Paranoia turned on the projector in my head and the movie flickered into life: it was in black and white with a creepy grain and the pulsing soundtrack of an irregular heartbeat. Whoever had it in for Dean Reed, whoever killed him, was somewhere down this road. Someone who was looking for us.
We would miss closing time at Checkpoint Charlie; we were way out of bounds, beyond the limits of our visa. We would spend the night in an East Berlin jail among officials who were not only Communists but also Germans, and perhaps there was a small concentration camp still open somewhere ... that would be it, a small camp. Rigid with fear, I sat, watching my socks flutter on the radiator. I thought I heard the wail of a German police car siren rise and fall. It was coming closer.
6A Schmockwitzer Damm was a low-lying, white stucco house with an orange tiled roof, a garage, a lawn. A large carved wooden R was perched on a post in the yard as if it were a ranch: the Double-R ranch; the Dean Reed Dude Ranch of Schmockwitz.
On the other side of the house from the road was a stretch of lake the color of tin, where Dean Reed's body lay for four days before it had been dragged to shore in June of 1986. The place felt deserted, lonely, desolate.
I took the newspaper clippings out of my bag and read the article by Russell Miller, a British journalist. Miller, by chance, had arranged to interview Dean Reed for a magazine the weekend he died. From West Berlin, where Miller was staying, he had called the house at Schmockwitz. The interview was scheduled for the next day, but Mrs. Reed told him that Dean was ill and could not see him. In the middle of the conversation, a man came on the line - it seemed to Miller that he had snatched the phone away from Mrs. Reed. He told Miller that Dean was in the hospital and that he should go home and would be contacted. Then he gave Miller his name and a telephone number in Potsdam. He was Mr. Weiczaukowski, he said.
Puzzled, Russell Miller went back to London and, on the following Tuesday, when he heard the news that Dean Reed was dead, he called Potsdam. There was no Mr. Weiczaukowski at the number he had been given. He wrote a story for the Sunday Times, and so the mystery was cranked up. It grew and leaked and multiplied.
"I have over 2000 scenarios," Dean Reed's mother would tell me. "And it's about up to 3000 now, I think ... each scenario brings up a new way I think he was killed."
"I read something about maybe there being drugs, or that there were some political implications," a friend of Reed's told me. "I've heard the CIA whack," said someone else. "I've heard killed by a jealous lover. Or the KGB."
And so it went. Eventually, the rumors spread so that nobody could unpick the truth about his death from the rumors. KGB, CIA, eventually I became hooked on the creepy network of conspiracy buffs. Already, for months, I'd been trying to get a fix on it, had talked to Russell Miller, who was as perplexed as I was. Now, finally, on this dank December day in 1987, I was here in this silent, cold place. The house was shut up. No answers.
I said, "Let's go."
It was wet and dark and I was frightened; we had seen the house. I wanted to go. I felt we were out on a limb with no backup, no way back if we got lost. But Leslie insisted on getting out of the car to take pictures of the house because, if he made a drama-documentary, his production designer would need them. He took his time while I sat in the car. It wasn't just for the production designer, I could see that. It was an obsession for him, this part of the world, this other place across the Wall. In a way he was addicted to Eastern Europe. It tested you and then you could go home, a no-exit with a revolving door, an adventure with a return ticket, he always said.
"Cheer up," he said now, turning to take yet one more picture, then getting back in the car and revving up the motor of the car loud enough to wake the dead. "Listen, honestly, this is nothing at all compared to when I was filming a documentary about torture in Brazil."
Down that country road, in the encroaching gloom on the other side of the Berlin Wall was where I seriously began looking for Dean Reed. The Berlin Wall had gone up in August, 1961, which was just about the time Dean Reed had left America. He never lived there again, and he died in this lake in East Berlin. Who killed him? Who was he? A true believer? A spy? Just a guy, an American with a guitar and great looks and a lot of ambition?
