"He knew too much. Over there in the East it is like the Mafia. Once you were in, you could never get out," she said.
As she saw it, Dean was a Manchurian Candidate, run, turned, used, a traitor but a victim, too. Having eaten all the spareribs, and turning to the fortune cookies, the Countess started on a tale about an out-of-body experience in which she met her dead father, who told her where the Czech government treasure was buried.
In London, around the same time that I met the Countess, I also met Artemy Troitsky. A friend called and asked if I wanted to meet a rock critic from Moscow. We agreed to meet at Tui, a Thai restaurant in South Kensington.
Troitsky was a Soviet rock critic with half an inch of stubble on his handsome jaw. He was traveling in Britain to help promote Back in the USSR, his book about Soviet rock.
Troitsky had a cold. He ate his lemongrass soup and blew his nose. It was his first trip to the West. He was my first real Russian. He said his Western name was Art. Wearing black jeans and sweater, an olive green T-shirt and jacket, and a new pair of sneakers, Troitsky had walked that morning from Bloomsbury to Chelsea. His feet hurt.
In the beginning the two of us made the sort of chitchat that seemed appropriate in those first heady days of glasnost. Art's favorite writers were Gogol and Cervantes, although when he was younger he read Kurt Vonnegut and J. D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye was Art's favorite book. In Prague, where he grew up - his father worked there as a journalist - he wore a yellow hat with a peaked brim because he could not get a red hunter's cap like Holden Caulfield's.
In 1963, around the time Dean Reed was already crooning his heart out in Santiago in the pale-blue gabardine suit, Troitsky heard "Surfin' USA." It was the first rock and roll record he ever heard, and because he could not find "surfin" in his English dictionary, he figured it was some kind of dirty word. "Like fucking," he said. "I thought this meant fucking." He was eight years old.
"I only believe in rock and roll and John Lennon," he said now in a way that managed to be both solemn and ironic.
In London, Art spent most of his time going to gigs, sometimes three in one night. Johnny Rotten was fantastic, he said. At the Limelight he heard Pop Will Eat Itself. "They were very good." Art's green eyes shone. "I had a great time. I almost ate myself."
I asked if he had been shopping, but he said that he didn't like shopping much.
"I do have a long list from my wife, Svetlana. She wants a sunlamp and a riding costume from..." He consulted a piece of paper. "Moss Bros. Svetlana is not allowed out of the Soviet Union at the same time as me. She is a hostage," Art said.
There was an uneasy silence while we ate some spicy squid salad and drank more cold Thai beer.
"You know, we have had in Moscow an American singer named Dean Martin," Art said.
Art had very nice manners and this was his first trip to the West, so I supposed he was trying to make an American connection for my sake.
"Dean Martin," I said. "Really?"
"Dean Reed, I mean," he said. "I mean Dean Reed."
"Dean Reed? You knew him? You saw him? Where? Tell me!" I was so excited I knocked a beer into my lap. "Tell me everything!"
But Troitsky just blew his nose again.
"Come to Moscow," he said. "I can introduce you to his interpreter, Oleg. Oleg Smitnoff. Also there is the best friend of Dean's girlfriend. His girlfriend killed herself when Dean Reed died. Big breasts. Very big." Art tugged unsuccessfully at the front of his black pullover.
My head was spinning. There were people in Moscow who had known Dean, people I could meet, a girlfriend, an interpreter.
"Come to Moscow," he repeated.
I said I was coming.
February 1, 1988. It was my first night in Moscow. I had followed Dean Reed to the East, to the place that seduced him. As soon as I saw it, saw Red Square, saw the scale, the otherness, I was surprised, excited, elated just being here. Maybe he was, too. Maybe Dean looked at Red Square and thought, Wow!
Off the plane from London we came, Leslie Woodhead and I and our friend Jo Durden-Smith, another journalist. Even years later, looking at my notes, I could absolutely recapture how thrilling it was. All of it seemed exotic: lousy Sheremetyevo Airport with half the lights out; the sudden appearance of an official tourist rep who seemed to know my name but not those of the others; and the ride along the grim endless road into the city with the stark monument to mark how close the Germans had got; the long straight road from the airport that turned into the shabby grandeur of Gorky Street which then exploded into Red Square. And finally, the arrival at the National Hotel where, from the balcony of room 101, Lenin spoke to the masses below.
There was a tingle, a faint sense of danger, which was crazy, of course. I traveled as a tourist with a tourist visa and I had a return ticket, but for me, this had the enticing whiff of the forbidden. I was an American, after all, as Leslie and Jo never failed to point out, joking about how I must be shaking in my capitalist boots. I had grown up with the Soviet Union as the Other, the Evil Empire, the place from which the missiles that would kill us all would be launched. I remembered the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was a kid when my father, terrified, had said he planned to move some money to a bank in some remote rural part of New York State.
Ambivalent, too. I'd also grown up among people in Greenwich Village who, when they were young, idealized the USSR and had been in the Communist Party; many had seen the USSR only through the rosy tint of those ideological glasses. In every way I was astonished to be here, especially that first night.
