"You be good, Dean, or we will give you to them," a guard and prisoners said on one occasion.
Instead, the guards gave them Dean's washing - the gays did laundry for a price - and it never came back.
"They tore it up into little strips for souvenirs," Dean said, whenever he told the story.
The South American stories, which reminded him of some of his most heroic days, were threaded through his life. He loved telling them. Dean courted trouble in foreign places and he said it was for honor's sake, for the cause, for the righteous position he took on things, for the revolution. Part true believer, part bad boy, he played politics because it was subversive and sexy and it got him in the news and it was loads of fun. He was a star. And he was everywhere.
During his time in Rome he became, briefly, a Maoist. I learned this from Georgy Arbatov, his Soviet minder; Arbatov told me he wrote to Dean about the Maoist business, but you couldn't really persuade him.
He also joined antiwar speakers in Rome, at the Piazza Navona. Wearing a suit, flashing his American passport, he talked his way into the US Embassy. From the steps, he turned to the crowd of protestors who stood outside the gates and he raised his fist.
"Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!" Dean shouted.
* * *
Many of Dean's adventures during the late Sixties and early Seventies were recounted to me by his second wife, the East German Wiebke Reed. They met in 1971 in Leipzig, at the international film festival. Over lunch in East Berlin seventeen years later, in 1988, Wiebke told me she could remember her first words to him.
"You are the best-looking man in the wotld." It was a line she got off a Little Richard record.
Earlier that day, I'd met Leslie Woodhead in West Berlin, and we took the subway to the Friedrichstrasse station to meet Wiebke. Friedrichstrasse station in East Berlin was three stops from the Zoo station in the West, and it was a much more surreal way to come across the Wall than through Checkpoint Charlie. It was banal and had no melodrama. You got into a subway car; the train juddered across no-man's-land; the passengers read their paperbacks, didn't talk to each other, and got out.
When you traveled by train, you barely saw the Wall. But at the turnstile in the station there were border guards with guns, the requisite exchange of hard currency for visas and the worthless East German money.
It was raining. Outside the subway, alone and in small groups, people scanned the crowd anxiously, waiting for relatives from the West. The hard-currency hustlers turned up the collars of their leather jackets against the weather and scanned the crowd for the suckers.
Wiebke was in her late forties, but looked a decade younger. Small-boned, pretty, and tough, she had a blonde ponytail and wore good leather boots and a cheerful expression. She was chatty by any standards; for an East German, she was gregarious. Her English was very fine - fluent, full of nuance and detail. She had learned it as a result of her marriage to Dean, and she worked as an interpreter.
We got into the tinny orange car of which she was dutifully proud and she pointed out the opera house that had been restored to its prewar grandeur.
I asked about the Wall and she produced a pro forma, but quite spirited, defense. I had heard it all before: the calm conviction that the system, if not perfect, was better than most. As we drove, she talked of the hemorrhage of talent, which had made life impossible in the East before the Wall was built; she described how the East had suffered during World War II; she recounted how the GDR was steadfast in its anti-Nazi stance. She wasn't at all aggressive about it; she simply believed.
At the Stadt Hotel, where, a few months earlier, a sullen doorman had turned us away, Wiebke had things in hand. A table had been booked. The waiter smiled at Wiebke as we sat down and she began her story of her first meeting with Dean.
At the film festival in Liepzig [2], when she saw Dean across the room, she was determined to meet him.
The room was full of filmmakers, but all she could see was the gorgeous man with the blue eyes in a white turtleneck sweater. Every other woman in the room was staring at him, too.
A clever, curious girl, she was thirty, worked part-time as a model, and had trained as a teacher. She adored music and art: she was especially into Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles, the Mamas and the Papas, and Leonard Cohen. Their records were not always easy to come by in East Berlin, but there were ways, and Wiebke was hip. She was standing with a friend who followed her gaze.
"What an astonishing-looking man," said Wiebke's friend.
Wiebke had an idea and she ran out of the room. She found a friend who was a photographer and she whispered in his ear.
"OK," he said.
He let Wiebke carry his light meter back into the reception, where she saw Dean again. She knew he was Dean Reed. Everyone knew.
Already Dean had a reputation in the East, he was big in the Soviet Union and word had filtered through. He was the center of attention. He was dazzling. From the second he set foot in East Germany, he was a star. He had no idea, of course, but Berlin would become his home for the rest of his life.
At the film festival, Dean had serious things on his mind. He was talking earnestly about his plans for a gesture of solidarity with the North Vietnamese. A group of Americans had gathered and was trying to decide what to do about Vietnam. Give blood? What were the alternatives?
Everyone from the Left was there at the festival. It was an annual event on the Leftie circuit. The room bulged and throbbed with people drinking, talking, making deals. There were a couple of elderly Americans, two members of the Hollywood Ten, who, persecuted by Joe McCarthy, had lived in exile in Europe ever since. Old men now, they talked a lot and cracked cynical jokes, and who could blame them?
The two blacklisted writers cracked up because Dean wanted to send white doves to Vietnam.
"Why don't you send the blood of the doves, Dean?" said one of them.
"How about we drink the blood of a couple of white doves, Dean?" said the other.
Dean didn't mind. He went on talking; he had seen news footage where some pretty North Vietnamese girls pushed bicycles loaded with provisions and ammunition up the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He wanted the delegates to load up bikes and push them into the market square at Leipzig as a gesture of solidarity. The Americans he was talking to at the festival thought this was a hoot.
"That's a good one, Dean," said one of them. "That's wonderful."
On the other side of the room, Wiebke tossed down a few vodkas; she hardly ever drank, but she was nervous. She made her way over to Dean.
"You are the best-looking man in the world," she said. She blushed horribly. Dean laughed and said something back to her in English, but she didn't understand. She had used up all her English with the one sentence "You are the best-looking man in the world."
"Let's get away from all this," Dean said to Wiebke. "Come up to my hotel room." He talked through a translator named Victor Grossman.
"I'm not going to do something as sleazy as that. I don't want to compromise my husband, who's quite well known here," Wiebke said. Victor translated this, too.
Not long after the festival, Dean left for Moscow. One day Wiebke was curled up in a chair and the phone rang. A girlfriend picked it up.
"It's your Dean. From Moscow, I think," she said.
"Hello? Who are you?" said Wiebke, trying to locate some English. She wanted to say "Where are you?" but it came out wrong.
"Who are you?" she said again.
"Dean Reed," the voice answered.
"I know it's Dean Reed. Who are you?"
"Dean Reed! This is Dean Reed."
It was a terrible mess.
Wiebke hired a Fraeulein Schultz to teach her some English. She worked hard at it. The fraulein was seventy-five and proud that she was still a fraeulein. They worked on English with "Cecilia," a Simon and Garfunkel track.