She said, "I went to South Dakota, smart Aleck. But I didn't know what to take. So I went to Wounded Knee and I went to Pine Ridge and I went to Martin and talked to a kid who didn't know his belly button from lint, and then I came home." She laughed happily at his astonished delight over her trip across South Dakota.
"I would love to spend the night with you tonight," Dean said suddenly.
"If I thought that was true I'd trip over my own two feet," Dixie said.
"I'll be leaving on Monday to go to Minneapolis. I'm not having as good a time as I did in Colorado," he said again, flirting with Dixie, obviously wanting her to say she'd come on to meet him, without having to ask. Finally, he said, "Would you fly out and spend some time with me in Ohio?"
She said she would come to Minneapolis.
Dean went on tour across America with American Rebel, the documentary that had played the Denver film festival. In Minnesota, Dixie met him. It was there they agreed that she could be his only manager instead of some Hollywood guy and help pave the way for his triumphal return to America.
Dean wrote to Dixie while he was sitting at John F. Kennedy Airport waiting for his plane back to Europe. He said he wanted to write to her of his thoughts and emotions and how he felt after spending more time in his homeland than he had for a quarter of a century.
"The trip was the happiest I've ever made to America. I've seen my blue skies again and my battery was recharged." He wrote of how he had seen the mountains and the faces of so many people, and of how he had visited Denver, Los Angeles, and New York. He talked of how all people must have a peaceful future and how he would work towards making it so. He said he felt he would return to his own country and do what he had done in thirty-two other countries.
He vowed to make Bloody Heart an inspirational movie and said he would be back soon. He signed the letter "Dean." Dixie sent him a bumper sticker that read: YOU CAN'T HUG CHILDREN WITH NUCLEAR ARMS.
Dixie tried to call Dean at JFK the afternoon he left. She was afraid of losing track of him. She wanted to beg him to know that not all Americans were Peter Boyle. But she couldn't reach him.
After that, Dixie spent a lot of time with some friends trying to reach a righteous decision about how to help Dean. The afternoon she received his first letter, she was so relieved she cried for six hours.
"I am very happy to be part of your Colorado world and eager to make Colorado another home for you, again!" Dixie wrote to Dean, adding if she ever spoke out of turn or if she stepped on his toes, so to speak, or Renate's or Sasha's, he was to tell her plain.
By the second half of November Dean was back in Germany, and, in the weeks and months that followed, Dixie called and wrote frequently and he responded eagerly.
Often, Dixie's letters ran to six or eight pages, single-spaced. In January of 1986 Dixie wrote to Dean seventeen times. He was astonished and delighted. All the letters were about him.
Almost as soon as Dean left Colorado, Dixie went to work as his Colonel Parker, paving the way for his return. She setup a fan club and had nifty membership certificates printed; Mrs. Brown was made an honorary member and so was Renate; Dixie got bumper stickers printed that read: SO WHO'S DEAN REED?
She wrote to classmates at Wheat Ridge High; she called record companies and checked out which early songs of Dean's had been hits; she commissioned record finders to locate copies of Dean's old records, including one titled "Cannibal Twist"; she drove across the Southwest, looking for props for Dean's movie; she had a lengthy correspondence with the South Dakota police department on the pretext that she was a schoolteacher whose class was interested in such things, and so obtained pictures of South Dakota police uniforms, badges, and cars.
Along with her letters, Dixie sent Dean packages. One contained postcards showing the Denver Mint and panoramic views of Denver. She shipped the movie props via Czechoslovakia, to the DEFA Film Studios in Potsdam. She sent him turquoise jewelry she had purchased in Santa Fe and a denim jacket from Johnny.
Dixie wrote out shipping lists very carefully; in one case at least she painstakingly translated it into German. This list included three music videotapes, one red bandanna, three copper medallions, twelve boy scout pins, one pack Skoal (chewing tobacco), one plastic ring, one 1986 calendar, one empty milk carton from the Wheat Ridge dairy (where Dixie and Dean had worked after school as kids) for a joke, one box of liquorice for Renate (just for fun). For St. Valentine's Day, she sent a cubic-zirconium heart-shaped pendant for Renate.
