Johnny and Mona could tell from Boyle's voice that he probably didn't like Dean.
"Do you consider yourself a defector!" Boyle asked Dean on air.
"Not at all, Peter. I consider myself an American patriot," Dean said, his voice firm and cool. "I'm a good American, Peter. I can take a sword 360 degrees around my head and cut no strings. I'm a puppet of no one, Peter."
Boyle egged Dean on, asking him about Communism and if he was some kind of traitor.
Dean started getting mad.
"Peter, I resent that. Dean Reed is not what you say. Dean Reed believes in equality for all mankind. You sound like a fascist. You're talking just like the neo-Nazis that killed Alan Berg."
"Don't you ever accuse me of that," Boyle screamed.
"That's the way you're talking," Dean said.
"Get out of here! Get out of here! Take a walk..."
Johnny thought, Jesus, man, I told you Boyle's best friend was Alan Berg, the talk-radio guy who was murdered by the neo-Nazis. Johnny knew those old Nazi boys were going to be sitting up there in Idaho now, watching for Dean. He thought: Man, if you stick around here, you had better get yourself a bulletproof vest.
"Take a walk. .." Boyle said.
What startled Johnny most, though, was that in the background, along with the noise of scuffling, he could just about make out Dean's voice. He was whistling.
"To me," Johnny said, "it seemed that World War Three almost erupted behind that microphone."
Eventually, I met Peter Boyle, and he said he was a little sorry he'd lost it with Dean Reed.
"I wish I had to do it again," Boyle said. "I probably would have done it differently. I don't know if I did my job correctly. It was a very raw nerve time for me. I had been, up until actually that day, I had been testifying in a murder trial of a colleague named Alan Berg, who had been murdered by neo-Nazis." Boyle was sorry he'd thrown him off the air and he recalled how intimidating Dean seemed.
"And he got up," Boyle said. "He really got up. And he was big."
Maybe it wasn't World War Three, but the story escalated around Denver, said Peter Boyle.
"Well, less than an hour later, the whole story about what had happened had changed. And it was all over the press. And Dean Reed was saying that he would be murdered in Denver that night. And if he was, it would be on my conscience. It was my fault. And I had just gone through a murder. And I thought, you know, 'My God!'"
That night, because of the Boyle affair, when American Rebel premiered at the documentary film festival, a squad of police cars cruised the Tivoli Center in downtown Denver.
Jesus, Johnny thought when he got there. Johnny had bought about twenty something tickets for the show and inside the Tivoli Center's movie theater, he and Mona and their friends settled in their seats.
The lights in the theater went down, the film opened on a rain-streaked Moscow street, and then changed to Dean in Red Square mobbed by fans. The filmmaker Will Roberts' voice described how he'd been visiting Moscow when he came across the scene and asked someone what was going on.
"That's Dean Reed," the guy said.
"Who's Dean Reed?"
"Why, Dean Reed is the most famous American in the world."
In the audience, Johnny figured it was going to be OK now so he just laid back and enjoyed himself, although he wondered how Dean could expect anyone in America to reach out with open arms to him when, in one of the film's sequences, Dean was singing "Ghost Riders in the Sky" to Arafat.
"You must be kidding me," Johnny said to himself, as he was prone to do.
But considering the adverse reaction to the Boyle business in the Denver press, not to mention the Arafat thing, there wasn't much trouble that night. After the show, folks gathered to welcome Dean, and pretty soon he was absorbed into the Denver life, as if he had never been away. That was Friday night, there was another screening on Saturday, and on Monday Johnny went down to Denver to rescue his old friend and bring him up to the house in Loveland.
In downtown Denver, Dean was troubled at first because he couldn't recognize a thing. He couldn't find where he had grown up and it upset him a lot, he told Johnny.
Although he had been back to the USA a few times, he had not been home to Colorado for a real visit since his high school reunion in 1963. The only buildings Dean recognized were those he had seen on television.
Dynasty had made Denver famous. It was the perfect primetime soap, the quintessential fairy tale for the Reagan years: rich people in big shoulder pads doing evil things to one another, while having a marvelous time spending loads of money. It was the most popular show in the world and its logo, which consisted of shots of Denver's glittering skyline, gave the city a real global presence. In Germany, Dynasty was called Der Denver-Klan. Even with the Berlin Wall still up, people in East Berlin could watch Western television because you couldn't jam TV signals.
What's more, because the West German television signals were too weak to reach beyond East Berlin, the rest of the population of East Germany made a terrible fuss. They wanted Dynasty, too, and in the end the East Germans were forced to run the program themselves.
On the evenings when Dynasty was broadcast, no one went out. In East Berlin, people pulled down the blinds, not altogether, in fact, because of politics, but because the soaps were non-kulturny; and Germans liked to think of themselves as cultured, if nothing else. At the house at 6A Schmockwitzer Damm, the Reeds, more than most, were glued to the television the night Der Klan was on. Like everyone in East Berlin, Dean watched both Dynasty and Dallas obsessively.
A friend of Dean's told me that once when he and his wife visited the Reeds in Schmockwitz they were watching Dynasty. "There are only two good days in East Berlin," Dean said. "The day we get meat. And the day we get Dynasty."
The TV shows were better propaganda for the West than any tract on democracy, better than long-range missiles; you could not buy this stuff for a billion bucks. Naturally, the citizens of the German Democratic Republic infinitely preferred low doings in American cities to socialist documentaries about the manufacture of neon, or German variety shows featuring dancing girls in animal suits singing "Winter Wonderland." Everyone could see the good life on American TV: big cars; big blondes; fabulous homes. I always thought it was Dynasty that brought down the Berlin Wall.
As they drove around Denver, Dean's mood lightened. He looked at Johnny's car.
"Is that all motor?" Dean said, admiring Johnny's Ford Elite.
"It sure is," said Johnny.
"It's a typical American car, lots of power," Dean added.
"I wouldn't have a small car, they scare me to death," Johnny said.
"Renate is the same way," said Dean.
As Johnny drove through downtown Denver, Dean went on just ranting and raving about how wonderful it was.
"Well, Dean, you call yourself a country boy but you like this sort of thing. A town that has more than one stoplight is too big for me," Johnny said.
"Johnny, you just don't know how to live."
"So how come you left Hollywood?" Johnny wanted to know.
"They sold out my contract to some weird guys," Dean said.
"Are you sure about that, man?" Johnny asked, because he considered Dean's response pretty paranoid. "I don't remember it like that. I thought they were just a couple of guys from Abilene, Kansas, with a Cadillac dealership who bought you out."
Dean didn't answer. For a while, on the fifty-mile drive up to Loveland, they were silent.
When Johnny pulled into the driveway in Janice Court, everyone in the neighborhood was hanging around. Johnny had explained in no uncertain terms just how big Dean was in the entertainment business but Dean just leaped out of the car and said hi and shook their hands, they nearly dropped dead of shock.
Mona came out to greet Dean. He put his belongings in the house and, grabbing his camera, climbed the ladder at the shed in the back yard and began taking pictures. The mountains were exceptionally beautiful that fall. Every time Mona Rosenburg looked out of the kitchen window, she felt glad to be alive.