"I don't think there was much church-going in Wheat Ridge," Dixie said. Dean's people were not church-goers," she added, although she herself was raised a Catholic. She took a small breath now, and slowed the truck down. She pointed at a two-story bungalo with a front porch and a tidy front yard with a low long shed behind it made of chicken-colored cinder blocks.
"That's where Dean's mom kept her chickens," Dixie said and I stopped the truck.
For a while we sat in the truck outside Dean's house.
Leslie said to Dixie, "What was Dean like in high school?"
"He was very naive in some ways. He was terribly shy with girls. When he went to Hollywood, he was still a virgin. I mean, everybody did it back then," she said. "My homecoming queen in high school was pregnant. Everybody was pregnant."
"Was Dean very political?" Leslie asked.
"Dean was not particularly political in high school, but he was a gung-ho kid. He did track, hence the race against the mule. He was a gymnast and a swimmer. He did it like he did everything. He was a track alcoholic, a music alcoholic, whatever he did, he did with maximum commitment. When I met him later, there were two Deans, the public man and the private one, and he was definitely a political alcoholic."
Then Dixie found a pack of cigarettes in her bag and lit one and took another little breath. She told us how after the showing of American Rebel at the Tivoli Center the night she met him, Dean had invited Dixie back to visit with him at the Westin Hotel. She thought it was so unique that Dean would be her friend, she said. He was the same slim cowboy she had known as a child. He spent the evening with her and sang her three songs so gently. In public he told the same three stories over and over, as if he'd memorized them, but, alone with her, he opened up. When he told her he wanted to think about coming home, he cried.
Cautiously, Leslie shifted the conversation towards Dean's death. Dixie grew wary. It was getting dark. I thought about the gun again. Leslie edged towards me and away from Dixie, pretending to reach over for a pair of gloves he had left on the dashboard. From somewhere police sirens wailed. Alongside the entrance to the freeway was a tangled mess of steel that had once been a car.
The pick-up skidded and Dixie drove badly, as if talking about Dean had drained her and she could no longer concentrate. She announced that she was taking us back to her place, and then she missed the exit that she must have taken every day. Her face glowed in the reflection from the headlights of oncoming cars. My stomach turned over.
"There are so many things I could tell you," she whispered, veering out of lane. "I know I can trust you. I think I can trust you. Can I?"
I nodded in what I hoped was a trustworthy fashion and Dixie smoked a second cigarette and told us she had given money to the Sandinistas because Dean told her it was a righteous thing to do. She let slip that she felt Fidel Castro was the devil incarnate. Her politics seemed to me a kind of American libertarianism that existed where liberalism flipped backwards to meet the right. Colorado had its own peculiar mix of laissez-faire libertarian and far-right zealots.
This was the heartlands: there were a hundred million handguns in America and a lot of them were in Colorado and at least one was in Dixie's glove compartment. I had never seen a gun in real life.
Dixie tried to believe what Dean had believed, a sentimental socialism that was part peace and love, part free medicine. But she had been raised on the anti-Communist Catholicism of the middle 1950s in the middle of America. As a result of this stew of ideas, she was now scared of everything, including the CIA, the KGB, and CBS.
Eventually, she found the exit that she was looking for, drove off the freeway, and pulled up in front of a small gray house. She jumped out of the truck and ran towards the door. In the window sat a big sad dog with a huge pink tongue, staring out into the night.
We followed her inside and stood around in the nearly empty house.
"Say hello to Bear," Dixie said patting the dog now licking the window pane.
Leslie said hello to Bear and I realized this was the dog mentioned on her answering machine.
Dixie went into the kitchen.
"There's orange. There's cola," she called out.
"Orange, thanks," I said.
It had been Dixie's father's house. She generally rented it out, though it was currently unoccupied, and kept only a room for herself. Most of the time she lived in the mountains near Grand Junction.
On a chair was a box and Dixie picked it up and held it close to her. In it she said were Dean's letters and some tapes. It was pretty much all she had of Dean, who had told her that he loved Renate, but that he did not want to die in East Germany. It would be hard for Renate to work in America. Dixie had said she would help find Renate a job. He talked to her about his need for America, about the movie he was making, about peace and love.
From the box she took a few ballpoint pens with the legend: "Colorado is Dean Reed Country."
"Have some," she said. "I guess you could say they're a rarity now." She gave me the pens then turned to the jumble of audiotapes in the box.
Dixie had taped all of Dean's telephone calls. The answering machine was on a table and Dixie took a tape out and pressed the button. The tape began.
A phone rang. Then Dean's voice came up. They exchanged salutations between Wheat Ridge and East Berlin.
"Is that me calling you, or you calling me?" Dean's voice said. "Are you just waking up? Did you have nice dreams? Are you a member of the Denver Klan?" he joked. Dean seemed to be entombed inside the scratched plastic cassette case and the tapes had the creepy vitality of relics, as discomfiting as a saint's toe-bone in a glass box. Dixie suddenly stopped the tape.
