According to his own way of thinking, Johnny felt he was Deano's close good friend, and he worried more and more for him. He was convinced if Dean came back to America after the 60 Minutes broadcast, he would get his head blown off. Johnny spent a whole lot of time in his shed out back of his house in Loveland trying to figure a way to tell Dean what was what.
Mona Rosenburg told me that, just before his disappearance, Dean phoned the house in Loveland very early one morning. She took the call. Dean asked if everything was all right because he hadn't heard a word, he said. Mona said they had all had the flu bad.
Dean said if they were in any kind of trouble, he would come back there and fix it. During the whole conversation Dean acted as though someone was listening in, looking over his shoulder. Something was wrong, Mona felt, but she didn't know what it was.
What did the call mean? Mona didn't know. Maybe Dean was looking for a reason to come back. But it was early in the morning and she was feeling lousy and the line was bad.
Johnny finally knew what to do, though, and he went out to his shed and after a while came back to the house with a new song on a cassette.
"I wrote a song for Dean and here's a kind of mystery," Johnny told me. "I've been accused of foreseeing Dean's death by writing this song. But after the 60 Minutes episode, after how shook up he was and how shook up I was, I sat down and wrote a song called 'Yankee Man'. It's about Dean. I sent it about two days before he died, and of course he never got to hear it. I've often wondered who over there got to hear it? Did Renate hear it? Did the authorities hear it?"
Johnny sent me a copy of "Yankee Man." The song was addressed to Dean - to Yankee Man - and it said that even if he said he was proud to be an American, he couldn't tear his country down. That if he couldn't find "nothin' good to say about the USA," he should stay where "You are in the land of the Big Red Star."
The song was Johnny's way of telling Dean that he would always be his friend, but that he was scared for him, that he wished "you'd turn yourself around." If he didn't, and he came home, someone might "place you six feet under ground."
It concluded with the poignant line: "Yankee Man, you've walked upon the wrong side of the world for just too long."
The package with the cassette was postmarked June 11, 1986, the day before Dean disappeared. It arrived in Schmockwitz after he was dead and only Renate heard the terrible song.
"Shall we eat?"
Renate and I had driven from her house to a little camping site a few miles away, down a bumpy lane near the lake. It was dinner time and kids in shorts ran and played among the chalets and tents. Their parents sat outside and smoked and called them in to bed.
It was a fine summer evening, humid, soft - the way it must have been the night Dean died. Renate apologized for the restaurant, but I liked it. It had piney walls and checkered tablecloths. The waitress smiled. I had a beer and Renate had champagne. We both ate dainty little steaks with mushrooms and Renate was still looking for a particular word in English.
"I am missing this word," she said, grimacing, balling up her fists, opening a package of cigarettes, and then crumpling the cellophane.
"Damn. A word. What is the word I am thinking of?"
I asked her if she felt she could talk about Dean's death at all and it was as if something in her snapped like a rubber band that had been holding her together and then she couldn't stop talking. She hinted again that she didn't believe Dean's death was an accident, but she had to believe it because otherwise she couldn't bear the pain, otherwise it would have been... what was the word she wanted?
There was no acting, it wasn't a performance, only a woman talking about loss in a flat matter-of-fact way. I felt like an intruder, a voyeur, desperate for her to go on and feeling ashamed of it. Renate's hands were steady when she lit her cigarette.
In the last week of Dean's life, he had had what she called a heart attack. I couldn't know how serious it was because we didn't have an interpreter and the technical terms were hard to translate.
Renate and Dean were at home in Schmockwitz. Dean was reading his script and making notes when he suddenly clutched his chest and sat back hard. He told her not to call the doctor; he was a week away from the biggest film of his life and it would have been stopped if a doctor got involved. They argued. Finally, he slept. The next morning, Dean wouldn't talk about it and it was that week the tension got worse and things escalated and they had the murderous fight about the lawn.
It was how such things happened, Renate said and asked if I understood; I said I did. It had been a very hot day. The lake was filled with boats. The sound of the lawn mowers all across Schmockwitz gave off an insistent buzz. Renate asked Dean to cut the lawn and he refused.
You know how these things are, Renate said again. Again I said that I knew.
Dean had a bad temper and he was enraged. Renate said she, too, had a temperamental side, though usually she could balance things. On the day she asked him to cut the grass she couldn't - how shall I translate, she asked - stand it, hack it, bear it, how did you say? So there was the terrible fight about the grass cutting.
