But there were plenty of people who remembered the South American Dean. By now I was plugged into a weird little network of people who had known Dean and who, energized by news of his death, sprang into life, electric with information or memories.
I must have talked to a dozen of Dean's rememberers around that time, people hoarding their rich titbits of fact, tiny articles of faith, improbable fantasies blurred by memory. All of it added up to a kind of epic South American Dean: the sheer verve of his leaving home and heading south; his sudden coming into stardom; the gilded looks which people recalled; the political awakening, its naivete, its bravery.
Chilean expatriates in New York remembered Dean's beauty as they mourned their beautiful country; an Argentine woman I encountered in a Los Angeles restaurant thought of Dean as perfectly raffine'; Marcello, a New York waiter who had once worked in a Buenos Aires television studio had seen Dean perform. Marcello had contacts in Miami who knew Dean and he gave me their addresses, but nothing much came of this.
Fired up by contact with the star, they all possessed a kind of fatal attraction for one another. Every now and again, as news of our drama-documentary was passed along, the phone would ring and a friend of Dean's, or a relative, or a witness to the life checked in with stories; information, with a covert agenda, a mysterious whisper, a crackle of excitement. The most fabulous witness to the South American years, though, was a Czech countess.
"I knew Dean Reed." A throaty voice inserted itself into my telephone.
It belonged to the Countess Nyta De Val. At the time I met her, in early 1988, the Countess was a chanteuse in the nightclub on board the Greek cruise ship Eugenia Costa. In the video she sent me of her act she wore a skin-tight beaded gown. She sang in French. She claimed to have known Dean in South America and she wanted to talk. She lived in Florida, but she was on her way to London - to see her publishers, to set up her cabaret act - it wasn't clear, but I was headed for London, too. I was on my way to Moscow and there were still no direct flights from the US.
I met the Countess at the Gallery Rendezvous, a Chinese restaurant in Soho, where there was a picture of Mick Jagger in the window.
The Countess ate spareribs and said she had made Dean Reed a star. She was a cabaret star herself, she said, a well-known chanteuse, and her contacts in Hollywood had brought him south. In another version, she met Dean in a hotel lobby in Buenos Aires where he was having trouble making himself understood and she helped him out. She saw he had a guitar and had him play for her and felt that, though he wasn't very good, his looks would make him a star.
About a year after "Our Summer Romance" went to the top of the Chilean charts, the Countess also noted, Dean Reed beat Elvis Presley in the South American Hit Parade poll, 29,330 to 20,805. Nyta de Val was very sure about all this; eventually, I found some newspaper clippings that supported the figures.
An imposing woman of a certain age, the Countess wore a leather skirt as voluminous as a sofa. Her head was tied up in a silk scarf and a hat sat flat on top of it like a pancake on an egg cozy. She wore several pairs of eyelashes and, as she handed me a photograph, she lowered them with the demure moue of a sixteen-year-old coquette. In the picture, she was on a beach in a bikini. She had a great figure. Dean was with her, and his body was great, too: young, lean, and lithe.
"We were lovers," she said. "Women wanted him, but the men were not jealous. He played the nightclubs, he played the stadium. All his singles went to number one. He wore a light-blue... how do you call this Italian fabric? I got it made for him, I brought the tailor," she said. "Gabardine! A gabardine suit the color of the sky, very tight pants and he was beautiful," added the Countess, and ate another sparerib.
In South America, Dean also got politics, which made the Countess unhappy. He saw the writing on the wall and it said: YANKEE GO HOME, sometimes literally. He was shocked. Like most Americans, in finding out he was not universally loved, he was hurt. It was his first exposure to what American imperialism had borne in South America.
"I saw poor people crawling on their bellies with their last little bit of something for the church," Dean would say.
He began to read. He wrote to Paton Price and Paton wrote him back, and Dean remembered the things Paton had taught and he set out to dedicate his fame. He wanted to save the world.
"South America changed my life because, of course, there, one can see the great differences of justice and injustice, or poverty and wealth," Dean said in an interview for American Rebel, a documentary about his life. "They are so clear to see for anybody that you must take a stand. I was not a capitalist, nor was I blind. And there I became a revolutionary."
In the same film, Cyril Reed said, "He was a normal American boy. And he went to South America. There he saw that ten or fifteen percent of the people were very wealthy, and the great majority of them were at the low end of the totem pole. It was there he began to get, not communistic, but socialistic ideas. There's a difference. Don't ask me what it is. But he can take ten or fifteen minutes and he'll tell you the difference. He did that to me once, but I forgot most of it." Which perhaps told you as much about Cyril's attitude towards his son as what his son felt about the world.
Heady times in South America, with revolution in the air. Already a sex symbol, when Dean acquired a political agenda he was unstoppable.
Within weeks of his arrival in Chile, he took out advertisements in the newspapers, urging Chileans who opposed atomic testing to write to President Kennedy. When he set out for a tour of northern Chile and Peru, the American Embassy told him his actions might be contrary to the best interests of the United States.
Dean also noted that he was an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling, that he was opposed to warfare and military service, and had been a conscientious objector since the age of eighteen. He announced that his friends at home were planning to sue Secretary of State Dean Rusk because of the unconstitutional attempts in Lima to suppress his, Dean's, freedom of speech.
From Hollywood, Dean's friends duly sent a telegram to the State Department, expressing outrage at Dean's treatment, and it was signed by several of Paton Price's students and by David Dellinger, who later became famous as a member of the "Chicago Eight."
Dean did not cancel his tour, of course. Every time he was opposed, whenever he realized that the State Department had taken an interest in him, it charged him up: this wasn't just the movies, this had the smack of real adventure. It was always high noon in Dean's South America.
"He was an idealist," said the Countess. "You could fool Dean easily. But he could get to 5000 workers and tell them how to vote. He was a sincere man. Not like that fat little Allende, who used to wash his hands every time he met the miners." The Countess spat when she mentioned Salvador Allende's name.
South America, for three or four years in the 1960s, was Dean's coming of age. Professionally, it made him a star. He appeared on television in Lima; with a troupe of "Twisters," he performed at the Astral Theatre. Roaming the continent, he gathered a following. Fans adored him for his music and his politics. The times were ripe in Latin America, what with the young Fidel in Cuba and Che only just dead, his handsome death mask imprinted on everyone's brain.
In Chile Dean met the poet Pablo Neruda and the folksinger Victor Jara. They accepted Dean, even though he was a gringo. At last, Dean had found a community.
It was more than a little ironic, because Jara's folk-song movement was intended to fight the tide of American culture that poured down like shit on Chile, as Jara saw it. Chile was a dumping ground for singers who couldn't cut it up north. So long as the pop stars had fair hair and tight pants, the girls went mad for the singing gringos.