Before I got to Moscow, I thought I'd begun to know Dean Reed. Now I realized I'd barely cracked the surface. I thought of Pastoukhov, who said Dean Reed was a fine young man who didn't have time for sexual stuff, and of Alla who said he had two or three women a day. Oleg Smirnoff said he taught the Russian kids democracy but criticized Solzhenitsyn. Millions of kids had believed in Dean Reed. And Vladimir Pozner thought he was just a fake, a two-bit hustler who could whack a guitar and swivel his hips.
The rest of the day I thought about Pozner. I thought about his love for American folk music and jazz and the blues, and his life as a kid in Greenwich Village, where I had grow up too. I thought about the rhetoric, too, of the American Left. I knew it by heart. My mother, the Commie, I thought.
My mother who, during the Depression, had attended Workers College, who went on bread marches wearing the Persian lamb coat her father gave her. My mother, who had gone to Moscow with a friend on a package tour in the 1960s and danced in her nightgown with a Soviet naval officer at the hotel nightclub. "I didn't have any evening clothes and anyhow it looked better than anything they had," she said. In Moscow, I missed my mother.
In the Kalinin Prospekt, after I left Pozner's apartment, a little crowd had formed. At its heart was an old crone with a crate beside her. The crowd pushed forward.
"Pineapples," she said. "Pineapples."
The crowd looked skeptical.
The old woman tore open the crate and extracted from it tiny white boxes. The crowd moved in. Showing her toothless gums in a triumphant smile, the woman tore the cardboard away and held up her proof: a slice of frozen yellow fruit. It was not unlike a slice from the pineapples that grew on the plantations near Mrs. Brown's condo in Hawaii, except the Moscow pineapple had no smell at all.
Inside the record store nearby, I looked for Dean Reed's records. I ran into Tolya, the rock fan who had once bought Records on Ribs. He said that he remembered Dean Reed. "I remember him very well," Tolya said. "He was a young, tall, lean guy, with a mane of hair. He was completely different by comparison with Soviet singers."
But I looked now for the records in vain. I wondered if they were out of print or out of stock. I found a Pat Boone album, though, and on it was a picture of Pat in white buck shoes. I bought it for Art Troitsky. He was in heaven.
Walking through Moscow, thinking of how Dean Reed had loved it when he arrived, I remembered what the Countess in the Chinese restaurant in London had said.
"Dean went to Russia. Now if you have a person that is kind and lovable, the entire world should not be punished; it should be loved. But he comes back after a couple of months of Russia, telling you he's got to murder half of the real world. The only way I to teach people how to live is to kill them."
She said, "And then he told me that he had been in a car accident and had to spend many weeks in a Russian hospital. Now, as I have lived under the two worst regimes in the world, Communism and Nazism, both with the capacity even in those days to brainwash people, the more I heard him speak, the more I became totally convinced that in the hospital they had brainwashed him."
In a sense, Dean had been brainwashed, but not in the way the Countess meant. It was the romance of revolution that seduced him and the way the fans made him an idol.
At the Lenin Museum later that day, I looked at the Soviet Realist paintings, many of Lenin himself, the most famous with him pointing to the future. Lenin's Rolls-Royce was also on display. And there was something touching and funny about the wig Lenin wore - it was there in a glass case - when he smuggled himself into Russia to start the Revolution he starred in. I thought that, somehow, for Dean, too, this country offered him a future and provided a perfect starring role. Within a few years, the museum would be shut.
12
After his first trip to Moscow in 1965, Dean Reed returned to South America. Back in Buenos Aires, where he was then living, Dean was questioned by the police about his visit to the USSR, and as the military began to crack down on the country, he was expelled.
For the next half dozen years, Dean commuted between South America, Europe, and the Soviet Union. Deported from Argentina, threatened by the Right, he tried to get in again by traveling to Uruguay. He was arrested. To the world that knew him, he had the glamour of a political cowboy, moving faster and faster. By now the FBI and the US State Department were on his case.
When I returned from the Soviet Union, I applied for Dean's file courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act, but it didn't arrive on my desk until about 1990. Much of it was blacked out, as was usually the case with FBI files. What I could read, as far as his exploits in South America went, seemed pretty accurate.
Anyway, after the illegal entry into Uruguay, a policeman who had previously arranged Dean's deportation recognized him.
"Hello, Dean," the file recorded him saying, "I always suspected we would meet again."
In 1966, Dean went to Madrid; the following year he moved on to Rome, where he made some Spaghetti Westerns. (This wasn't a life, I began to think; it was a mini-series!) He made eight movies altogether: in 1967, Buckaroo; in 1968, 20 Steps to Death, The Three Flowers, and Adios Sabata; in 1969, Death Knocks Twice, Pirates of Green Island, and - my favorite title - Machine Gun Baby Face. Sometimes, late at night, you could still catch Adios Sabata on TV. In it, Dean worked with Yul Brynner. Dean was taller than Yul, but Yul was the star, so Dean played their scenes standing in a hole on the beach that had been specially dug for him. Dean told the story for laughs, but it clearly got up his nose that he was less important than Yul.
Around that time Dean got divorced from Patty and said Jane Fonda had told him Santo Domingo was a good place to get a divorce. When he arrived there, he laughingly told the press about how he was taller than Yul. Next thing he knew, he saw a story in the paper that Yul Brynner had arrived in Santo Domingo. He hinted at scary reprisals from Brynner.
In 1970, when Dean applied for a new passport - his old one had expired - his height was listed not as six feet one, as it had been in his original document, but as six feet four, and this became a tiny fact in the confusion over his death. Or maybe by 1970 Dean just felt he had grown taller.
In 1972 [1] he washed an American flag out in public. It was the year of the Miami Convention, when Richard Nixon was already deep in his own paranoia and lies, and in Vietnam and Cambodia more and more people were dying. Washing the flag became Dean's emblem. He proclaimed that he was cleansing it of the blood of North Vietnam, making it clean of American guilt. Making it clean, clean for Dean.
He loved stirring things up and getting arrested; in a way he loved going to jail. Except maybe for the time the gay guys got after him. There were plenty of gay guys in South American jails because homosexuality was a crime. "Give us Dean! Give us Dean!" they cried merrily, and banged their tin mugs on the bars of their cells. As Dean told it, these men had faces so painted up, you would not believe it.
"I was never so frightened in all my life," Dean admitted.
1
Ошибка автора: на самом деле это произошло в 1970 г. Все перечисляемые далее в абзаце события произошли в 1972 г.