That first trip to Moscow changed all our lives, one way and another, mine and Leslie's and especially Jo's. That first night late, after we checked into the National Hotel, we sat in the main restaurant of the hotel. From another room came the sounds of a private party, laughter, balalaika music, ice on glasses.
Through the lace curtains in the window, we watched the snow coming down on Menezh Square. The snow mixed with the patterns of the lace. Red Square was just visible, so were the Kremlin walls and the gold onions on St. Basil's, all magical in the snow. Somehow I had envisioned the Kremlin as a grim fortress, not a place where behind brick walls were exquisite yellow stucco walls and ranks of gold domes.
At midnight, we went out and walked, freezing, over to Red Square. It was enormous, vast, eternal, with enough space for whole armies to parade - it was the most satisfying public square I'd ever seen, bigger than you expected and much more beautiful. In front of Lenin's tomb, in front of the massive red granite box where he lay, the guards were on duty, goose-stepping through the night, and, in the distance, pinkish puffs of frozen smoke rose from a power plant near the river.
"Suddenly, in one of the Helsinki parks I see a young man singing, his cowboy hat on the ground. When he finishes, I go up to him and introduce myself. He says that he is Dean Reed. To me that meant nothing."
In Moscow, the day after I arrived, Nikolai Pastoukhov told me how he first met Dean in Helsinki in 1965.
Although the Countess had said she sent Dean to Moscow because she was afraid of his going "Left Left Left," Pastoukhov said it was because he, Pastoukhov, encountered Dean in a Helsinki park during a World Peace Conference in 1965. Everyone had a version, everyone wanted to somehow own Dean Reed.
I had followed Dean to Moscow and now to the offices of the agricultural newspaper Pravda Selskaya Shizn which translates roughly as Pravda Country Life, where Nikolai Pastoukhov was the editor. Pastoukhov - he sometimes thought of himself in the third person - had been bored out of his skull at the conference. The conference was dull. The women looked like dogs. The Chinese were contentious and intractable. The speeches were incessant. Which was why Pastoukhov escaped for a smoke.
Strolling in the park, smoking, he ogled the pretty girls in their miniskirts. Right up to their asses, he thought, and tried not to get too excited about this vision of Western pulchritude. Still, it was part of his job, observing life around him; he was a journalist.
Suddenly, Pastoukhov's attention was diverted by the sound of music. A little group had gathered and at its center was a handsome young man with a fine head of thick hair, playing the guitar, his hat on the ground. He was working for money to get a ticket back to Argentina, he said. But he was not an Argentine. He was an American. His name, he said, was Dean Reed.
Stamping out his smoke, Pastoukhov looked the American over. God, he thought, the American had the little group in the park eating out of his hand.
In those days in the mid-1960s, Soviet officials were on the lookout for acceptable entertainers to pacify the Soviet kids and prevent their wholesale defection to the decadent music of the West. (Damn Bittles! Pastoukhov thought, as he often did, for Beatlemania had swept the Soviet Union.) Here was this handsome American with a real cowboy hat, plucking his guitar, singing peace songs. Pastoukhov had a little talk with the young man who, to his wonderment, espoused peace and love and the socialist cause. This was the jackpot! Bingo, he thought, or the Soviet equivalent.
"Come with me, Dean Reed," he said.
That evening at the hall where the peace conference was in progress, Pastoukhov pushed Dean on to the platform and introduced him to the delegates in the packed room.
"Here is new blood come to us with the peace movement from America," Pastoukhov said.
Dean Reed began to play. Pastoukhov stood in the wings and watched, holding his breath. When Dean played the World Peace Congress in Helsinki, things were a mess: the Master of Ceremonies, a doddering old Finn, was hysterical; Bertrand Russell had failed to show; Bertrand Russell's secretary, who was there, took up the Chinese line, which was that you could not talk World Peace until there was World Revolution.
"Bullshit," the Soviets cried.
"Bullshit," thought Pastoukhov, bored to death with this idiotic babble and desiring only a cigarette.
"Stop him! Stop him!" some people yelled at Bertrand Russell's man.
"Let him speak," others shouted.
Pastoukhov said, "There was almost a fistfight starting. And he jumps on to the podium with his guitar and starts singing for us. OK. And I am thinking it would be so good for him to come to us in Moscow.
Maybe Dean looked out into the sea of angry faces, maybe he listened to the contentious voices and escalating fury, and thought: I can make a difference; I can make the difference between war and peace; I can make people touch each other. He was twenty-seven.
He picked up his guitar and sang "Marianna." He sang cowboy songs and he sang something that to Pastoukhov, at least, sounded a lot like rock and roll.
From the podium Dean greeted the delegates - the Westerners in jeans, the chubby Chinese in Mao jackets, the dewlapped Soviets, their chests webbed with war medals, the East Germans in gray leather shoes, and he made them sing. He told them to hold hands. He told them they had to hold hands, even if the girl sitting next to them was lousy looking - this was how Pastoukhov reported it - they had to hold hands and sing.