In the wings, Nikolai Pastoukhov grinned his delirious grin; he knew a good thing when he saw it.
"Come with me, Dean Reed," he said. And by nightfall, Dean Reed was on the train from Helsinki to Leningrad.
With Pastoukhov, he traveled in a private compartment that belonged to the Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union. Deputy Tikhonov was a celebrated poet and he greeted Dean as a fellow artist. Through the June night, Tikhonov read his poems aloud and Dean played his guitar - you could just hear him singing the "Midnight Special." Pete Seeger had toured the Soviet Union to great acclaim a few years earlier and his American folk music was held in high esteem.
I liked to imagine that they sat in an opulent old-fashioned railway carriage with red plush seats and antimacassars, and a gleaming samovar. Toasts were made. Outside the cornfields sped by forests of white birches. Pastoukhov remembered it like a scene from a Russian novel, from Tolstoy perhaps.
At Leningrad the train pulled into the Finland Station. Pastoukhov took Dean to the Astoria Hotel for lunch. There was a jazz band in the restaurant and he asked Dean to sing. It was a kind of audition and Dean sang his heart out, and the audience fell in love with the young American. Bingo! thought Pastoukhov for the second time.
Dean's final conversion to the East began on that stage at Helsinki. Perhaps he was an official delegate from Argentina. Maybe the Countess's version - that she had sent him - was partly true; maybe not. Maybe Pastoukhov's tale of the pick-up in the park was a bit of embroidery. Who could tell?
Finishing his tale, in his Moscow office, Nikolai Pastoukhov leaned back in his chair and puffed on his cigarette. He was past seventy now, but vigorous and canny. Cigarette ash tumbled down the florid, flowered tie that covered half of his dark-purple shirt that was the color of grape juice.
In Pastoukhov's office, there was neither a typewriter nor a note pad, only a bank of plastic telephones with blank faces and a row of Christmas cards on a shelf bereft of books.
Pastoukhov dropped the butt from his cigarette into an ashtray and lit up again, his mouth pulling in smoke between the huge jowls, like a friendly hound enjoying a smoke. Like every Russian I met, he had real narrative talent. Still wrapped up in the tales of his discovery of Dean Reed in a Helsinki park in 1965, he gave those old jowls a good shake.
"Deanrid!" He said it as a single word, the way Russians often did, as though it might have been a slogan or a product, the way you might say Kleenex! or Communism!
"Deanrid!"
Nikolai Pastoukhov was restless. I asked about the rest of Dean's career, but because he had played no part in it, he was not interested and he waved the question away with an impatient gesture.
"Yes, yes, he traveled a lot," Pastoukhov said. "He left South America and went to live in Italy, then to Berlin. He settled in Berlin because he met a woman."
I asked about the death.
"Officially, he drowned. But he was a very good swimmer. How did it happen? I don't know. Maybe provocation. The American press calls him the "Kremlin agent" or the "notorious Communist." He annoys the Americans."
Glee engulfed Pastoukhov's features. He winked. Then he fixed his face in a somber expression more appropriate to official grief.
"I was shocked when I received the sad news of his death. He was very young, very handsome. He was the first friend from the West. He talked about peace and friendship; we were very much impressed. He visited Siberia; he said his visit recollected his native Colorado in the United States. He liked to make out autographs, to be mixed with girls. But I think he had no time for this sexual business. He is good boy. Look."
Rummaging in his perhaps bag - you never knew when there might be a sudden special on bananas or socks in Moscow, so you always needed a bag ready - he pulled out a photograph album. Pastoukhov pushed an old magazine cover with a picture of Dean under my nose. He said, "Dean has written here: 'To my lovely papa from his son, Deanrid.' Always he calls me papa, because I gave him birth here in Soviet Union," added Pastoukhov, who leaned back in his chair again and this time rubbed his eyes.
The old eyes filled up, though whether this was from affection, self-pity, or cigarette smoke was hard to tell.
Chasing Dean Reed was like scrambling through tangled webs spun by those who adored him and wanted to protect him, and there were plenty of them: lover, mother, daughter, father, son.
"He called me his second mama," older women said. "I was his second papa," said some of the men, and when I met an American journalist who once interviewed Dean Reed, she said, "I never slept with him, of course. We were just friends." But I hadn't even asked.
They were enchanted because he was so alive, because, if he was always on the make, it was usually in pursuit of love - theirs, the fans', the world's - it didn't matter. As a result, all these papas and mamas and lovers wanted nothing to do with the dark side of Dean Reed, but only to keep his memory intact. For them he was like a figure in a plastic snow globe from a long ago holiday; you could take it out and shake it whenever you wanted to remember how wonderful it all once was.
Pastoukhov's assistant arrived to show me out. A man in a suit and sneakers, he spoke exquisite French and looked exactly like Klaus Maria Brandauer. I said so, meaning it as a compliment, but he looked crestfallen.
"What about Charles Bronson? Everyone says I look just like Charles Bronson," he said.
As I was pulling on my coat, my mother's ancient mink I'd brought to Moscow for warmth, Pastoukhov eyed it appreciatively.
He said, "I remember America very fondly. Americans come here. We go to America. We traveled up and down Mississippi River."
"What year was that?"
"1978? 1979?" he said. "So, you like this glasnost?"
"Oh, yes. Isn't it wonderful?" I said. "Isn't it amazing. Wouldn't Dean Reed have loved it... it's great!"
He shrugged doggily. "1978, that was real detente," he said.
For a moment Pastoukhov looked thoughtful. He opened his mouth as if to reveal something, some fact about Dean Reed, some hard nugget of evidence, but he shut it; his journalist's heart no longer stirred and, anyway, the next morning he was starting a skiing holiday with his girlfriend. We shook hands. We exchanged addresses.
