In Hollywood, the Capitol Records building was pretty easy to find because it was built in the shape of a stack of records.
Inside, sweet-talking the receptionist, Dean evetually got in to see Mr. Voyle Gilmore, who turned out to be the genuine article. The bum on the road was, in fact, a musician and a pal of Gilmore's from the old days. Gilmore was also a top producer for, among others, Frank Sinatra.
Dean got a try-out. Next thing you knew, he was on the phone back to his mom telling her to come on out and sign him to a seven-year contract with Capitol. He wasn't twenty-one yet and his mother had to sign....
"Come on out to California, Mom," he said, shouting because he was on long distance, which was still a novelty, used only for death and celebration.
It was 1958. He was twenty. He had a great smile. He could shake his hips and girls thought he was very sexy.
Dean's dad was mad as hell that Dean had quit his education and gone to Hollywood. Dean didn't care. He was on the move now, recording songs, appearing on TV. Now, on Ruth Anna Brown's television set, I watched a clip from an old program. In it, a girl bobbed on to the stage, her pony-tail bouncing.
"How about everyone coming over to my house. I've got the new Dean Reed album and it's areal gasser," she said.
The girl on the screen had the knowing look of a TV pro, even at fifteen. She wore a party dress with a big skirt and she had the calculated innocence of the 1950s.
"But here he is himself in person. It's Dean Reed!"
Bright as a button, he bounced up to the mike in that loose-jointed way that was considered slick, snapping his fingers, dancing, jumping. He wore a white sports coat and he had all the moves. He was quite polished; he knew his stuff. He was accompanied by a group of similarly hip boys, snapping their fingers.
"I went to a football game and I never will forget that pretty little, pretty little, pretty little majorette," he sang as he smiled his million watt smile. The boys joined in the refrain: "Twirly Twirly," they sang. "Twirly Twirly."
Then a couple of plump majorettes in little white booties came on and pranced around, tossing their batons, eyeing Dean Reed.
"Twirly Twirly," Dean sang again.
Leslie and I looked at each other; I could see that, like me, he could barely sit still he was so excited, that he wanted to say, as he did after we left, "This is it! This is the key. This is the root of the story, the beginning of the Dean Reed we've been looking for. He was on his way to being an early American idol and, if he'd stuck it out, he could have been, well, Fabian."
"Dean's life, it was just like a movie," Mrs. Brown said, as she reached over to shut off the TV.
For a minute I was silent. Mrs. Brown was clearly ready for us to go. I wasn't going.
Finally, I said, "So who do you really think killed him? How did your son die?"
"Well, I went to see one of their policemen over in East Germany, you can just imagine." Mrs. Brown was not as reticent as I had expected. "My goodness, he was a pompous man. I asked who he thought did it and he looked at me as if I were just plain crazy. I'll never forget it. He said to me, 'There are three things to consider. First, crime. Second, suicide. Third, accident.'" She hesitated. "Then he said, 'One. We do not have crime in the GDR. Two. We know Dean well and he would never have committed suicide. Three, therefore, it was an accident.'
"So tell me this," Mrs. Brown continued. "If it was an accident, why was Dean pinned under the pilings of the pier in the lake? Why were his arms stretched out so that he was pinned in a Christ-like position? Why was he wearing two jackets in the middle of summer? Why?"
Notions poured from her like hope: that Dean got into trouble because he knew something about Chernobyl - he had been due to start filming that summer in Yalta, which was not far away; that he was dissatisfied with the system - she had a letter from him as far back as 1985 saying so; that he knew things about Oliver North and the Contras. He was intending to call a press conference for the Saturday he died, he said.
"There was always an agent assigned to Dean to do a 'wet job', in case he got out of line, " she said.
"A wet job?"
The scenarios of his death, as Mrs. Brown called them, came on faster and faster. She could handle something dramatic, brave, important, a death that had meaning. The only unspeakable thing was an accidental death. She whispered to me of the CIA. From her trunk she took a folder and handed it to me. It was the coroner's report on Dean's death.
Back at the Kahala Hilton in Honolulu, I sat on my balcony - my lanai, as they called it - and watched people on the terrace below feed peanuts to the birds. Dolphins in the man-made lagoon sang for their supper. Holiday-makers, dolphins, we were all tourists locked in a palmy conspiracy of good times. In the souvenir shop were toy rescue dogs with barrels of macadamia nuts around their neck, plastic pineapples with clocks in them, and motorized plastic dolphins to swim in your bath.
All of Hawaii seemed a comfy lagoon where old people, tourists and children relaxed in the sun. Everyone who tended to the visitors appeared as cheery as could be, putting on muu-muus, cooking pig luaus, driving pedi-cabs, carrying suitcases, selling nuts at the macadamia nut museum, working the army bases, frying McNuggets at McDonald's, dancing the hula, though a waiter at the Kahala Hilton restaurant did tell me that when Imelda Marcos came for lunch - she had her own personalized silver napkin ring - it was an awful lot of trouble. Security men had to be posted everywhere and local reporters came by to see what kind of shoes Imelda was wearing.
There were a lot of realtors, too, selling real estate to the Japanese, who were buying up the islands even faster than the native culture was disappearing. Every hotel had numerous courteous Japanese on the staff.
Much of the most desirable real estate the Japanese were buying was around Honolulu, within spitting distance of Pearl Harbor and the Arizona Monument. The sunken battleship, entombed in the waterborne shrine, preserved World War II in a plastic box; visitors, ferried out into the harbor to look at it, looked down fearfully and imagined the dead and dying, December 7, 1942, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Dean Reed was four years old.