Dixie wrote to Dean of her progress and how she had picked up material on music videos, their production costs, and even directors in the Denver area; she boned up on music copyright laws and ordered both the Songwriters Market book and a Nashville yellow-page telephone directory.
Her letters were full of good advice and jokes; she was coy, cute, smart, flirtatious, and sassy. She chided and chastised Dean and instructed him to be good to himself. When he was feeling down, he was to look in the mirror and say "I love me." She was bossy, sweet, provocative, spirited, determined, and greedy, but only for love. The letters included sly asides and little drawings - moon faces of herself, smiling or pensive. There was such longing in all of them, and poetry, and the sense that she was blossoming, that her world was enlarged, embellished, and lit up by Dean Reed.
Dixie wrote to Dean of her feelings for Colorado: "the inky blue darkness of the star bedecked night" and "the light blue cloudless sky of morning"; of a delicious Mexican meal she had eaten; of her snowmobile, which was a delight. She tempted him with the pleasures of an American life and wished him "beautiful blue-sky days." She said she hoped Renate would "like our weather, our little towns and big towns, our massive shopping centers filled with people who are rude, kind, happy, sad, little, big, young, and old! In her own way, Dixie was a poet of the banal.
"In case you haven't figured it out, getting a letter from you, or a card, is better than home-made chocolate cake," she wrote to Dean. She wrote that she had even begun German classes and she signed one of her letters "Chow" because it was a word Dean often used. She asked him what it meant.
He wrote back, "It's an international word in Italian for hello and goodbye" and she wrote that that was "neat" and she was relieved to know what it meant because she couldn't find it in her German dictionary.
Dean said her letters were "jewels" and exclaimed on how many she had written. He complimented her on her humor. "I tried to translate some of your jokes for Renate, but it is difficult to translate jokes - that is my problem living in Germany... Humor must be in the native tongue. Ja?'
His letters were typed on a portable typewriter, and he noted his spelling was terrible, but blamed it on the fact that he spoke four languages. He enclosed the address of Mr. Oleg Harjardin, the President of the Soviet Peace Committee, because a friend of Dixie's had requested it.
They wrote about everything. Dean wrote about how his dog bit him, about the Sandinistas, and about his trips to Prague for recording sessions and to Moscow to negotiate money for Bloody Heart, his movie. He wrote Dixie when the Challenger space shuttle blew up in the winter of 1986 that he thought it was a bad omen.
Dean's letters to Dixie covered a lot of territory and revealed not only a man with an enormous appetite for work and for movement, but also a man who, in between the lines, was growing weary of it all. The letters careened between revelations of his philosophy of life, the determination to better the lot of all mankind, and the steely practicalities of the performing life: copyrights, arrangers, engineers, producers, contracts, deadlines.
As they wrote and called each other, in the letters and tapes, you could feel the intimacy build, as if they were locking into some fatal two-step to the exclusion of everyone else.
In the house by the lake in East Germany, Renate began to resent Dixie's barrage of phone calls, but she was always polite when she picked up the phone.
The calls and the letters continued on well into the winter of 1986. The manic reporting of every detail in their lives continued. Dean had begun to focus seriously on his return to America. There was also an ecstatic mention of the possibility of 60 Minutes. The biggest show on American television was interested in Dean! In his mind, Dean fixed his return to America for October, 1987, which was only a year and a half away and 60 Minutes would be terrific publicity.
His return, he said, would be based on the distribution of American Rebel, the documentary, and the release of his new LP in America, which he also intended to call American Rebel. In a letter to Dixie, he discoursed on the meaning of the word "rebel." Dixie looked it up in her Funk and Wagnall's Dictionary and also in her Reader's Digest Family Word Finder.
How to present himself to America, he wondered. There would be a personal tour; his film must be shown in the universities. He, Deano, would appear on television and radio talk shows; there would have to be an advance man to handle Deano's publicity .
He also discussed with Dixie the autobiography he intended to write; the old one was incomplete. Maybe Dixie would write it for him. Yes, why not, and perhaps they could get an advance from a publisher, although maybe that was too optimistic.