"So maybe I will visit the United States. I will stay in your house, OK?" Pastoukhov said and bellowed with laughter so that his hound-dog jowls shook again and ash from his cigarette toppled on to his tie one more time.
In the lobby of the newspaper building, on a wooden bench, people sat waiting for appointments, their boots dripping snow that turned into puddles on the floor. Over the sound system, Dave Brubeck played "Take Five." On a tiny television propped on a wobbly table, the security guard on duty wearing rough wool mittens watched blurry images of Mikhail Gorbachev talking to people in the street.
Dean Reed was twenty-eight when he stepped into the center of the stage at Moscow's Variety Theater in 1966. He sang like crazy for the audience: folk songs, ballads, Latin American songs he learned in Chile, show tunes - "Maria" was a big favorite in Russia - some of his own antiwar songs. He could sing "The Twist," he moved like a rock and roller; he crooned Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" like a pop tune.
Some in the audience had perhaps seen other Americans perform, Pete Seeger, perhaps, or, if they were old enough, Paul Robeson. But no one in Moscow had ever seen anything quite like Dean Reed. It was electric. He was so vital, so handsome, so rock and roll. For an encore, Dean sang "Ghost Riders in the Sky" and it became his signature tune in Russia.
At the end of the concert, the audience cheered, clapped, whistled, and stamped their feet for twenty-five minutes.
In reporting performances, Pravda noted that Dean Reed "left his country as a sign of protest against the unjust war in Vietnam." Posters all over Moscow announcing the performances showed that he was gorgeous and played the guitar and hinted at an "exotic" biography. He had a recording contract with Melodiya, the state recording company, which had never before issued a rock and roll record; he got a tour. It was such big news that even the New York Times got wind of it, which was pretty rare in those days for a Western newspaper. On page forty-seven of the New York Times on November 28, 1966, it was reported that an American singer was loudly cheered at a Moscow theater.
In the Soviet Union, Dean's official minder was Georgy Arbatov, the director of the Institute for Canada and the United States, and an influential player in Soviet-American policy. I went to see Arbatov, who was a pleasant man in a good suit with a benign face and an avuncular manner. His office was elegant, with a long conference table that shone with polish. A picture of Gorbachev hung on the wall. Through a translator, Arbatov spoke about Dean Reed, and how he was for the Soviets like the Beatles, and how important it had been, his coming.
Until Dean came along, though Arbatov did not spell this out, Russian kids mostly had to settle for folksongs celebrating tractor production or maybe for mustachioed pop stars with plastic smiles. Once in a while a foreign folkie like Pete Seeger might show up. There had been a time when Soviet bureaucrats had tried to offer a bit of modern culture to the kids; somewhere along the line, apparatchiks tried to replace the Twist with new dances for socialist youth. The Moskvich, the Terrikon, and the Herringbon were not a success.
Georgy Arbatov told me that he was convinced the KGB had not killed Dean Reed.
"I know that the KGB had already decided a long time before Dean's death not to interfere in this way, not to practice any terrorist activities," he said. An accident, Arbatov suggested, perhaps Dean's death had been an accident.
What he was saying hit me only after I'd left Arbatov's office, a kind of delayed shock. I wasn't exactly tuned into the activities of the world of covert activity, so only when I was walking through the snow in Moscow did I realize that "terrorist activities" meant state assassination. No longer practiced at this time, Arbatov had said, meaning, of course, it had been practiced and perhaps not so long ago; Arbatov could refer to it casually in the middle of a conversation about Dean Reed and the Beatles and rock and roll. I shivered. My feet were wet. It was freezing out.
No one in Russia had cared who was in charge of Dean, of course, not when he arrived. The lust for Western culture was huge but undiscriminating, and nobody cared if Dean Reed was run, as someone said, by the Communist Party or the Soviet cosmonauts, or a monkey.
Dean's arrival in the Soviet Union had the verve, the heroics, the aspirations of his conquest of South America all over again. Although he would continue to live with Patty in Argentina for a while, then move on to Madrid and to Rome, he went back to the USSR again and again, tempted by the adoration the Russians gave him, seduced by the feeling that he mattered so much.
On his first tour of the Soviet Union, Dean played twenty-eight cities and he sang "Yiddishe Momma" to a little old lady with a round face. Again and again, he went to Russia to record, for concerts, as a peace delegate. He made rock videos, after a fashion: Dean riding his motorbike; Dean clowning in parks, on riverboats, singing "Yesterday" and "Heartbreak Hotel." Everyone I ever met in the Soviet Union remembered Dean. He was as big as Frank Sinatra, people said.
On Go for It, Boys, a televised competition in which young men vied in several categories for the title of "Most Macho Male," Dean appeared as the celebrity host.
And Dean Reed was impressed with what he saw in the Soviet Union. He spoke with the comrades on long plane trips across the country - pictures show his face wreathed in smiles under the big fur hat. He studied Marxism, Leninism. A little boy gave Dean his Pioneer's badge.
There were people everywhere who had met Dean and kept his autograph or his pictures. One of them was named Sasha Gurman. He was from Tblisi and I met him about a year after I went to Moscow, met him in Beverly Hills of all places, on a balmy winter night. He had thick wavy hair and impish eyes, and he was sexy, like a magician, which in a way he was. He was an interpreter, the sort who gets not just the words, but the subtle magic of language. Glasnost had come to Hollywood in the form of Elem Kilmov, the Soviet film director, and Roland Joffe' was giving a dinner for him. Sasha had come to translate.
The sky was a rich tuxedo blue that night, the stars were out, and Beverly Hills was sleek and lush. Drinking it all in, Sasha inspected the crowd on the patio at Roland Joffe's house, where he, a kind of vigorous human sputnik spun off by Glasnost, had put down for the evening.