Dean nodded. On Dean's second tour in the Soviet Union, a little man who said he was from the Ministry of Culture told Dean it was forbidden to sing "Yiddishe Momma." Dean told him that Lenin would rollover in his grave if he had heard him say that because no Marxist could be anti-Semitic and, though he, Dean, did not agree with Zionism, he loved the Jewish people. He had even said this to Yasser Arafat.
He told him, "Yasser, I always include 'Yiddishe Momma'."
"That's OK, Dean," Arafat said. "I have nothing against the Jewish people."
So Dean told the little man from the Ministry of Culture that if he was forbidden to sing "Yiddishe Momma" he would leave the Soviet Union and never return. Mme. Furtseva, the Minister of Culture, who had once tried and almost succeeded in getting the Beatles a Soviet date, came to see him a few days later.
"Dean, it was all a terrible mistake," she said. "Of course, you can sing anything you want to in our country." She added, "If anybody ever tells you to change something that you say or do, you come to me and I'll hit them over the head."
"You sang it?" Mike Wallace said to Dean.
"I sang it. And I continue singing it," Dean said, "I do it a cappella."
"Oh, perfect. Do it a cappella," said Wallace.
"Can I sing it 'Yiddishe Poppa' and sing it to you?"
"You can," Wallace said.
That night, when they talked, Dean told Dixie that he had sung for Mike Wallace and that Wallace had cried. "We did three days' shooting," Dean said. "Then he came into the house and we shot for four hours. "You know, Mr. Reed, I wasn't expecting a man as intelligent as you," Mike had said. "We're going to do the portrait of you now, twenty minutes from Dean."
Dixie thought it was neat.
In his office at CBS, Mike Wallace scanned a letter from Dean.
"He concludes by saying, 'And maybe we can also solve the problem of the "Yiddishe Poppa,'" Wallace said.
"What does that mean?" I said. I wanted to hear Wallace's version.
"I'm a non-practicing, non-religious Jew. A bad Jew." Wallace smiled. "I was incredibly moved and I nearly burst into tears. After that, frankly, the piece was really a valentine to Dean. Sitting there in East Berlin with this cowboy from Colorado... there was this terrific yearning in him to come home."
The 60 Minutes piece was scheduled to go out the following fall, so Dean put it at the back of his mind after Mike Wallace left Berlin. In the six weeks that followed Wallace's visit, Dean was increasingly busy, preparing his movie, recording music, on the road playing concert dates.
There were more calls and letters between Schmockwitz and Colorado. In March, Dean wrote to Johnny, "Sorry if I don't write. There are TV shows and films. I'm damn tired and I feel old at times... Fifty will be coming along... Keep your fingers crossed for Mike [Wallace], ex-Mack the Knife." To Dixie, he wrote, "60 Minutes is not finished yet. Did I tell you? I spoke to Mike Wallace. They're gonna hold it until the fall, when they will have the biggest public," said Dean. It was early April.
"Beautiful," said Dixie.
As usual, Dixie and Dean bantered and giggled down the phone.
"'You have a beautiful day," Dixie would say.
"Have a nice week," said Dean.
"Say, I love me," Dixie said, signing off.
On April 20, 1986, 60 Minutes went on the air with the piece about Dean Reed. For one reason or another, maybe scheduling, it was not held over until the autumn but went out in April. That night, Dean was fast asleep in Moscow and had no idea that the piece was on the air.
I was at home in New York, watching 60 Minutes that night. Johnny and Mona Rosenburg sat in their living room in Loveland, glued to the TV. The title of the piece on Dean came up. It was called "The Defector." Sweet Jesus, thought Johnny. Dear God.
The resonant voice of Mike Wallace began the piece: "When we think about Americans who defect to the other side of the Iron Curtain, we usually think about traitors or spies. Dean Reed is neither. Colorado born, American bred, he now lives in East Berlin, just because he likes it better over there. An entertainer who's become the Soviet version of a superstar. He sings. He acts. And he speaks with what seems to be genuine conviction to the Soviet line. The Kremlin has even rewarded him with their Konsomol, Lenin Prize. There is just one thing missing for him. He yearns to duplicate his success behind the Iron Curtain with a similar success back home."
There were shots of Dean's concerts. There were lovely shots of Dean and Renate in matching sheepskin jackets, walking hand in hand in the woods near their house and talking with Mike Wallace. When Dean sat down with Mike Wallace to talk, Wallace asked, "You equate Ronald Reagan with Joseph Stalin?"
"I equate the possibilities of Ronald Reagan with Stalin. I say he has the possibilities to do the same injustices and much more, by incinerating this planet through an atomic war."
