So we toasted Glasnost and Gorbachev.
So much stuff was going on in Moscow that it was hard to get Dean Reed into focus again. Intellectuals found him loathsome or ridiculous, if they remembered him at all; the "peasant young people," as Art had called them, had other things on their minds like finding jobs and food.
They were cynical about everything, these Soviet kids. Someone took a poll of young Soviets; in the eyes of the young, the most desirable job was that of "racketeer." This was followed by hard-currency hooker and croupier at a gambling club.
When the Australian Embassy offered to process emigration forms, half a million Muscovites came to the gates. They had been promised better times for seventy years and better times had never come and they were fed up to the teeth. They wanted to have some fun before they died.
"The best thing for this country is to sell it off a piece at a time to the highest bidders," Art said as we strolled into Pushkin Square.
Oh, McDonald's!
It shimmered there, all the neon, the yellow and red arches, the backlit signs, the shiny floors and surfaces, the stainless steel palm trees, and the pop music playing. It was the biggest McDonald's I had ever seen. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. There was a line outside every day. People waited three or four hours because they knew when you got inside, unlike a lot of places in Moscow, you actually got something to eat.
Beeg Mek. Yum. I ate my first Big Mac in Moscow. I went very early one morning to avoid the lines. Tolya Schevshenko, the rock fan who had once bought a Chubby Checker record inscribed on an X-ray plate, came with me. We ate cheeseburgers and fries, the hot apple pie, and vanilla ice cream. Tolya asked why I had never eaten this food before and I tried to explain that, in a place like New York, fast food was mostly for kids and poor, people. Tolya was not convinced. I ordered more fries.
McDonald's was the new People's Palace. My own skepticism about my country disappeared for a while. In Moscow, all things American were, more than ever, hugely desirable.
The more often I went to Moscow (I went again and again through the early 1990s), the more often I met Americans who, like me, could not get enough.
A lot of us were the grandchildren of Russian immigrants, the children of the old American Left. We were urban coastal Jews who had grown up during the 1960s. We had been cynical about mainstream America most of our lives. Now we had seen the other, we had seen the Soviet Union, and we were cynical about it, too, but also seduced by it. We were ineluctably drawn towards this mess of a country.
I talked about it with Joe Klein, the journalist, over a lunch at Doc's in New York. Like me, Joe was busy calculating how soon he could get back to the Soviet Union. Like me, he had his own friends, his Svetlana and Art, his Tolya. He had his favorite stories, his favorite restaurants, his own account of the first time he had seen Red Square. Joe made me see why it was so irresistible; for one thing, they wanted us. They loved us, and in a way always had, for our jeans, our dollars, our hamburgers and music, our movies and literature, our Coca Cola and our Constitution, and our friendliness. I remembered that Vera Reich had loved the West above all for its friendliness.
They loved us, as Americans, and we loved them back for it. It was also a kind of relief, at least for someone like me who had put in time in the 1960s and 1970s obsessed with the evils of America. We were off the hook. Going to the Soviet Union gave us back America. In Moscow I took a picture of McDonald's.
"Not allowed!" shouted a uniformed boy.
Pictures were not permitted except by special arrangement, he said, casting a sharp eye on the squads of young Soviets scrubbing the floors religiously.
These were the rules and in this, I thought, McDonald's, the result of perfect regimentation, was ideally suited to the Soviet Union. This was the company built on the inviolable principles of the University of Hamburgerology. Outside Moscow, in specially equipped factories, any bun that did not meet its standards was killed.
On the way out I looked at the long line. McDonald's now fulfilled the longing for America. It was my conceit that in some ways McDonald's had replaced Dean Reed as the American icon.
The next day I saw Oleg Smirnoff, who now represented Pizza Hut, which was coming to Moscow.
No longer did Oleg have a row of ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket; no longer did he speak the Party line. He wore a navy blue blazer from Next. He talked about "Communist assholes" and about his advertising agency. For the Moscow opening of Pizza Hut, his biggest client, he planned to commission a song about pizza. I suggested "That's Amore".
"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore!" I sang. Oleg seemed nonplussed.
We moved on to Dean's death. Oleg was no longer reluctant to talk to me.
"His death was played down and made little of in the USSR, which made everyone suspicious," he said. "Dean talked about America a lot. Maybe somebody in East Berlin got pissed off."
In the spring of 1986 Dean told Oleg, "I can go home again, Oleg. I met people in Colorado who told me they remembered me. I can have a career there. I can go home." It was the last time the two met.
"Dean, at the end, was a man who could not acknowledge that he had wasted his life. It was too late for him," Oleg said. "He was an idealist."
Oleg and I drank coffee in the Savoy, Moscow's newest hotel, where the chairs were covered in turquoise nylon brocade; the dissident poet Andrei Voznesensky ate steak in the restaurant there, I heard. All around us, men sat on the little chairs and signed deals that would never come to much. Upstairs in a casino, pimply boys, in tuxedos, worked as croupiers.
At long last, more than two years since I'd first met him in the club in Gorky Park, Oleg offered me his videotape. When I looked at it, it was mostly a memorial concert in honor of Dean Reed.