She pooh-poohed all that, and told him he should be nicer to himself. He would soon be rich, she kidded, which was just as well, because she might want a new Rolls-Royce in 1987.
He confided in Dixie his dream of founding a social democratic party in America. If there were 260,000,000 Americans and only two percent voted for him that would be considerable.
"My dedication in my life has been to use my fame and talent to fight against injustice wherever and whenever I found it," Dean wrote, then added, "I believe that there is a great commercial hole to be filled in the USA. There is a need for a new singer to fill the void which Pete Seeger used to fill."
Now Dixie had a real purpose. She called Mrs. Brown; she called Tillie Price; she talked to Phil Everly on the phone and Phil did not have the heart to tell her that she had no idea how to be a manager. As she toiled to put Dean back on the American map, she saw the pitfalls everywhere. But she had found a community.
Then relations in the community soured. There was bickering about who owned what bits of film archive in American Rebel. Mrs. Brown said she had given Will Roberts money to accompany Dean to Chile; Will Roberts said he had mortgaged his house to make the film. For Dean's biography, Dixie thought maybe she would write to Yasser Arafat for his thoughts on Dean because, "Wouldn't that fritz Johnny?" She was not happy working with Johnny.
To protect Dean (in case he hit it big), Johnny had had Dean sign a deal with him for residual rights. It would stop people making spin-offs, such as Dean Reed dolls, without Dean's approval. The contract ran until the end of 1988. Dixie didn't like it one bit. Dean said he made the deal because Johnny was "sick and didn't have much of a future," explaining how much it meant to John and Mona when he, Dean, came to visit and gave them his love and trust. Anyhow, Johnny had promised when the day came that Dean signed on with the William Morris Agency in Hollywood, he would tear up that contract right in front of Dean's eyes.
Dixie finally asked Dean to release her from her promise to work with Johnny. His views were on the hard right, she said.
Dean responded that "Johnny was a religious and conservative guy, who, if he did not love Dean, would never be a fan of his life." But Johnny did love Dean, Dean said, and Dean would not release Dixie from her promise. To cheer her up, he sent her Yasser Arafat's headscarf for a present.
Dean left Dixie no choice about Johnny, so she turned on Will Roberts and told Dean that she figured Will was no friend of Dean's and that Will was reluctant to part with his material. Dean wrote to Will that Dixie was his business partner now.
There were insinuations and suspicions, and the various factions took differing views of Dean's future in the United States; no one agreed. At one point Dixie took some friends up to Loveland to check Johnny and Mona were not agents of one kind or another.
"God, Dixie, can't you see we're just poor clods?" Johnny said.
All of them dissected every letter Dean sent, as semioticians might do; they taped his telephone calls, and sent the cassettes round in carefully made packages. They copied the video cassette of Dean's farewell concert in Johnny's basement. They put his bumper stickers on their cars.
In the way that Dean's American friends operated, it was a lot like an underground network in the East. There was the hope, the desperate desire for information, the coveting of news, the fear. Cassettes of Dean's songs were copied over and over, like the magnetizdat which Soviet kids had once made of rock music, passing them along, their amateur quality - where you could hear the laughter in the background - making them more potent. Videos were copied, too, until they were too grainy to look at.
Letters smuggled from one partisan to another were cherished, reread and reread. There were also the aspersions cast on those who seemed to have defected. There were the relationships degraded by desire and need. At one point along the Dean Reed trail, I heard from a musician who had known Dean in Moscow that someone - perhaps it was Mrs. Brown - had heard rumors that I was working for the CIA.
In Colorado, Dean's friends were not hicks. But they had no East Berlin. They could understand only that their friend had become a big star. By the time Dean came home in 1985, for different reasons - Johnny's bad back, Dixie's longings - they inhabited a world that was as flat as the yellow scrublands on the way up to Loveland from Denver. Dean's presence animated it, and they could not bear to let him go.
Their delight seduced him; he was homesick; he saw an opportunity to move on one more time and he was determined to take it because it meant going home.