I said to her, "Why did you make tapes of Dean's calls?"
"I just like hearing his voice. Not just then, but all my life."
I wanted the cardboard box. I wanted the letters and the tapes, but Dixie was reticent and said she would think about it. We agreed to meet for dinner the next night and she drove us back to the Brown Palace Hotel. It was snowing harder.
* * *
The Rattlesnake Club was inside the Tivoli Center. The restaurant where we met Dixie had fat copper brewing vats - it had once been a brewery - pushed halfway through the floors like unexploded bombs. The distressed walls looked like the consequence of a tasteful war. The waiters wore Topsiders and pink Ralph Lauren shirts, as if they were Yalies or yachtsmen. Only a few tables were occupied. Dixie, thin in her short white fur jacket, looked bewildered, as if she did not know whom to trust.
We talked about Dean and out of the blue she offered me the cardboard box with the letters and the tapes. The next day, Leslie and I went back to the little house in Wheat Ridge and took the box with a kind of obscene speed, as if she might change her mind about the treasure.
In the tapes and letters Dixie gave me, as in Johnny's tapes and letters and memories, were all the details of Dean's time in Colorado and all that came afterwards. Dean had wanted to come home to America. He wanted it so bad he could taste it, and Dixie conspired with him to make it happen. She had asked Dean if she could set up a fan club for him in America and, before he left Colorado, she was already at work for him.
When Dean left Colorado, he went to Los Angeles to look for a manager because, though Dixie would help, he was savvy enough to realize he needed a pro, as well. In fact, he told her, he spent most of his time talking into answering machines. Everyone Dean knew was out of town: the Everly Brothers were in Australia making a video; Jane Fonda was away. No one answered his calls and he hated the smog.
"It gets on my nerves. I've been calling people in Hollywood all day and all I get are recorded messages," Dean told Dixie over the phone.
A fellow named Levinson was interested in working for Dean, but Dean did not trust him; he felt Levinson would sit on his ass and wait for Dean to perform, then come in for his twenty percent. He told Dixie this was the America he hated, said that Hollywood was worse than the killing fields of Cambodia, because you never knew who your friends were. Dean stiffened up his morale with the political rhetoric he could wrap around him like a familiar blanket.
In Los Angeles, Dean stayed with Tillie Price, Paton's widow, who was old and unwell and sometimes referred to herself as "Silly Tillie." He went to visit Paton's grave and missed him terribly. In the house where Paton Price once taught his students the meaning of life, Dean sat on the bed in his room, wondering if anyone would ever call him back.
A second Hollywood career now seemed a pipe-dream. Sure, he'd amassed $300,000 in a West Berlin bank from residuals on his movies, but in LA he discovered $300,000 wouldn't buy a chicken coop. Tillie gave a little party for Dean.
"Don Murray and Kent McCord came," Dean told Dixie. "I asked Kent if he could get me an agent and he said only Jack Fields, who is Ed Asner's agent, is brave enough politically. Haskell Wexler - I know him from Chile and Nicaragua - said the same thing."
Maura McGivney, an old girlfriend of Dean's who sometimes looked in on Tillie Price told me some time later, "When Dean was here, he used to leap out of bed in the morning and run out to the pool for a swim, naked, with a huge erection, singing 'Oh What a Beautiful Morning'. Tillie was embarrassed."
Ramona was the other reason Dean went to Los Angeles, he told Dixie. Ramona was his daughter by his first wife, Patty, and he wanted her to take his name. Mrs. Brown said it was true that Dean was keen on Ramona, who had visited him in East Berlin. Ramona wanted to make Dean's life story as a Hollywood movie.
I saw a snapshot once of Dean's children, Ramona, Natasha, and Sasha, and they were an oddly assorted bunch. Ramona was a healthy, pretty, self-possessed American teenager; Sasha, the only boy, wore his privilege as uneasily as he wore his skinny black leather pants; Natasha, the pale little girl he'd had by Wiebke, seemed somehow isolated.
Dean had really put his back into getting the hard currency he needed to send some regular support money to Patty and Ramona. According to Dixie, Ramona didn't want anything to do with Dean around the time of the trip to Los Angeles and it nearly broke his heart. In the spring of 1986, he sent Dixie a copy of a letter he wrote to Ramona to commemorate her eighteenth birthday.
He called her his "Dearest Daughter" and told her of his sorrow that he was often not there when she needed him. He told her life was not black and white. He passed on the many homilies Paton Price had preached to him. The letter was full of syrupy political sentiment. I wondered if Dean had sent Dixie a copy because things felt more real to him if he had an audience.
"My daughter wants to become a singer," Dean told Dixie.
Dixie said she was thinking about his career in America. The conversation had the dreamy quality of two people dawdling down different paths, but hoping to meet up.
"Nothing much is happening," said Dean. "It's not as nice as Colorado. The smog is terrible," he said and added that in California he was down in the dumps.