Wallace asked, "Do you think Mr. Gorbachev is a more moral man, a more peace-loving man than Ronald Reagan?"
Dean nodded.
"Why was the Wall put up in the first place?" asked Mike Wallace.
"The Wall - the Berlin Wall - was put up to defend the population in the first place," said Dean.
Johnny just sat there and listened to Dean defend that Wall and it burned his butt so bad! He could feel himself wanting to be sick. Johnny was in a rage; he felt his knuckles go white as Dean denied that East Germany was a colony of the Soviet Union. Dean talked about maybe being a senator from Colorado... if Gary Hart was going on to the Presidency, why not?
Johnny was horrified. "I think it was the next day I called him to tell him it had been shown over here, and I said to him, 'It has done nothing for you here, Dean. The one thing you can't do is defend that Wall in this country.' And he sort of laughed and said, 'Well, I guess I'm going to have to come back and explain things.' And I fired back at him, 'Well, if you do that, you better wear a bullet-proof vest.'"
In November of 1988, I went to Leningrad to see Boris Grebenshikov play a rock concert. Grebenshikov was the first authentic homegrown Russian rock star, and his band was playing in the USSR in public with Western musicians. AQUARIUM AND FRIENDS '88, the show was called. Fifty rubles a ticket on the black market.
Jo Durden-Smith, who had been with Leslie Woodhead and me on our first trip to Moscow, was making a documentary about Grebenshikov. Leslie was hoping to film some of the concert himself to use as background for the Dean Reed drama-documentary. I was interested in the music because in some ways the increasing popularity of Russian rock written and performed by young Russians had eventually made Dean Reed irrelevant.
In that April of 1986 after 60 Minutes was broadcast, when Johnny sat in his shed in Loveland chewing his liver and trying to convey to Dean how angry he was, what was mostly worrying Dean was that he was feeling old.
He worried about his voice failing; he worried he was too old to be a pop star; he realized that the Soviets and even some of the Eastern European countries had their own fresh music, their own young stars, local kids. Even Dean's own stepson, Sasha, didn't like his music. He wrote to Dixie, "Sasha calls me 'old man'." He sent her a picture of himself and wrote a note saying hopefully that he thought he looked rather young. "Oh, it is nice to have a baby face," Dean wrote. He was forty-seven.
"Guess what?" Leslie said as our Aeroflot plane lurched through a winter storm.
"What?"
He looked around the interior of the plane, and at the window and smiled knowingly.
"Guess," he said again.
But I closed my eyes, then opened them, terrified as the plane fell through some hideous air pocket. Outside the window it was black.
Leslie smiled at the stewardess, who did not smile back, but delivered a tray with a cup containing what tasted like swimmingpool water and a single toffee in greasy waxed paper that passed for lunch. Several drunks, cans of beer in hand, roamed the aisle.
How dull travel in the Soviet Union would be one day without the terrors of Aeroflot and without the drunks, the horrible hotels, and the listening devices. Small talk would dwindle badly; dinner parties would grind to a halt.
The plane shuddered. I closed my eyes and thought of photographs of Dean Reed's early trips to Russia. He was always moving, in a plane with fur-hatted commissars, jumping out of a plane door after it landed, standing on top of a big Russian express train, riding backwards, and strumming his guitar and singing Woody Guthrie songs. "This train," Dean sang astride the moving cars.
Now, the Aeroflot plane bumped to a halt on the runway and we got out and trudged into the terminal, which resembled something from the 1950s. It was three in the morning. Jo Durden-Smith was waiting to meet us because he had arrived earlier, and in a blinding snowstorm we somehow got to the Pribaltiskaya, a modem hotel on the outskirts of town. It was very depressing, Soviet Modern, probably circa 1980. It had endless corridors with ugly patterned carpet. Every time you turned a corner, you tripped over a drunken Finn.
Helsinki's drinking laws had become so draconian - the politicians were trying to get the people to dry out a little - that on weekends a lot of men flew into Leningrad, hired some girls, got laid, got drunk, vomited, and passed out where they were, sometimes in the hotel corridors. They lay there until they sobered up enough to get up and go home. That night I didn't care. I wanted a bed. In my room, I fell asleep with half my clothes still on.
The next morning, I went looking for Art Troitsky, who had come from Moscow to Leningrad to meet us. I gave him a bottle of Advocaat liqueur I'd bought in the duty-free shop on the way out. We had coffee in the dining room, and Art said he had just been to London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and Graceland, and that he had enjoyed the West. Still, he said, he wished he had escaped the USSR illicitly in the bad old days, wished he had done it in a balloon. Traveling business class on a 747 seemed pretty tame to Art and even though this was one of his conceits, the rock life was becoming a little dull for him.