Dean did talk to Renate about America a lot, about the special smell of Colorado, its blue skies and smiling people, and his longing seemed insatiable.
He seemed like a man sorting through his life, clearing things up, cleaning out the past. He visited Wiebke at her house, where on a hot day in spring she sat in her bikini in the garden, typing translations. Smiling, Dean pushed open the gate.
"I've been thinking things over and I want to leave a present for Natasha," Dean said.
He gave Wiebke 3000 Czech crowns.
"That's very generous, Dean," Wiebke said.
He said he wanted to see Natasha more often now because he was going to the United States in the not-too-distant future.
Dean said, "I want to come back and talk. Maybe I shall come back soon," he said...
"He never came back," said Wiebke. "I wish I had just wrapped away my typewriter and said, 'This is a good time, why don't we talk now?' But the moment passed and we didn't. That's the last time I ever saw him."
Doggedly, Dean continued his work on Bloody Heart, but he also wrote to his high school classmates, who were gathering for a reunion. He told them he missed them and felt it was not fair that he could not be with them at the high school Ole Gym, where they could play basketball. He missed the picnic. He loved hamburgers and potato chips. You could feel how homesick he was. I felt it more than I had ever felt his passion for politics. There was something terribly naked about this peppy communication with his high school classmates.
He wrote of his destiny and how it had taken him to thirty-two countries, that he spoke four languages (English the worst!), sat in prison, fought injustice, made his mistakes, and favored the human race over the arms race. He wished his friends much peace, love, courage, and happiness, and signed it, with an embrace, "Dean 'Slim' Reed."
Bloody Heart was scheduled to begin on Tuesday, June 24 - Tuesday because, as Gerrit List told me, it was bad luck to start a picture on a Monday.
In East Berlin I met Gerrit List, who was a producer and production manager at DEFA and had worked with Dean in East Berlin almost from the time he arrived. I got the impression that he had considerable power inside the film business.
I met him in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, which had become my refuge in East Berlin. List was a middle-aged man in an anorak and the gray leather shoes East German men seemed to wear a lot. He smoked Camels. With Dean, he had made El Cantor in Bulgaria and Sing Cowboy Sing in Romania. List could effectively manage the complicated life of a location; he could work in Soviet Karelia in winter and in Cuba in the tropical summer heat.
Once he had waited patiently in a Cuban port for a ship that was three weeks late because he did not have the hard currency to expedite the baggage by air - that was sometimes the price of working in movies. He had a nice time in that sunny Cuban port, though; "The Bay of Pork," he called it.
It was a Saturday morning when we met, and although he refused even a coffee - I think he wanted to get on with his shopping - he talked freely about Bloody Heart. By June of 1986, there were already ninety people at work on pre-production in Yalta and List was looking forward to the three-month shoot.
"The Crimea looked a hundred percent like South Dakota!" he said with the tidy pride of a good production manager who has accomplished the impossible and reinvented the world: Bulgaria for Chile, the Crimea for South Dakota. "Riga was a very fine studio and I have developed very hearty friendships in the Soviet Union," he added.
It was true. Everyone in Russia liked Gerrit List.
Crossing his plump legs, he exhaled some smoke and I asked him if the trip to America had changed Dean. He nodded. "He was filled with impressions. 'My country is so great. People are so good. Politics are so bad.' He tells me Dixie will organize a concert tour. He says he wants to do it."
Dean wasn't much of a singer, Gerrit List said and confided that he himself was a Dixieland fan.
"Dean just played himself," he said. "In the beginning, some people asked, 'Why does he stay here in the GDR?' I think, and this is only my opinion" - Gerrit List put his hand lightly on his breast - "he stayed for love. For Renate." He added, "In the Soviet Union Dean was like God. Here it was no longer so. A lot of people felt he wasn't so big."
I told Gerrit - he asked me to call him by his first name - that even in the Soviet Union his status had changed, that in the big record store on Kalinin Prospekt in Moscow by 1986 you couldn't find a single Dean Reed album. I mentioned that, at Supraphon in Prague, production of Dean's albums had dwindled almost to nothing. In 1979, 1980, and 1981, ninety thousand copies of his records were issued. With Country Songs, the 1986 album Dean had set so much store by, only a couple of thousand were sold and, after that, nothing. Gerrit List looked sad at all this.
I remembered that Dean had told Mike Wallace that he had espoused the socialist way because it offered, above all, security. Not even the security of socialism could protect him from the defection of his fans or from his own middle age. More than anyone else, Renate knew it.
Renate was waiting at the front door of her house, smiling. On the lovely summer's day when I crossed into East Berlin and then driven out to Schmockwitz, the house and the woods looked as they must have looked around the time Dean died.
The sky was blue. Boats bobbed on the lake. There was the sound of lawn mowers and the smell of new cut grass. A large man in short shorts and Dr. Scholl clogs appeared. His name was Hans and he had produced and directed Dean's television shows. He lived just across the lake.
