I knew that Phil had visited Dean in East Berlin and I asked what it was like.
"Dean couldn't go out of the house without being mobbed," Phil said. "Man, he was bigger than Elvis."
"Was he any good?"
Phil said, "You can't fool crowds that size, not anywhere."
"Big crowds?"
Phil smiled. "Everywhere he went and he looked great, he was in great shape and he could still walk on his hands. He was the same age as me and still doing that."
"So he made out OK over there?" I asked.
"If Dean was doing the same business over here, he'd have been a millionaire many times over," Phil said seriously. "I don't hold with socialism, but, hey, Dean put his money where his mouth was."
Lighting up, Phil exhaled more delicious smoke and sipped his drink. Across the table, Joe, the bass player who sold real estate, was listening hard.
"So who do you guys think killed Dean Reed?" Phil asked, and I realized it was the reason he had agreed to see us, to find out if we knew anything.
Leslie recited the usual litany: the KGB killed Dean because he was wanting to come home to America; the CIA killed Dean Reed because he wanted to come home and they didn't need another commie agitator; it was an accident as the official report said.
Leslie leaned forward. He was always brilliant at what I think John Mortimer once called the "fatal question," the zinger, the one that comes right at the end of an interview.
"Or suicide?" Leslie asked very casually.
Still, Phil wasn't buying it. "There's not a chance in hell that Dean would have committed suicide. A man that can't laugh, that's a man that kills himself," he said for the second time that day as if saying it again would make us believe it. He had the feeling that, towards the end of his life, Dean did want to come home.
I said, "But he had his passport. He was a US citizen. It was easy. Why didn't Dean just pack up and come back?"
"What about 60 Minutes? They are pretty much on the left," Phil said.
"I don't understand. Do you mean 60 Minutes had something to do with his death?" Leslie asked, but Phil just shook his head and his reticence grew.
"Let's have another drink," I said.
Phil said no thanks, but he added, "Dean was real big over there, though. A big star. You couldn't go into the street without the girls coming up to Dean for an autograph. It was the real thing."
Outside, the sunlight was blinding. Phil had to go back to work. He was making a new album. It was his best album yet, he thought.
In the parking lot, Phil and Joe shook our hands and smiled. We all said, "Keep in touch."
Shading our eyes from the hot California sun, we stood on the asphalt that shimmered with heat and said goodbye. Phil shook our hands again. He looked just like the boy who, with his brother, once upon a time, helped invent rock and roll.
Smiling, Phil Everly put on his sunglasses, climbed into the powder-blue Cadillac and drove away, waving bye-bye.
For a minute I didn't want to go at all, as if staying on in that parking lot with Phil Everly could keep any more time from passing.
5
Dean went south to Chile on a hunch, the way he raced the mule, the way he gave the bum on the road to Hollywood his extra pair of pants. Movement was everything and, like a conjurer's trick, it blurred the reality. Life was a stunt, a gamble, a race to get to the big time, to the finish line, to the party, wherever the party was. Fed up with Hollywood - later he would say it was, for him, "a time of exploitation, a time of fear, a prostitution camp" - he simply left. It was 1962.
He had heard that his record "Our Summer Romance" was a hit in Chile. He was fed up with getting nowhere, as he saw it, and figured he would set out on his own. Or maybe Dean was just plain restless, tired of being cast as a prop at Chasen's.
In February, 1962, when he was still a contract player at Warner's star school in Los Angeles and had a few hits on the provincial charts, he applied for a passport, stating he intended to depart from the US for South America at New York on March 9, 1962. Did he go from New York? Did he catch a plane? Did he, as might have been the case, hop in his Chevrolet Impala and head south, to Mexico first, or had he already been to Mexico? It didn't really matter. What mattered was that he was on the road now, and though he came home to visit, he never actually lived in the United States again; for the next twenty-four years, Dean kept on moving.
His passport was issued at the beginning of March, and, like all American passports in those days, it was marked: "Not valid for travel in Albania, Cuba and those portions of China, Korea and Vietnam under Communist control."
On his application, Dean listed his "hair as brown, although people sometimes referred to him as blond and in some photographs he appeared fair-haired. His eyes were green, it was stated, although they always looked blue; everyone said they were blue. His height, it was stated, was six feet one. This became an important detail in the mystery of his death because there was a discrepancy in his height on various documents, and some people said this meant he was not dead at all. But that came later.
Almost as soon as he got the passport, he left; he didn't tell his agent or his room-mate; he just packed up his bags and left the house. A few years later, he sent a postcard to Johnny Rose, his room-mate, saying Merry Christmas.
Dean arrived that spring in Chile, in Santiago, expecting a modest welcome, perhaps from the local DJs who were playing his tunes on the radio.
Viva Dean Reed! We want Dean!! Viva Dean!!!
The blue-eyed god had come down from the north, and when he opened the shutters of his hotel room that faced the Presidential Plaza in Santiago, he saw a sea of up-turned faces, or so the story went.
We want Dean!
Even when he closed the shutters, he could still hear the roar.
There was a OJ at a Santiago radio station; his name was Ricardo Garcia and although he dutifully plugged "Our Summer Romance" because the kids liked it, he did not think much of Dean's singing.
On the other hand... on the other hand, when Garcia saw Dean in the flesh, he knew Dean was hot. The looks were something else, Garcia thought. Dean was very, very sexy, what with the big hair and the big white teeth. His looks were his most important asset. He was as handsome as Robert Redford, and some people thought him a dead ringer for Kurt Russell. He had terrific presence on stage, and warmth, and some ineluctable adhesive compelling quality that drew people to him. You couldn't miss it.
"He was a naive gringo, who had come to 'do' Latin America," Garcia said. Like a character from a movie musical, Dean was called The Magnificent Gringo.
I pieced most of the story of Dean in South America together from scraps. I never made it to South America. By the time I went looking for Dean Reed in late 1987 and 1988, the obsession, for me, was with the East. The Soviet monolith was breaking up and this was the hottest story of the second half of the century. Cracking like ice in the spring, I thought, but it was the wrong metaphor.
Rather, it seemed as if, beyond the Berlin Wall, for decades Darth Vadar had ruled, evil, unknown, shuttered. Suddenly, you could look. Lift the visor and see inside. Every other feature story coming out of the USSR was about some underground rock band, or a concert, or a club. In the end, for the most part, the Soviets had not wanted to nuke us; they just wanted to listen to our music.
Any drama-documentary about Dean would inevitably focus on the Soviet Union and Berlin, the East, and the Cold War. I was in pursuit, after all, of the man who brought rock and roll to Russia. South America felt like a sideshow.