"Like the Pied Piper," said Vera.
"Was he good? Was he a good singer?"
Vera grinned. Who could tell? Who cared! He was so handsome and he was wearing very tight pants. He sang rock and roll. He brought us this gift. He was American.
"I guess Dean was also popular because he espoused socialist values," Leslie Woodhead said.
Vera chortled politely.
"What you must understand is that we believed the exact opposite of the propaganda," she said. "If the television said, America is slums, poverty, crime, we believed the opposite." It was what Vladimir Pozner had said. "May I ask you something?' Vera inquired delicately.
"Sure."
"How it is that some people in United States have joined the Communist Party?"
I told her that everything was not quite perfect in America. I said that there were many people who were illiterate, hungry, and homeless.
"But, surely, they are just bums," said Vera.
For the time being, I left Vera to her dreams about the streets that were paved with gold.
"I guess Dean's problem going home to America was that people in America weren't too keen on socialism," Leslie said.
Vera said, "They're not too keen on it in the Soviet Union either."
She pulled on her knitted hat. Vera was going home to some remote corner of Moscow and would pick us up the next morning. I thanked her for fixing the rooms and tried to give her a box of fancy soap, but she shook her head and refused.
"This is my job," she said politely.
Vera visited the West for the first time that year and she wrote to me to say she didn't care for the supermarkets in England because the variety of goods made her hyperventilate. What she loved most about the West was that relationships were not degraded by need. Vera loved the West for its friendliness. Eventually, she went to live in Arizona.
The next day I met Xenia Golubovitch, a sixteen-year-old Moscow student who had met Dean Reed first when she was a little girl. Xenia, dark and intense, showed me the poster of Dean on the wall of her bedroom.
She said in perfect English, "He was the embodiment of the whole country's dream about America. In their secret hearts, people have the American dream. The point was that they were trying to project the way they wanted America on to Dean." She pointed at the poster and read out the hand-written dedication on it: "'To Xenia, I thank you for your love and friendship and for your tears. Be brave, plus happy, plus truthful, love Dean Reed.' That's what he wrote to me when I was five."
The poster had been on her wall all of Xenia's life. As a five year old, Xenia had seen El Cantor on television. (It was the story of the Chilean folksinger Victor Jara who had been a friend of Dean's and was murdered in the soccer stadium in Santiago by Pinochet's goons.)
Xenia said, "I saw Dean Reed in a film about Victor Jara on Soviet TV and they killed Jara and I cried. They were such humble people and I have such an image of them and their ponchos."
Her mother asked Xenia what she wanted for her birthday that year and she said, "I want to meet Dean Reed."
Now she added, "My mom dressed me up like a little doll and took me with her to the Rossiya Hotel where Dean was performing."
"Do you want me to dance with you?" Dean had said to Xenia when they met. "What do you think of me?"
"In my kindergarten, some people think of tables, some of chairs. I think of you," Xenia told Dean.
Showing off, she had begun counting in English for Dean and he laughed and she nearly died of embarrassment.
Xenia's mother Yelena Zagrevskaya was Jo Durden-Smith's girlfriend. After I had seen Xenia's Dean Reed poster we all sat down in the kitchen of the apartment and Yelena's mother made us lunch.
Yelena was a brilliant translator and interpreter. Since our first trip in February of 1988, Jo had been back to Moscow a lot and he had fallen in love with it and with Yelena. In his cowboy boots, his big leather bag flapping on his shoulder, and a cigarette in his hand, Jo had become a familiar figure around Moscow.
Jo was a writer, witty, charming, talented, and skeptical, though when he had left London for America in the 1960s he told a friend, "I have to commit myself to the Revolution." (He subsequently wrote a wonderful book called Who Killed George Jackson? It was about the reality and, most importantly, the illusions of the 1960s in America.)
"The Sixties are alive and well and living in Moscow," Jo often said.
