but he recorded under Johnny Rose and how they met at Estes Park, where Dean helped him.
Dean remembered. Of course, he remembered. You could almost hear Johnny let out his breath with relief that his old friend remembered him.
Johnny told Dean he had made the TV news back in Colorado. Dean asked if Johnny was still in the singing business. Johnny told him how he underwent surgery in 1981 and couldn't work. They exchanged news about their families and promised to write each other. It was almost crying time for Johnny, as he put it.
"My God, man, keep in touch, write to me," Johnny said.
That's how it got started. The renewed friendship got cranked up as they wrote each other. A while later, Dean told Johnny he was coming back to Colorado for the Denver Film Festival in the fall of 1985. Some fellow called Will Roberts had made a documentary film about Dean: American Rebel was its title. It was more than twenty years since Deano had been back to Colorado, but he was finally coming.
From things Dean was saying in his letters, Johnny could see he was a big star over there in the East. Big like Michael Jackson. That kind of big. Johnny realized that Dean thought a lot of people would know of him in Denver. It worried Johnny considerably.
Johnny said, "In his letters he would say, 'Well, when I get back to Denver, Johnny, maybe we can have a horse parade from the airport to the state capitol, and the governor can be there to greet me.' And I thought, Wait a minute. Nobody knows him. I thought to myself, You're a songwriter, John. You've got to do something here. You've got to tell Dean nobody knows him back in his hometown. Then I thought, Well now, wait a minute. That's a pretty good title for a song. So I sat down and I wrote this song. I called it 'Nobody Knows Me Back in My Hometown'."
"You think he'll laugh at it?" Johnny had asked Mona when he had finished the song.
Mona said, "So what? You've had people laugh at your songs before."
Johnny sent the song on over to Dean in East Berlin, and Dean flipped for it. Dean sang it at the Youth Festival in Moscow, the summer of 1985. A couple of months later, he called Johnny to say he would arrive on October 16.
Johnny played "Nobody Knows Me Back in My Hometown" for us on the tape recorder. It was really good, a classic country tune.
Johnny remembered everything about that period, and he recorded his and Dean's phone conversations and put his own thoughts down on tape. It was uncanny. It was as if Johnny knew that one day somebody would make the movie.
Johnny picked up the bible with the bronze cross from the table near his chair in his living room in Loveland. I asked him about Dean's death.
"Maybe he was the best mole this country ever came up with," said Johnny Rosenburg. "But me, maybe I'm thinking more with my heart than with my mind when I say, I think he was murdered."
"Welcome home, welcome home. My God, man, you kept all your hair. Look at me," Johnny said right off the bat when Dean came off the plane at Stapleton Airport that October day in 1985. He had just burst out of that plane door like the biggest star you ever saw. He looked terrific. He was forty-seven years old.
Dean was in something of a daze, Johnny could tell. There was some press at the airport but not like Johnny would have liked. Dean had written that maybe there could be a horse parade and the mayor could meet him at the capitol. He was used to that level of welcome in Eastern Europe, he said; he loved the fanfare. Johnny had called a few TV stations.
"Guess who's coming to town?" Johnny said.
"Dean WHO?" was what people had usually said back.
Johnny had the date Dean arrived engraved in his head: October 16, 1985. Mona was real excited. Their pictures had hung together on the wall at Johnny's mom's house for as long as she could remember. After staring at Dean's mug on the wall at her in-laws' house for all those years, it was thrilling for Mona to meet him for the first time.
At the airport, Mona got introduced. God, he was a handsome man! she thought when she first laid eyes on Dean. The first thing Johnny noticed was that, to his ear, at least, Dean had developed something of a foreign accent, which the female race, including Mona, found very sexy. But in other ways he hadn't really changed all that much.
But then Dean was swept off down to Denver by the film people who were in town for the documentary film festival.
Mona and Johnny jumped in Johnny's Ford Elite and drove home to Loveland real fast to tape the news coverage. As they ran into the house, they turned the set on. They saw Dean stepping out of his limo at the Westin Hotel downtown.
The day after he arrived in Denver, Dean did a radio show with Peter Boyle. Johnny warned Dean not to go on Boyle's show. Communism was not flavor of the month exactly; no one knew much about this Gorbachev guy; Reagan was talking Evil Empire.
"Don't do it, Dean, you're being set up. Don't do it," said Johnny.
"Johnny," Dean said. "I have played my songs in thirty-two countries and I have risked my life for the things I believe. Why would I worry about one radio talk show guy?"
Dean went ahead with the interview. At their house, Johnny and Mona were listening to the radio.
"It's seven after the hour of nine o'clock on a Friday, the 17th of October, in Denver... you heard it through the grapevine," Boyle's voice came over the radio from the Fairmont Hotel lounge, where he was broadcasting. The music switched over from Martha and the Vandellas to Dean Reed singing, a ballad about Sacco and Vanzetti. Dean called them Nicola and Bart.