Just then a boat sputtered up to the dock behind the house and Sasha and his friends tumbled out and clattered up the walk into the house. Renate smiled and went to get them a meal. In summer, crowded with children and the windows open, the house felt much less lonely, though it had been summer when Dean died.
Renate cooked for the pack of Sasha's friends and they gorged themselves while I talked to Hans.
Yes, he said, Dean's popularity as a singer was going and he was sad about it. He knew that tastes were changing.
But the kids skidded out to their boat, and Hans went away with a basket of strawberries that Renate had given him to his red Peugeot that matched the fruit, his Dr. Scholl clogs going 'clock, clock, clock' down the garden path. Suddenly it was just the two of us.
Renate told me little things at first. She spoke in English that day and she told me how, when Dean's codirector on Bloody Heart got cancer, the blow was enormous. She showed me Dean's own copy of Bloody Heart; the script was painstakingly annotated in English in his schoolboy handwriting. There were notes about casting, but also notes about the best place to buy plastic cups in West Berlin, and you could feel Dean's immense weariness. He was the star, the director, the writer of Bloody Heart, and, still, he had to get the plastic cups. Real directors didn't buy their own plastic cups.
On the floor several boxes lay half open and Renate sifted through them as she talked. After Dean died, she had received a telephone bill for 2800 marks or fifteen hundred dollars. She said that most of the calls had been to Johnny in Loveland, but I thought they were to Dixie too, and that Renate knew it because her voice was so bitter.
Renate was a realist about what Dean's chances in America might have been. She knew that on the university circuit, with a few songs and the story of his extraordinary life, Dean might have made a small go of it. Dixie and Johnny wanted to turn him into a commercial pop star and take the politics out.
"He was not good in that way," said Renate simply, lighting a cigarette and tossing back her luxuriant black hair, she said suddenly, "It was 60 Minutes. The letters." She foraged in one of the boxes.
The night it was shown, Dean had been in Moscow and Renate couldn't get through to him on the phone and she was frantic. America had just bombed Libya. There was a lot of anti-Arab feeling in America and Dean dancing around with Yasser Arafat would not go down well. She knew what was in the program, even though it was broadcast only in America. My God, she thought.
Dean came home the next day and, when Renate told him that 60 Minutes had been transmitted and what she was feeling, he went crazy. His mood went black. Everything was over, she said. "Kaput," she said now. Renate used the word kaput and put her head in her hands.
Miraculously, it turned out for the best or so it seemed. In May, 60 Minutes sent a videotape of the show to Schmockwitz and Dean watched it and was happy. It was fair-minded, he thought. Dean was quite chipper. Mike Wallace forwarded a few nice letters that viewers had written. Dean wrote to Wallace to thank him and suggest that they work together for world peace.
Dean didn't hear much from Dixie or Johnny for a while and it worried him a little, so he wrote to say he hoped the show had not changed their relationship.
Did he suspect that Dixie was losing heart and Johnny was sitting at home, his butt burned over what he saw as Dean's betrayal? Dean whistled a lot and made plans, Renate said.
It must have been in the week or two before Dean's death that the rest of the mail to 60 Minutes was forwarded to Schmockwitz by the CBS bureau in London.
Renate shuddered, as if death had come into the room, and she wrapped herself with her arms. The letters! Oh God, Renate remembered, the letters.
Every night, glasses slipping down his nose, Dean sat up in bed, reading the letters over and over and over. He read them out loud. He couldn't stop reading the letters that called him a traitor, a terrorist, and a fraud, letters that said keep away from America, no one wants you here, go home to Russia.
Worse still was that not all the letters were inarticulate or written by crackpots or right-wingers. The cruelest letters criticized Dean, not for his politics, but for his hypocrisy, his ego; they called him an opportunistic man of little talent who could only make it east of the Berlin Wall.
Dean wouldn't let go of the letters and Renate literally snatched them from him and tore some of them into little pieces. Even Victor Grossman knew.
"Did Dean plan to defect?" I asked him the day after I saw Renate.
"He didn't have to defect. He had an American passport," Victor said. "He wanted to go home. 60 Minutes was going to change his life, but it all went horribly wrong."
"What went wrong?"
"Dean thought he had done so well on 60 Minutes. Then Dixie - you've met Dixie?"
I said I knew Dixie.
"Dixie wrote to him to say, It's over. You can't come home again. You did so badly on 60 Mmutes, you blew your chances. Dean lay on his bed in a darkened room unable to function," Victor said. "His movies were less popular. This is a country of twelve million people and a lot of them began to dislike Dean. How long, in a small country, how long can you go around performing concerts? Once, twice, but the third time? Also people who were becoming more and more disillusioned with or opposed to the system here naturally didn't like somebody who supported it," Victor went on. "What happened was that fewer and fewer people went to his concerts, and this troubled him greatly, I'm sure. He liked to be the star, and, you know, it's not so nice being a star playing in an empty theater." Victor paused."'By the mid-1980s, Dean heard the doors shutting one at a time," Victor said.
Like Dixie, Johnny phoned Dean regularly to tell him how bad it was for him in America after the 60 Minutes program, after he went on the show and defended the Berlin Wall.