Russia was his new love, his new discovery, the place where the culture was up for grabs and rock and roll was playing in every bar. It wasn't just that Jo liked to be where the action was - which he did - there was something about the Russians that touched him in the way that America had once done. It was nothing at all like the cozy, comfortable, middle-class England that Jo came from and that he loathed.
In Russia Jo could lose himself. He loved it and he loved the people. He loved sitting around all night drinking and smoking and talking philosophy with poets. Most of all he loved the fact that he could claim the place as his own at exactly the moment when you could actually feel history happening. Here it was all over again, the 1960s: the politics; the rock and roll; the shifting values; the wild nights; the fabulous characters; the conflict between old and young; and the booze and parties.
Jo shuttled in and out of Russia. It became more and more exhilarating. Westerners flooded in: movie producers did deals; Western comics did stand-ups in Red Square; businessmen grabbed what they could - I met at least one business guy who felt salvation for the Soviet Union lay in potato chip factories. In Moscow, at least, Glasnost had also begun to liberate the Russians, not just from fear, but from nothingness, from the dead stagnant years.
The drama was all there, and the melodrama and the excitement and the theater, and people bellowed with rage and sometimes with laughter. Even the women who guarded the floor at the Rossiya Hotel were moved by it all and they smiled shyly and hoped you would offer them a lipstick or some pantyhose.
Jo was crazy about it. He was endlessly tolerant of the poets and musicians - I called them the Wispies for their chin beards - who could talk you to death, and for the hoods who could get you diamond earrings cheap, and the famous pianist with a marvelous dacha outside Moscow, who was a connoisseur of seven-star brandies. There was never enough talk, never enough late nights.
With Yelena to translate, Jo now knew his way around Moscow: he could get you into the Bolshoi Ballet through the back door, where a man waited to ply you with cakes and sweet champagne; he knew where to buy a good steak; he knew everyone in Moscow and everyone knew Jo.
Like any number of Westerners before him, George Bernard Shaw and Paul Robeson and folk singers and hippies and artists and spies, Jo was seduced by Russia.
"The Sixties are alive and well and living in Moscow," Jo said and I repeated it portentously to anyone who would listen.
I gave Yelena's mother a box of scented soap and she went into the other room with it and through a half-open door I saw her perusing the label carefully, decoding the legend of this box from New York City.
Like everyone, the family hoarded stuff, and the kitchen where we ate lunch was strewn in profligate disarray with shortbread, Scotch, and Chanel nail polish.
We ate lunch. We ate stroganoff, kasha, pickles, eggplant, cabbage, cookies, chocolate cake, and bread and butter, and drank beer, wine, and whisky and soda.
Xenia ate and then she talked about the last time she had seen Dean Reed. It was in 1986 at the Olympic Velodrome at Krylatoskoye, which was Stas Namin's old discotheque. Suddenly, Stas himself had appeared. He clapped for attention.
"We have a friend here. We have the famous Dean Reed," Stas said.
Xenia went on. "There was an uncomfortable silence and, half a beat too late, the crowd obediently rushed towards Dean, who strode into the spotlight. From his pocket, Dean took pictures of himself and began signing them, handing them out to the dancers in the club, who took them politely."
Sitting on a box that held the equipment that made smoke for the disco, Xenia had watched, a little aloof.
Now she said, "Once he was handsome, and he was trying to keep his romantic American image," she said. "But he realized the game was over. It reminded me of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, The Last Beauty of the Self."
An intense feeling of sadness had come over Xenia. That night in the discotheque Dean reminded her of her grandfather who could not face the truth.
"Grandpa grew up under Stalin. Grandpa was a spy during the War. When he worked for the KGB, he felt it was real and virtuous. If you take their work away, men like this have nothing. In the end, he had nothing to live for. He was just like Dean Reed. Grandpa was a true believer."
That same night in the discotheque Dean asked Xenia, "What do young people really feel?"
"My attitudes had changed, of course," Xenia said. "We are the small brothers and sisters of Boris Grebenshikov. We had all our principles changed. We have none left."