I got out the police file Mrs. Brown had given me, along with the coroner's autopsy report. These were the banal summaries of officialdom - the police and the forensic experts in Berlin - their brutal expressionless accounts of what had happened to a human being. It was labeled "The Final Report Concerning the Death Under Suspicious Circumstances of United States Citizen Dean Cyril Reed."
Taking into account the autopsy and the criminal investigation, so called, the report stated that there was "no evidence of traumatic violence," "no evidentiary basis for suicide," that "the suspicion of crime has not been confirmed." Officials of the German Democratic Republic concluded: "It can be presumed that Dean Reed died by accidental drowning."
In the grim medical log that was the autopsy, the only anomaly was a reference to "so-called Canuto's trial cuts... in a typical place as can often be seen in cases of suicide." The cuts were very superficial, the report noted. Nothing conclusive.
Mrs. Brown was certain Dean's death was not a suicide. He had everything to live for: he was at the height of his career; he loved his wife; he was preparing his biggest movie role ever.
Before I left Hawaii, Ruth Anna Brown called to say that she wanted Leslie Woodhead to help her produce a television series about the Reed family; she had a sort of American Upstairs, Downstairs in mind. There wasn't much I could do in the way that she wanted me to, so I sent flowers by way of thanks for her time. She wrote to say that she had placed them on the Korean Peace Memorial in Hawaii in memory of her son, Dean Reed, the American singer who died in East Berlin.
She missed her son whose grave was on the other side of the world. So she made do by putting out flowers for him and communing with his spirit at a Korean shrine. But she failed to find the quarter he had won for racing a mule when he was seventeen.
"Dean did not kill himself," said Phil Everly when I met him in Burbank a week after I saw Ruth Anna Brown in Hawaii. "He was a good laugher and a guy that laughs does not kill himself," Everly added.
After Dean got to California in 1958, he not only got himself a recording contract, he got a screen test and a contract with Warner Brothers, where he studied to be a movie star. Among his new friends was Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers and, according to Ruth Anna Brown, they remained friends for life.
The day was bright and hot. Inside El Torito, a Mexican restaurant, it was dark and wonderfully cool. The maitre d' had a moustache and a red vest. I whispered that we were waiting for Phil Everly and he smiled. "Of course," he said, "we know Senor Everly."
Leslie Woodhead was there; he was in California on business and, as a serious rock and roll guy, he wasn't going to pass up a chance to meet Phil. We watched through the window as outside Everly disembarked from a long, low powder-blue Cadillac with tail fins, and sauntered across the parking lot to the restaurant.
A handsome man with a thick shock of brown hair and a baby face, he came through the door, removing his sunglasses as he walked slowly into the restaurant, ducking slightly to avoid the hanging plants. He looked around in a leisurely way, not because he expected anyone to pay particular attention to him, but because he was a man who moved slowly with that easy, hot-weather grace southerners often have. With him was a middle-aged man with a bald spot. They paused for a moment, conferring, squinting, canvassing the room.
Phil Everly took the center of the floor naturally and, star-struck, like teenagers, Leslie and I fumbled towards him.
Then Phil saw us. He smiled, walked forward, and stuck out his hand.
"Hi," he said, "I'm Phil Everly."
"Hi," said Leslie. "I'm Leslie Woodhead."
The nice man with the bald spot was Phil's friend, Joe. Once Joe had played bass for Phil. In Phil's company, he'd once met Dean Reed, which was why he was there, I guessed, or maybe he served as Phil's entourage. Joe sold real estate somewhere around Burbank.
Phil's had not been an easy phone number to come by, which had added to the anticipation. Getting it had required a couple of dozen phone calls back to London, to friends at the BBC, who once had made a documentary for Arena about the Everly Brothers and their reunion concert at the Albert Hall. On the phone, Phil Everly who had a sweet, southern wispy voice, had said he was seeing us just because he liked the guys from the BBC so much. He had had a nice time with them. He liked those English guys. But during the whole, long, boozy lunch that followed, Phil Everly never once mentioned the reunion concert. He never mentioned his brother, Don, either.
* * *
We settled, the four of us, in a booth towards the back and drank frozen margaritas out of huge glasses. Phil advised on certain dishes with the assurance and concern of an expert - this burrito or that quesadilla or whatever other fried, cheesy, spicy, tasty Mexican item that was a specialty of the house.
Phil was an easy talker, and he described how, in 1946, his folks, Ike and Margaret Everly, took their kids and left Tennessee for a better life, first in Chicago, then in California. Their two boys, Don and Phil, were already making records together. In the restaurant in Burbank, a song ran through my head: "Bye-bye, love. Bye-bye, happiness. Hello, loneliness."
As far back as 1957, the year they recorded "Wake Up Little Susie," Phil and Don were stars. But everyone wanted to be in movies. The studios, awed by the success of Elvis Presley on the big screen and terrified by television, which was a dirty word in Hollywood, grabbed at new talent wherever they could find it.
"We had signed with Warner Brothers Records," Phil said, blowing out smoke from a Marlboro. "And in the process, we also went to the Warner Brothers Drama School," he added and said it was where he met Dean. "Dean was a real all-rounder. He could sing, he could act. I was a lousy actor." Phil laughed. "The acting class was taught by a man named Paton Price, and to know Dean you had to know about Paton Price. Paton was a real important guy for all of us," Phil said. "He taught us it didn't so much matter what your politics were so long as you used your art to further what you believed in. He was what you might call a life teacher," Phil added, "He was also a surrogate father for Dean who lived with him and his wife, Tillie, for a while. Tillie still lives here in Burbank.