Leslie drove a few hundred yards and stopped and got out of the car. I followed him to the little cemetery by the side of the road. A few wet flowers lay on a headstone. It seemed incredibly sad somehow that the dazzling American I'd seen on TV should end up in this lonely place. I bent down. On the headstone, in German, was inscribed simply: Dean Reed. Born Colorado, 1938. Died Berlin, 1986.
When Dean Reed was seventeen, he raced a mule 110 miles for a quarter. He did it on a dare, his mother told me, and he nearly dropped dead and so did the mule. Some people said it showed his tenacity and grit, but she figured it was just a funny thing a kid would do. Anyway, Reed won and someone caught him in a photograph. At the end of the race Dean's face glowed with triumph. Racing that mule was ambitious, brave, and hokey, and it had the feel of one of those old folk songs where heroic men in bare feet race locomotives.
"I still have that quarter somewhere," said Dean's mother, Ruth Anna Brown.
Mrs. Brown lived in a condo on the north shore of Oahu in Hawaii. I went to see her because I wanted her to tell me how her son had died. Instead, for a while, we talked about his childhood: how, born in 1938, he grew up in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. We talked about the mule race and she looked for the quarter.
Hawaii seemed as far away as you could get from East Berlin and the Dog's Vomit Cafe. The islands were like a trail of denatured but delectable crumbs, nibbled off the coast of California and flung far away across the South Pacific. The sun shone, holiday-makers tanned their plump flesh, girls in bars wiggled their hips and their straw hula skirts, and everyone drank things from huge pineapples with pink plastic parasols in them.
Up near Wahiawa, where Mrs. Brown lived with her fond husband, Ralph, the air smelled of pineapples. The fruit, whose smell made you giddy, grew on plantations that were as plush and tidy as wall-to-wall carpeting, but the mountains just beyond the fields were raw and imposing. The settlements had a breezy ramshackle charm, and on my way to Mrs Brown's, I'd seen plenty of surfers with heavy tans and hard bodies and pale vacant blue eyes lounging outside the bars and burger joints.
Mrs. Brown got up suddenly from her chair and went to the windows, one at a time, fastening the wooden shutters, then closing the windows: There was a storm coming and you could hear the wind and somewhere a flag flapping in it like wet laundry.
I liked Mrs. Brown. She was a handsome woman with fine, powdery white skin and hair, but she wasn't a fragile old lady. She was tough and funny, and some of the time she (Well, my goodness!) camped it up, her hands on her hips, full of self-mockery and good humor. Her back was straight and she wore a sweatshirt from the University of Hawaii, where she had just finished her doctorate in women's peace studies. At seventy-four, she was immensely hospitable and naturally wary, and she had an unbending determination to see right done by her boy who was dead in East Berlin. At first we made small talk.
Mrs. Brown was no fool, Courteously, she asked who I was. Leslie Woodhead, who was there too, talked about the drama-documentary he hoped to make, and I mumbled something about writing for the Guardian and tried, shamelessly, to refer to my right-on past on various picket lines and peace marches. Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, I almost said. It was OK; Mrs. Brown got the point.
"I had that child for a special reason. I always thought that Dean was born under a magic star," she said.
Mrs. Brown sat on the carpet between the television set and a brassbound trunk. I sat beside her. The trunk was full of memorabilia. Every so often, she reached into it and brought out pieces of Dean; there were record albums and tapes, videos and scrapbooks, and copies of Dean's autobiography, a small book with dark blue covers, written in German. Everyone I met had a copy of Dean's little blue book and in each, on the flyleaf inside the blue covers, was an inscription in his big childish hand, invariably wishing the recipient peace and love and all good things for a socialist future. And then there were the photographs of Dean: Dean in his high school letter sweater, Dean and the mule, Dean with his guitar, Dean with his white Chevrolet Impala convertible. His mother next to me, his images spilled on the carpet, I began to feel I knew him a little; already I was thinking of him as Dean.