Dean stormed upstairs to his study. A few minutes later, she followed and to her horror his door was locked. Dean never locked the door. Never! Renate knocked.
"Please Dean, please let's talk," she said. "Talk to me!"
There was no answer.
"Please!"
As if in slow motion, he opened the door and she saw him reach for the machete - a prop from one of his films, but a real machete - from the wall where it hung and then he held it and began to slice at his arm. He cut himself over and over.
"My father was brave enough to kill himself, but I can do nothing," he said to Renate.
Dean stood in his study and then slowly sank to the bed. Sasha ran up the stairs to see what was wrong, but Renate barred the door.
"Go back downstairs," she told Sasha. "Go downstairs! Go!"
Now at the little restaurant, Renate smoked and told me that Dean had only nicked himself. He made a lot of cuts on his arm, as many as fifty perhaps, but they were no more than scratches and there was no real blood. I wondered if these were the "Canuto's trial cuts" referred to in the autopsy report that Dean's mother had given me in Hawaii.
Renate sipped her champagne and offered me a cigarette.
What should she have done, she asked? Should she have called for medical attention when Dean wounded himself? Should she have halted work on Bloody Heart? But Dean... he, what was the word she was looking for?
* * *
On Thursday, June 12, 1986, Dean and Renate had dinner. Dean took a sleeping pill, as he had done every night of his life since he was twenty. They argued again, bitterly this time but not as violently as on the day when Dean had slashed himself.
At about ten in the evening Dean called Gerrit List, who had just returned from Moscow. Gerrit said he had news about the contracts for Bloody Heart. It was the news Dean had been waiting for and he couldn't wait until the next morning when he would meet Gerrit at the studio. He said he would come over to his place right away. He was excited. He told Renate he would spend the night at Gerrit List's house and then in the morning the two of them would go right to the studio. List's house was only a few minutes from the studio and the Reeds were forty minutes away. Dean would meet Renate at the studio, he told her. He had to talk to Gerrit. He couldn't sit still.
At about half past ten or just after - Renate couldn't remember exactly - Dean left the house in Schmockwitz. He got in his car and drove away.
On Tuesday, June 10, 1986, Gerrit List had signed the contracts for Bloody Heart in Moscow and then he flew back to East Berlin. He went to the studio from the airport; there was a lot to do on the movie. Special effects were in the works. Among the first sequences filmed would be a night scene shot during the day. The
"American Night," Gerrit List called it.
According to Gerrit, he definitely called Dean at home in Schmockwitz on Thursday, June 12, although the police reports recorded that Dean had called Gerrit. It didn't matter. They talked. They exchanged greetings and Dean said he was coming to spend the night with Gerrit.
"We can speak and I can sleep, and tomorrow I am already at work," said Dean.
"My wife was away, so I made up the bed in the sitting room," Gerrit List said. "It was not good manners of Dean to ask to stay over. He didn't ever sleep at my home before. It was not usual. But my family was on holiday and he wanted to hear the news." Then Gerrit added, "But Dean never arrived."
When Dean didn't show up after Gerrit had gone to the trouble to make up the bed in the sitting room, he was mad. But he just figured that Dean had changed his mind again and went to bed. Or maybe he didn't want to phone the Reed house in case Dean had gone somewhere else. He was always going off on escapades. Gerrit wasn't worried. He went to bed. The next morning, Renate drove herself to the studio and Gerrit was waiting for her.
"Where is Dean?" she said.
Gerrit told her that Dean had not come to his house the night before and she got very nervous. He was angry at first; Gerrit was sure it was one of Dean's stunts. Dean was always doing stupid things on impulse, Gerrit List thought. On another film, Dean had disappeared for a while because he felt like a break or because he wanted to be in the mountains or for the hell of it.
"This is not good to suddenly make a holiday when everybody at the studio is waiting to work," List said angrily. He was quiet, but he was angry.
Renate did some make-up tests for Bloody Heart and then Gerrit sent her home to Schmockwitz to rest up and wait for Dean. In these things, as he put it, he was Renate's producer, too; it was his job to look after her.
Gerrit List was a mild-tempered man, but he was furious as he phoned around looking for Dean. He was also worried. Dean had called him the night before, and now it was Friday and he didn't know where Dean, his director and star, was.
Renate called Gerrit; he could hear in her voice she was upset. She said, maybe there had been an accident. Gerrit List drove to Schmockwitz.