Johnny Rosenburg was convinced that American neo-Nazis killed Dean as they had killed the DJ Alan Berg. But how did they get to East Berlin?
Dixie didn't entirely disagree with Johnny's theory because back when she was still trying to help set up Dean's return to America, a bunch of kids came after her at her country property up near Grand Junction, Colorado. Dixie said they were from the Aryan Nation and they were after her because of Dean. But a Boulder journalist named Jennifer Dunbar, who had met Dean at the Denver Film Festival and was now writing about him, said they were just rich punks.
On the other hand, Dunbar said - and I knew yet another wiggy scenario was in the works - how come when Dixie called the police, twenty-eight FBI agents turned up?
So many people were suspect; so many were part of a perceived conspiracy that every scrap seemed to become evidence. Even the truth about the origins of the 60 Minutes piece appeared confusing. The truth about 60 Minutes, of course, was simply that it had been, as often happened with stories, suggested separately by Erik Durschmied and Anne de Boismilion, the staff producer working out of Paris.
The mystery about Dean's death came mostly out of a kind of desperation to make it important. Like Moscow's intellectuals who towards the end of 1989 sat around the cafes promising themselves civil war and chaos, the more terrible the scenario, the more seductive. Who wanted to settle for the ordinary when you could have a revolution? Or for a messy accident when you could have a political murder?
"He would never get old. He said he would take a gun and go to some revolution," a friend of Dean's said. "He would have loved a famous death."
* * *
The paranoia became rampant. A West German reporter said she saw Dean alive the day after he died. Someone else saw him buying pencils in Schmockwitz the next week.
There was plenty of evidence that Dean was alive, if you looked for it, except that none of it had any real substance. There were some who pointed to the fact that the man described in the autopsy report was taller than Dean. But there had always been a discrepancy about his height right back to his 1970 passport application, where he put his height at six feet four, when his 1961 application had it as six feet one. I was pretty sure the precise Germans had taken their data from the later document.
"The whole of Berlin was talking about the mock suicide," said Vaclav Nectar, who believed, among other things, that the arm slashing had been partly a publicity stunt on Dean's part as well as a tactic to psych up Renate for her performance in Bloody Heart.
Others said Dean wanted to flee, but to spare Renate he faked his death and that the body in the lake belonged to a certain singer who looked a lot like Dean. I loved the idea, it made a great story, but I wondered how Dean could have got hold of a spare body.
I remembered that Dixie had once asked me to check Dean's account at the Berliner Bank to see if money had been withdrawn since his death, because if it had it would prove that he was alive. After his death, she started hearing voices over the phone, mysterious voices. The bank account was checked: nothing has been withdrawn.
Still, it spooked me for a while. It got so I almost expected to pick up the phone and hear Dean Reed's voice.
For a long time Dixie Schnebly was in regular contact. She helped me out with information, sent letters and tapes, and was generally cheerful. When she disappeared, I figured she was driving a rig on one of her long-haul routes across country.
Some time in 1989, my phone rang early in the morning.
"Hi," said a familiar voice muted by pain.
Dixie.
"I just wanted to stay in touch, be friends. If Dean's alive, which I still believe, he won't be able to get in touch with me unless he gets in touch through friends in Minnesota." We wished each other well and I hung up. I never heard from her again.
"Towards the end Dean could hear the doors shutting, one at a time," said Victor Grossman. "I believe it was suicide."
Johnny could not accept it.
"I think the chance of his committing suicide is about as good as my putting on my shoes and walking to the moon," he said. "I just do not believe Dean did not want to push his shoeshine one more time across this earth," he added.
I felt it was what Renate believed in her heart, though.
Drowning was a common enough form of suicide, the forensic pathologist at Manchester University said. It was common and quite easy; you sucked in a little water and gave yourself up to it.
The cuts on Dean's arm revealed a classic suicide attempt said the pathologist. Fifty cuts was a classic number, he said. He said there was nothing fishy in the autopsy report. The report might have come out of the GDR, he said, but it "was German, nonetheless" and, insofar as death was concerned, the Germans were meticulous.
Finally, I came to feel that Dean's death was a kind of unintentional suicide, a bumbled, messy panic attack that led to the lake behind the house in Schmockwitz. He was a man running out of time, his career drying up, his voice fading, his marriage coming to pieces. Dean missed America, but there was nothing in America for a forty-seven-year-old cowboy rocker. America didn't want some commie cowboy who went on 60 Minutes to defend the Berlin Wall.
Dean looked to the East and saw a dead end there, too. The Russians were listening to their own music and his record sales were down. As passionate as he was for Glasnost, it gobbled up the ground from under him and left him with nowhere to stand. But, as a scenario, suicide was unacceptable to Dean's family because it was a betrayal.
It was hard to untangle Dean Reed, the man, from this mess. Leslie thought him the dupe of two cultures, too easily taken in by both myths, a rebel only by stance. Leslie couldn't really forgive Dean for his willful disregard of political reality.