She was rueful. In spite of the trunk, she felt she had so little of Dean left. She said that she possessed not so much as his belt buckle - Dean's widow would not give it to her, she said. So, - when a year or two later, the Colorado Historical Society organized the Dean Reed Collection, she was happy. Eventually I met Stan Olliner, the curator of the collection, a bespectacled man who carefully put on white cotton gloves before showing me the Reed archive, which included film scripts and pictures and diaries, as well as a plaster casting of Dean's teeth. Dean had always carried the cast with him in case he should break a tooth on the road, Olliner explained. "Dean was a pack rat, thank goodness," he added. "He literally saved everything.
All of it had been donated by Dean's widow, Renate. She even apparently offered Olliner Dean's dog, Emu, for when the dog died and could be stuffed. Olliner said, no thanks.
"In no way could I justify a stuffed Emu to the Colorado Historical Society," its director told the Denver Post. Mrs. Brown thought it was all perfectly wonderful anyway.
"I think Dean's looking down and saying, 'Wow! I just knew I'd come back to Colorado, no matter what.'"
All day long, as we sat with Mrs. Brown on her living-room floor, the television was on, and images of Dean - some from contraband videos of television specials he'd made, others from documentary films about his life - flickered across it. Pictures of Dean lay on the carpet in black and white and color. 1938-1986. I knew I should get to the point and ask Mrs. Brown about Dean's death, but it made me feel like an intruder. Anyway I didn't want to stop her from telling the stories that poured out of her in random order as she turned over the photos and glanced up at the videos and talked about her kid. I couldn't turn away from the images, either.
On the wall was a large glossy photograph of Dean; in it he was wearing a beaded Indian neckband and the eyes looked a little mournful. It had been taken not long before his death, and as I stared at it, I found myself dredging up a poem by e. e. cummings. The verse that I'd loved as a moony teenager came back and it reminded me of Dean Reed:
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what I want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
Dean Reed was born on September 22, 1938, in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. It was one of a string of small towns on the fringe of Denver when Denver was still a cow town. Wheat Ridge was resolutely rural, not yet eaten by Denver's urban sprawl. Ladies put on their hats for a day out in Denver.
"All we had was just a very small house and two enormous chicken houses at the back, where we kept the chickens," said Ruth Anna Brown. "We had a cow - I made my own butter and whipping cream - and a pig. I think the kids enjoyed it very very much. I don't think I did. I wasn't meant to be a farm wife," she said, laughing. "I never did care for those chickens."
In Wheat Ridge, everywhere you looked were the mountains; everything was diminished by their presence. The Rocky Mountains dominated the town where Dean Reed was born; the mountains formed him. Sometimes during the summers when he was a teenager, Dean cruised the mountain passes at night; aboard his Chevrolet. He put down the top, stuck his foot flat on the accelerator, climbed the steep, curving roads, and, turning on the radio, sang at the stars. Sometimes, he turned out the car lights and steered by the light of the moon.
All around Denver, the Rockies were the horizon, a huge presence, waiting to test you or trick you. The mountains could make you feel tiny, a scrap of nothing on God's turf.
Dean went to the local schools and joined the Boy Scouts and the Future Farmers of America. At the local military academy he attended, he was good at sports, a keen gymnast, and a fine horseman.
At Wheat Ridge High, he set the record for the mile-and-a-half cross-country run. In his senior year there was the mule race. Also, as his mother pointed out, he could eat more ice cream than any kid in town - all his life he was crazy about ice cream. In the afternoons after school, he worked at the local dairy. His ears bugged him, though. They were as big as jug handles. He thought they made him ugly, and he worried about getting girls. He got a guitar, figuring it would help get with girls, the ears notwithstanding. He played the high school auditorium; he played Phipps Auditorium in Denver; he played the Harmony Guest Ranch up in the mountains at Estes Park.
Mrs. Reed stuck a video in the VCR. A documentary titled American Rebel flickered into life.
"Dean's dad, Cyril," Mrs. Brown explained.