Wiebke persevered, and when Dean returned to East Berlin a few months later to begin work on a film, her English had improved. The relationship blossomed. Dean was some catch. He had his own minder, who was a member of the Politburo. He experienced the privilege that artists enjoyed - nice housing, good medical care. He always wore that white turtleneck. Rock and roll in East Berlin had had its ups and downs, as often as not, the state took its cues from the USSR.
In 1972, Dean made his first German film. In The Good for Nothing, an adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel, Dean was deliciously miscast. His German was lousy, but it didn't matter. In a long pageboy and a ruffled shirt with puffy sleeves, he looked gorgeous.
Wiebke and Dean began seeing each other and he took her to Moscow with him. In those days he could draw 60,000 people for a concert. Women followed him openly in the street.
Wiebke was astonished. After a performance one night, a girl tried to rip his cowboy shirt from his back when he came offstage. A bit of cloth came off in the girl's hand and she stood there, looking at it and weeping. Another slipped him a note that read, "I'll meet you at midnight."
Before a performance, he whistled from anxiety. When Dean began whistling, Wiebke knew he was worried. He had enormous energy. He lived off big rushes of adrenalin, and then, at the end of a day's work or after a concert, as it drained away, he was exhausted. He fell into a chair one night at the Ukraina Hotel, staring at the green chenille bedspread with little cotton balls on it. He couldn't stand or speak. He shut down, like a light switch. And then, in Moscow, out of the blue, Dean asked Wiebke to marry him.
"Would you like to be my wife?" Dean said.
"I would like two days to think the situation over," she said.
He was not pleased at all by her reticence, although it was a phrase she learned from him. "I would like two days to think it over," Dean would say whenever he had a difficult political issue to deal with.
"Unless you're my wife, I can never take you places," Dean told her.
So she said OK. They got married and Dean did take her traveling. He took her to Venice. He took her to America where, like Leonard Cohen, they stayed at the Hotel Chelsea. On a plane to LA, she saw Kojak in the flesh. With Dean, Wiebke went to Colorado and Hawaii, and to New York, where she was sick as a dog in a restaurant in Greenwich Village. She told him she thought it might be fun to stay in America for a few months, maybe longer, but Dean said no.
"'I cannot," he said, "I have no career here. I am a political man."
Wiebke: adored Cuba, although Dean was disappointed because Fidel Castro was out of town when they got to Havana. Nonetheless, he was impressed by Cuba; it was the only country in Latin America where, as he saw it, there weren't great disparities between rich and poor. Wiebke was surprised that white people ran everything.
"The music in Cuba was wonderful," said Wiebke. "Dean made his best record with some Cubans. They have natural rhythm, you know.
Now, in the restaurant of the Stadt Hotel in East Berlin, Wiebke finished her story, staring at the remains of the kebab on her plate.
"Have some wine?" I said.
I wanted to get Wiebke to tell me what Dean was like in bed.
"No thanks," she said, "I'm driving."
We stayed on for a while, talking and drinking coffee. There were more stories, more anecdotes, more tales. Across the table I could see Leslie thinking: how in the hell are we ever going to make a film of this huge promiscuous life, about all this STUFF?
"Of course, he was a Virgo," said Wiebke thoughtfully.
I said, "I see." "Like me," she said. "Both Virgos. Stubborn, obsessive, perfectionists. He didn't have hobbies. He didn't read much, except politics. He didn't go to the theater or the opera, or have an interest in sports. He was interested in propelling his career. He "craved attention," she added. Once we were in a boat with Victor Grossman. Dean disappeared. We got into a panic. We looked over the side of the boat, and, suddenly, he bobbed to the surface. 'Look, I've drowned,' he said and, rising from the water like Jesus Christ, he burst out laughing."
Wiebke shuddered, finished her story and signaled the waiter for a bill.
I opened my bag to get some money to pay it. Wiebke stopped me.
"Please," she said.
"It's OK," Leslie said.
"No, I will pay and, if you like, you can pay me back later," she whispered, glancing over her shoulder at the waiter. Then I understood: she wanted the dollars.
Wiebke stuck her elbows on the table and put her chin in her hands. "Sex and politics. That's all Dean was interested in. Sex and politics."
I thought of Paton Price.
Paton who had been angry with Mrs. Brown because she sent Dean to Hollywood a virgin; Paton who wrote letters to Dean in South America about the women he screwed; Paton who made him strip naked in class, and sent him to a prostitute who said Dean was a natural in bed. Dean always said: "I am no puppet." But wasn't Paton his godfather? His puppet-master? The best friend of Dean's life as he called him: Paton Price.
"Was he?" I asked.
"Sorry?"
"A natural?"
Wiebke changed the subject. The next afternoon, at her house in East Berlin, Wiebke showed us her nudie shots of Dean doing push-ups on the carpet.
Wiebke's place was in the Berlin suburbs. It was five minutes' drive from Dean's place at Schmockwitz.
We ate coq au vin in the kitchen. Over the table, a shelf held a dozen brightly colored packets of tea that were obviously precious. I asked if food was hard to come by. Only the mushrooms, she said. And oranges. You could only get oranges at Christmas.
Natasha, Wiebke's daughter by Dean, ate with us. She was twelve years old. A slight, fair, pretty girl, she had her mother's face imprinted on her like a pale photograph. She smiled shyly and hardly spoke. She refused to speak English, Wiebke said, because she was angry with Dean for leaving her. And for dying. She was mad at him for dying.
A cuckoo clock chirped from the living-room wall. Wiebke got out a box of pictures, as Mrs. Brown had done in Hawaii. There were photographs of Dean turning somersaults in the air, of Dean rolling around with the dog, of Dean doing push-ups on the rug without any pants on. There were pictures of Wiebke barebreasted, which she showed us without any embarrassment.
Natasha crept quietly into the room and curled up in the corner of the sofa.
I tried to get another look at the picture of Dean doing pushups bare-assed, but Wiebke had moved on and was staring at her own wedding pictures. Dean wore a cowboy shirt with an eagle on the front. Wiebke wore a muu-muu from Hawaii and platform shoes. Everyone had had such a good time that they forgot to speak English, which made Dean feel left out. He grew petulant and remote. Wiebke wondered what she was doing there.
"It was the first time since we met we didn't make love, our wedding night," Wiebke said.
After Dean and Wiebke were married, they built the house in Schmockwitz. She gave up her career. He chose women who were self-possessed and competent, but as soon as they were his, he wanted them to stay at home.
Dean could be erratic, even volatile, Wiebke said. His moods could change on a dime.
"Once he became so furious he punched the furniture with his fists. On another occasion we turned up at some cinema where tickets should have been left for him, but weren't. He could not handle it. He wanted to go home and give himself up to despair," she said. "I said, 'Dean, let's go out and have a good evening,' but he said, 'You don't know what it's like when I'm checked in this way. It makes me feel dreadful. I can't cope with it.'"