Like a flame, Dean sucked you in, but delivered no heat. There was a malign magic to it all, Leslie thought; it infected everyone who came near the story. Everyone was enlarged, changed, disarrayed by contact with Dean Reed. For them he was a star.
By then I cared much more about what Dean Reed had done than about how he died. If it was suicide, you could feel for him, for his anguish, for the messy life. I liked him not because he was a martyr to his cause, but because, while almost everyone he grew up with stayed home and watched TV, he did something. But there was no way I could tell his mother that.
"I believe it was probably a suicide to end it that way," said Victor Grossman, "and, although he was a good friend and a really nice fellow, I think, perhaps, by departing this world, he saved himself an awful lot of heartbreak in the years that followed."
Gerrit List put it even better. "It was, perhaps, the times that killed him," Gerrit said. "His star was going down. Maybe it was the right moment, but who is to say so? Maybe it is better to say, that's show business."
Clink, clink, clink.
Between the summer night in 1989, when I said goodbye to Renate at the lake, and the beginning of 1990, everything changed. Mikhail Gorbachev had been in office since 1985 and he was doing things "His Way," as his spokesman said and called it the Sinatra Doctrine. Gorbachev met Ronald Reagan. Reagan went to the Soviet Union; Gorby came to America. He walked through the crowds and charmed us in a way almost no foreign leader ever had.
The whole planet shifted on its political axis. Hungary declared itself a republic. In Poland, Solidarity became a government. In Prague, where Vaclav Havel, dissident playwright, was made president, Alexander Dubcek, the now elderly leader of the Prague Spring and an epic figure, returned from exile in the countryside and appeared on a balcony in Wenceslas Square at Christmas. With the Velvet Revolution, the soundtrack went on again in Prague and the streets were vibrant with music and talk, discussion and politics.
And in Romania, where Dean shot some of his movies because the countryside looked a lot like the Old West and had hardly any television aerials, the television station became the headquarters for a revolution. After Ceausescu was executed, Romanians went into his office and rolled ecstatically around on the priceless Persian carpets, grinning, their Kalashnikovs beside them.
November 9, 1989. The Berlin Wall fell.
It was breached by a bunch of kids with some hammers, and then they partied on top of it, dancing all night long.
Clink, clink, clink: you could hear the sound blocks away from Checkpoint Charlie.
"The sound of freedom," I said.
"The sound of money," said Leslie Woodhead and then took it back. "I don't want to be cynlcal," he added. "Not yet."
I went to Berlin in the middle of November. I got to Checkpoint Charlie and stood and gaped. What a prophet I had been. Even the summer before when I'd visited Renate, I was convinced nothing here would ever change, and now, just before Christmas, Bloomingdales was selling chunks of the Berlin Wall at twelve and a half bucks a pop in New York.
Clink, clink, clink. It reminded me of something but I was so dumbstruck by the thing itself, I couldn't come up with it at first.
Then, I remembered. The sound of the Wall coming down reminded me of a noise I had heard in Moscow when I passed a dog decked out with war medals like a little general. The medals went clink clink clink.
For a while after the Berlin Wall was torn down, a handful of idealistic East Germans imagined that there was a Third Way - a kind of fantasy combination of socialism and capitalism. It lasted i about as long as it took East Germany to disappear up the ass of the West. For a little while, though, in the beginning, everyone was caught up in the celebration; around the Wall, there was always a party.
That November day I walked up to the Berlin Wall and bought a piece of it from a boy from New Jersey who had set up shop. A burly ex-GI from Texas said hello and told me, "We come on over to get us a piece of that there Wall," and looked nervously at his friend while a gang of drunken teenagers did a rock version of "Winter Wonderland" for KOOL, America's oldest golden oldies station. KOOL was in town from Arizona, doing live remotes from the Berlin Wall.
"The rock and roll revolution is right here, babe!" the DJ screamed.
The nice ex-GI from Texas, who was in his fifties, and his pal, who had served with him in the army, asked me if I'd walk through Checkpoint Charlie with them; they were Cold War guys and a little bit nervous about Communists, they said. I said sure I'd walk with them and I said it with some bravado, but, as we went through, Checkpoint Charlie held no more terrors. I saw now that the daunting military uniforms the border guards wore were falling apart. Their epaulets were made of plastic; one hung by a thread from the shoddy shirt a young soldier wore; it seemed suddenly just a flimsy costume now, from a period film, shot on lousy stock.
"Have a nice day," said the border guard and smiled nervously.
On the other side of Checkpoint Charlie, Renate Reed was waiting for me with her bright red Peugeot. I gave her a piece of the Wall I had bought and she turned it over slowly in her hand. She looked terribly thin. Sasha was now in the army and she was living alone in the house in Schmockwitz. As always she was very warm and I thought again how much I liked her, how much I felt for her. It was as if she had experienced an earthquake with never-ending aftershocks: first Dean's death, then the Wall coming down, and then her son leaving home. She smiled, though, her heartbreaking smile and we shook hands.