I wandered around Moscow by myself a lot. Svetlana was away in London. Art was considering his career. Tolya dreamed of Malibu. I thought of the eight hundred thousand children dying from leukemia from the spill at Chernobyl and of the mutant babies with six toes who were born there and the trees that grew upside down. And I thought of Vera, who was leaving for America because her husband was afraid of the anti-Semitism. It was one of the ironies of Glasnost and of the break-up of the whole Soviet Empire: with freedom of expression, people felt free to hate each other.
I asked Vera to show me her passport. In plain Russian it was marked: Jew. On days when the Pamyat scheduled pogroms - it was physically shocking to write the word pogrom in 1990 - Yelena Zagrevskaya's mother put a scarf over her head and stayed indoors. I read that, in the main square in Vilnius, a sign had appeared: Lithuania for the Lithuanians, Poles to Poland, Yids to the Crematoria.
Asleep in my room at the Savoy, I dreamed that I heard a loudspeaker blast through the hotel. The hotel management was shouting, howling, and screaming for all of the Jews to assemble in the courtyard. Then I dreamed of a horse that had fallen into a swimming pool. When it was hoisted up, it had no legs.
Chaotic times, strange, terrifying, wonderful. There were people who had no bread and people who talked to you fearlessly about politics and smiled at you in the subways just for the hell of it. I didn't get anywhere with Dean Reed's death, though, just the same rumors and whispers recycled, retailed, cranked up. It was driving me crazy. Back to Berlin.
In Berlin, most of the Wall was already gone, except for a few slabs, one that was a kind of backdrop for a snack bar in the Potsdamerplatz. On the road to the suburbs to see a homicide cop who had some information, or said he did, there were dozens of trashed Trabants, the Cold War cars nobody wanted anymore.
Thomas Sindennann, who had been East Berlin's chief homicide policeman, had sharp eyes and a pointy nose, and he occasionally sniffed when he talked, as if he had an allergy or smelled something bad. Private enterprise had allowed Sindermann to recycle himself as a private eye, a German Sam Spade with a fancy computer in the office in his house. .
I wasn't expecting much. I'd half given up expecting answers about Dean's death, and then, in a matter-of-fact way, Sindermann calmly laid it all out.
In Sindennann's view the confusion surrounding Dean's death was that the Central Committee of the Communist Party got involved instead of the homicide police; but, then, he was a cop. And it was easy for Sindermann in hindsight to see what the problems were, to treat it as a straightforward case. Renate had, of course, been most of all worried about her husband during the events leading up to his death and never suspected a crime. As far as Renate and Gerrit List were concerned there was no reason to suspect anything other than that Dean had disappeared temporarily as he so often had. They had acted the way anyone would have done in their situation.
Sindermann felt the Central Committee had somehow attempted a cover-up; Dean Reed was an important person, Sindennann said, and it had been important to preserve his reputation.
"He was a well-known figure especially for youngsters. He'd been promoted as an idol, an American fighter for Communism. He also starred in films. Their quality was debatable," added Sindermann, with a faint smirk, "but the authorities didn't want to show young people and others that he had problems and had taken his own life."
Finally, according to Sindermann, Dean's death was a suicide. He was sure about it. Then, as if he'd opened the door a crack, more stuff came through and the alleged suicide letter I'd heard about surfaced. How did it happen? Where did it come from? No one was sure, but somehow Leslie Woodhead and I got hold of a copy in time to include it in the BBC documentary we were making.
It was addressed to Eberhart Finch, Dean Reed's friend on the Central Committee, and written in German on the back of Dean's movie script.
We got it translated. The letter said that he, Dean, could not take money for a film that might never be finished and death was the only way out.
To the end, though, he was still Comrade Rockstar. He ended his letter saying, "May all progressive people create a better and more just and more peaceful world, Dean Reed."
Was it authentic? Was it the real thing? I believed it was. And that was it. All the months and years of looking, and then I knew: Dean had killed himself.
Handwriting experts confirmed as best they could - they were dealing with a dead man, after all - that Dean Reed had written the letter. Renate only saw it four years after he died and she suffered terribly. It was as if a hand had reached from the grave to hurt her one last time.
In 1991, Dean's mother took his ashes back to Colorado, and Renate rubbed his name off his gravestone in the little cemetery near their house in East Berlin.
* * *
"I would never have believed the Wall would come down in my lifetime," Johnny Rosenburg wrote to me. "I wonder what Dean would have thought. I sort of feel he would have adjusted real quick and went along with the flow... Why in God's name did he have to die at this point in time? With things changing the way they are, he could have played such an important part in the whole affair. What a waste."
What Johnny couldn't see was that, without the Berlin Wall, Dean Reed had no role. When Dean crossed to the East he seemed seditious, foreign, sexy, American.
The Cold War raged; Dean sang. He was wonderful propaganda, this American true believer they could sell to their own people. Dean was rock and roll and good times; for twenty years behind the Iron Curtain Dean Reed seemed to be a force for life or at least the illusion of it.
As things changed, even in the short time I had been looking for him, Dean Reed seemed to recede towards some far horizon defined by the Cold War.
"There was no profit in a dead man," Vaclav Nectar said in Prague, where a million portraits of Vaclav Havel replaced a million pictures of Vladimir Lenin. In a record store up a cobbled street near Havel's castle, an old lady in carpet slippers searched the bins in vain.